ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the scene for the more detailed analysis of ethnographic data which follows, by offering a broad discussion of the impact of transnational processes on Mexican rural society. Even in the Eighties, international migration was not the predominant response in all regions, and participation in international migration continued to show some patterns of social selectivity within regional societies. The potentially destructive consequences of transnationalization are especially evident where emigrant communities provide the logistical base for separatist movements, and this is only one of the contradictory results of a global capitalism which makes political borders open to the flow of commodities, people and media images. The formation of transnational communities is a global phenomenon produced by the uneven development of capitalism and successive restructurings of the capitalist accumulation process. The small but powerful group of transnational owners of capital which develops within transnational class relationship is in fact a beneficiary of crisis.
