Tziscao: Migrant Flows and Community Changes

In my interview with don Angel, he helped explain to my why international emigration has developed in Tziscao and how this emigration has affected the community. Like many other villages in Chiapas, out of all the types of migration, emigration to the United States from Tziscao is the newest, appearing within the last 10-15 years. The reasons, according to don Angel, are mainly economic. After land reform in the 20s, 182 families in the town received plots of land that they could work. However, if you don’t have a plot, or you don’t have a document to prove that you have a plot, or you only have a small plot (a problem that arises when land is passed down to multiple children), you aren’t going to be able to make a living off the land. This is the case for many people in the town. They go to the U.S. so they can earn money to buy their land, their house, and their truck and then the majority, according to don Angel, returns to live in Tziscao. Other people put the cause of emigration more simply, “Well, the poverty.”

Despite the newness of this emigration, its effects are keenly felt in the village. Don Angel told me that the young people don’t want to work in the fields anymore, that they come back with vices and drinking habits and they act proud. Indeed, I could feel many of the effects of emigration (and, in general, the increased integration of Tziscao into the global system) just by walking through the town. I could fairly easily pick out the houses that have been built with remittances. They are strong looking houses with adobe walls and tiled roofs and decorative metal gratings on the windows. Many of them stand empty. Some young men drive around with their new trucks. The children, primary school age, ask me about how much certain car models cost in the United States. One mother tells me that her 12-year-old son is already talking about what it will be like “when he goes to work in the United States.”

While it’s impossible to rate the wide variety of these changes as either entirely good or entirely bad, it is clear that emigration has brought new challenges to the people of Tziscao. I think one of the most striking realizations for me was that emigration interferes with efforts to build community. Don Angel and his cousin Fernando, with whom I also spoke, are working hard to improve their village for all ho live there: they both participate in a coffee cooperative in the town, they are working on sustainable tourism projects, and they volunteer their time to work in town government. They have pride in Tziscao and they want to help make it the best place it can be, a place that truly responds to the needs and wants of the community of people living there. However, don Angel is worried, because the youth are leaving for the U.S. at earlier and earlier ages and, as he puts it, they no longer care about working the land and following the traditions of the town. There is a danger, therefore, that the work to build community in Tziscao will be lost with a new generation of emigrants.