Ofelia and Germán’s standoff arose in part from differences in how family members perceived each other over the passage of time. For Ofelia, Germán remained a young boy bonded with his grandmother, even while her own life changed radically with the birth of another child and the work required of her and her husband to create an economic foothold in New Jersey. For the grandmother, another year or two in her care were worth it if Germán could reach a more natural stopping point at his local school. And for Germán himself, time brought big changes in both his feelings and his understanding of his situation.
From Germán’s perspective, and that of other children like him, migrant parents are a presence even when physically absent. Germán felt that his parents were important to him, and he knew that they should provide and care for him. He felt resentful that they left him and now gave more attention to his U.S.-born sister. At the same time, Germán understood that they had migrated out of economic necessity and, in part, to support him. He liked living with his grandparents and in Las Cruces; in fact, that was the only life he knew. In essence, he did not want his life to change drastically, except that he would like his parents to return to show they care. With each passing year, the ways Germán communicated these mixed emotions to the adults in his life changed. Germán’s jeers at my suggestions that I would soon see him in New Jersey gave way, within a little more than a year, to his boasts that he would soon be in the United States, even if against his will. More recently, Germán left school in Mexico and more wholeheartedly accepted the idea of coming north. As for children anywhere, each year brought developmental and emotional changes, and those changes affected his interpretation of his parents’ sacrifice.
But for parents, the gains won each year as a migrant come painfully slowly. Stability in housing and employment may take years to achieve. Migrants invest huge amounts of energy and resources to carve out successful lives in U.S. cities. These investments made it hard for Ofelia and Ricardo to return for Germán, as he wanted them to do. They had to weigh the cost and the risk of doing so. They had to consider that Ofelia’s family in Mexico depended on remittances from the United States and that their standard of living would fall if Ofelia went back. Moreover, Ofelia had a strong link to New Jersey through her U.S.-born daughter. If she returned to Las Cruces and had trouble crossing the border on her return, who would look after Stacy during her absence? What would happen if she could not return? Ofelia reasoned that she might convince Germán to join them if she could spend some time with him, but the danger of the border crossing made a short return visit a great risk. It would also be extremely costly and would require economic stability that Ofelia and Ricardo were unable to achieve until Stacy started kindergarten and they both were working full time and did not have to pay for child care. Like Germán, Ofelia felt conflicted in deciding on her best course of action. As a migrant father explained to me, “Sometimes, Joanna, you simply cannot have everything you want at once.”
Over time, parents become more engrossed—and invested—in their lives in the United States and even more conscious of the rising price of having left their children. Trapped by the lifestyle they adopt in the United States, scheduled almost entirely around the workweek, parents worry about their relationships with their children. Being absorbed by work at the expense of the family is not a novel concept. Working parents in the United States may have similar reactions of being in a “time bind.”7 Yet the physical distance considerably increases the dissonance between the pace of parents’ lives at work and the pace of the lives of their children at home.8 One migrant father’s comment summarizes the effects of migrant parents’ unique time bind on relationships with children whom they do not get to see at the end of each day:
For a time, the phone works wonders. It is like your weapon, your love, your everything, because you talk, you listen; it’s everything. But after a time, you lose that passion of talking. You lose that dream of waiting for Sunday to call your kids and talk to them. Why? Because you realize that it starts becoming ordinary. . . . Instead of seeing it as [a means of] affection, love for your children and to your family in Mexico, it becomes ordinary, like a line you have to follow. And you just don’t feel the same anymore. . . .
The distance makes you forget, it makes you lose something, it makes you . . . How can I explain? It makes it so that the affection, that which was love, becomes almost ordinary. It becomes commercial. Why? Because you only think about working, sending money, and that they [the kids] are okay over there. . . . [It is routine] because you cannot enjoy what you sent and take your child out to eat, take him on an outing, or buy him some clothes. All of this makes it so that you forget what the love of your child is like.
Conflicting emotions that result from the passage of time at different paces in different places often prolong periods of separation. Ironically, it is also the passage of time that can resolve standoffs between parents and children, like the one between Ofelia and Germán. Because parents and children have few opportunities for interaction, they do not have the ability to negotiate small solutions to their difficulties. They must wait for a combination of factors to converge, including economic stability, opportunity, and the willingness of children to migrate, in order to plan a reunification. In some cases, parents and children are reunited within a few years. In other cases, as for Ofelia and Germán, reunification is delayed for most or all of a child’s childhood. I now turn to what happens to families from the perspectives of parents, children, and caregivers during these periods.
Regular phone calls home help fathers like this one maintain contact with family members in Mexico. Photograph by Joanna Dreby
THREE Gender and Parenting from Afar
It was mid-February 2005, and the atmosphere in San Ángel and the region was lively. Since the New Year, there had been at least two private parties per week. A number of couples had planned their weddings for this time of the year, which were open events that anyone could attend, since most of San Ángel’s twenty-five hundred residents knew one another. Live bands played in the central plaza; these nights ranchera music rang throughout the town until the early morning hours. Many from nearby towns attended these events, and residents of San Ángel joined in the celebrations of neighboring towns. The festivities were even more exciting because the U.S. migrants who had come home for the holiday season had not yet returned north. With the arrival of migrants, there were new, even if familiar, faces in the crowds. Efrén, father of four, was one of them.1
I had first met Efrén in New Jersey. At that time, he had not been back to see his wife and children, who lived in a town just ten minutes from San Ángel, for more than three years. Although money was still tight, in December 2004 he had decided to go home for an extended vacation because his father was quite ill. Before his return, I had visited frequently with Efrén’s wife, Claudia. Claudia was a schoolteacher and fun to talk with. We occasionally walked together for exercise and took our children on outings to the nearby river. I saw Claudia much less after Efrén returned. Understandably, they were spending more time together as a family. The couple’s four children did not come to San Ángel to play in the street with their cousins and my son Temo nearly so often. They spent the evenings at home, watching TV and playing with their father.
Although Efrén spent much time with his wife, children, and ailing father, on occasion he took on the role of host, showing me around his town. He had, for example, invited me along with his wife to a New Year’s Eve party. The night of the dance for the town feria, he invited me once again. That evening I joined Claudia, Efrén, Efrén’s adult cousins, and an aunt visiting from Mexico City at the dance. By the time the band stopped playing at 3 A.M., we had finished a bottle of tequila and Efrén invited us to continue the party at his house. As three of us had lived in New Jersey, we sat in their living room listening and dancing to merengue and bachata songs typical among Latino crowds in the United States but almost foreign in the region.