Fieldworkers on the Frontera
Team of Undergraduate Researchers Pioneers Program in Mexican Migration

By Inga Kiderra I June 13, 2005
Photos by Wayne Cornelius

Twenty-one UCSD undergraduates journeyed south of the border in January to learn firsthand what brings untold numbers of Mexican migrants north.

Led by professor Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies (CCIS), the students were founding participants in the field research track of a new interdisciplinary minor in International Migration Studies. The minor, offered by CCIS in collaboration with Eleanor Roosevelt College, was launched in the fall quarter of 2004 and is believed to be the only undergraduate concentration of its kind at an American university.

This year's fieldwork focused on two rural, migrant-sending communities in the states of Jalisco and Zacatecas.

Graves of unauthorized migrants from one of the research communities who died crossing the Arizona desert.

The students - who went through a rigorous admissions process that included (in the words of Cornelius) an "interrogation" in Spanish to test their fluency - spent the fall in hard training for their winter trip. They studied research methods. They read extensively about the culture, politics and economics of the region. And they helped develop the 143 questions they would eventually pose.

"We weren't just handed a readymade survey," said Marisol Gutierrez, a graduating political science major, who comes from a family of both legal and illegal immigrants. "We were part of the process."

In Jalisco and Zacatecas, the research team interviewed more than 600 recently returned and potential migrants to discover, in part, if tougher border policies were having an effect. In a word: No.

Beefed-up border enforcement, Cornelius and the students found, has not served as a deterrent to illegal migration. Of those interviewed, 65 percent said evading the Border Patrol was now "much more difficult," and 23 percent had been apprehended on their most recent trip. Nonetheless, a majority reported they had succeeded in entering the U.S. on their first or second try.

Most of the migrants were aware of intensified border enforcement and many (64 percent) knew of someone who had died crossing. Still, 46 percent of those without papers planned to enter the U.S. in 2005. If anything, riskier crossing had driven up the fees of the people-smugglers known as coyotes.

A 75-year-old resident of one of the research communities who migrated to the United States 50 years ago as a "bracero" contract laborer, and later six times as an unauthorized migrant. (Photograph by Wayne Cornelius)

Statistics don't tell the whole story though, as the students quickly found. After spending two weeks in a small town and talking for at least an hour with each person they interviewed, textbook knowledge was brought alive, Gutierrez said.

"The people were no longer subject A or subject B, but Maria or Jose," said senior Anjanette Urdanivia, whose parents are from Peru.

"Being Latina," she said, "I thought I knew what immigration was about.but my eyes were opened."

Urdanivia was particularly struck by the story of one woman who had crossed stuffed in a coyote's car trunk with her pregnant sister and worried that not only would the two women suffocate but the baby too.

Also lodged in Urdanivia's memory is a woman named Locha. "A godmother to half the town [of Tlacuitapa]" and guardian to all, Locha fed the students "yummy" meals and helped them gain the trust of the community. She regularly advised, Urdanivia said, to say to the people on whose doors they were knocking, "tell them Locha sent you."

Just as valuable as the structured studies, Rob Oliphant said, were the many learning experiences that took place informally. He found important lessons over dishes of menudo and posole in people's homes and in the good shade and good company to be had on the wall opposite the "green store" where townspeople stopped for a days-end beer.

Though they had put in long days in the field in Mexico, the students were not entirely prepared for the slog that awaited them stateside. On returning to San Diego, the remainder of the winter quarter was dedicated to processing all the data they'd collected.

Spring session focused on data analysis and wrestling the research into a book manuscript. Working into the wee hours, Oliphant wrote on migrant settlement behavior in the U.S.; Urdanivia, on conditions in Mexican shoe factories; and Gutierrez, on migrants' political participation.

Offerings left by returned migrants and those who are leaving for the United States at the shrine of Father Toribio Romo, popularly known as the patron saint of migrant workers in Los Altos de Jalisco.

Coauthored by Cornelius, the book will be published by CCIS in the fall and distributed by Lynne Reinner Publishers.

It was tough to work in group on a publishable chapter while also picking up quantitative analysis skills on the fly, Oliphant said, but "I'm proud we're taking part in something that's creating knowledge, rather than sitting in the back of a classroom sponging information."

True to program goals, the students were not only equipped to pursue graduate school and public service careers, they also produced new research.

"The students are not just recycling someone else's data. They are making an original contribution in the field of migration studies and to the public debate on these issues," Cornelius said.

Ann Craig, provost of Eleanor Roosevelt College, notes that research opportunities for undergraduates in the social sciences and humanities are rare and that the Mexican migration field program is particularly unusual in its emphasis on team research: "The group fieldwork model is more commonly found in the hard sciences," she said.

The minor, she added, is a good match for both ERC and for UCSD as a whole, since so many students have either immigrant parents or grandparents.

"This is a way of giving students the opportunity to reflect in the language of a university what is a very personal experience for many," Craig said.

While the students have wrapped up the fifth and final drafts of their book chapters, work on next year's program has already begun.

Craig is exploring ways to expand the service track of the Internal Migration Studies minor, where students can intern in a San Diego/Tijuana-area agency that works with immigrants or refugees. And Cornelius is busy picking (and grilling) the next set of undergraduate field researchers, who will travel with him January 2006 to a Maya-speaking town in the Yucatan.

Like the first cohort, the second will have to make a yearlong commitment to the program.

Urdanivia, who raves about her experience and has volunteered to help out next year, warns that Cornelius doesn't accept mediocrity and pushes students to perform at the level of graduate students: "This isn't for everyone, that's for sure," she said. "It takes a dedicated group."

Cornelius has a warning of his own. "No prima donnas allowed," he's telling new applicants. "This is not a reality show - we can't vote you off the island."

More on the Mexican Migration Field Research and Training Program: http://www.polisci.ucsd.edu/cornelius/

More on the International Migration Studies minor:
http://www.ccis-ucsd.org/Programs/underminor.htm