This dissertation examines how migrants mobilize ethnicity throughout the different stages of their migratory journey. The study is based upon multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork set in Mexico City and Wisconsin, and draws upon the case of a group of indigenous Mexicans (Otomis from Santiago Mexquititlán). The comprehensive perspective, which focuses on the exogenous and endogenous identification of indigenous migrants, as well as on their organization, reveals the subjectivity of the migrants. I chose to simultaneously analyze internal migration (to Mexico City) and international migration (to the United States) so as to evaluate how several factors impact the conception of transnational migratory projects: the national and local hierarchical ethno-racial systems; the urban setting in which international migration takes place; or previous migrations. I argue that ethnicity is a variable that indigenous migrants mobilize when they conceive migratory projects, by navigating between individuation and communalization, by increasing or decreasing their distance from the ethnic network, or by displaying or concealing ethnic symbols. I also point out the limits that constrain their agency. By analyzing the impact, on migratory experience, of the local structure of political opportunities, and of the intersection of class, race, gender and migratory status, this study therefore aims at enriching the literature on migrations, and on gendered and ethnic relations, in particular in Latin America.
