What is it about?

Mexican immigrants who move to the United States exert great influence on the reproduction of tradition in regional Mexican cities. This study examined the “changes in vistas” that appear due to the frequent migration that connects global cities with sending societies. The emphasis here is on the realities in which residents upgrade their living spaces using traditionality with their own unique strategies (posttraditional vistas), despite social and financial restrictions. Employing ethnographic methods and measurement surveys of housing, this study focused on Jalostotitlán, Jalisco, Mexico. It was found that changes in the vista of Jalostotitlán have not resulted from the unidirectional impact of people, goods, and money flowing from global cities; rather, they have arisen from the bidirectional relationship between immigrants and their hometowns. This research helps to depict another factor for discussions of the global migration narrative by placing regional cities at the core.

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Why is it important?

This article explores how Mexican immigrants in the United States influence the reinvention of tradition and urban aesthetics in their hometowns, revealing a dynamic interplay of imagined and invented traditions in Jalostotitlán, Jalisco, that challenges one-way narratives of globalization. This work is unique in that it reframes transnational migration not merely as an economic phenomenon, but as a bidirectional cultural and spatial transformation between global cities and the regional towns that supply them. The use of "posttraditional vistas" as a conceptual lens—grounded in ethnographic research and architectural analysis—offers a rare and vivid account of how traditions are actively reconstructed through migration, remittances, and visual identity. By placing the often-overlooked regional cities at the center of the analysis, this article contributes a fresh, bottom-up perspective to the global migration discourse. It invites scholars, policymakers, and urban planners to rethink how hometown transformations reflect not just economic ties, but also emotional and symbolic ones—making it highly relevant for current discussions on diasporic identity, urban regeneration, and cultural sustainability.

Perspectives

I found this work striking because it humanizes the macroeconomics of migration. It doesn't just count remittances—it shows how those remittances are turned into homes, plazas, and visual cues that reconnect people to place. There's a quiet dignity in how these migrants—often overlooked in policy and scholarship—assert their presence and reshape tradition on their own terms. To me, that’s the heart of this article: it captures the creativity and resilience of people who are not just between worlds, but building one of their own.

Professor Fuyuki Makino
Toyo Daigaku

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: The Role of Mexican Immigrants in the United States on the Imagined and Invented Traditions in Mexico’s Regional Cities, Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, April 2019, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0739986319843510.
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