7. Migration to Mexico, Migration in Mexico: A Special Case on the North American Continent

While the United States and Canada as well as Brazil and Argentina have been immigration countries and while the Caribbean was repopulated after the genocide or near-genocide of Native Peoples, in New Spain and after 1821 in Mexico, numerous Native or First Peoples provided a rural labor force-once they overcame the European contact-related demographic disaster, a population collapse of about 90 percent in the sixteenth century.Their nineteenthand twentieth-century descendants formed the urban laboring population.Thus Mexico's migration history differs from that of almost all other societies of the Americas except perhaps for Catholic French-language Quebec.1We discuss the colonial period's Spanish inmigrations and restrictions on entry of non-Catholic Europeans, the importation of African-background people, the migrants from Asia through the Spanish Philippines, and internal migration whether voluntary or involuntary.We also outline the emergence of anti-Spanish and anti-foreigner sentiments from the 1820s to the 1860s, and the inmigration to Texas of Anglo settlers with slaves and of Confederates during the U.S. War of Secession.During the mid-1850s to mid-1870s basic frames for migration emerged: the dispossession and resulting mobilization of Native Peoples and the insertion of a small number of foreign investors, entrepreneurs, and fortune seekers.Porfirio Díaz's dictatorship, 1876-1910, ended internal warfare and attracted foreign capital.Investors sent their personnel to engage in railroad building, mining, and oil extraction.Railroad construction facilitated internal migrations as well as northbound moves to the borderlands and into the United States.We will discuss migrants from Asia who, in circumstances that contrasted with Anglo-American exclusion, arrived in small numbers to the 1930s.We will assess the impact of racist eugenicists, A Special Case 189 who from around 1900 demanded immigration of Europeans to whiten the mestizo population, as well as of the anti-Chinese movements of the 1930s.The decades from the early Porfiriato to the late 1930s were a time of urbanization and internal migrations.The period of revolutionary warfare, 1910-21, involved mobility of soldiers and dependents and mass flight internally and to migrant communities across the United States border.Labor migrations to the United States brought a new kind of inmigrants, the large number of returnees.At the same time, the southern border with Guatemala remained an integrated border region to the 1920s.Finally we turn to internal migrations to the cities after the Second World War and the emerging maquiladora belt along the U.S. border.(See chapter 1 for migration to the United States and chapter 9 for the borderlands.)2We argue that the number of migrants (Span.inmigrantes) to Mexico throughout its history was small, but that as investors and entrepreneurs or simply as "Whites" or "U.S. Whites," they had a major impact on both economic development and the emergence of anti-foreigner discourses and diatribes.At the same time both voluntary educational migrants and involuntary political exiles created an image of Mexico in the societies of destination across the Atlantic World.As regards internal migrations, we argue that high inequalities, both economic and ethno-cultural, explain the internal interregional, rural-urban, and interurban migrations.A brief synopsis will position Mexico's inmigration in the context of the Americas and the Atlantic World.While from 1820 to 1932 the United States received 32.6 million migrants, Argentina 6.5 million, Canada 5.1 million, Brazil 4.4 million, and Cuba 1.4 million, Mexico attracted a mere 270,000, or 0.5 percent of total European overseas migration.Foreigners in Mexico hovered at around 0.5 percent of the population for most of its history, reaching a brief high of just under 1 percent in 1930.In absolute numbers, migrants from Spain and the two neighboring states, Guatemala and the United States, accounted for 12,000 to 14,000 migrants each in 1895; French, British, Germans, and Chinese together accounted for another 10,000.By 1930 Spanish immigrants formed the largest contingent (47,000), followed by Chinese (19,000), Guatemalans (17,000), and U.S. Americans (12,000).From 1950 on U.S. Americans accounted for the largest contingent by far.3These data indicate the importance of transborder migrations between neighboring states-of which the Guatemalans as workers or refugees rather than investors have received little notice in scholarship.4The borders, politically drawn by distant national governments between 1823 and 1842 in the south and in 1836, 1848, and 1853 in the north, would be constructed socially over a century and, from 1924, be guarded by a new, armed U.S. Border Patrol.

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