Lindsey Carte

Human migration and land are inherently connected, as people move from, through, and to places with diverse land processes and systems

Patagonia evokes images of a remote, unpopulated frontier region endowed with a variety of undisturbed natural environments, including arid steppes, high mountains, fjords, forests, and ice fields....

This paper explores the migration experiences, perceived COVID-19 impacts, and depression symptoms among Haitian migrants living in Santiago, Chile. Ninety-five participants from eight neighborhoods with a high density of Haitian migrants were recruited. Descriptive statistics, univariate analysis, and logistic regression analysis were conducted. Chi-squared tests were used to confirm univariate results. We found that 22% of participants had major depressive symptoms based on the CESD-R-20 scale, 87% reported major life changes due to COVID-19, and 78% said their migration plans had changed due to the pandemic. Factors associated with more depressive symptoms were being in debt (OR = 3.43) and experiencing discrimination (ORs: 0.60 to 6.19). Factors associated with less odds of depressive symptoms were social support (ORs: 0.06 to 0.25), change in migration plans due to COVID-19 (OR = 0.30), and planning to leave Chile (OR = 0.20). After accounting for relevant factors, planning to leave Chile is significantly predictive of fewer symptoms of depression. Haitian migrants living in Chile had a high prevalence of depression. Planning to leave Chile was a significant protector against depressive symptoms. Future studies should explore how nuanced experiences of uncertainty play out in migrants’ lives, mental well-being, and planning for their future.

Much smallholder farming currently exists side by side with large-scale, industrial agriculture, as an outcome of the Green Revolution unfolding in uneven and dualistic terms. In Guatemala’s Pacific lowlands, state incentives fuel expansion of industrial export agriculture. Large-scale sugarcane production has come to surround rural farming communities, where small-scale farmers grow maize and sesame with little state support. Drawing on a survey of nearly 200 households, seventeen in-depth interviews, and four focus groups in five communities during 2014 and 2015 in the Department of Retalhuleu, our research explores the realities and imaginaries of smallholders as they negotiate their incorporation into the Green Revolution. In the face of minuscule agricultural plots resulting in limited production, cycles of agrarian debt, vulnerability to drought, and emigration to the United States, smallholders paradoxically work hard to replicate “modern” Green Revolution approaches in their own parcels. We argue that the proximal, uneven expansion of modern technocentric agriculture, fueled by the model of the Green Revolution, has helped cultivate “constrained spatial imaginaries” among smallholders, in which ideas and desires around improved agricultural practices remain bound to accessing hybrid seeds, chemical inputs, and technical extension, despite the way the Green Revolution has been implicated in their ongoing marginalization.

Chile has embraced the expansion of monoculture forest plantations of exotic Monterey pine and eucalyptus as part of its development strategy. While forestry is considered financially successful and meets sustainability objectives, the increase in forest plantations across southern Chile has received harsh critiques for exacerbating conflict over Indigenous land rights, producing negative environmental outcomes, and increasing poverty and inequality. There are also claims that forest plantation expansion has led to an abandonment of the countryside. Migration is viewed as a result of the socioeconomic challenges that forest plantations produce at the local level; however, the linkages have not been explored. We examine the linkages between forest plantations and migration through two questions: Is there a relationship between forest plantation cover change and out-migration from rural areas? If so, what are the factors that explain this process? We use a difference-in-differences method analyzing panel data from the Chilean census and from CONAF, the Chilean National Forest Corporation, complemented by interviews, mapping workshops, and focus groups to answer these questions. Results indicate a statistically significant relationship between expanding forest plantations and population decline in rural areas. Qualitative data show that this expansion led to displacement of residents, declines in employment opportunities, and agriculture difficulties.

Human migration plays a critical role in numerous contemporary environmental concerns including global climate change and environmental justice. This review characterizes the ways migration is critical to contemporary human–environment geography. We delineate four themes from the literature based on (a) how migration affects the environment; (b) how the environment and/or environmental events affect migration; (c) how migration produces uneven environmental benefits and burdens; and (d) how environmental displacement/dispossession produces migration and vice versa. We articulate five recommendations for a research agenda that integrates migration processes, recognizes migration as a heterogeneous process, and approaches human–environment interactions holistically and non‐deterministically.

Smallholders worldwide continue to experience processes of displacement from their lands under neoliberal political-economic governance. This displacement is often experienced as “slow”, driven by decades of agricultural policies and land governance regimes that favor input-intensive agricultural and natural resource extraction and export projects at the expense of traditional agrarian practices, markets, and producers. Smallholders struggle to remain viable in the face of these forces, yet they often experience hunger. To persist on the land, often on small parcels, families supplement and finance farm production with family members engaging in labor migration, a form of displacement. Outcomes, however, are uneven and reflect differences in migration processes as well as national and local political economic processes around land. To demonstrate “slow displacement”, we assess the prolonged confluence of land access, hunger, and labor migration that undermine smallholder viability in two separate research sites in Nicaragua and Guatemala. We draw on evidence from in-depth interviews and focus groups carried out from 2013 to 2015, together with a survey of 317 households, to demonstrate how smallholders use international labor migration to address persistent hunger, with the two cases illuminating the centrality of underlying land distribution questions in labor migration from rural spaces of Central America. We argue that smallholder farming family migration has a dual nature: migration is at once evidence of displacement, as well as a strategy for families to prolong remaining on the land in order to produce food.

Research on Central American migration has revealed the importance of journeys to the global North for rural sending communities. The outcomes of south–south journeys to nearby countries are less explored, although they are commonplace. We examine Nicaraguan rural residents’ migration to other Central American countries, especially El Salvador, to understand this migration's impacts on agricultural systems and food security. Based on mixed‐methods fieldwork in north‐western Nicaragua, we find that rather than produce remittance landscapes, or an abandonment of agriculture, south–south migration is linked to the maintenance of small‐scale agricultural systems and thus food production. “Subsistence migration,” or mobility to maintain small‐scale agriculture as a food security strategy, draws attention to how these less explored forms of migration in Central America help families to persist in agriculture in a context of worsening environmental and structural conditions.

Mexican bureaucrats and the everyday restriction of transnational migration in a context of scarcity. Territory, Politics, Governance. Examining the everyday practices of the state is crucial to our understanding of the multiple ways that governments regulate transnational migration. While geographers have increasingly focused on these practices at a broad, institutional scale and in sites in the Global North, less attention has been given to the mundane and often unseen processes of regulation and restriction that take place beyond physical borders and outside of the formal spaces and practices of the state immigration apparatus in the Global South. This article draws on ethnographic research to understand the contexts in which low-level officials and bureaucrats’ practices of policy implementation with the Central American immigrant community in the Mexico–Guatemala border city of Tapachula unfold. It explores how institutional contexts and conditions shape officials’ restrictive actions. In particular, it focuses on conditions of material and resource scarcity and how this connects to poor service provision. I argue that officials’ actions occur within a complex context in which neoliberal scarcity prevails alongside pressure to increase productivity and long-held, practices. These factors entangle to create spaces that allow everyday restriction to flourish.