Mobility and vulnerability in the school-to-work transition of rural youth in Mexico

Abstract

In the rural towns of central Mexico, one of the most decisive consequences of the slow deagrarianization of the countryside is the fact that its youngest population have had their access to educational possibilities and their economic income curtailed, whilst they are also the protagonists of an intense dynamic of displacements between their place of residence and medium-sized and large metropolitan areas. Current social-anthropological scholarship links this kind of mobility to strategies for survival in precarious and vulnerable conditions which lead to a significant diversification of occupied spaces. Within this context, the aim of this article is to identify and understand the dynamics of geographical mobility in the school-to-work transition among rural youngsters in seasonal conditions of social-economic hardship. The research took place between 2013 and 2020, using an anthropology-based methodology with fieldwork which included using techniques to record multi-sited ethnographic information involving people who move on a daily basis. Its goal was to develop a case study that allowed for the analysis of the data within its social context. Research findings allowed us to reflect upon how, in contexts of structural precarity, young people´s prioritizing of seeking varied and distant paid work, together with their subsequent early leaving and intermittent attendance of school, add up to a cumulative path of disadvantages which are learnt and socialized at the home of origin. Within this framework, daily mobility becomes an integral component of such adverse life-paths, thus co-producing conditions of high vulnerability for rural young people in very heterogeneous but constant ways.