century may do their part to increase the forced separation of Mexican migrant families, this book focuses on the much more common experience of parents deciding, under such policies, that they must migrate without their children. I explore the lives of families in which married fathers and single mothers have migrated alone and those in which mothers and fathers have migrated together. I pay particular attention to the ways in which gender and family structure shape family members’ experiences. I also include the perspectives of children, to evaluate the consequences such migration patterns have over a child’s life course.
“International migration,” asserts the social scientist Aristide Zolberg, “is an inherently political process.”7 In this book I look at the other end of the spectrum: migration as an inherently personal process.8 By following the experiences of select families over a number of years, I provide an up close and personal account of private aspects of the lives of the Mexican men and women working in low-wage jobs in the continental United States, their hopes and aspirations, and those of their family members living in Mexico. Rather than in the workplace, street, or neighborhood, I explore the migratory experience within the domains of family life, in what might be considered a “domestic ethnography.”9 In doing so, I reveal the impact that political processes of international migration have on the everyday experiences of families.
The interviews show the lives of parents and children divided by borders to be extremely difficult. Parents and children are tied to each other by the expectation that parents will make economic gains during their time abroad and that children will make their parents’ sacrifices worthwhile.10 Yet the lives of parents and children divided by borders are essentially unequal. Parents and children live in different worlds, with different daily routines, different opportunities, and different sources of tension. As their lives unfold in the United States, parents are unable to meet the expectations of migration as quickly as they had hoped. Unmet expectations, particularly of migrant mothers, cause tensions and hurt feelings in parent-child relationships. Meanwhile, children in Mexico feel resentful of parents’ absences. They have a difficult time proving their parents’ sacrifices worthwhile. The emotional fallout of parents’ work decisions is a great source of hardship in families.
Over time, however, parents and children show remarkable resolve to overcome such hardships. Unmet expectations are not absolute. Parents cling to their parenting roles even when those roles are difficult to fulfill. They often adjust their goals and aspirations in reaction to their children’s negative experiences of family separation, and children are able to influence their parents’ subsequent migration decisions. Parent-child relationships at a distance are constantly in flux. The hardships arising from separation paradoxically reinforce family members’ commitments to each other. A story of both adversity and the intensity of family ties, this book depicts the ways in which Mexican families struggle and persevere in a global economy.
TRANSNATIONAL FAMILIES
The dawn of the twenty-first century marks what some consider to be the third major wave of global migration.11 Today, men, women, and their families are moving not from densely populated areas to frontiers, as was typical before the mid-twentieth century, but rather from less developed countries to highly industrialized nations, such as from Mexico to the United States.12 Technological advances have enabled migrants to maintain more dense social and economic ties in home and host countries than in times past.13 Migrants from Latin America, for example, sent more than 50 billion U.S. dollars back to their home countries in 2006, accounting for significant portions of many countries’ gross domestic products.14
Contemporary researchers describe individual families who are divided by international borders and who maintain significant emotional and economic ties in two countries as “transnational families.”15 Transnational families are not new; international separations were also common in earlier periods.16 Yet today this migration pattern is most common among those moving from less wealthy to more prosperous nations. When the most economically productive members of the family—men and women in the prime of their lives—move to areas of concentrated capital in industrialized nations, and children and the elderly remain in developing areas with few resources, inequalities between contemporary wealthy and poor nations are reproduced and reinforced in individual households.17
The inequalities experienced by today’s migrant households are different in another way. It used to be that men were the primary movers in families. Although migrant mothers were not unheard of during earlier periods, these cases appear to have been unusual.18 A study of family separation among U.S. immigrants in 1910 found that only 7 percent of mothers across ethnic groups had left their children in their home country when they came to the United States, compared to more than 50 percent of fathers.19 Among Mexicans, the bracero program (1942–1964) institutionalized male-led migration patterns by providing men with temporary agricultural work visas but offered no provisions for the migration of their wives and children.20 When men left women and children to work abroad, migration accentuated gender inequalities within families.21
Today, however, mothers who migrate without their children are increasingly common, suggesting a major shift in the ways families around the world fulfill individual and household needs. Transnational mothers have been reported around the globe: Turkish women in Germany; Sri Lankans in the Middle East; Ecuadorians, Colombians, and Peruvians in Spain; Filipinas in Canada, Hong Kong, and Italy.22 In some cases, women migrate before their husbands and children, radically reversing migration patterns of times past.23 Among the more than 11 million Mexicans currently living and working in the United States, estimates suggest that 38 percent of fathers and 15 percent of mothers have children living in Mexico.24 Although rates of male migration still outpace those of females, Mexican women, especially those who are unmarried, widowed, or divorced, are migrating at higher rates than ever before.25 A mother’s choice to migrate is often reluctant, with deep emotional repercussions; such choices mark the pervasive impact of global inequalities on individual families.26 At the same time, some suggest that migrant mothers are “actively, if not voluntarily, building alternative constructions of motherhood. . . . Transnational mothers and their families are blazing new terrain, spanning national borders, and improvising strategies for mothering.”27 Migrating mothers simultaneously replicate global disparities of wealth and—albeit inadvertently—challenge gender-based inequalities within families.
Scholarship on today’s migrating mothers and others divided by international borders categorizes them, for the most part, as a new class of “transnational migrants” who can be distinguished both from nonmigrants in their home communities and from immigrants in receiving countries who have severed ties with family and community back home.28 Researchers have found complex ideas of identity among this new class of citizens, who feel they belong to two or more nations.29 Transnational migrants are often politically active in organizations from their hometown and support development projects there, and national policies and actions shape, and at times constrain, transnational migrants’ activities.30 Economic contributions of this new class of citizen may end up dividing communities of origin between those who have little or no access to remittances and those who have become the “remittance bourgeoisie.”31 Transnational migrants also may forge different types of social relationships, what some call “social remittances,” because they negotiate gender in their families in new ways, reconfiguring the rituals and expectations associated with courtship and marriage in a binational context.32
Much of our understanding of the lives of transnational migrants comes from the experiences of Mexicans in the United States; perhaps no other immigrant group has as lengthy a history of transnational migration. Since the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, migration of Mexicans to the United States has ebbed and flowed. During the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution (1913–1920), Mexicans moved north along the railroad lines to work both in agriculture and in the expanding industrial centers in the United States.33 After the economic crisis of the Great
