parents away. Young children are jealous for their parents’ attention. Parents struggling to understand their children’s changing needs are unsure how to discipline them and worry about their children dating and becoming sexually active. Above all, parents hope their children will avoid their own mistakes and want to provide them with a better future. These themes are likely to sound strikingly familiar.
This was my experience as a researcher. I am not Mexican, nor Latina. I am not an immigrant. Yet I am a mother and a daughter. For a time, I was a wife. I often found during the four years that I conducted this study that my own life paralleled those of the families I was interviewing. My experiences are instructive about how I managed relationships with the more than 140 participants in this project, gaining access to what they often considered to be private aspects of their lives. They also illustrate the persistent tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary endemic in researching family relationships.
I ALWAYS THOUGHT YOU WERE NORMAL . . .
It was in January, after a day of sightseeing at the ruins of Monte Alban, in Oaxaca, and I was enjoying an evening of casual conversation with Armando, a migrant father and a member of one of the twelve families with whom I did in-depth work for this study. I had met and interviewed Armando in New Jersey and then traveled to Mexico, where I interviewed his three children and his mother, who cared for them. While I was living in Mexico for nine months, Armando returned to live with his children. Later I visited and stayed with the family twice more. On this occasion, Armando and I had met up at a friend’s house just a month after his arrival and spent three days touring the city and comparing notes on my time in Mexico and his return home.
That evening we drifted into a conversation about my research, how sociology differs from psychology, and how I planned to make my findings useful. We had previously talked about this in New Jersey, but Armando, who had already told me quite a bit about his life, was not the first to ask what I was “really” doing interviewing families like his in Mexico. He and I continued talking as the night wore on, moving into more personal topics long after the others had gone to sleep.
“You are always asking me all these questions about my life, but I never felt comfortable asking you before about yours,” he commented.
“I am an open book,” I responded. This was the attitude I took throughout the study. Separation was a sensitive topic for parents. When people I interviewed asked me about myself, my Mexican husband, or my son, I felt obligated to reciprocate with my own story. That night I elaborated.
Armando was a good listener. He quietly accepted the pieces of my story before responding, “I always thought you were normal, Joanna. But you are just like the rest of us.”
A WIFE
Armando was referring primarily to my marriage and recent separation from Raúl. At the time, Raúl and I had been separated for about a year; we subsequently divorced. To Armando’s surprise, I—who had served as a sounding board for his insecurities and concerns over his recent divorce—had similar skeletons in my own matrimonial closet.
In fact, there were a number of parallels in our experiences. Armando was twenty-nine when he married a woman ten years younger, and he felt that the age difference and her immaturity had caused problems in the marriage. Armando said he had very little in common with his ex-wife. “I fell in love with her smile,” he once explained, emphasizing how they had lacked shared interests and goals. I met Raúl when I was just twenty-one, not long after I had graduated from college. Raúl, six years older than I, was an immigrant from Veracruz who had been out of school and working for years. We had met as activists. Before starting this research, I had worked for a number of years in three different social service agencies and as an ESL teacher in central New Jersey. Aside from our work in the Mexican immigrant community, however, Raúl and I were very different. Eventually our differences in age, education, background, and most crucially, experience became problematic.
Economic difficulties also plagued both our marriages. Armando’s wife had pressured him to migrate, something he had not been eager to do, to help the family sobresalir, or get ahead. He felt she was more concerned with material goods and status items than he was. Raúl and I struggled to manage our finances as I pursued graduate school full time and he aspired to start his own business. Raúl’s multiple obligations to family members in Mexico, particularly after the birth of our own child, further strained our resources. We disagreed on how to prioritize our family’s needs.
Armando and I shared experiences common to many divorced couples. Economic difficulty, lack of common interests, and immaturity are typical sources of marital conflict. In fact, Armando’s observation about me had missed the mark slightly: we were actually both normal.
Marital conflict is a central theme of this book and was common in all types of migrant families I interviewed. In some families, it was fathers who had migrated, leaving their wives and children in Mexico. For these fathers, physical separation presented a number of challenges in maintaining the marriage. Accusations of infidelity (by both wives and husbands) were particularly common. In other families I met, single mothers had migrated alone. Often their migration had been precipitated by difficulties with the children’s father, which came either after an unintended pregnancy or after a divorce. Tensions in conjugal relationships were also evident in cases in which both parents were living together in the United States and had left their children in Mexico. I witnessed marriages breaking up in the United States or, in the case of one family I interviewed, after the couple had returned to Mexico. In the end, it was difficult to learn anything about parenting, the primary focus of this study, without first learning something about marriage. Men’s and women’s relationships with their children are inevitably intertwined with their relationships with each other.
A STEPMOTHER?
For Armando, it was the problems with his ex-wife that had prompted a deepening of his relationships with his children in Mexico and his return to live with them. I witnessed a similar dynamic while married to Raúl, who had two children in Mexico from a prior marriage. At the time, I did not know I would subsequently study families like his. At first I was primarily concerned with the plight of migrant mothers, and I had not considered Raúl’s life to be particularly telling. Yet I came to view fathers’ relationships with their children as key to understanding those of migrant mothers. I now see that my observations about Raúl’s relationship with his children during the five years we lived together and afterward (we had a relatively amicable divorce) are consistent with the experiences of others in this study.
When we first met, I often listened to Raúl’s phone conversations with his children, at that time ages four and six. Raúl maintained fairly regular contact with them and with his ex-wife, calling once a week and sending money once or twice a month. He would ask how the children were, if they needed anything, and what gifts they wanted him to send. At Christmas, Raúl sent money for bicycles. In the spring, we packed a box of toys and T-shirts that cost thirty dollars to send and took more than a month to arrive by mail. The following fall, when I visited Raúl’s parents in Mexico, I left remote-control cars and clothes to be taken to the boys.
About a year later, Raúl’s ex-wife, frustrated with her lack of work opportunities in Mexico, decided to come to the United States. Raúl was upset the day she called from Texas. He had no idea she had planned to leave the children with her mother, and he did not think this was good for them. After his ex-wife migrated, Raúl’s communication with his children suffered, because the boys’ grandmother did not let him talk to them.
Then there was an abrupt change. Raúl’s ex-wife moved in with another man. Her mother, back with the children in Mexico, was angry. She complained to Raúl and allowed him greater access to the children. He called the children more frequently, sometimes twice a week; he visited the children and even spoke with his ex-mother-in-law about taking custody of them. Later, when I became pregnant,
