Abstract

Migration has become a ubiquitous fact of life for people living in countries like El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Haiti, and many parts of Africa. Its growth in the past three decades raises important questions about social change for those who remain in these countries, choosing not to migrate. In El Salvador, migration has affected how people manage land, plan their local economies, and structure their social relationships, while pre-existing land tenure patterns and changing social relations of production mediate migration's localized effects. On questions of migration's developmental impact, migration studies have been limited by scholars' reliance on early modernization versus dependency theories of development that lead to generally optimistic or pessimistic conclusions and mask the mechanisms of the relationship between migration and development. Development scholars have moved beyond the confines of such debates but tend to overlook migration as a factor of local or regional development. The question thus becomes, how do residents in high migration areas balance the resources stemming from migration against the challenges it poses as they pursue available paths of development? Using 118 in-depth interviews, archival data, and extensive ethnographic observation and field notes, I construct historical narratives to compare how residents of Yucuaiquín (in the department of La Unión) and Masahuat (in the department of Santa Ana) make the most of migration. These two towns have similar histories of migration (onset, duration, magnitude) but differing land tenure patterns, occupational structures, and experiences with the war that ended in 1992. Despite receiving remittances in nearly equal proportions and similarly experiencing a variety of social ruptures through decades of mostly unauthorized migration to the U.S., residents of each place produced distinctive development trajectories within the same national context.