they seemed ambivalent. Then they became excited. Raúl’s oldest son gave us permission to name the baby after him (and my grandfather). When the baby was born, they wanted to talk to him over the phone. That December we traveled to Veracruz, and I met Raúl’s children for the first time. The boys did not seem to hate me, as I had expected, but rather were curious. They played affectionately with their little half-brother.
Throughout this time, we learned of Raúl’s ex-wife’s life only through the grapevine. We were told that she too had another child with her new partner. The baby was born a month before our son, and fearing their reaction, she had not told the boys about it until after the fact. They were upset. Rumor had it that her attentions to her children in Mexico had waned because her new husband was machista: he did not want to accept her children from a prior marriage. Eventually, however, it was she, not Raúl, who returned to Mexico. After living with the boys in Veracruz for a time, she left them with her mother again and moved with her youngest child to her new husband’s family home. After about a year of no communication, Raúl once again was able to communicate with his children freely. Later, Raúl’s oldest son moved to his paternal grandparents’ home to further his studies, and Raúl continues to visit his children in Mexico periodically.
Raúl’s experiences in fathering from afar, I now see, are typical. Like that of other parents, Raúl’s relationship with his children fluctuated greatly over a short period of time. It was dictated to some degree by his relationship with his ex-wife and also by gendered expectations of mothers and fathers. These two themes, gender and the passage of time, are central to understanding the extraordinary aspects of how family members’ lives unfold while living apart.
A MOTHER
When Armando said, “I always thought you were normal,” he was ribbing me for my complicated relationship with Raúl and his children in Mexico. But Armando’s comment also points to another parallel in our experiences: we both worried greatly about how to provide our children with a stable and loving home environment. This was something that tormented Armando. He struggled over how his decision to migrate had affected his children. He felt guilty that his decisions and his difficulties with his ex-wife had adversely affected his children. He deliberated over how to explain his problems with his ex-wife to them. He considered his children carefully as he planned for the future.
That evening I shared with Armando my concerns regarding my son’s adjustment to living in Mexico, so far from his father. Already separated from Raúl at the time, I was determined that two-year-old Temo would not lose touch with his father while we were away. I hoped that Temo would have an ongoing, positive relationship with his father, as I had with my own father after my parents divorced. Thus, during my first few months of living in a small community in Oaxaca, Mexico, I found myself anxiously anticipating Raúl’s calls. I empathized with the women awaiting calls at the caseta (public phone) on the first floor of the house where I stayed for seven months. Though not economically dependent on such calls, as the other women were, I got frustrated when calls would not come through or when the phone card ran out of minutes, cutting off our conversations mid-sentence.
More strikingly, as I explained to Armando, I was surprised at how my son reacted to living without his father. Temo could not remember a time when he had lived with Raúl; the same was true of Armando’s four-year-old daughter, who had never met him before he returned. For Temo, Daddy was someone who visited several times a week. Yet after we moved in with a couple in Mexico who had a three-year-old daughter, Temo was instantly interested in fathers. For a time he insisted that the taxi driver who accompanied us on a ten-day trip to visit families (including Armando’s) was his father. At the beach, Temo requested that I draw pictures in the sand of not only the mommy and baby fish but the daddy fish as well. When we visited a woman who had a pet squirrel, he repeatedly questioned us as to where the squirrel’s daddy was.
Even after his obsession with daddies wore off as the year progressed, Temo generally asked after his father several times a week. Here is one conversation we had before getting out of bed one morning, about a month before Temo turned three:
| J. D.: | Temo, what do you want to do today? |
| TEMO: | With my daddy. |
| J. D.: | You want to go with your dad? |
| TEMO: | Yes [nods, smiling]. |
| J. D.: | But he is in the U.S. |
| TEMO: | What is he doing? |
| J. D.: | Hmmm. . . . Maybe he is clearing snow, or maybe he is resting. |
| TEMO: | And “Sonido Tecos”? [Raúl’s D.J. business] |
| J. D.: | Well, since today is Tuesday, I don’t think he is playing. He only does it on the weekends, like on Friday or Saturday. Maybe this weekend he will play. |
| TEMO: | At parties? To dance? |
| J. D.: | Yes. |
| TEMO: | Hmmm. . . . And it is very far? |
| J. D.: | Yes, your dad is far away. |
| TEMO: | And that is why I can’t go look for him? |
| J. D.: | Yes. |
| TEMO: | Hmmm . . . |
Children’s responses to parental absences and their ability to influence their parents is another topic of this book. For Temo, as for the children of migrants I interviewed in Mexico, the thousands of miles that separated us from Raúl did not diminish the importance of his father in his life. Unlike in New Jersey, where we lived with another single mother and her child, in Oaxaca, Temo was more aware of his father than he had ever been before. Reactions to separation are in part a function of a child’s developmental stage. My second son, Dylan, for example, emerged, at age two, from his own “daddy” phase, a much shorter one than Temo’s. But I also believe that Temo’s heightened awareness of his father was related to our living in a small community where the roles of migrants, and particularly fathers, are celebrated. I found that children as young as five understood that their parents have migrated to el norte in order to provide for them. For children, physical separation does not diminish their expectations of their parents and, in some ways, augments them.
In turn, parents like Armando and me—and the migrants I interviewed—worried about our children’s reactions to separation. We scrutinized little interactions—like Temo’s requests for sand drawings of daddies or Armando’s son’s refusal to talk to his mother on the phone—for clues about how they were adjusting. While migrant parents may be the ones to decide where family members will live, they are preoccupied with the effects these decisions have on their children. Such concerns may be typical among all parents, but they are intensified when parents and children live apart.
THE ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY
The themes central to this book are familiar ones. Marital conflict, gendered expectations of mothers and fathers, the changes brought on by the passage of time, and children’s power in families have been evident in my own experiences as a mother and wife and may be familiar to you. Parents’ social status as transnational migrants, however, creates unique dynamics in families. I turn now to the persistence of family ties in the transnational context and the hardships that make these families’ experiences extraordinary.
Acknowledgments/Agradecimientos
