CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

The province of Santiago del Estero is historically characterized by the existence of a large number of migrant rural workers engaged in constant movements to productive areas that demand temporary rural workers. Migration therefore has become one of the most important parts of local socio-economic dynamics, offering job opportunities for the local population. However, in the last 20 years, part of the province underwent different types of transformations as a result of the advance of the agricultural frontier, mainly after the emergence of soybean production, and as a consequence the rural landscape is renewed and socio-economic changes take place. Among these changes, on one hand, we find rural definitive migration to urban areas associated with the decline of small farming and eviction from land; on the other hand, and against their own idiosyncrasies, we find different kinds of mobilities to these territories linked with the processes of capitalization and the emergence of new activities.This paper analyzes how population mobility manifests in a territory on transformation due to the movement of temporary and permanent migrants workers and the mobilities caused by labor demand for soybean crop as well. The purpose is to characterize the different movements and highlight how these mobilities cause depopulating of rural areas but also generating other economic and employment opportunities in a new context of disputes over space habitability.The case study is the department of the Juries, in the province of Santiago del Estero, representative of these types of changes. The methodology is qualitative, including in-depth interviews with key informants (government officials, local businesses, local workers, migrant workers, among the most important). The study is complemented with the use of secondary data from the Population and Housing National Census.