A migrant walks in Chacamax, Chiapas state, Mexico, on June 21, 2015. AFP Photo / Alfredo Estrella
In this piece, Dr. Jan Rus, an anthropologist, comments on David Stoll’s article, “From Wage Migration to Debt Migration?” Stoll expanded on this article in his latest book, El Norte or Bust!: How Migration Fever and Microcredit Produced a Financial Crash in a Latin American Town (2013). Rus and Stoll have done extensive fieldwork in their examination of the role that debt plays in the undocumented migration of indigenous people to the U.S.
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One of the cruel paradoxes of undocumented migration is that for some time now the greatest exploitation migrants suffer may well be in their home villages and barrios. In order to pay smugglers to get them to the United States, migrants — and potential migrants — in David Stoll’s Nebaj have for the past several years been borrowing up to US$5,000 from neighborhood lenders. As Stoll writes, the interest rate on such loans in rural Guatemala is 10 percent a month. Think about what it means to borrow US$5,000 at a simple (that is, not compound) interest of 10 percent a month. The borrower has to come up with US$500 a month just to stay even; to retire the debt, he or she hopes to be able to pay the lender a few hundred dollars a month more. But full-time, pretax take-home pay at the minimum wage in the United States runs only about US$1,000 a month, and out of that migrants also have to eat, pay for a place to stay, pay transportation costs, and call their families every now and then on Sunday. It is not hard to see why the undocumented are such motivated workers, why they hold two or three jobs, why they do not take sick days, why they are willing to endure abuse rather than lose a job. In addition to inherent work ethics and the fear of deportation, they are typically driven by overwhelming debt taken on to enter a United States that pretends to want to keep them out but has succeeded only in making jumping the border expensive.
Striking as the debt associated with migration is, it has been, as David wrote me recently, the “dark side of the moon” in migration studies. In part this may be because even when students of migration look at the starting point, the sending communities, they tend to focus on those aspects of social organization that carry over into the migrants’ behavior in the north — the ways migrants from a single community form networks for mutual aid, for example, or the way knowledge of migration spreads through a community. In part, however, it may be because until just the past few years the cost of migration was much lower and thus less of a visible burden on Mexican and Central American migrants. In the case of the indigenous communities I know in highland Chiapas, very similar to Stoll’s Nebaj but 200 miles and one international border closer to the United States, the fee to cross into the United States as recently as the early 1990s was only a bus ticket to the border and US$300 to be led on a short walk around a border post. But as the United States walled-off the border near cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez in the second half of the 1990s, driving migration into the desert and mountains, the price (and danger) inevitably climbed. By 2000, it cost US$1,500 to get to the United States from highland Chiapas; by 2003 it cost US$1,800–$2,000, and today fees can reach as high as US$3,000. As in the towns of highland Guatemala, the interest charged by lenders in Chiapas’s indigenous communities is 10 percent a month. Five years ago, when loans for migration were for US$2,000 and when the U.S. economy still seemed to have an endless demand for low-paid labor, this was manageable, if barely. Most of the remittances sent home by migrants during their first year in the North during those years went not to support their families but to pay their creditors. But the loans could be repaid. Today the situation is much more difficult. Not until halfway through their second year are a majority of highland Chiapas migrants now clear of debt (Rus and Rus, 2008). Given the rate at which indigenous people in highland Chiapas are able to repay their debts, one wonders if they could ever catch up with the US$500 per month that the Nebajenses have had to cover the monthly interest alone.
To historicize what Stoll has written, as enforcement along both the Guatemala-Mexico and the Mexico–United States border has grown stiffer with each year since the late 1990s and as the demand for low-paid immigrant labor (a leading indicator of recession) has declined since 2006, the result has been a “perfect storm” for the financial systems of Guatemalan communities like Nebaj. At the most recent “fare” of US$5,000 per migrant for increasingly scarce work, the cost of migration has finally became prohibitive. What of Chiapas? In an apparent contradiction, so far the crackdown on the border continues to be the bonanza for indigenous moneylenders that it was until recently for their counterparts in Guatemala. In the early 2000s, some families in Chiapas could still provide US$1,200 from their own savings to underwrite a son’s or brother ’s trip north. But as the price to enter the United States rose and more people went, eventually virtually all migrants were forced to borrow at least some of the cost from local prestamistas. In one Tsotsil-Maya hamlet I know, the neighborhood loan shark, whose business was formerly limited to lending at the beginning of the season to plant truck gardens or to buy an old pickup, had by 2005 a total of US$50,000 on loan to a few more than 20 migrants for a monthly interest income of approximately US$5,000. Since 2006, as work in the North has become harder to find, he has nevertheless continued to profit from a decreasing number of migrant borrowers. Perhaps this is explained by the fact that it still costs slightly less to travel to the United States from Chiapas than from Guatemala and so repayment is still possible. But it also may be the result of what appears to be a slightly different culture of lending: in the Tsotsil communities of highland Chiapas, where Grameen style banks are not as much in evidence, “professional” lenders hold notes on borrowers’ houses and land and are not shy about foreclosing if payments are missed — and indigenous courts enforce those foreclosures. Although I do not have numbers, testimonies suggest that a significant percentage of the 80,000 – 100,000 indigenous people who have moved into the nearby city of San Cristóbal in the past 30 years are victims of such dispossession.
