The ones left behind (old blog from 2022, just published)

I won't recount all the conversations I had with family members of migrants in any detail. A lot of them were not very long. I didn't have high expectations of these; to some degree, it was more important or useful for me to see where people had lived before coming to the U.S. and hear whatever their families had to say. Not all of the interviews contained a lot of insight or information. Some only last a few minutes -- in one case it took twice as long to set up the interview (that is, to find a time and place where we could talk) than it did to conduct the interview. 

In a few cases, I visited people in communities that I had known from previous visits -- for example, my interview with Ken's family in La Puerta. In others, such as in San Andrés Sajcabajá, I went to a community that I hadn't known.

There were some unexpected bits of information. People I met casually or whom I was interviewing for some other purposes told me that they had migrant relatives in the U.S., or knew people who had migrated recently. One of the alcaldes indígenas in San Andrés told me that he hoped to migrate to the United States. He had made an attempt a few years ago and was turned back at the border (or deported, I'm not sure which) but wanted to try again, "because here there are no jobs".  In Zacualpa, the director of nursing at the health center told me that a friend of his had four children in the U.S., the latter three of whom had left during the pandemic, including two who had migrated this year. Also in Zacualpa, one of the alcaldes indígenas told me that he had three siblings in New Bedford, including a younger brother who had only migrated a month ago. And finally, on my last day in Zacualpa a young woman who was living in the house where I was staying casually mentioned that she had a sibling who had recently migrated to the United States. The woman who hosted me in Zacualpa has children in the U.S. -- I think she might have said that all her children (I'm not quite sure how many she has; I didn't ask) are in the U.S. None of them are recent migrants, which has been my focus -- although the current pandemic-era migration has to be seen in the context of long-established patterns of migration to the U.S. (and in the case of my research, specifically to New Bedford and nearby areas).

So while it might be a slight exaggeration to say that every single family in Zacualpa has relatives in the U.S., that's probably not too far off the mark.

One of the phenomena that I observed, or that was told to me, is that many of those who are migrating now have a higher level of education than those who migrated earlier. There are several who have completed high school (bachillerato) and a few who have some university training.