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.

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.

Unauthorized migration under global regimes of border and immigration enforcement has become more risky and costly than ever. Despite the increasing challenges of reaching, remaining in, and remitting from destination countries, scholarship exploring the implications of migration for agricultural and environmental change in migrant-sending regions has largely overlooked the prevalent experiences and consequences of “failed” migration. Drawing from recent fieldwork in Central America with deportees, this paper demonstrates how contemporary migration at times reverses the “channels” of agrarian change in migrant-sending regions: instead of driving remittance inflow and labor loss, migration under contemporary enforcement can result in debt and asset dispossession, increased vulnerability, and heightened labor exploitation. Diverse migration outcomes under expanded enforcement also reveal a need to move beyond the analytical binary that emphasizes differentiations between migrant and non-migrant groups while overlooking the profound socioeconomic unevenness experienced among migrants themselves. With grounding in critical agrarian studies, feminist geographies, and emerging political ecologies of migration, this paper argues that increased attention to the highly dynamic and diverse lived experiences of migration under expanded enforcement stands to enhance our understanding of the multiple ways in which contemporary out-migration shapes livelihoods and landscapes in migrant-sending regions.