La Ciénaga

During my visit to Oaxaca City at the end of August, I took a day trip to visit La Ciénaga, a town about 1 hour outside of the City of Oaxaca and a major sending community to Poughkeepsie and the Hudson Valley. While writing my senior thesis, I read quite a bit about the transnational relationship between Poughkeepsie and a few specific communities (2-3) in Oaxaca. These communities are prime examples of chain migration – many people in the towns migrate to the United States and almost all go to the same place, in this case, in the Hudson Valley. They also provide examples of transnational identity – connections are kept with the home communities and there is a significant amount of communication and information sharing between the two distinct places. In this regard, one author I read spoke of a continuum of space and culture between Oaxaca and Poughkeepsie. While living in Poughkeepsie, I was fascinated by the results of this phenomenon as they were exhibited there. Even though the immigrants there were in a different country, many of them still had many strong social networks in the city, and they maintained many connections with the home communities. Of course, there was a wide diversity of immigrants in Poughkeepsie, but these processes could certainly be detected on a general level. I was told that with some communities, connections were so strong that if you went to the home communities in Mexico, everyone would know about Poughkeepsie.

Well, when I was in Oaxaca City, I realized I had the opportunity to see for myself. So I got on a bus and headed to La Ciénaga. The driver seemed a bit confused about why I was going there, but didn’t ask any questions. The bus dropped me off on the highway next to a long, paved road heading to the town. There was a sign announcing that it was the road to La Ciénaga and also described when the people of the town pooled together the funds to construct the road. I had a feeling that remittances probably had a hand in that construction (in fact, for many emigrant communities, pooling of resources gained from remittances for public works projects in the home communities is quite common).

I walked the mile or so past farm fields and a tomato farm to arrive at the town. I walked around the town a bit to get a feel for it – a mix of dirt roads and paved roads. Modest homes. A few corner stores interspersed. There was a main road with more restaurants and schools. There was also a town square (almost completely deserted when I was there) surrounded by the church, the government building, a playground, and the clinic. The donkey parked in front of the clinic is a statement of the rural nature of the town - the people who work in the town mostly work in agriculture.



After walking through the town, I was thirsty. Also, I was interested in talking to some people there. So I stopped in a small corner store and bought a juice. While paying, I asked the woman behind the counter, “Do you know Poughkeepsie?” She said, “no.” In Spanish, the question “do you know,” when used with places, often means “have you been there?” So when the woman behind the counter said “no,” I initially started worrying that I had come to the wrong town. But then, a second later, she said “but yes, I know about Poughkeepsie. I lot of people from this town are there.” Apparently, she had thought I was asking if she’d ever been to Poughkeepsie. But as far as knowing about Poughkeepsie, well she hardly had to answer – of course she knew about Poughkeepsie. That’s the attitude I sensed with her response. I explained to her why I had come, that I had lived in Poughkeepsie and was interested in visiting to see the town. She told me her name was Celia. We got to talking. She told me she had relatives there. She asked me if I knew the bridge that was there. Pretty soon, a man entered the store to buy something and Celia asked him if he had been to Poughkeepsie. He said no, but that his sister lives there now. He himself worked for 7 years in New York, but in the city.

Later, I stopped in a restaurant for lunch. There, I was served by Graciela. She told me that her son was in the Hudson Valley, working as a bus boy and living with an uncle in Highland. She showed me a photo of him. He’s been gone for about 2 years. She misses him. While I was eating, someone else came in to the restaurant for their lunch. His name was Antonio. He too had been in the U.S. working. He left for the U.S. at the ripe age of 13 and he worked in both New York City and the Hudson Valley and he worked there for about 12 years. While we ate, we got into a conversation about politics in the U.S. and the upcoming presidential elections.

In the combi headed back to Oaxaca City, I chatted with Rodolfina, an older woman seated to my left. Apparently she had lived in the Hudson Valley as well, in Highland. She moved back to Mexico, however, because she has problems with her legs and it was too difficult there with hardly any public transportation and everyone in their own house. Rodolfina has a daughter who lives in Oaxaca City and the rest of her children live in the U.S. She was incredibly nice and encouraged me to come back to visit and stay in her house. To my right in the combi was a very friend young woman named Jennifer. She too had lived in the Hudson Valley – in Hopewell Junction for the first 13 years of her life.

In sum, what I had been told about La Ciénaga and the connection with Poughkeepsie and the Hudson Valley was incredibly true - every person I spoke to in the town had some sort of personal experience with migration to the region (whether through a personal migration or the migration of a close relative). In addition, everyone I talked to repeated the same phrase “Yes, there are many people from La Ciénaga over there.” In truth, I barely scratched the surface when it comes to understanding how emigration affects the town. I intentionally didn’t ask very probing questions in my conversations and avoided pressing when the conversation turned touchy or emotional – I was there as a visitor, not as an interviewer or researcher. Hearing painful stories about how Graciela misses her son, for example, would have allowed me to leave the town saying “oh, how sad,” but wouldn’t have done much good for Graciela or anybody else. Nevertheless, even with the surface-level conversations I had, the impact of emigration on the town was notable. Emigration was a fact of life. Being separated from family members was common. And a general knowledge about the Hudson Valley was clearly present in the town, even among those who had never left. Here, the transnationalism I had read about and been told about was certainly evident.