David Stoll

El Norte or Bust! (eBook, PDF)

How Migration Fever and Microcredit Produced a Financial Crash in a Latin American Town

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Debt is the hidden engine driving undocumented migration to the United States. So argues David Stoll in this powerful chronicle of migrants, moneylenders, and swindlers in the Guatemalan highlands, one of the locales that, collectively, are sending millions of Latin Americans north in search of higher wages. As an anthropologist, Stoll has witnessed the Ixil Mayas of Nebaj grow in numbers, run out of land, and struggle to find employment. Aid agencies have provided microcredits to turn the Nebajenses into entrepreneurs, but credit alone cannot boost productivity in crowded mountain valleys, which is why many recipients have invested the loans in smuggling themselves to the United States. Back home, their remittances have inflated the price of land so high that only migrants can afford to buy it. Thus, more Nebajenses have felt obliged to borrow the large sums needed to go north. So many have done so that, even before the Great Recession hit the U.S. in 2008, many were unable to find enough work to pay back their loans, triggering a financial crash back home. Now migrants and their families are losing the land and homes they have pledged as collateral. Chain migration, moneylending, and large families, Stoll proposes, have turned into pyramid schemes in which the poor transfer risk and loss to their near and dear.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury eBooks US
• Seitenzahl: 296
• Erscheinungstermin: 13. Dezember 2012
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9798216222682
• Artikelnr.: 74844599

Autorenporträt

David Stoll, who has been visiting Guatemala since the 1970s, is professor of anthropology at Middlebury College. His books include Fishers of Men or Founders of Empire?, Is Latin America Turning Protestant?, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala, and Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans.

Inhaltsangabe

Part I: The American Dream Comes to the Cuchumatanes Chapter 1: A Financial
Bubble in a Guatemalan Town Chapter 2: A Town of Many Projects Chapter 3:
Nebaj Goes North Chapter 4: Indenture Travel Part II: The Nebaj Bubble and
How It Burst Chapter 5: Borrowers, Moneylenders and Banks Chapter 6:
Projects and Their Penumbra-Swindles Chapter 7: Losing Husbands to El Norte
Part III: Comparisons and Extrapolations Chapter 8: Dreams and Pyramid
Schemes Chapter 9: The Right to Not Migrate