Such differences in the lives of migrants and their nonmigrant children are not surprising, particularly in Mexico, where patterns of labor migration to the United States are long-standing.115 Yet there are reasons to suspect that disparities between the lives of migrants and nonmigrants have increased over the past twenty years or so, now that so many Mexican migrants live in urban and suburban areas of the United States, as in central New Jersey. In the past, when Mexican migrants were farmworkers or lived in border communities in the Southwest, their living conditions may not have differed so much from those of their communities of origin. Compare my descriptions of parents’ lives above to the comment of a Oaxacan woman, also from the Mixteca region, whom Leo Chavez interviewed in a canyon campsite in San Diego in the early 1980s: “I had imagined the United States very differently. I thought it was one big city. I never imagined it was the same as there [Oaxaca]. In Oaxaca we live in a small village, and we live the same here. In our house there is no electricity, no water. We must haul water to the house the same as here. We use candles instead of electricity the same as here. There is no stove. . . . Our house is wood like these. It is the same. The same living there as it is here.”116
The Mexican migrant parents I interviewed work in a service economy and live in urban and suburban areas near their employers; their children remain in places that depend on an ever-shrinking agricultural base. Consequently, parents’ and children’s daily lives are drastically different. Moreover, because family separations are of longer duration than even just twenty years ago, inequalities between migrants and their children are likely to have more long-term consequences.
The rest of this book focuses on precisely this question: what are the consequences of divided lives for Mexican families at the start of the twenty-first century? Drawing on a combination of the stories of specific families and my larger sample of interviews, each subsequent chapter focuses on one aspect of the inequalities between parents’ and children’s lives that affect family members’ relationships over time. While chapters draw primarily on interpersonal experiences, social structures including the labor markets in the United States and in Mexico, immigration policy, public programs such as Social Security, and the Mexican educational system contribute to the context in which these relationships develop.
I start in chapter 2 with one of the most devastating consequences of parents’ decisions to migrate without their children: separations are almost always longer than originally anticipated. Drawing extensively on the experiences of migrant mother Ofelia Cruz and her son, Germán, I describe how such prolonged separations unfold and are more often than not the product of the temporal mismatch between the structure and pace of migrants’ lives in the United States and those of their children in Mexico.
In chapter 3, I turn to a discussion of how prolonged separations are managed by both mothers and fathers who live apart from their children. Comparing mothers’ and fathers’ experiences as low-wage workers in New Jersey, I examine how gendered expectations subsequently shape parent-child relationships from afar. I show that in the transnational context, families “do gender,” or ascribe meaning to their interactions, according to rather traditional gender role expectations. This is not always the case. As I show in chapter 4, when parents divorce after migration, fathers may seek new roles in the lives of their children during periods of separation. Drawing on the experiences of one father, Armando López, I describe the conditions under which men may redefine fatherhood.
In chapter 5, I shift the focus to how children react to parental migration at different ages and how parents attempt to be responsive to their children’s changing needs. I describe young children’s expressions of loss after a parent leaves, and parents’ redoubled efforts to show young children they care. I describe teenagers’ outward displays of resentment and their lack of social support not only at home but also at school. Although parents send money home to pay for children’s schooling with the hope that their sacrifices will result in intergenerational mobility, teenagers struggle in school while parents are away. This is one of the most disturbing aspects of the separation. Thus, by the time children reach young adulthood, their prospects of financial security in Mexico still seem limited. At this stage, many children decide to join their parents working in the United States, and parents must change their migration strategies accordingly. Family reunifications rarely come, however, when parents or children originally plan. Although not the ones to initially divide the family across borders, children are afforded power in their relationships with the adults in their lives as a result of the separation.
In chapter 6, I move to the roles of Mexican caregivers, whom I call “middlewomen,” in mediating relationships between parents and children. Most often grandmothers whose access to migrants’ remittances is secured by caring for children, middlewomen have their own financial and emotional stakes in the caregiving arrangement. They are thus generally supportive of migrant parents’ sacrifices. Prolonged separation does not diminish expectations of parents to provide emotionally and financially for their children in Mexico. With the support of caregivers, parents’ and children’s reunifications are possible—and increasingly likely—as children, and their caregivers, age. When divided by borders, family members “do family,” or socially construct their families, in ways that reinforce parent-child obligation. In chapter 7, I narrate the story of Cindy Rodríguez, which illustrates the unintended consequences of family separation for young women and men. Children like Cindy experience instability even when living in stable home environments. They end up feeling caught between two families, not belonging to either, when families stress parent-child obligation during periods of separation.
Ultimately, the experiences of parents and children divided by borders result from a combination of family members’ relative participation in migration and their relative position in their families. As I summarize in chapter 8, in a legal environment that promotes and necessitates prolonged periods of family separation, the emotional aspects of separation are extremely difficult for family members. Women are critiqued more for migrating without their children than men are. And the emotional consequences of separation are concentrated among the least powerful members of the family: children. At the same time, children are not powerless. They are able to influence their parents’ decisions about migration. Likewise women show great resolve to affirm maternal ties to children despite the critiques of other family members and their neighbors. When both women and men are faced with economic difficulties in the United States, parents’ ties to their children back home become even more important. Separation is a source of great hardship. Yet separation, and the sacrifice it entails, also reinforces parents’ and children’s commitments to each other, at the very least during the time that parents and children live apart.
Exemplifying the mismatch between the lives of migrants and their nonmigrant children, this family portrait superimposes an image of the child living in Mexico on a painting of the family members living in New Jersey. Photograph by Joanna Dreby
TWO Ofelia and Germán Cruz
MIGRANT TIME VERSUS CHILD TIME
November 2007. I finally caught up with Ofelia. It had been six months since I had last seen her, before I moved to Ohio from New Jersey. When we had spoken that past spring, Ofelia had once again changed her plans to send for her thirteen-year-old son, Germán. In April, she had made arrangements to bring Germán to the United States over the summer, after he had graduated from the sixth grade. Ofelia had hoped that by the time school started in the fall, he would be living with her and her husband, Ricardo, and their six-year-old daughter, Stacy, born in New Jersey. As I sat on Ofelia’s sofa in May,