keep asking me about the other two rooms in the back,” she explained. “I tell them I don’t want to rent them until the house is in better shape. People say they don’t care. But, you have to be careful because, you know, we have things, and you don’t know what someone might want to take.”
In some ways, the children of migrants experience greater prosperity than do their friends without access to remittances. Studies have found, for example, that child and infant health in some Mexican communities is better among families with U.S. migrants than among those without migrants, presumably because of the overall economic benefits of migration.74 I surveyed more than three thousand children in the Mixteca and other regional schools and found that in the Mixteca, 90 percent of children of migrants reported receiving money from abroad, compared to 77 percent among those with migrant relatives, but not parents.75 The average amount of remittances reported by children of migrants was more than twice that reported by children without migrant parents (3,393 pesos per month compared to 1,478 pesos per month).76 Access to remittances may give children of migrants greater social standing than their peers.77
Often, however, children of migrants told me they felt too embarrassed to show off the material advantages of having a parent working abroad. When I asked one fourteen-year-old who had just joined his father in New Jersey if he used to take things his dad sent him to school, he explained: “Some of the kids do that, but it is mal visto [looks bad]. The other kids make fun of them for it. When I was in grade school, I never took things from the U.S. to school and they never made fun of me.” In reflecting back on her childhood, a young woman remembered a backpack her father had sent her. “Oh how I wanted this backpack for school. But once he sent it, I was too embarrassed to take it with me to school. It just hung there on the shelf.” For children of humble backgrounds, displays of wealth from migration are perceived to be snobby and pretentious. Children do not want parents’ migration to differentiate them from their peers.
If migrants’ lives in the United States are organized around their busy workweek, children’s lives revolve around school. To be sure, children’s schooling is central to parents’ sacrifices.78 Parents hope their economic support from the United States will give their children the opportunity to have a good education in Mexico and not have the same economic difficulties as an adult that they have had. For example, single mother Paula, who had less than a sixth-grade education, dreamed her two children would become professionals in Mexico. She paid for private school with her remittances. Migrant father José explained: “My son wants to study at Las Américas [a prestigious private college in Mexico]. And that university is very expensive. I have to be here to pay for it. . . . And my daughter, she wants to be a military nurse. I have to send money there for that.”
Providing children with educational opportunities in Mexico requires substantial economic resources.79 Tuition for public schooling through the university level is free in Mexico, but parents often have difficulties with the costs associated with attendance past the ninth grade. Most of the younger children I met attended schools in their home communities for kindergarten (three years, starting at age three), grade school (grades one through six), and middle school (grades seven through nine). Parents of young children described regular contributions for fees, supplies, and uniforms. Migrants said they varied remittances according to the expenses related to their children’s schooling. But because children attend schools near their homes, the cost of young children’s schooling is manageable. Caregivers walk a midday snack to children at school during the recess period, and children are home a little after 2 P.M. for lunch. In contrast, most children who attend high school (grades ten through twelve) have to travel to other communities to do so. Siblings Cassandra and Fernando, for example, both studied in the city closest to San Ángel, which was a 3½-hour bus ride on an unpaved road at the time. They lived in the city during the week, returning home on weekends. Cassandra recalled: “I remember how uncomfortable it was to ask for money to go to school.” By the time their younger brother Paulo attended high school, a new school had opened in the neighboring town. The expense for Paulo’s education was less, but transportation costs to this school were still significant. One eighteen-year-old I met in San Ángel attended the same school and nearly dropped out because she worried that her attendance strained the family budget.
Indeed, a common complaint among the fifteen teachers and school administrators I interviewed in the Mixteca was school retention. In one middle school I visited, enrollment dropped from 220 in 1985 to 27 in 2005. Some students were lost because of the addition of schools in three nearby communities that used to send their young people to this school. But this development cannot explain all of the population decline, for I visited one of these new middle schools and found only fourteen students enrolled. The director attributed the school’s severe drop-out rate to students’ aspirations to migrate to the United States. At the beginning of the year, ten first-year students had preregistered; only two remained in December when I visited. Of the eight dropouts, the director reported that only three had subsequently migrated. The other five remained in town but told him they were planning to leave soon. Retention problems are not unique to middle schools. In this same town, 260 students were enrolled in the primary school in 2001. When I visited in 2005, only 70 remained.
In the Mixteca, children may simply not see any concrete benefits to staying in school. For students in rural areas, teachers are often the besteducated role models they have. Yet teachers’ salaries have not recovered from losses in real income incurred after the Mexican debt crisis of the early 1980s, particularly in rural areas and in the southern state of Oaxaca. Although I was in rural Oaxaca before conflicts erupted in the teacher’s strike of 2006, teachers said that skilled masons in their communities earned more than they did.80 In fact, it is relatively common for these well-educated community members to migrate north, just as children’s family members have done.81 A social worker I interviewed told me: “My biggest illusion is to go there [to the United States]; the problem is I cannot.” She then complained that the students had no aspirations other than migration. And a teacher in San Ángel explained that he earned approximately 250 dollars every two weeks:
I don’t know [how much that is per hour]. We are supposed to not work that much. But here I work as much as I did when I was in Texas, which is like forty hours a week. . . . And, it isn’t enough. . . . Our president did it; he went north. So did Francisco [another teacher in town]. They took a year sabbatical to go north to pay off their debts. That is what happened to me. I did the same. I had a debt here to pay off, and I had to go and do it. And you know, on my salary here I could never buy a car. I had to go north in order to bring back a car.
Although migration to the United States from Mixtecan communities like San Ángel is not as long-standing as in other parts of Mexico, an undeniable orientation toward el norte permeates communities where many children’s parents have migrated.82 The economic contributions of migrants are vital to what some describe as a “culture of migration.”83 Aside from remittances to individual family members, migrants paid for fluorescent lights on the main thoroughfare in San Ángel. They paid for renovations of the central plaza. Migrants’ financial contributions even change the pace of life. The year I was in San Ángel, a party or wedding was held nearly every weekend between December 12 (the celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe) and the feria, or festival of the town’s patron saint, in mid-February. Return migrants paid for these private parties, participated in them, and often took videos to share with town members living in the United States.84
Migration in this region of the Mixteca is so prevalent that even a local D.J. service refers to the other side of the border with its name “Luz y Sonido Manhattan.” Photograph by Joanna Dreby
Children are aware of migrants’ vast contributions to their communities. Ideas of the north pervade children’s imaginations. Indeed, 81 percent of students I surveyed in the Mixteca said they would like to visit the United States: 72 percent were motivated by curiosity, saying
