Diaspora policy’s impact on migrant organizations: fifteen years of the Tres por Uno program in Zacatecas, Mexico

ABSTRACT

Migrant origin countries are increasingly implementing diaspora policies to embrace and tap into emigrant communities. These policies often call for the participation of migrant organizations, but it is unclear how the outreach affects the groups or whether space is created for migrants to exercise agency. I engage these questions through analysis of Mexico’s migrant-centred 3x1 Program for community development, examining the institutionalization of the policy and the experiences of established migrant organizations. Two broad trends emerge: First, bureaucratization of the program at the federal level has strained the capacity of participating migrant groups, which are volunteer-managed clubs not professional NGOs. They have been forced to find informal workarounds and rely on help from government officials, which has the potential to tokenize their participation. Second, however, I find that established migrant organizations have nonetheless continued a pattern of mediated empowerment. They are interdependent with the state government and constrained in some ways, but they also are able to build and exercise agency to influence how diaspora policy is enacted in their origin areas. I conclude that the proliferation of diaspora policies is a mixed bag for migrant organizations, with the potential both to empower and to marginalize them.

KEYWORDS:

• Diaspora policy
• migration and development
• hometown associations
• participation
• mediated empowerment

Acknowledgements

Thank you to all of the research participants, particularly the Denver Federation of Zacatecan Clubs. Thank you to Fernando Riosmena, Xóchitl Bada, and Sarah Tynen for providing comments on earlier drafts. Thanks also to three anonymous reviewers from the American Association of Geographers’ Latin America specialty group, who selected an earlier draft of this paper as the 2019 Best Student Paper (PhD level) and provided insightful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Geolocation information

Research was conducted in multiple locations in the USA and Mexico. Primary sites include Zacatecas, Zacatecas, Mexico (22.7642° N, 102.5866° W) and Denver, Colorado, USA (39.7392° N, 104.9903° W).

Notes

1. See Délano (2011), p.1–4 for a discussion of the use of ‘diaspora’ in reference to Mexican migrants.

2. Hickey (2015) highlights a division between ‘migration-and-development’ policies, which seek to maximize the impact of low-skilled workers’ remittances, and ‘diaspora strategies,’ which focus on elite migrants as potential investors or benefactors. I use the term ‘diaspora policy’ as a broader category that encompasses both, in part because the 3×1 Program in Mexico that is my focus is hard to categorize – many of its participants are ‘low-skilled’ migrants, but they are engaged as benefactors and investors.

3. Critics have questioned why migrants, many of whom have not lived in the origin community for years or decades, are assumed to be experts on local needs (Faist, 2008), problematizing the special emphasis on migrants to the exclusion of hometown-based groups or local residents (Bada, 2014). Bolstering these critiques, an evaluation of 3×1 projects concluded that HTA’s attempts at oversight are often counterproductive if not paired with active home community civil society partners (Burgess, 2016).

4. Diario Oficial de la Federación (México), 27 diciembre 2014. Reglas de Operación del Programa 3×1 para Migrantes, para el ejercicio fiscal 2015. 2.1. Objetivo General. Contribuir a fortalecer la participación social para impulsar el desarrollo comunitario mediante la inversión en Proyectos de Infraestructura Social, Servicios Comunitarios, Educativos y/o Proyectos Productivos cofinanciados por los tres órdenes de gobierno y organizaciones de mexicanos en el extranjero.

5. Author calculations from 3 × 1 Program administrative data for 2002 through 2017.

6. I compiled an unofficial list of federations from the 3 × 1 Program’s online management system as of April 2018. There was a total of 115 registered federations, including from Zacatecas – 19 (17%), Michoacan – 12, Jalisco – 10, Guerrero – 10, Guanajuato – 8, Hidalgo – 8, Puebla – 6, Durango – 5, and Yucatan – 5. In total, 23 states and the Federal District had at least one registered federation, though it is likely that some appearing in the system are inactive.

7. Iskander (2010, p. 24) describes a nearly inverse scalar politics in an earlier era, as migrants in both Mexico and Morocco shifted down to local (municipal and state) engagements when early interactions with the national governments were not fruitful. Only after achieving local successes were they able to scale back up to the national.

8. See Bada (2014, p. 157) regarding a similar ‘abuelita visa’ program sponsored by a U.S. Congressman to reunite families in his district.

9. Officially, the approval rate for temporary visa applications by Mexican nationals is 78%, but this number includes all tourist and business visa applications, obscuring any more detailed accounting that might reveal the likelihood for poor, rural applicants to be approved (Bureau of Consular Affairs, US Department of State, 2018). It is safe to assume approval rates are substantially lower, making the 85% success rate for Corazon de Plata noteworthy. However, by the end of 2018, the approval rate for the groups seemed to be falling closer to 50% (Fieldnotes, 8 December 2018; Text message, 18 December 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Fellowship from the U.S. Department of State, Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council, Community Based Research Fellowship from the University of Colorado Engage Center, and Dinaburg Fellowship and Gilbert White Doctoral Award from the University of Colorado Geography Department.

Notes on contributors

Aaron Malone

Aaron Malone completed his PhD in Geography at the University of Colorado - Boulder in 2019. He is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Mining Sustainability at the Colorado School of Mines. His research has been based in the US and Latin America, focusing on migration, policy mobilities, and development studies.