by EMILY ACHTENBERG
The tradition of dual residency—between city and countryside, or across national borders—has been an important survival strategy, and a source of solidarity, for indigenous communities. But in places like Oaxaca, Mexico and the Bolivian highlands, the practice is becoming a source of conflict, pitting residents, communities, and social sectors against one another in new forms of economic and political competition.
In Oaxaca, Mexico’s most ethnically diverse state where 75% of the residents live in “extreme poverty,” some 400 indigenous municipalities are governed by a centuries-old system of usos y costumbres (uses and customs). Residents choose their leaders in open, democratic assemblies and are obligated to perform unpaid community service (e.g., as local government officials, policemen, or sanitation workers) on a rotating basis.
These traditions have kept the villages functioning for centuries, even in the face of vast out-migration over the last 40 years, as successive neoliberal governments instituted failed agrarian and trade policies that decimated local peasant economies. With a high percentage of Oaxacan migrants resettling as undocumented workers in southern California, as long as the border was fluid residents could—and did—return periodically to perform their obligatory service, subsidized by their own savings. Migrants retained land, homes, and voting rights in their native villages, keeping relatives and local businesses afloat through remittances and maintaining strong community ties inbetween visits.