ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we examine the connection of two distant and unequal territories through the provision of cheap and undocumented workers from Pahuatlán in the Northern Sierra of Puebla, in the center of Mexico, to North Carolina, in the Nuevo South, during the last four decades. International migration, initiated in the 1980s, spread throughout the municipality. Between 1995 and 2007, we identify a short-cycle accelerated migration developed in the region and the combination of the traditional model of individual and cyclic mobility of male predominance, a “military model of migration,” with a mobility scheme of single women or with dependents, which overlaps with the migration of young couples with or without children. We document the conditions that underlie the production of the mother-worker-undocumented migrant subject, whose experience of mobility between two countries is intertwined with precarious work, overexploitation and gender inequality. We describe and explain the tensions that traverse a type of binational domestic arrangement in which children born in Mexico and North Carolina were raised in the United States, a formation that has grown during the last three decades in the context of the decrease of circular migration.
