chapter 6, I move to the roles of Mexican caregivers, whom I call “middlewomen,” in mediating relationships between parents and children. Most often grandmothers whose access to migrants’ remittances is secured by caring for children, middlewomen have their own financial and emotional stakes in the caregiving arrangement. They are thus generally supportive of migrant parents’ sacrifices. Prolonged separation does not diminish expectations of parents to provide emotionally and financially for their children in Mexico. With the support of caregivers, parents’ and children’s reunifications are possible—and increasingly likely—as children, and their caregivers, age. When divided by borders, family members “do family,” or socially construct their families, in ways that reinforce parent-child obligation. In chapter 7, I narrate the story of Cindy Rodríguez, which illustrates the unintended consequences of family separation for young women and men. Children like Cindy experience instability even when living in stable home environments. They end up feeling caught between two families, not belonging to either, when families stress parent-child obligation during periods of separation.
Ultimately, the experiences of parents and children divided by borders result from a combination of family members’ relative participation in migration and their relative position in their families. As I summarize in chapter 8, in a legal environment that promotes and necessitates prolonged periods of family separation, the emotional aspects of separation are extremely difficult for family members. Women are critiqued more for migrating without their children than men are. And the emotional consequences of separation are concentrated among the least powerful members of the family: children. At the same time, children are not powerless. They are able to influence their parents’ decisions about migration. Likewise women show great resolve to affirm maternal ties to children despite the critiques of other family members and their neighbors. When both women and men are faced with economic difficulties in the United States, parents’ ties to their children back home become even more important. Separation is a source of great hardship. Yet separation, and the sacrifice it entails, also reinforces parents’ and children’s commitments to each other, at the very least during the time that parents and children live apart.
Exemplifying the mismatch between the lives of migrants and their nonmigrant children, this family portrait superimposes an image of the child living in Mexico on a painting of the family members living in New Jersey. Photograph by Joanna Dreby
TWO Ofelia and Germán Cruz
MIGRANT TIME VERSUS CHILD TIME
November 2007. I finally caught up with Ofelia. It had been six months since I had last seen her, before I moved to Ohio from New Jersey. When we had spoken that past spring, Ofelia had once again changed her plans to send for her thirteen-year-old son, Germán. In April, she had made arrangements to bring Germán to the United States over the summer, after he had graduated from the sixth grade. Ofelia had hoped that by the time school started in the fall, he would be living with her and her husband, Ricardo, and their six-year-old daughter, Stacy, born in New Jersey. As I sat on Ofelia’s sofa in May, just a few weeks after hearing these plans for the family reunification, Ofelia had announced: “Germán doesn’t want to come anymore.”
“What happened?” I had asked.
“Well, I finally had him convinced. Everything was in place. But then, you see, he went to these soccer tryouts in Puerto [Puerto Escondido] and was picked to play for Pachuca [a youth team for one of Mexico’s professional leagues]. So now he doesn’t want to come anymore.”
“Wow, what an honor! He must be very good at soccer.”
“He loves it,” Ofelia said. She added: “He said, ‘Mom, please, just let me play for a year and then I’ll come over there with you guys. Just let me try for a year.’ So he doesn’t want to come anymore.”
Ofelia had been disappointed. I later learned that Germán’s soccer gig had not lasted. Because he had anticipated joining his parents in New Jersey as soon as possible, Germán had not started middle school that September. Indeed, he had made one attempt to cross the border, but he was caught by the border patrol and, since he was a minor, was sent all the way back to his grandmother’s home in Oaxaca. Germán did not try to cross again that fall. In November, Ofelia told me that she and Ricardo were too worried about his safety and, having lost two thousand dollars in their first attempt to bring him to New Jersey, they did not want to waste any more money on another failed attempt. Instead, Ofelia told me, Ricardo would go back for Germán in December.
Four years earlier, when I had first met Ofelia, she had told me of a similar plan for a holiday reunion. At the time, Germán was nine years old. She had left him seven years before, when Germán was just two. By November 2007, it had been eleven years since Ofelia had seen her son.
PROLONGED SEPARATIONS
Most family separations are not as long as that of Ofelia and Germán. In fact, in seven of the twelve families I followed over a period of four years, parents and children have since been reunited. Although their case was unique, the difficulties that Ofelia and Germán encountered in their attempts to reunite exemplify a dynamic common in all the families I interviewed: periods of separation last much longer than originally anticipated. At times reunification came just a year or two later than expected; for most it was longer. The extreme of eleven years illustrates how such a dynamic unfolds even when parents and children long to be reunited.
A number of factors contribute to the prolongation of family separations. As low-wage, undocumented workers, parents have a difficult time meeting their economic goals in the United States; their limited resources make reunifications difficult. Over time, parents’ resources are strapped even further by new commitments in the United States. Children, for their part, have conflicting emotions about seeing their parents, whom they may barely remember. Children sometimes resist reunification, and parents do not want to coerce them. Children are also loyal to their caregivers in Mexico. Caregivers, who enjoy certain economic and emotional benefits from caring for children, may also act in ways that extend periods of separation. I address the nuances of each of these dynamics—the difficulties migrant parents face, children’s conflicting emotions, and caregivers’ stakes in the arrangement—in subsequent chapters.
More deeply, prolonged family separations reflect the mismatch between the time needed for parents to reach their goals in the United States and the pace of their children’s growth in Mexico. Families divided by borders lack what Eviatar Zerubavel has called “temporal coordination.”1 Parents’ time in the United States is structured around irregular work schedules of forty to sixty hours per week.2 I was often told by those I interviewed that “my life in the U.S. is all work.”3 Oriented toward future goals, parents are constantly scrambling to feel productive in low-wage, unstable jobs. “I did not do anything,” explained Armando, describing his first two years in the United States. “I just paid off [my debts]. Another year went by, and not until then could I start to make plans to bring my family here.” Parents do not want to give up their goals, because they want their sacrifices to be worthwhile; in the meantime, periods of separation grow longer. One father explained: “The problem is that we immigrants end up here a long time.”
While parents feel caught, spinning their wheels in the United States, their children are changing at a pace parents can barely keep up with. Children, particularly those living in small communities like San Ángel, live in places where the pace of life follows agricultural work patterns, seasonal celebrations, and the school calendar and is marked by various holidays.4 The slowness and
