That evening, Doña María sold tacos once again. We sat and chatted as on the previous evening. This time, when Germán came out and declared he was hungry and wanted a cheese sandwich for dinner, Doña María snapped at him: “You are way too young to be demanding things like that.” Germán retreated inside to prepare his own sandwich.
Although at Germán’s urging we had originally planned another beach trip that Saturday, at lunch on Friday, Doña María told me that she had not been able to change the catechism class for Germán’s Communion the next morning, so we would not be able to go to the beach. “Since his mother is not here,” she explained, “I am the one who has to be there for him.” When I told Germán that we would not be able to go to the beach after all, he looked disappointed. I left the next morning. As Doña María accompanied me to the bus stop, Don Fernando and Germán were busy washing the truck. Don Fernando mockingly faked wailing at my departure: “When are we going to see her again,” he cried, and we laughed. I called out a good-bye to Germán, but he concentrated on cleaning the tires in the back of the truck, completely ignoring me. Doña María shook her head as we walked away. “You should have called out to him, ‘See you in New Jersey’,” she said. “Then he would have responded.”
THE LONG ROAD TO REUNIFICATION
April 2006. As had been the case since I first met with Ofelia in the fall of 2003, talk of Germán’s reunification with his parents continued. Once, when I called Doña María a few months after returning from my visit, Germán answered and chatted away about the party his family threw for his First Communion. “It was a big party. There was a D.J.,” he reported eagerly. “My dad said that he would either put [money up] for a D.J. or a cow [to provide the meat for the party], but then my dad put [money] for the D.J. and my grandfather put the cow so I had both.” After a bit, Germán asked, “So when are you going to come again so we can go to the beach?”
“I don’t know,” I explained. “Probably not for a little bit. When are you coming here? I bet you’ll come here before I go there.”
I was surprised when Germán answered decisively, “April 30th.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah, my dad says he is going to send for me. I am going to go with my cousin Trini. Antonio [Chavela’s young son and Germán’s cousin] is going to go back also.”
“Wow.”
“But I don’t want to go,” Germán added, although the excitement in his voice seemed to belie his reluctance.
After we spoke for a bit, Doña María came on the line. We exchanged news, again of the party and also reports on who in the family had been ill. I then added, “So are they really going to send for Germán?”
“His father says that he is going to come back for Germán and take him to the United States. But I don’t know. I tell them to wait until he finishes school. You see, now he is in fifth grade, and he just has one more year left to graduate, so I think they should wait until he is done with school.”
“Oh. Well, Germán said he is going to come in April,” I explained.
Doña María simply laughed and changed the subject.
April came and went. Germán remained with his grandparents. Germán’s cousin Trini, a single mother, did migrate to New Jersey and left her three children, then ages four, six, and seven, with Doña María. Although talk of Germán’s migration still hung in the air, the next year he went on to the sixth grade in Las Cruces.
May 2007. Exactly one year later, I visited Ofelia, who spoke of her plans to return for Germán over the summer. Although this was only one of many conversations I had had with her about Germán’s migration, this time it seemed that a number of factors had converged to make the reunification more likely.
First, Germán would now graduate from the sixth grade, which was the benchmark his grandmother had set for his migration. Second, according to Ofelia, Doña María was overwhelmed with the care of Trini’s three children. Trini, now pregnant and living with a new boyfriend in the United States, was not sending enough money to provide for the children properly. Ofelia was providing most of the economic support for their care and had hired a girl locally to help her mother, much to Ricardo’s chagrin. “My mother is getting too old to look after these kids; they are all young, not like Germán. And when I left Germán, she wanted me to. That was one of the reasons I left him, to give her company. But these three, they need a lot of work. My mother is getting too tired to look after them.”
Not only did the changed circumstances in Las Cruces make Germán’s migration seem likely, but Ofelia and Ricardo’s economic situation seemed to have improved markedly since I had last seen them. They now rented a three-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of the city, which they shared with just one young woman. The living room was furnished with a new white sofa and love seat (covered in plastic to protect against spills), a large TV, and a bookshelf displaying pictures of the family. I looked over the framed pictures of Germán as a little boy, and Ofelia pointed out the pictures of her, Ricardo, and their daughter, Stacy, from their vacation the summer before. Ofelia had a new job with benefits, including a yearly two-week vacation, which they used for the first time to go away to Virginia Beach. Both Ofelia and Ricardo owned vans they drove to work, providing rides for coworkers at the going rate of twenty-five dollars per week per person, which augmented the family income. When I asked if they planned to have more children, Ofelia gave a decisive no. “When they are little, it is so hard economically. I didn’t work for two years to stay with Stacy, and we only had Ricardo’s [income]. But now she is in school, and I can work too. We are much better off. No, it is too hard when they are little. Two are enough for me.”
Aside from the improvements in Ofelia and Ricardo’s economic situation, Ofelia explained that she now had a concrete plan for bringing Germán back with her to the United States. She had finally caught up with the woman who had helped the family cross the first time. The expense would be great, two thousand dollars more than it would have cost ten years earlier, but she and Ricardo felt it was worth it. Over the summer they hoped to take Stacy back to Mexico, so she could meet her grandparents for the first time. If all went according to plan, the family would be living together in New Jersey by September.
As I was leaving Ofelia’s house that afternoon, I admired a wall hanging I had overlooked earlier. It was a painted family portrait, depicting Ofelia and Ricardo at the center and Stacy just below them. Never forgotten, Germán was in the portrait as well. Ofelia explained that they had had a photograph sent so the artist could add him to the painting. Although recognizable, it showed Germán as he must have looked years before I had met him. The two siblings looked at most a year apart in age, while there is actually seven years between them. The wall-hanging captured the time disparities that governed the families’ memories and realities: American-born Stacy had an up-to-date portrait, as did the parents who stood with her, while Germán was incorporated into the family as he had been years before.
PARALYSIS
What accounts for the dynamic between Germán and Ofelia, which led to indefinite postponement of their reunion? It is possible that caregivers in Mexico, in this case Doña María, resist family reunification so they can continue to garner economic support from parents’ migration. Grandparents do rely on the remittances of their migrant children and develop close emotional bonds with their grandchildren while parents are away. Yet caregivers are not responsible for