Migration from rural communities in Mexico to labor markets in the United States is an important activity for several million Mexicans who support their households and communities in both countries. Researchers have focused on how this mass movement of people creates important economic, cultural and political changes in and linkages between migrants' home and host societies. The effect migration has on the exploitation of natural resources in sending regions has not been studied. This dissertation project, conducted by a student of cultural anthropology from the University of California, Riverside, will focus on the members of a rural community in Puebla, Mexico and the town's migrants in New York City in order to understand the changes due to migration in the social relations and local institutions which mediate control and access to land, livestock, water, and mineral resources, how these changes have shaped patterns of resource use and management, and the meanings that community members assign to these new developments in their lives. The impact of social change on resource exploitation is important in the context of state-sponsored conservation and development programs which, when coupled with changes in agrarian reform laws, have the potential to curtail control over resources claimed and managed by transnational communities. The town and its surrounding communal lands are located within a nationally recognized protected area established in the 1990s to conserve the region's rare and fragile desert landscape. The results of the doctoral dissertation will increase our knowledge of how transnational communities manage natural environments and what the implications of this process are for the outcome of state-sponsored conservation and development programs.
Broader Impact: Aside from contributing to the education of a young social scientist, the research findings will inform policy planning that promotes ecologically and socially viable conservation and development programs in rural areas with high rates of international migration throughout Mexico and other Latin American countries.
