they wanted to learn about it, or they wanted to travel to a new place or meet new people. One fourteen-year-old girl explained that she wants to go “to see what it’s like there. I would like to know if it is really nice there, because some of my friends told me it is, so I want to go see.” A twelve-year-old boy wrote: “I want to discover new things not found in Mexico”; he also said he imagines the United States to be “like a city of gold.”
Even young children have clear ideas about the United States. I had children in three primary schools draw pictures of their families and of the United States: many drawings depicted el norte as a place of tall buildings, elaborate roads, snow, and Christmas trees and presents.85 Some students even included symbols of the United States in their drawings, such as the American flag and the Statue of Liberty.86
A game children played in San Ángel illustrates how U.S. migration shapes children’s ideas of place. I often took my son, Temo, to the playground in town, always empty during the hot mornings. The seesaw
A third-grade boy’s drawing of the United States.
The merry-go-round at the playground in San Ángel. Photograph by Joanna Dreby was broken, as were parts of the metal swings, and a number of steps on the three slides were missing. Not until the sun began to set and the temperature cooled did other children come out to play. They rearranged the long metal bar of the former seesaw to climb the steep slides or balanced it between the steps of the monkey bars. The most popular game was always on the merry-go-round. Children as young as four years old positioned themselves on the circular seat while older siblings and friends pushed them round and round as if on a super-fast airplane. The children would say that spinning around a few times took them to the next nearest city. A little faster would transport them to the state capital of Oaxaca. The next stop was always—and I never heard it played differently—the United States. The young children on board would laugh and shout, “Spin it fast, real fast! Send us to el norte!” The older spinners interjected: “Wait, wait, wait! We have to stop in Tijuana first.”
Children in the Mixteca grow up oriented toward the north. If for migrant parents opportunity lies in what they can do with their paycheck in Mexico, for their children, opportunities are unilaterally in the United States.
LEAVING CHILDREN
The vast difference in opportunities between Mexico and the United States are part of parents’ rationale for leaving their children in the first place. Parents want to take advantage of employment opportunities abroad, but they anticipate that their lives as migrant workers will be difficult. They use a migration strategy that they hope will bring the greatest benefit and have the least impact on their children. Essentially, inequalities between parents’ and children’s lifestyles are at the heart of parents’ sacrifices.
Yet such decisions are further complicated by parents’ gender. Since mothers appear to be migrating without their children at higher rates than in the past, differences between mothers’ and fathers’ migrations are key. I find three types of family separation among those I interviewed: (1) migrant fathers who come alone, (2) migrant fathers who are subsequently joined by their wives (i.e., both parents are in the United States), and (3) single mothers who migrate alone.87 Among the schoolchildren I surveyed in the Mixteca who had a parent in the United States, 73 percent had just a father abroad, 20 percent had both parents abroad, and 7 percent had only their mother abroad.88 Parents’ migration patterns are significant because each corresponds to a slightly different rationale for leaving children in Mexico.
Married Fathers
Nearly all the fathers I interviewed were married to the mothers of their children at the time of migration (although a handful had also migrated before getting married). One study estimates that male-only migration accounts for approximately 81 percent of migration events among Mexican couples.89 Married fathers primarily view their labor migration as a straightforward path to fulfilling their role as economic provider for the family. Fathers come north after becoming unemployed in Mexico or when they see friends and family do better economically abroad. One father’s description of migration as an escape from financial difficulties in Mexico is typical. The forty-year-old father was born in a very small town in the outskirts of a small city in Oaxaca. “We were very poor.” Until the age of twenty-four, he worked as a farmer cultivating corn, chiles, and beans. When his three children were six, four, and two, he and his entire family moved into the city (including his parents, sisters, and brothers), where he worked unloading trucks. He earned about a hundred pesos a day (equivalent to ten dollars at the time of the interview), which was barely enough to feed his family. “I had no land or anything else in my name.” Frustrated at his lack of opportunities, he decided to go north when a friend who had been once before offered to take him.
Many fathers described the pressure they felt from family and friends to migrate. Pedro said it was his brother who encouraged him to migrate. “I never wanted to come, but I was working in Mexico City in a factory, and I had a brother in California who sent me the money to migrate. Since he sent the money, I had to go.” José, the first in his family to migrate, also felt compelled to leave owing to his relationship with his siblings: “I was a manager at the company, but it was a very stressful job, and I had a hard time working with my supervisors. But I also felt a lot of stress because I was not as successful as my brothers and sisters. We come from a humble background. They all have done well, and their houses were nicer than mine. I felt like the one most behind.”
Wives also pressure their husbands to migrate.90 Daniel, who had been to the United States before he was married, had wanted to stay in Mexico after he returned home. He agreed to migrate again as a newlywed only because his wife was adamant that she wanted to live in the United States. Armando said that he was reluctant to leave his family. Although many of his brothers were already working in New Jersey and he had been offered the opportunity to go north before, Armando decided to migrate at his wife’s insistence.
Regardless of the source of pressure to work in the United States, fathers’ decisions to leave children hinge upon the expectation that migration will lead to greater economic opportunity and that they will be able to better economize without their children present. Migrant fathers express qualms about the quality of life in the United States for their children. Many have strong opinions as to why it is better that their children be raised in Mexico. When I asked one father whether he thought about bringing his children to New Jersey, he said, “Definitely not, because here there is no family life.” Another said he did not want his kids to be raised in the United States, because “here the kids forget they are Mexican.” A father of two teenagers in Mexico explained: “I am not the kind of person who likes this life for my children. Here there is too much freedom for them. It is not really a safe environment.” Married men plan to work hard and return to Mexico, where their children are raised by their wives, as soon as possible.
Married Mothers
Although also fundamentally related to work aspirations, mothers’ motivations for leaving children are more complicated. Single mothers and married mothers often have different expectations of migration. The married mothers I interviewed all joined their husbands who had already been working in the United States.91 Married mothers described migration as affording them personal benefits in addition to being advantageous for the family unit. Many explained that their decision to migrate was prompted by curiosity. One mother said, “I wanted to know what it was like.” Even husbands described their wives as being the primary movers behind family migration. A father living with his wife and U.S.-born daughter, with two more children in Mexico, told me: “It was her. She told me she wanted to come and see what it was like
