Empire and the origins of twentieth-century migration from Mexico to the United States

This article argues that the old push-pull model and the post-1870s emphasis on the agency of migrants as theories explaining Mexican migration cannot withstand serious scrutiny. We argue that the U.S. economic empire, from the late nineteenth-century and into the twenty-first, is at the root of a century of Mexican migration to the United States. Mexico became the first nation to come under the domination of large-scale U.S. economic interests, particularly railroads and mining corporations. The construction of Mexico's railroad system by U.S. railroad corporations led to the mass uprooting of peasants from traditional farming lands, sending them into a migratory flow that eventually supplied railroad and mining operations with much-needed cheap labor. The social consequence of these economic incursions, the uprooting of the peasantry, and the internal migration within Mexico caused a rapid population shift from the central and southern regions to the north within Mexico. These internal migrations eventually crossed in the United States in the early twentieth century, leading to the emergence of the ethnic Mexican community. U.S. economic domination increased over the course of the twentieth century, marked by Mexico's dependence on foreign lending, the maquila industry, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Together these have effectively eroded any semblance of Mexican economic independence.