Some might say that this kind of lending in the communities of Guatemala and Chiapas is normal profit-seeking behavior, that it demonstrates the Tsotsils’ and Ixils’ commercial astuteness and adaptability — that it is not only analogous but identical to the risky use of credit in the United States and elsewhere. That is probably so. At the same time, one might also say that it is an appalling example of profiteering, of deriving obscene profit from the neediness of neighbors forced to pay increasingly exorbitant “entry fees” to participate, typically as a last resort, in the U.S. labor market. More than that, unlike the U.S. tech bubble in the 1990s or the housing bubble of the 2000s, participants in the bubble Stoll has described or in the lending characteristic of my prestamistas in Chiapas could see their victims. During their “good” years, lenders in Nebaj knew that the remittances coming to them in the form of windfall interest payments, inevitably for many, many months, represented money not going to the needy, mostly young families of their neighbors who had migrated. This was not, in that sense, a “victimless” bubble that depended on being able to sell a good with an inflated value to a faceless buyer on the other end of a computer transaction. This was a case of beggaring those who lived next door and across the road. In Chiapas, where the older lenders’ capital typically came from government jobs or small businesses, this was bad enough. In Nebaj, where much of it was derived from loans extended at 2 percent a month by micro-lending institutions that, from my observation, never released a cent without multiple meetings and even signed contracts to drive home their social and even religious purposes, it took an especially calculating, cold heart. Maybe that does not make the Nebaj lenders any worse than the Madoffs on our side of the border. But, as Stoll argues, at the very least it does suggest that that aid agencies and others who intervene in peasant communities ought to revise their understanding of the way those societies work.
For at least the past two and a half years, scholars and activists who work in the communities of Mexico and Central America that send undocumented workers to the United States have been wondering when and how the deepening U.S. economic crisis and the increasing clampdown on the border would begin to bite. Would it be a decline in remittances, and with it a decline in the well-being of migrants’ families? Would it be an increase in the number of unemployed young, now denied the safety valve of working in the United States? Or would there suddenly be tens of thousands of mostly young men on the street — daring, experienced men who had walked across the Sonora and Arizona deserts to find minimum-wage jobs in the United States, now suddenly back home, still in debt, with no way to feed their families? The first two of these have gradually begun to manifest themselves. All of us hope that we will not see the third. In this groundbreaking essay, Stoll has added to our appreciation of the individual burden represented by this debt and caused us to begin looking in our own communities for the collapse of the communal financial systems that in just the past few years have been blown out into bubbles by rapid escalation in the cost of crossing the U.S. border. It is a signal contribution.
REFERENCE
Rus, Diane L. and Jan Rus 2008 “La migración de trabajadores indígenas de los Altos de Chiapas a Estados Unidos, 2001–2005: el caso de San Juan Chamula,” pp. 343–382 in Daniel Villafuerte and María del Carmen García (eds.), Migraciones en el Sur de México y Centroamérica. Mexico City: Miguel Ángel Porrúa Editores/UNICACH-Chiapas/FLACSO-Costa Rica/Organización Internacional de Migración.
Originally published in Latin American Perspectives 37:1 (January, 2010), pp. 145-147.
Central American migrants use trash bags and cardboard to protect themselves from the rain as they wait atop a stuck freight train, outside Reforma de Pineda, Chiapas state, Mexico. AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell
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Dr. Jan Rus lives in Chiapas and teaches at the Universidad de Ciencias y Artes de Chiapas. An anthropologist, he is the author of many articles and books, including Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias (2003), El acoso de las fincas y la transformación de la sociedad indígena en los Altos de Chiapas, 1974-2009 (2010), and co-edited México, 2006-2012: Neoliberalismo, movimientos sociales, y política electoral (2006).
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