“Well, I finally had him convinced. Everything was in place. But then, you see, he went to these soccer tryouts in Puerto [Puerto Escondido] and was picked to play for Pachuca [a youth team for one of Mexico’s professional leagues]. So now he doesn’t want to come anymore.”
“Wow, what an honor! He must be very good at soccer.”
“He loves it,” Ofelia said. She added: “He said, ‘Mom, please, just let me play for a year and then I’ll come over there with you guys. Just let me try for a year.’ So he doesn’t want to come anymore.”
Ofelia had been disappointed. I later learned that Germán’s soccer gig had not lasted. Because he had anticipated joining his parents in New Jersey as soon as possible, Germán had not started middle school that September. Indeed, he had made one attempt to cross the border, but he was caught by the border patrol and, since he was a minor, was sent all the way back to his grandmother’s home in Oaxaca. Germán did not try to cross again that fall. In November, Ofelia told me that she and Ricardo were too worried about his safety and, having lost two thousand dollars in their first attempt to bring him to New Jersey, they did not want to waste any more money on another failed attempt. Instead, Ofelia told me, Ricardo would go back for Germán in December.
Four years earlier, when I had first met Ofelia, she had told me of a similar plan for a holiday reunion. At the time, Germán was nine years old. She had left him seven years before, when Germán was just two. By November 2007, it had been eleven years since Ofelia had seen her son.
PROLONGED SEPARATIONS
Most family separations are not as long as that of Ofelia and Germán. In fact, in seven of the twelve families I followed over a period of four years, parents and children have since been reunited. Although their case was unique, the difficulties that Ofelia and Germán encountered in their attempts to reunite exemplify a dynamic common in all the families I interviewed: periods of separation last much longer than originally anticipated. At times reunification came just a year or two later than expected; for most it was longer. The extreme of eleven years illustrates how such a dynamic unfolds even when parents and children long to be reunited.
A number of factors contribute to the prolongation of family separations. As low-wage, undocumented workers, parents have a difficult time meeting their economic goals in the United States; their limited resources make reunifications difficult. Over time, parents’ resources are strapped even further by new commitments in the United States. Children, for their part, have conflicting emotions about seeing their parents, whom they may barely remember. Children sometimes resist reunification, and parents do not want to coerce them. Children are also loyal to their caregivers in Mexico. Caregivers, who enjoy certain economic and emotional benefits from caring for children, may also act in ways that extend periods of separation. I address the nuances of each of these dynamics—the difficulties migrant parents face, children’s conflicting emotions, and caregivers’ stakes in the arrangement—in subsequent chapters.
More deeply, prolonged family separations reflect the mismatch between the time needed for parents to reach their goals in the United States and the pace of their children’s growth in Mexico. Families divided by borders lack what Eviatar Zerubavel has called “temporal coordination.”1 Parents’ time in the United States is structured around irregular work schedules of forty to sixty hours per week.2 I was often told by those I interviewed that “my life in the U.S. is all work.”3 Oriented toward future goals, parents are constantly scrambling to feel productive in low-wage, unstable jobs. “I did not do anything,” explained Armando, describing his first two years in the United States. “I just paid off [my debts]. Another year went by, and not until then could I start to make plans to bring my family here.” Parents do not want to give up their goals, because they want their sacrifices to be worthwhile; in the meantime, periods of separation grow longer. One father explained: “The problem is that we immigrants end up here a long time.”
While parents feel caught, spinning their wheels in the United States, their children are changing at a pace parents can barely keep up with. Children, particularly those living in small communities like San Ángel, live in places where the pace of life follows agricultural work patterns, seasonal celebrations, and the school calendar and is marked by various holidays.4 The slowness and even boredom of daily life in the Mixteca are also evident in Victoria Malkin’s description of her fieldwork site in western Mexico: “Residents often sat on their stoops labeling different aspects of their surroundings as ‘ugly,’ ‘boring,’ ‘backward,’ and ‘closed.’ They contrasted this reality with the idea of an elsewhere drawn from the trips they have made to larger cities nearby, the soap operas they follow on television, or the migrants’ stories about clean streets, shopping malls, escalators, planes, dishwashers and cleaning products.”5 As the pace of small-town life moves cyclically around them, children’s growth and development stand out.
Parents and children experience the passage of time at different paces in different social locations. For parents, harried work schedules make time fly, while the time it takes them to meet their goals is drawn out. For children, daily life is slow, but their developmental changes are rapid. No case better illustrates how a lack of temporal coordination affects parent-child relationships than that of Ofelia and Germán. When the son knows little about his parents’ life in the United States and the mother cannot keep up with her son’s development in Mexico, parent-child relationships are not only elusive, but also they are constantly changing.6 As a result, family reunification is unpredictable and may take longer to realize than expected.
A MOTHER’S CONSTRAINTS DURING MIGRATION
November 2003. I had arranged to meet Ofelia at her home at six o’clock on a November evening. I had known one of Ofelia’s brothers and her husband, Ricardo, for years. Among other things, they had both been students in one of my ESL classes. I had never met Ofelia, however, and did not know that she and Ricardo had a son in the coastal town of Las Cruces, Mexico, until I started interviews for this project. On this particular evening, I arrived at Ofelia’s house to find that she was out shopping. I sat in the narrow living room making small talk with Ofelia’s brother over the cartoons blasting from the TV as a number of family members came and went from the room. Later I learned they were all relatives who shared the small home and that Ricardo had been upstairs the whole time. Throughout this project, most of my contact with his family has occurred through Ofelia and her kin.
After a bit, Ofelia’s brother left for his class at the local community college. His wife, Chavela, politely waited with me and told me about what it was like to live in Las Cruces. Chavela was from the northern state of Jalisco but had moved in with Ofelia’s mother when she married Ofelia’s brother. “I grew up in the city. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor either. There was always enough to eat, and all I had to do as a child was worry about getting up, going to school, and doing my homework. . . . [Ofelia’s] family is of a much more humble background. When I first got married, they all said it wouldn’t last. But when I went to live in his town, I got along very well with his mother. She is a really patient person. I learned how to cook, make tortillas, and do other things around the house. It was hard, but I learned. And I learned that my husband’s family is much more united than my own.”
Chavela’s description was cut short when Ofelia arrived, lugging Wal-Mart shopping bags. She giggled nervously upon finding me in the living room, excusing herself by saying she had thought the interview was to have been an hour earlier. When I had not appeared, she had gone out to pick up some diapers for her three-year-old daughter. As if in proof, a chubby toddler with messy pigtails trailed in behind her. Ofelia went upstairs to leave her bags. Within minutes of her return, everyone cleared the room to give us privacy.
Ofelia smiled and giggled again. “I have been asking everyone what they think you will ask me about.” The laughter seemed a sign of her anxiety about being interviewed. It resurfaced every time we broached an emotionally charged topic. I tried to reassure her and asked simply that she tell me a little bit about how she had come to the United States and about her son who lives in Mexico.
“I