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Dan Bauer, professor of anthropology and sociology, was featured on World Vision Report radio this week as part of a special report on Mexico.
Bauer provided insights on an important tradition of community service obligations that many Mexicans observe—returning to their home country after emigrating to help their communities. He explained the role of the “cargos” or honor-system public works projects carried out by returnees who may live just across the border in the United States, or as far away as Los Angeles or New York.
World Vision Report is a weekend newsmagazine and daily feature show capturing the human drama behind global issues and events affecting the world’s poorest children and families. It airs on radio stations across the United States.
The full story can be heard here. An excerpt follows:
Anchor: Thousands of Mexicans come to the U.S. every year looking for work. That exodus of young people can have a serious economic impact on the impoverished communities they leave behind. But everyone who leaves the town of El Alberto knows – at some point – they’ll have to come back — for a year of community service. It’s a long-standing custom that ensures the economic vitality of the community. Workers return to the village to fix up the school, pave the streets, and do other community improvement projects. Some of those who return to El Alberto have no intention of staying, but they say they do it as a matter of honor. Jordana Gustafson reports.
Gustafson: Every man who leaves El Alberto knows he will one day return home.[Cargos] compel citizens to fulfill a year of community service when they are called to do so by town elders.
Lafayette College anthropologist Dan Bauer has spent years studying this model in an indigenous community nearby.
Bauer: The system of cargoes is a set of obligations that people have to their community, that people who fail to commit their energies to their cargoes are regarded as people who are not community spirited and don’t deserve a lot of respect within the community.”
Gustafson: It’s this respect that’s kept the system of cargoes in place for hundreds of years. It lessens the negative effects of migration to the US.
Bauer: I’ve seen some small towns that started off with maybe a population of 400 or 500 people and are now down to basically old people and their grandkids who live with them.
Gustafson: But not El Alberto. Each year more than a hundred men and their families return home from their jobs in the U.S. They come whether they live just over the border in Arizona or in New York and they come whether they’ve been gone two years or twenty.
Bauer brings his experiences in rural Mexico and among the peoples of Ethiopia and Peru to his classes on ethnographic methods. The students learn to be trained observers, interviewing subjects and producing videos and written ethnographies documenting their group.
For the last 20 years, Bauer has also been the program director of Lafayette’s Technology Clinic, in which teams of students tackle a real problem for businesses or non-profit groups. The clinic has become a capstone experience for students, who must be nominated by a faculty member and selected for a spot on a team.
