Stephanie Cruz de Echeverria Loebell

STEPHANIE CRUZ DE ECHEVERRIA LOEBELL, then a graduate student at City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, New York, was approved funding in April 2021 to aid research on “Staying: National Ideology and the Experience of Non-migrants in a Historic Region of Migration in Mexico,” supervised by Dr. Mandana Limbert. The grantee conducted 12-months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jalostotitlán, Mexico, and archival research. The project examines the experience and politics of staying in a place where Mexicans have been migrating to the United States for over a century, and migrating has become a commonsense part of everyday life. Part I involved analyzing correspondence to the president in turn in postrevolutionary Mexico (~1920s-1940s) and newspaper articles concerning a mid-century break down of the worker exchange agreement known as the Bracero Program (1942-1964), which provided data on how emigration began to be seen in Mexico as a political problem, and how the rhetoric association of labor migration to the United States with unpatriotic behavior and moral corruption was framed and circulated. Part II utilized qualitative ethnographic methods to document the lived experience of stayers in Jalostotitlán, a small town in Mexico’s historic region of migration. Recorded life stories provided data on the ideas and strategies people deploy to stay put in a context where leaving has become part of the fabric of local economic and cultural life.