La Crónica

The Diaspora of San José de Gracia

San José de Gracia is a town with one foot in the United States, and has been for well over a century. Here is what is documented about why, and what its own numbers say about it.

A town with one foot in the United States

Like most of Los Altos de Jalisco, San José de Gracia has sent its people north for well over a century. The migration is old: it began along the new Porfirian railroads in the late nineteenth century, deepened through the upheavals of the Revolution and then the Cristero War, and was cemented by the Bracero era (1942 to 1964), which built the lasting networks between Los Altos and the American West that families still draw on today.

A structural pull, not an accident

The reasons run through the shape of the local economy itself: a dispersed dairy-and-ranchero world of small private ranchos, large households, and a long tradition of small family enterprise, all of which favor chain migration, where one person's move north opens the path for relatives to follow. Jalisco is Mexico's second-largest remittance-receiving state, and Los Altos is among its most migration-shaped regions, San José de Gracia included. A family with land enough for one son to inherit and several more to place somewhere else is, in effect, a family already halfway to sending someone north.

Where the town's people settled

By 2018 the great majority of Jaliscienses living in the United States were in California, with smaller communities in Colorado, Arizona and Texas, a footprint that traces back to the Bracero-era routes into the American West described above. Watching over them, in the devotion many families carry with them, is Santo Toribio Romo, the Jalisco priest canonized in 2000 and venerated across the migrant corridor as the patron of those who cross.

The economy behind the migration

The push has always been agricultural. The municipality of Tepatitlán, San José de Gracia included, cultivates on the order of nine thousand hectares of agave, alongside the maize, beans and cattle that make up the rest of the local economy. Good soils and an unusually humid highland climate have made this productive ranchero country, but a ranchero economy built on small holdings and large households has never had room for all of its sons at once. That is the plain arithmetic behind a century of departures, long before anyone in San José de Gracia had heard of the tequila industry that now operates on its land.

Signs of it at home

The 2020 census left its own mark of the migration on San José de Gracia: the town counted 2,926 women against 2,515 men, a female majority large enough to read as an out-migration signature, the kind of imbalance a town shows when a share of its men are working elsewhere. The town's own chronicler, Taurino Arámbula Vázquez, gives it a face: for more than thirty years parishioners working in the United States sent donations home for the church, and it was Arámbula who was trusted to receive them. His own account of the local economy notes, too, that the fields were already sending their surplus sons north well before the modern tequila industry arrived, when this was still mezcal country of maize, beans and agave.

What the numbers still don't say

No source consulted for this article puts a number on how many people from San José de Gracia specifically live in the United States, or how much they send home each year. Nor does any source confirm a club de oriundos, a hometown association of the kind many Jalisco towns maintain for their migrants abroad, complete with its own fiesta and its own fundraising for projects back home. Those remain open questions for a town whose history, in almost every other respect, keeps a close count of itself.

Sources

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