Dr. David Griffith will undertake research on the effects that migration to the United States has on traditional knowledge systems in sending communities. Migrants from Latin America and the Caribbean to U.S. destinations continue to remit earnings to their natal communities for investment in productive regimes, house construction, and the enhancement of community infrastructure. Such behaviors explicitly bring global phenomena to bear on local settings, challenging local knowledge systems to accommodate new political economic conditions. The research proposed here will focus on the impacts of migration on local knowledge in one region in Veracruz, Mexico and one region in Olancho, Honduras. Using a battery of methods that complement long-term ethnographic research, investigators from three countries will compare migrant and non-migrant households, as well as migrating family members with non-migrating family members, regarding their knowledge of local production regimes.
The research is important because it will contribute to social science theory that seeks to integrate close, long-term studies of local settings with multi-site, multinational studies done in the context of transnationalism and other processes that transcend communities. Local settings continue to exert powerful influence over human behavior, serving as life-long seats of identity, attracting significant investments in housing and land, and generating important knowledge bases about natural resources, ecological processes, and other features unique to specific ecosystems and production regimes. This research will combine insights from cognitive anthropology and local knowledge studies with insights from migration research. This investigation will thus draw together two important strands of social scientific inquiry to understand the complex relations between migrant-sending and immigrant-receiving regions in the Americas.
The research also will foster collaboration among Mexican, Honduran, and U.S. scholars and graduate students.
International labor migration presents challenges to both migrant-sending and migrant-receiving communities around the world, and is currently one of the most contentious political and economic issues facing the United States and its Mexican and Central American neighbors. Migration can lead to glutted labor markets and consequent unemployment and underemployment in receiving communities and to labor scarcity in sending communities. Working in Honduras and Mexico, this project investigated the influence of migration over local economic activities, including entrepreneurs developing new business models in four sending communities in Honduras and four in Mexico. It examined how local knowledge of production systems and of local natural resources changed due to emigration and its consequent labor scarcity. In the sending communities, project personnel found that emigration was one of a number of economic opportunities pursued by community members after economic problems developed around traditional economic activities such as coffee or basic grains production. New businesses developed by community members in Veracruz included small-scale bamboo furniture manufacturing workshops, floriculture and ornamental horticulture, and aquaculture; new businesses developed by community members in Honduras included carpentry workshops, the production of dairy products, and aquaculture. Shifts to new business models were stimulated by access to local natural resources and the search for economic models requiring lower labor inputs. New economic activities in some cases were leading to deforestation, as people cleared forests for additional cattle pasture for milk and dairy products and as people cut bamboo and cedar for furniture and carpentry, but some efforts were underway to replant bamboo and cedar to assure continued supplies of these forest products to furniture and carpentry workshops. Intellectual Merit. This project drew together two bodies of work in anthropology: local knowledge studies and international migration studies. Both fields of inquiry emphasize the importance of economic behavior in community and individual identity, yet the former often considers human behavior in confined settings, closely attached to place and local natural resources, while the latter ranges over international territories that involve multiple connections and new social and economic experiences. By bringing the two together in the study of specific production regimes, this research has bridged the gap that often exists between micro and macro levels of analysis, revealing how national and international policies and economic processes influence local natural and human resources and the systems of knowledge that support them. Using a method called cultural biography (or tracing the cultural histories of production regimes), we were able to locate those public and private factors that led to the erosion of traditional production regimes and the rise of emigration and the development of new economic alternatives. Broader Impacts. This project contributed to the intellectual development of three graduate students and one undergraduate student in the United States, three graduate students in Mexico, and three research assistants working for a Nongovernmental Organization in Honduras. In terms of its policy importance, project findings demonstrated that viable economic alternatives to migration—such as furniture manufacturing, ornamental horticulture, and aquaculture—exist in sending communities that could prevent youth from risking the long, arduous, and dangerous treks from their home communities to the United States. Enabling the development of new markets for the fruits of these alternative economic endeavors could slow the growth of the undocumented immigrant population in the United States by keeping people at home and contributing to local job growth and economic activity. Migration constitutes but one of several possible economic alternatives that people could pursue in these communities, and many Mexican and Honduran citizens would prefer to remain in their home communities rather than emigrate. Findings from this research have shown that entrepreneurs who have pioneered new economic alternatives have tended to reinvest earnings in business stability or expansion, and their models can be used to develop business plans for new entrepreneurs, generating investment, employment, and educational opportunities not only for business owners but for others in the community.
