labeling different aspects of their surroundings as ‘ugly,’ ‘boring,’ ‘backward,’ and ‘closed.’ They contrasted this reality with the idea of an elsewhere drawn from the trips they have made to larger cities nearby, the soap operas they follow on television, or the migrants’ stories about clean streets, shopping malls, escalators, planes, dishwashers and cleaning products.”5 As the pace of small-town life moves cyclically around them, children’s growth and development stand out.
Parents and children experience the passage of time at different paces in different social locations. For parents, harried work schedules make time fly, while the time it takes them to meet their goals is drawn out. For children, daily life is slow, but their developmental changes are rapid. No case better illustrates how a lack of temporal coordination affects parent-child relationships than that of Ofelia and Germán. When the son knows little about his parents’ life in the United States and the mother cannot keep up with her son’s development in Mexico, parent-child relationships are not only elusive, but also they are constantly changing.6 As a result, family reunification is unpredictable and may take longer to realize than expected.
A MOTHER’S CONSTRAINTS DURING MIGRATION
November 2003. I had arranged to meet Ofelia at her home at six o’clock on a November evening. I had known one of Ofelia’s brothers and her husband, Ricardo, for years. Among other things, they had both been students in one of my ESL classes. I had never met Ofelia, however, and did not know that she and Ricardo had a son in the coastal town of Las Cruces, Mexico, until I started interviews for this project. On this particular evening, I arrived at Ofelia’s house to find that she was out shopping. I sat in the narrow living room making small talk with Ofelia’s brother over the cartoons blasting from the TV as a number of family members came and went from the room. Later I learned they were all relatives who shared the small home and that Ricardo had been upstairs the whole time. Throughout this project, most of my contact with his family has occurred through Ofelia and her kin.
After a bit, Ofelia’s brother left for his class at the local community college. His wife, Chavela, politely waited with me and told me about what it was like to live in Las Cruces. Chavela was from the northern state of Jalisco but had moved in with Ofelia’s mother when she married Ofelia’s brother. “I grew up in the city. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor either. There was always enough to eat, and all I had to do as a child was worry about getting up, going to school, and doing my homework. . . . [Ofelia’s] family is of a much more humble background. When I first got married, they all said it wouldn’t last. But when I went to live in his town, I got along very well with his mother. She is a really patient person. I learned how to cook, make tortillas, and do other things around the house. It was hard, but I learned. And I learned that my husband’s family is much more united than my own.”
Chavela’s description was cut short when Ofelia arrived, lugging Wal-Mart shopping bags. She giggled nervously upon finding me in the living room, excusing herself by saying she had thought the interview was to have been an hour earlier. When I had not appeared, she had gone out to pick up some diapers for her three-year-old daughter. As if in proof, a chubby toddler with messy pigtails trailed in behind her. Ofelia went upstairs to leave her bags. Within minutes of her return, everyone cleared the room to give us privacy.
Ofelia smiled and giggled again. “I have been asking everyone what they think you will ask me about.” The laughter seemed a sign of her anxiety about being interviewed. It resurfaced every time we broached an emotionally charged topic. I tried to reassure her and asked simply that she tell me a little bit about how she had come to the United States and about her son who lives in Mexico.
“I came like everyone else,” she said, “because there is no work in Mexico. The economic situation is very bad, and I wanted my family to get ahead.” She explained that her husband was the first to leave. He worked in Los Angeles for about a year, and Ofelia stayed with her own mother and newborn son in Las Cruces. This was a hard time for Ofelia. “It was really difficult not knowing where he was, since it was the first time we had ever been apart. In Mexico, when the women are washing clothes, they say, ‘Watch out, you could be using your husband to wash your clothes.’ ” She laughed. “You see, since we don’t know anything about them when they leave, we joke that they come back as [laundry] soap.”
Within a year, Ricardo asked Ofelia to join him. Ofelia was eager to migrate to New Jersey to see the place where her father and brothers had worked for a number of years when she was a teenager. “You see, my father left when I was thirteen. He was in the United States for nine years before he went back. While he was away [and after I married], it was my husband who was really the man of the house there in Mexico, helping out with the work. But just my luck, once I came to the United States, my father returned to Mexico. We crossed paths. I am the only one who doesn’t know him. It has been fifteen years now. Oh, how I want to see my father.”
According to Ofelia, Ricardo had wanted her to migrate with their only child, Germán. But Ofelia was concerned about where she would live when she got to the United States and who would take care of the two-year-old boy. At the urging of her mother, she left Germán behind and planned to send for him once she settled in the United States.
After Ofelia’s arrival in California, the couple moved to central New Jersey to live with Ofelia’s siblings. She started working at a factory; it was the first job she had ever had outside her home. “I felt really bad at first, it was like . . . ” Ofelia struggled to find the words and instead laughed drily. “But then at the factory where I worked I found out that so many women had their children in Mexico, and then I didn’t quite feel so bad, although I still really missed him, especially at the beginning.”
“Do you like working?” I asked.
Ofelia answered: “No. If I could, I wouldn’t work. I never worked in Mexico except in the house helping my mother out with things. But, you know, when you get older and get married, you need to do things for yourself, for your own family. So, that is why I came to work in the United States.”
“Do you think you will miss working if you ever go back to Mexico?”
Again, Ofelia said that the work is not important to her. “It is not the work that people miss back there. It is that [in Mexico] no one pays you to sit around eating all day long. That is what everyone misses when they go back to Mexico, getting a check at the end of the week.”
“Every day, everything in Mexico is more and more expensive,” she continued. Recently, one of her brothers had returned from visiting Mexico and had told Ofelia that a pair of pants costs between 250 and 300 pesos (roughly twenty-five to thirty U.S. dollars). She was shocked. For this reason, Ofelia explained, she feels satisfied that her earnings in the United States are helping provide for her son’s needs. “I know my son is missing the love of a mother. But I also know that he eats well, that he doesn’t suffer from hunger, that he has clothes, and that he can study. I know that he is okay.”
At the time of the interview, Ofelia had not seen nine-year-old Germán in more than seven years. “I don’t have any recent pictures,” she explained, “but when I first left, my mother sent me pictures all the time. I watched my son grow up through photographs.”
Ofelia said she calls home about once a week. Her son is the only grandchild living with her mother and father, and although she wants to bring him to the United States, she is making no progress toward this goal. She said that Germán did not want to migrate and added that she was reluctant to take him away from her parents. “When I call him, he asks me to come home. But he says he doesn’t want to come here, because he doesn’t want to leave his mama in Mexico. You see, he calls my mother “Mama.’ But he does know that I am his mother, because he says so. He says, ‘I know you are my mother, but I don’t want to leave my mother here.’ And I don’t want to force him to do something he doesn’t
