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This chapter assesses the range of practices employed by Indigenous communities and authorities in Oaxaca’s usos y costumbres (UC) municipalities in response to the many challenges posed by migration. Based on analysis of original survey data, the chapter shows that migrants are often required to continue to fulfill their obligations to the community under the cargo system and to make financial contributions to public works projects after leaving, and often suffer sanctions when they fail to do so. At the same time, however, communities that engage in these punitive and illiberal practices are better able to preserve a degree of unity than other high-migration communities, and are more successful in channeling migrant collective remittances toward potentially development-enhancing public works projects. Finally, former migrants are found to be overrepresented in positions of authority, suggesting that they are not merely victims of rights violations but are also empowered members of their municipalities.

This chapter examines the Mexican state’s intervention into remittance building practices (often referred to as remittance development) through a spatial analysis of their Tres Por Uno (3x1) program. Despite its democratic and transparent nature, 3x1 creates a top-down institutional space that channels emigrants’ informal remittances sent through Hometown Associations to government projects that migrants initiate but do not fully control. Ultimately, the 3x1 program extends the logic of the remittance house: stretching communities across disparate geographies can result in material change at home. Yet as the unit of analysis shifts from family to community and an increasing number of actors are involved, more is at stake and the complexities and consequences of long-distance building are amplified. This chapter argues that a spatial analysis of 3x1 reveals a remittance development model that formalizes migrant building practices and institutionalizes their roles as long-distance hometown boosters.

The first empirical task is to identify the characteristics of municipalities which US-based migrants have come together to support financially. Using a nationwide, municipal-level data set compiled by the author, the chapter estimates several multivariate statistical models to compare municipalities that did not benefit from the 3x1 Program for Migrants with those that did, and seeks to explain variation in the number and value of 3x1 projects. The analysis shows that migrants are more likely to contribute where migrant civil society has become more deeply institutionalized at the state level and in places with longer histories as migrant-sending places. Furthermore, the results suggest that political factors are at play, as projects have disproportionately benefited states and municipalities where the PAN had a stronger presence, with fewer occurring elsewhere.