roles by migrating. Knowing their lives will be all about work is enough reason to leave their children in Mexico. For mothers, the decision to migrate arises out of a combination of economic and family considerations; a busy work schedule, the border crossing, and the insecurity of living in the United States without legal documents is not enough to deter migrating with their children except temporarily. Mothers make the choice knowing they will be able to communicate regularly with their children in Mexico for what they expect to be the short time before they are reunited.111
UNEQUAL LIVES
When parents move to the land of opportunity without their children, they purposely divide their families with the idea that doing so is the best economic strategy for the family as a unit. It would be a mistake, however, to consider the family as a discrete unit of analysis during the time parents and children live apart. Parents’ and children’s day-to-day experiences are not equal. Inequalities within families are not straightforward.112 Geography complicates families already stratified by gender and age distinctions.
On the one hand, parents live difficult lives; they have busy schedules and live in uncomfortable, overcrowded places. Many parents reside in unsafe neighborhoods where their movements, and particularly those of children, are restricted. Working all the time, parents have little time to enjoy themselves or spend time with their families and friends, as is common in Mexico. Because of their legal status, they lose everyday privileges they had enjoyed in Mexico. They cannot easily drive and obtain car insurance. They cannot take a trip on an airplane. Men, in particular, may feel less free to frequent public spaces than they were in Mexico.113 Migrants’ lives are constrained. In this sense, as low-wage, undocumented workers in the United States, parents experience a drop in social standing and in quality of life when they migrate.114
On the other hand, when parents migrate, they have access to resources not available to their children who remain in Mexico. At a very rudimentary level, parents enjoy amenities associated with life in an industrialized nation, even if to a much lesser degree than enjoyed by U.S. citizens. No one I interviewed, for example, washed clothes by hand in New Jersey; they used Laundromats. In San Ángel, most families washed by hand, or—if they were able to purchase a washing machine with remittances—rinsed by hand and hung the clothes out to dry. Parents I interviewed also had access to hot water, something few families in San Ángel enjoy. Most parents lived in heated homes and had room air conditioners in the summer months. While heaters are not necessary in San Ángel, where temperatures in the summer months often exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit, when I was in town no one had air conditioners. Parents also have access to employment opportunities that are nonexistent in Mexico (even if the opportunities can bear fruit only in Mexico). At the lower rungs of the social ladder in New Jersey, parents are optimistic that improvements in their lives are possible. They feel, for example, that by working hard and learning English, they may find a sympathetic employer or a job with benefits. They are hopeful that Americans will recognize their contributions to the economy and that eventually immigration laws will change, allowing them to regularize their legal status. Parents feel that with time, opportunities will increase. Children, in contrast, feel that their lives in Mexico are stagnant. Benefits from their parents’ remittances are ultimately limited. In this sense, parents’ prospects are more optimistic than those of their children living in communities whose economies are dependent on those working in the United States.
Such differences in the lives of migrants and their nonmigrant children are not surprising, particularly in Mexico, where patterns of labor migration to the United States are long-standing.115 Yet there are reasons to suspect that disparities between the lives of migrants and nonmigrants have increased over the past twenty years or so, now that so many Mexican migrants live in urban and suburban areas of the United States, as in central New Jersey. In the past, when Mexican migrants were farmworkers or lived in border communities in the Southwest, their living conditions may not have differed so much from those of their communities of origin. Compare my descriptions of parents’ lives above to the comment of a Oaxacan woman, also from the Mixteca region, whom Leo Chavez interviewed in a canyon campsite in San Diego in the early 1980s: “I had imagined the United States very differently. I thought it was one big city. I never imagined it was the same as there [Oaxaca]. In Oaxaca we live in a small village, and we live the same here. In our house there is no electricity, no water. We must haul water to the house the same as here. We use candles instead of electricity the same as here. There is no stove. . . . Our house is wood like these. It is the same. The same living there as it is here.”116
The Mexican migrant parents I interviewed work in a service economy and live in urban and suburban areas near their employers; their children remain in places that depend on an ever-shrinking agricultural base. Consequently, parents’ and children’s daily lives are drastically different. Moreover, because family separations are of longer duration than even just twenty years ago, inequalities between migrants and their children are likely to have more long-term consequences.
The rest of this book focuses on precisely this question: what are the consequences of divided lives for Mexican families at the start of the twenty-first century? Drawing on a combination of the stories of specific families and my larger sample of interviews, each subsequent chapter focuses on one aspect of the inequalities between parents’ and children’s lives that affect family members’ relationships over time. While chapters draw primarily on interpersonal experiences, social structures including the labor markets in the United States and in Mexico, immigration policy, public programs such as Social Security, and the Mexican educational system contribute to the context in which these relationships develop.
I start in chapter 2 with one of the most devastating consequences of parents’ decisions to migrate without their children: separations are almost always longer than originally anticipated. Drawing extensively on the experiences of migrant mother Ofelia Cruz and her son, Germán, I describe how such prolonged separations unfold and are more often than not the product of the temporal mismatch between the structure and pace of migrants’ lives in the United States and those of their children in Mexico.
In chapter 3, I turn to a discussion of how prolonged separations are managed by both mothers and fathers who live apart from their children. Comparing mothers’ and fathers’ experiences as low-wage workers in New Jersey, I examine how gendered expectations subsequently shape parent-child relationships from afar. I show that in the transnational context, families “do gender,” or ascribe meaning to their interactions, according to rather traditional gender role expectations. This is not always the case. As I show in chapter 4, when parents divorce after migration, fathers may seek new roles in the lives of their children during periods of separation. Drawing on the experiences of one father, Armando López, I describe the conditions under which men may redefine fatherhood.
In chapter 5, I shift the focus to how children react to parental migration at different ages and how parents attempt to be responsive to their children’s changing needs. I describe young children’s expressions of loss after a parent leaves, and parents’ redoubled efforts to show young children they care. I describe teenagers’ outward displays of resentment and their lack of social support not only at home but also at school. Although parents send money home to pay for children’s schooling with the hope that their sacrifices will result in intergenerational mobility, teenagers struggle in school while parents are away. This is one of the most disturbing aspects of the separation. Thus, by the time children reach young adulthood, their prospects of financial security in Mexico still seem limited. At this stage, many children decide to join their parents working in the United States, and parents must change their migration strategies accordingly. Family reunifications rarely come, however, when parents or children originally plan. Although not the ones to initially divide the family across borders, children are afforded power in their relationships with
