ARTISAN PRODUCTION, AN ALTERNATIVE TO POVERTY MIGRATIONS IN AMEYALTEPEC, GUERRERO

Abstract

In a framework of structural inequalities and differentiated access to resources, labor migrations constitute one of the main strategies for the reproduction of the Guerrero indigenous communities of the Balsas’s Depression. Based on ethnographic research, this work focuses on the occupational transformation of a Nahua community with a high degree of marginalization, which faced its own process of unavoidable abandonment of the field through artisan activities linked to internal migrations. Beyond just resorting to the theory of the new rurality as an explanatory source for its transformation, in this community where agricultural work was practically suppressed as a result of a prolonged drought and structural reforms supported by the conceptual bases of neoliberalism, this research concludes that the agricultural decoupling course followed in Ameyaltepec, Guerrero, although it had a long period of crisis, thanks to a pronounced willingness to craft activities and a decisive business profile of its inhabitants, crafts and their marketing in Mexico’s most important urban centers, allowed the ameyaltepences not only to transform occupationally from subsistence peasants to migrant artisans, but to avoid the consumptive labor migrations in which many communities in the region fell irretrievably, to give rise to rural-urban family migrations and return of the most promising artisans vendors, that although some of their negative implications are related to educational and health problems of the family nuclei, enabled them to overcome their heritage poverty and through self-employment, resolve this endemic lack of the Balsas’s Depression.

Keywords

• deagrarization
• depresión del balsas
• production strategy
• occupational transformation