danger of the border crossing made a short return visit a great risk. It would also be extremely costly and would require economic stability that Ofelia and Ricardo were unable to achieve until Stacy started kindergarten and they both were working full time and did not have to pay for child care. Like Germán, Ofelia felt conflicted in deciding on her best course of action. As a migrant father explained to me, “Sometimes, Joanna, you simply cannot have everything you want at once.”
Over time, parents become more engrossed—and invested—in their lives in the United States and even more conscious of the rising price of having left their children. Trapped by the lifestyle they adopt in the United States, scheduled almost entirely around the workweek, parents worry about their relationships with their children. Being absorbed by work at the expense of the family is not a novel concept. Working parents in the United States may have similar reactions of being in a “time bind.”7 Yet the physical distance considerably increases the dissonance between the pace of parents’ lives at work and the pace of the lives of their children at home.8 One migrant father’s comment summarizes the effects of migrant parents’ unique time bind on relationships with children whom they do not get to see at the end of each day:
For a time, the phone works wonders. It is like your weapon, your love, your everything, because you talk, you listen; it’s everything. But after a time, you lose that passion of talking. You lose that dream of waiting for Sunday to call your kids and talk to them. Why? Because you realize that it starts becoming ordinary. . . . Instead of seeing it as [a means of] affection, love for your children and to your family in Mexico, it becomes ordinary, like a line you have to follow. And you just don’t feel the same anymore. . . .
The distance makes you forget, it makes you lose something, it makes you . . . How can I explain? It makes it so that the affection, that which was love, becomes almost ordinary. It becomes commercial. Why? Because you only think about working, sending money, and that they [the kids] are okay over there. . . . [It is routine] because you cannot enjoy what you sent and take your child out to eat, take him on an outing, or buy him some clothes. All of this makes it so that you forget what the love of your child is like.
Conflicting emotions that result from the passage of time at different paces in different places often prolong periods of separation. Ironically, it is also the passage of time that can resolve standoffs between parents and children, like the one between Ofelia and Germán. Because parents and children have few opportunities for interaction, they do not have the ability to negotiate small solutions to their difficulties. They must wait for a combination of factors to converge, including economic stability, opportunity, and the willingness of children to migrate, in order to plan a reunification. In some cases, parents and children are reunited within a few years. In other cases, as for Ofelia and Germán, reunification is delayed for most or all of a child’s childhood. I now turn to what happens to families from the perspectives of parents, children, and caregivers during these periods.
Regular phone calls home help fathers like this one maintain contact with family members in Mexico. Photograph by Joanna Dreby
THREE Gender and Parenting from Afar
It was mid-February 2005, and the atmosphere in San Ángel and the region was lively. Since the New Year, there had been at least two private parties per week. A number of couples had planned their weddings for this time of the year, which were open events that anyone could attend, since most of San Ángel’s twenty-five hundred residents knew one another. Live bands played in the central plaza; these nights ranchera music rang throughout the town until the early morning hours. Many from nearby towns attended these events, and residents of San Ángel joined in the celebrations of neighboring towns. The festivities were even more exciting because the U.S. migrants who had come home for the holiday season had not yet returned north. With the arrival of migrants, there were new, even if familiar, faces in the crowds. Efrén, father of four, was one of them.1
I had first met Efrén in New Jersey. At that time, he had not been back to see his wife and children, who lived in a town just ten minutes from San Ángel, for more than three years. Although money was still tight, in December 2004 he had decided to go home for an extended vacation because his father was quite ill. Before his return, I had visited frequently with Efrén’s wife, Claudia. Claudia was a schoolteacher and fun to talk with. We occasionally walked together for exercise and took our children on outings to the nearby river. I saw Claudia much less after Efrén returned. Understandably, they were spending more time together as a family. The couple’s four children did not come to San Ángel to play in the street with their cousins and my son Temo nearly so often. They spent the evenings at home, watching TV and playing with their father.
Although Efrén spent much time with his wife, children, and ailing father, on occasion he took on the role of host, showing me around his town. He had, for example, invited me along with his wife to a New Year’s Eve party. The night of the dance for the town feria, he invited me once again. That evening I joined Claudia, Efrén, Efrén’s adult cousins, and an aunt visiting from Mexico City at the dance. By the time the band stopped playing at 3 A.M., we had finished a bottle of tequila and Efrén invited us to continue the party at his house. As three of us had lived in New Jersey, we sat in their living room listening and dancing to merengue and bachata songs typical among Latino crowds in the United States but almost foreign in the region.
Our informal party was interrupted shortly thereafter by some commotion outside. Two drunken men were upset because a car had blocked their truck and they were not able to get out. Claudia had gone to the door and was trying to explain to them that it was not their car and there was nothing they could do about it. Efrén got up and joined her, speaking more forcefully. I was not listening to the conversation until Claudia’s loud voice, now directed at her husband inside the house, caught everyone’s attention. “Don’t be so stupid,” she spit out. “You are not going to start a fight over something like this. You don’t live here. I do, and I don’t want problems.” To this, Efrén erupted: “A woman doesn’t tell me what to do in my own house.” Before I fully figured out what was going on, he took a swing at her in front of us all. Claudia proceeded to run from him through the living room and into another room; Efrén followed and hit her once again.
Claudia wailed. The other family members followed and separated the couple. I sat shocked at the ugly face of violence and how it had caught me unawares. Then a small figure came out of the bedroom, rubbing his eyes to see what had happened. This got me to my feet, and I took the eleven-year-old boy—Efrén and Claudia’s oldest son—back to bed. I sat with the boy in the dark until the voices outside seemed more subdued.
Feeling out of place in this family affair, I eventually emerged from the bedroom and spoke to both Claudia, who was being pampered by the female relatives in one room, and Efrén, calming down with a beer and his cousin in the outer room. I briefly gave Claudia a supportive hug while she dabbed her eyes. With a nasty resolve she told me this was not the first time he had picked a fight and left her with problems. “Nunca le voy a perdonar [I will never forgive him].” When I apologized for being a part of the situation, Claudia shook her head and replied bitterly, “Nadie tiene la culpa menos él [No one is at fault but him].”
I spoke at greater length with Efrén. I said that he should not worry and that I would forget about the whole incident for my book. Efrén disagreed.
But—and you can write this in your book—that I, if right or not, will not accept that my woman intervene in my house. I try to be a little educated, and really I am a pretty tranquil man. Everyone can tell you this. It is rare that I get agitated like this. And I know I am being the typical machista man. Pero, simplemente es mi casa, y soy yo en frente, y no acepto que mi mujer intervenga en eses asuntos. [But, it is simply my house,
