me when I am going back there. . . . They ask me for shoes, clothes, toys and money.” A migrant father told me: “My son asks me when I am going back and asks me to send him money.” A migrant mother said her six-year-old says, “Take me north. I want to go north with you.”
Children’s versions of conversations with parents are surprisingly similar; differences in conversations are not dictated by the parent’s or the child’s gender, but rather by the child’s age. The youngest children talk mostly about material goods and migration. A six-year-old boy said that when his mother calls, “I ask when she is coming and she says she is coming soon.” A six-year old girl explained that her mother says “she is going to send clothes, a dresser, a bed and a mirror.” As children grow older, they talk with their parents about school performance and behavior. For example, an eleven-year-old girl who lives with her maternal grandmother and siblings said, “My mom asks if I want something—I say yes—clothes, shoes, and school supplies. Then she tells me not to hit my little sisters because my sister tells her that I hit her. But I hit her because she hits the youngest one.” The oldest children are concerned about parents’ emotional well-being, saying they talk about the family news and give and receive advice from their parents. Fifteen-year-old Brian described conversations with father José as follows: “[We talk about] how he is, that he works harder there because there are a lot of things to do. I tell him to work harder because he has been there a long time and hasn’t done much, and I tell him not to get discouraged, that he can trust us and tell me anything.”
Gifts
Although phone conversations are filled with talk of gifts, parents said they preferred to send money, as it is expensive to send goods either through mail services or via courier businesses. Most only sporadically send gifts with friends or relatives or bring things back on their own trips home. A father who had been migrating seasonally for seven years gave me the following list of items he takes to his wife and four children whenever he returns: one pair of shoes each, two to three sets of clothing for each child, toys (almost always remote control cars for the boys), and an electronic item, once a TV, another time a VCR, and most recently a video camera. Another migrant father said he collected random toys throughout the year to send to his four-year-old son. As proof, he disappeared into his basement bedroom to retrieve a small teddy bear from his collection to give to my son, Temo.
The most common gifts from parents are photographs, school supplies, clothing, and shoes. Among the students I surveyed in the Mixteca, 74 percent of those with migrant parents reported receiving emotionaltype gifts (like photographs or home videos) from the United States, 80 percent reported receiving clothing or shoes, and 59 percent reported receiving school supplies.18 There is no significant difference in the types of gifts they reported receiving from their migrant mothers and their migrant fathers.19 Daughters of U.S. migrants in the Mixteca more often reported receiving all types of gifts than did sons.20
Despite parents’ intentions to provide for their children by sending things from the states, children and grandparents said parents often get sizes wrong since they have been away so long. One grandmother gave me a pair of her grandson’s almost new shoes for Temo; her daughter had sent them two sizes too small. Tina said her father sends “clothes, shoes, toys, because he still thinks I am a little girl and I like them.” The twelve-year-old rolled her eyes, pointing to a row of Barbie dolls on a shelf in the room. “But,” she added, “my cousin likes to play with them.” Age-inappropriate gifts exemplify the ways parents lose track of their children’s development over time, signaling the time dislocations characteristic of parent-child separations.
Children may also feel embarrassed about the material aspect of their relationship with their parents. When I asked what kinds of things they want their parents to send them, many children grew shy and simply answered “I don’t know.” Tina said that she does not ask her father for much: “What I ask for, he sends. But I try not to ask for much.” When I asked a six-year-old if he asked his mom for toys, he answered defensively, “Not me,” causing his five-year-old sister to object and call him a liar. Children seem aware that material objects are not equivalent to parental affection, and some are wary of parents’ use of gifts as replacements for time together.
At the same time, children recognize parents’ gifts as markers of love. One fourteen-year-old girl, for example, told me she does not love either her mother or her father. Her parents are divorced, and both have remarried and live in the United States. She said she was most uncomfortable with her father, who recently had tried to reestablish a relationship. Her maternal grandmother, the girl’s caregiver, told me a story of a small jewelry box with a gold locket inside that the girl’s father had recently sent: “It was a small box. And we had just read in a book about a father who gave his daughter a small box, like that one, but it had nothing inside. Supposedly every time the girl opened the box, she would receive a kiss from her father. So [she] joked that the box her father sent her was like that; she would keep it in her dresser and open it when she wanted a kiss.” As this grandmother eloquently concluded, gifts “make them [children] feel special and loved. But the gifts don’t inspire love from children for their parents. They cannot bring trust and affection.”
Remittances
Gifts are symbolically significant.21 But money is the most important item both mothers and fathers send home. In New Jersey, mothers and fathers reported similar frequency of remittances: once or twice a month. However, parents were reluctant to disclose the amount of remittances and were more sensitive about financial matters than about their undocumented status, which other scholars of Mexican migration have also noted.22 Most mothers and fathers were vague or dismissed my questions about the amount of remittances by giving what seemed to be generic answers. While other research suggests that women send less money home than men do but send a larger proportion of their income, among the parents I interviewed, variations in reported remittances were greater among mothers and among fathers than between them.23
Among the children I surveyed in the Mixteca, 96 percent of those with migrant mothers and 89 percent of those with migrant fathers reported receiving money from their parents. Children who had only their father in the United States reported higher amounts of remittances per month as compared to those of single migrant mothers and those with both parents abroad, although differences are not statistically significant.24 There is no statistically significant difference in amount of remittances reported by sons and daughters.
In interviews children, like their parents, were vague in discussing monetary remittances. All children, however, even those of very young ages, understood the economic nature of their parents’ migrations. A five-year-old girl said her parents went to the United States “because they are earning money there.” An eight-year-old told me his mother migrated after his parents split up, “because there we were going to have a different life and she was going to earn more money.” A nine-year-old boy explained: “My dad is there so that he can send us money.” I asked, “How much does he send?” The boy replied, “I don’t know.” Virtually all children responded similarly; they understood that their parents had migrated to support them, but few told me how much money their parents sent home and how often. Interestingly, 77 percent of students of migrant parents in the Mixteca reported specific details about how much money parents sent home and how often. It is not necessarily that children do not know details about parents’ remittances; it is that they do not want to talk about them.
Given the importance of money to parents’ sacrifices—that parents leave home in order to provide for their children financially—and children’s ability to answer survey questions about monetary matters, the reluctance of children and parents to describe the financial aspects of their relationship during periods of separation is interesting. It suggests their unwillingness to use remittances as a measure of the quality of their relationship once away. For children of divorce, suggests Gry Mette Haugen, “money may symbolize a currency for both love and care.”25 Yet for transnational families, money risks
