Gustos and gender: Yucatec Maya migration to the Mexican Riviera.

Abstract

To challenge the continued emphasis on structural factors as an impetus for Mexican migration, recent studies conceptualize migration as a social and gendered process. In studies of transnational migration, in particular, this approach highlights the importance of examining migrant subjectivity. This dissertation addresses the migration experiences and subjectivity of indigenous <italic>internal</italic> migrants in Mexico. These migrants move within a regional space encompassing the <italic>ejidos</italic> (communal landholdings) of the southeastern Yucatan Peninsula, and the international beach resorts of the Mexican Riviera. This thesis proposes that notions of personhood and gender play a critical role in shaping migration processes. I suggest that what it means to be a man, woman, child---a person---in one's community, and the social relations within which personhood is configured, make up the framework that guides people's actions, and mediates their social practices. Based on an ethnography of a Mexican migrant circuit constituted by a Yucatec Maya rural community and its migrant community in Cancun, Quintana Roo, this study analyzes archival materials; economic and labor force participation data; interviews; and migration narratives, collected during 28 months over an eleven year period (1991--2002). I argue that Yucatec Maya men and women have increasingly turned towards symbols of global capitalism made accessible via wage labor, instead of the gendered division of agricultural labor, as a way to perform personhood and display their <italic>gustos</italic>: expressions of tastes that mark the boundaries of the self, and distinguish the self from a collective identity. By comparing how personhood was enacted prior to migration and how it is performed today, and situating these performances within economic, political, and gendered contexts, this analysis demonstrates how gender and work relations are reformulated prior to and after migration. Consequently, personhood provides an important lens through which to think through migration. As migration and tourism are increasingly regarded as solutions to the economic crises in Latin America and the Caribbean, the implications of this research go beyond the subnational to the transnational. This dissertation contributes to discussions of tourism development, the future of indigenous communities, and gender in Latin America.