Mexicans—U.S. citizens and immigrants alike—were rounded up and sent back to Mexico in deportation campaigns.34 Between the 1940s and the 1960s, leaving their families, Mexican men moved north en masse to work seasonally on bracero contracts.35 Many Mexican families, and even entire communities, became dependent on their laborers working abroad.36 After the Mexican debt crisis of the 1980s, broader sectors of Mexican society, including urban dwellers and people from the middle class, have come to rely on migration to the United States.37 Estimates suggest that today one in ten Mexicans lives in the United States, accounting for more than 30 percent of the U.S. foreign-born population.38
The Contemporary Legal Context
Over the past twenty-five years or so, the circular nature of Mexican migration has begun to decline for the first time.39 After an amnesty program was passed in 1986, U.S. immigration policy became ever more punitive toward undocumented immigrants. There are currently no legal pathways to permanent residency for Mexicans who have entered the country illegally. In addition, the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border has made it increasingly difficult and expensive to come to the United States.40 The cost of an undocumented crossing tripled between 1995 and 2001.41 Death rates on the border have also skyrocketed. Between 1994 and 2000, there was a 1,186 percent increase in deaths among unauthorized border-crossers in Arizona.42 Although United States immigration policies are intended to deter Mexicans from working in the United States illegally, they have had the opposite effect. Mexicans continue to come north, and they are not returning home, as they used to.43
Meanwhile, labor demand has meant that Mexicans are moving to new destinations throughout the continental United States—to places such as Georgia, Nebraska, and New Jersey, where sizable Mexican communities did not exist prior to the 1990s.44 Because of the difficulties in coming and going, Mexican immigrants are now settling in these communities at higher rates and in greater numbers than ever before. Family separation among Mexicans may have been the norm for years, but today separations are likely to be of a longer duration.45 Mexicans in the United States have few opportunities to legalize their status and reunite their families. As they are also increasingly settling farther away from Mexico, return trips are even more difficult and costly. Prolonged family separations are common.46
Despite mounting evidence about the lives of transnational migrants, we actually have very little understanding of how these contemporary legal structures shape migrant parents’ sacrifices. This is particularly important at a time when the lengths of family separations among Mexicans, the largest immigrant group in the United States, are rising. A research emphasis on transnational processes and on transnational migrants as a distinct social class has obscured the systemic differences in the experiences of family members who are divided by international borders. Pioneer social scientists W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki recognized such differences in describing early immigrant families as internally divided between “new and old world values.”47 More recently, the sociologist Dalton Conley has proposed that “inequality starts at home” and that unequal outcomes within families are more pronounced among those who are racially or economically disadvantaged.48 Even though contemporary transnational family members may move back and forth between two geographic spaces, the daily lives of family members residing in Mexico and the United States are fundamentally different.49 At a time of increasingly rigid immigration policy, geographic separation—and the migratory status it entails—complicates gender and generational inequalities within families. A true assessment of the ways immigration as a political process shapes families’ lives must move beyond the treatment of transnational migrants as a homogenous social class. It requires an in-depth study of the experiences, not the values, of different members of families while they are living apart.50
THE LIVES OF MIGRANT PARENTS
This book is based in part on fieldwork and interviews with twenty-three fathers and twenty-two mothers conducted between 2003 and 2006 in Central New Jersey.51 I met most of these migrant parents in one new destination for Mexican migrants: a city of approximately fifty thousand residents where the proportion of Mexican foreign-born individuals grew 869 percent between 1990 and 2000.52 It is also a city where I had lived and worked with Mexicans in numerous social service agencies, including as an ESL teacher, starting in 1997. I had developed lasting friendships with many Mexicans, some of whom helped me to locate parents to interview. Despite my community connections, I found the topic of family separation to be delicate. Many interviewees, for example, brought up issues of marital conflict or personal failures, such as problems of alcohol abuse. Snowball sampling did not work in the traditional sense; I generally gained parents’ confidence one by one or via referrals from individuals without children in Mexico. Being accompanied by my young son, Temo, born in 2002, facilitated conversations about the sensitive topic of parenting from afar.53 I ended up having multiple contacts with more than half of the parents, some of whom I have known for years.
The migrant parents in this study struggled economically before coming to the United States but were not living in abject poverty in Mexico. In fact, the poorest in Mexico usually cannot garner sufficient resources to move north for work.54 The parents I interviewed came from a range of middle- to lower-class backgrounds. Five had some college-level training, ten had been to high school, fourteen had seven to nine years of schooling, and sixteen had been to school for less than six years. The high concentration of mothers in the latter group is consistent with findings from a Pew Hispanic Center survey that transnational mothering is more common among women with low levels of education.55 Among my sample, parents’ prior work experience in Mexico also varied. Fathers had previously worked as farmers (eight), government administrators (three), a baker (one), a police officer (one), electricians (two), and an accountant (one). Most of the mothers had not been regularly employed outside the home in Mexico; however, two were college educated and four were working professionals prior to migration.
The mixed socioeconomic status of migrant parents is not surprising. The majority of Mexicans in New Jersey had previously lived in the three-state region of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Guerrero, with many from a relatively arid region known as the Mixteca. Although internal migration is a long-standing practice in the region, it was not until after the Mexican debt crisis in the 1980s and again in the 1990s that U.S. migration rates from the Mixteca swelled.56 It is an economically depressed area with low returns on education. Researchers have found that Mexican migrants from such areas are more likely to have heterogeneous educational backgrounds than are those from other regions where migrants may be less educated than nonmigrants.57
Once arriving in New Jersey, migrants of diverse class backgrounds find themselves on a relatively equal playing field. Legal status, in particular, prevents those with higher levels of education from gaining an edge. All but one of the forty-five parents I interviewed was undocumented at the time they first migrated without their children. Only three had obtained legal status by the time I interviewed them. Lack of legal status is a widespread problem among recent Mexican immigrants; it is estimated that between 80 and 85 percent of Mexicans arriving in the United States between 1995 and 2005 were undocumented, and that in 2008 nearly 55 percent of all Mexicans immigrants were undocumented.58 Family separations are concentrated in this group.59
Above all else, the migrant mothers and fathers I interviewed, regardless of educational background, came to New Jersey to work.60 Men who had been both government officials and farmers found themselves working side by side in landscaping, construction, factories, or private restaurants. Men typically earned between eight and twelve dollars per hour in such occupations. This is roughly ten times the typical rate of one hundred pesos per day that male laborers earned in the Mixteca at the time. The women I interviewed mostly worked in local fast-food restaurants and factories.61 They earned less than men did, averaging between six and nine dollars per hour. Since most had not worked for pay prior to migrating, women viewed such salaries as quite productive. Migrant mothers complained that women in their hometowns simply
