The City Will Come to Us: Development Discourse and the New Rurality in Atotonilco El Bajo, Mexico

A declining agricultural sector and decades of US migration have transformed Atotonilco El Bajo, Mexico into what local residents call “the ghost town.” More recently, Atotonilco’s increasing connections to nearby Guadalajara are prompting a shift in local development discourse towards one that is more focused on regional integration than transnational migration. These changes are broadly reflective of a “new rurality” in Latin America, an intensified process of spatial and economic transformation that is blurring the line between rural and urban. Drawing from transnational ethnographic research, this paper calls for “new rurality” studies to more explicitly engage with locally-contingent development discourses.