ABSTRACT
Migration between Mexico and the US has become a permanent and powerful force in the socio-economic landscape of rural Mexican villages. This is reflected in the fact that at any moment in time a large part of the Mexican village population resides in the US and that in rural Mexico one finds a continuous coming and going of migrants. In addition to the flows of people, much circulation of goods, money and information takes place between the village and different localities in el Norte. As Long points out, ‘confederations of households and wide-ranging interpersonal networks embracing a wide variety of activities and cross-cutting so-called “rural” and “urban” contexts, as well as national frontiers, constitute the social fabric upon which livelihoods and commodity flows are woven’ (Long, 1997, p. 11).
