U.S. Imperialism and Migration: The Effects on Mexican Women and Families

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze the contemporary mass migrations of families and documented and undocumented workers from Mexico to the United States in terms of what is seen as the fundamental determining characteristic: monopoly capitalist domination of the U.S. economy and the attendent imperial ist domination of the Mexican economy. The preservation of semi-feudal back wardness in the Mexican countryside arising from foreign monopoly capitalist domination creates the conditions for the greatly cheapened reproduction of migrant labor-power via the intensive manual labor of women and the family working under rural, backward, preindustrial conditions. This in turn allows for the superexploitation of immigrant labor-power within U.S. industrial and agri cultural production, which begins to rely increasingly on variable capital under conditions resembling preindustrial production: dispersion of production, inten sive hand labor, sweatshops, etc. Historically, economically, and politically this is seen as representing reactionary and retrogressive trends and the growing decay of imperialism.