Indigenous People, Rural Migration and Communication Technologies

The purpose of my paper is to highlight how rural people and ethnical minorities do actually transform and enrich their historical relational environment, throughout migration and the social usage of technologies. The paper will be based on the results of a research I carried out in Mexico and the United States on the case of the Mixtecos migrants employed in the transnational labor market of the North American agro-business. Actually, by experiencing multiple forms of migration, employment, labor treatment, and social interaction and communication, and by acquiring new individual and social abilities to use communication technologies-like the cell-phones, the internet, but even the transportation means- they open up and construct new opportunities of thinking and implementing local development. This process is based on the social maturation of new subjectivities, on the transformation of the traditional relations of power within the indigenous communities they come from, on the organization of new and wider links and connections among such communities and the global world.