Stephanie Cruz de Echeverria Loebell

This 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. It focuses on institutional and popular discourses and practices ‘against’ emigration,’ both in postrevolutionary Mexico (~1917-1940s)’at a time when intellectuals, artists, and scholars were trying to determine the incipient nations’ place in the world, in history, and what it meant to be Mexican’, and in today’s town of Jerez, at the heart of a ‘historic region of migration’ in Mexico’s central plateau. In this 15-month research project, I ask: how does not-migrating become understood as a viable option in a place where leaving seems inevitable? How has migration become part of national ideological discourses, and been mobilized politically? This project consists of three months of archival work in Mexico City’s National Archives to trace the discourses and policies aimed at impeding emigration, and of a year of ethnographic fieldwork in Jerez, Zacatecas, where I will gather life-stories, conduct interviews, and do participant observation. I examine staying as an existential experience closely entangled with ideas about morality, sociality, political belonging, and the good life.