young son and Germán’s cousin] is going to go back also.”
“Wow.”
“But I don’t want to go,” Germán added, although the excitement in his voice seemed to belie his reluctance.
After we spoke for a bit, Doña María came on the line. We exchanged news, again of the party and also reports on who in the family had been ill. I then added, “So are they really going to send for Germán?”
“His father says that he is going to come back for Germán and take him to the United States. But I don’t know. I tell them to wait until he finishes school. You see, now he is in fifth grade, and he just has one more year left to graduate, so I think they should wait until he is done with school.”
“Oh. Well, Germán said he is going to come in April,” I explained.
Doña María simply laughed and changed the subject.
April came and went. Germán remained with his grandparents. Germán’s cousin Trini, a single mother, did migrate to New Jersey and left her three children, then ages four, six, and seven, with Doña María. Although talk of Germán’s migration still hung in the air, the next year he went on to the sixth grade in Las Cruces.
May 2007. Exactly one year later, I visited Ofelia, who spoke of her plans to return for Germán over the summer. Although this was only one of many conversations I had had with her about Germán’s migration, this time it seemed that a number of factors had converged to make the reunification more likely.
First, Germán would now graduate from the sixth grade, which was the benchmark his grandmother had set for his migration. Second, according to Ofelia, Doña María was overwhelmed with the care of Trini’s three children. Trini, now pregnant and living with a new boyfriend in the United States, was not sending enough money to provide for the children properly. Ofelia was providing most of the economic support for their care and had hired a girl locally to help her mother, much to Ricardo’s chagrin. “My mother is getting too old to look after these kids; they are all young, not like Germán. And when I left Germán, she wanted me to. That was one of the reasons I left him, to give her company. But these three, they need a lot of work. My mother is getting too tired to look after them.”
Not only did the changed circumstances in Las Cruces make Germán’s migration seem likely, but Ofelia and Ricardo’s economic situation seemed to have improved markedly since I had last seen them. They now rented a three-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of the city, which they shared with just one young woman. The living room was furnished with a new white sofa and love seat (covered in plastic to protect against spills), a large TV, and a bookshelf displaying pictures of the family. I looked over the framed pictures of Germán as a little boy, and Ofelia pointed out the pictures of her, Ricardo, and their daughter, Stacy, from their vacation the summer before. Ofelia had a new job with benefits, including a yearly two-week vacation, which they used for the first time to go away to Virginia Beach. Both Ofelia and Ricardo owned vans they drove to work, providing rides for coworkers at the going rate of twenty-five dollars per week per person, which augmented the family income. When I asked if they planned to have more children, Ofelia gave a decisive no. “When they are little, it is so hard economically. I didn’t work for two years to stay with Stacy, and we only had Ricardo’s [income]. But now she is in school, and I can work too. We are much better off. No, it is too hard when they are little. Two are enough for me.”
Aside from the improvements in Ofelia and Ricardo’s economic situation, Ofelia explained that she now had a concrete plan for bringing Germán back with her to the United States. She had finally caught up with the woman who had helped the family cross the first time. The expense would be great, two thousand dollars more than it would have cost ten years earlier, but she and Ricardo felt it was worth it. Over the summer they hoped to take Stacy back to Mexico, so she could meet her grandparents for the first time. If all went according to plan, the family would be living together in New Jersey by September.
As I was leaving Ofelia’s house that afternoon, I admired a wall hanging I had overlooked earlier. It was a painted family portrait, depicting Ofelia and Ricardo at the center and Stacy just below them. Never forgotten, Germán was in the portrait as well. Ofelia explained that they had had a photograph sent so the artist could add him to the painting. Although recognizable, it showed Germán as he must have looked years before I had met him. The two siblings looked at most a year apart in age, while there is actually seven years between them. The wall-hanging captured the time disparities that governed the families’ memories and realities: American-born Stacy had an up-to-date portrait, as did the parents who stood with her, while Germán was incorporated into the family as he had been years before.
PARALYSIS
What accounts for the dynamic between Germán and Ofelia, which led to indefinite postponement of their reunion? It is possible that caregivers in Mexico, in this case Doña María, resist family reunification so they can continue to garner economic support from parents’ migration. Grandparents do rely on the remittances of their migrant children and develop close emotional bonds with their grandchildren while parents are away. Yet caregivers are not responsible for preventing the reunification of parents and children. Caregivers, in fact, respect the priority of parent-child bonds. They often reinforce these ties, and the obligations they entail, as did Doña María when she told me in front of Germán that she had to go to his Communion class because his mother was not there to go. If the prolonged separation of mother and child did not result from the grandparents’ wishes, why did it occur?
Ofelia and Germán’s standoff arose in part from differences in how family members perceived each other over the passage of time. For Ofelia, Germán remained a young boy bonded with his grandmother, even while her own life changed radically with the birth of another child and the work required of her and her husband to create an economic foothold in New Jersey. For the grandmother, another year or two in her care were worth it if Germán could reach a more natural stopping point at his local school. And for Germán himself, time brought big changes in both his feelings and his understanding of his situation.
From Germán’s perspective, and that of other children like him, migrant parents are a presence even when physically absent. Germán felt that his parents were important to him, and he knew that they should provide and care for him. He felt resentful that they left him and now gave more attention to his U.S.-born sister. At the same time, Germán understood that they had migrated out of economic necessity and, in part, to support him. He liked living with his grandparents and in Las Cruces; in fact, that was the only life he knew. In essence, he did not want his life to change drastically, except that he would like his parents to return to show they care. With each passing year, the ways Germán communicated these mixed emotions to the adults in his life changed. Germán’s jeers at my suggestions that I would soon see him in New Jersey gave way, within a little more than a year, to his boasts that he would soon be in the United States, even if against his will. More recently, Germán left school in Mexico and more wholeheartedly accepted the idea of coming north. As for children anywhere, each year brought developmental and emotional changes, and those changes affected his interpretation of his parents’ sacrifice.
But for parents, the gains won each year as a migrant come painfully slowly. Stability in housing and employment may take years to achieve. Migrants invest huge amounts of energy and resources to carve out successful lives in U.S. cities. These investments made it hard for Ofelia and Ricardo to return for Germán, as he wanted them to do. They had to weigh the cost and the risk of doing so. They had to consider that Ofelia’s family in Mexico depended on remittances from the United States and that their standard of living would fall if Ofelia went back. Moreover, Ofelia had a strong link to New Jersey through her U.S.-born daughter. If she returned to Las Cruces and had trouble crossing the border on her return, who would look after Stacy during her absence? What would happen if she could not return? Ofelia
