Varias personas me han apoyado con la parte más crítica de este proyecto: conocer a las personas cuyas historias se narran en este libro. Quiero expresar mi agradecimiento de forma especial a Vanessa Colón, Eugenia Cruz, Arturo Erasmo, Gregorio Félix, Gaudencio Ferrer, Ramón Hernández, Napoleón Mariscal, Raúl Mariscal, Efigenia Romero, Gregorio Romero, Juan Sierra Barbosa, Vicky Tizón, y a Teresa Vivar por ayudarme a ponerme en contacto con las personas entrevistadas en Nueva Jersey. Sin el apoyo, la confianza, y la fe de ustedes, este libro nunca se habría realizado. También le doy infinitas gracias a todos aquellos en México que me apoyaron durante mi estadía allá, entre las que se encuentran Victor Contreras, Margarita García, Adelaida Hernández, Elvira Méndez, Ramiro Ramírez, Macedonio Santiago, la familia Sierra-Barbosa, Crisanto Sierra, Eduardo Torres Rodríguez, Laura Vásquez, Diana, Agustina, y la familia Mariscal-Velasco.
Para mí, todo este lío empezó con aquella semilla de Unidad Cultural. Fue una idea pequeña de un grupo de personas jóvenes e idealistas que surgió de un trabajo comunitario que ha afectado a las vidas de muchas personas—el impacto que tuvo en la mía es evidente en este libro—y que ha madurado hasta convertirse en un grupo muy sólido de amigos. Agradezco el empeño que todos pusimos en esa idea, y a todas los que se involucraron a través de los años. Aparte de los que ya he mencionado, les doy las gracias a Alberto Aguilar, Massimo Bossachi, Manny Domínguez, Elizabeth Erasmo, Walter Flores, Efrén García, Carmen Heredia, Francis Julián, Roberto Perea, y Norberto Reyes. Me han enseñado mucho.
Finalmente, mi agradecimiento sincero a aquellas personas que compartieron conmigo sus experiencias sobre la separación familiar. Reconozco que algunas han sido experiencias dolorosas y no tan fáciles de compartir. Les estoy agradecida por confiármelas y espero poder hacerles justicia a continuación.
For Mexican migrants, finding a job in a small city like this one in el norte gives them the means to provide for their children living back in Mexico. Photograph by Joanna Dreby
ONE Sacrifice
Paula is lucky.1 Paula has worked seventy hours each week since 2001, when she arrived in New Jersey. Each morning at 9 A.M. she leaves the apartment she rents near the train tracks in a small suburban town for her first shift at a fast-food restaurant. In mid-afternoon she crosses the street to her second job, at another fast-food chain, returning home around 11 P.M. most nights. Unlike the other five Mexicans who share her apartment, Paula can walk to both jobs and has not been out of work since she arrived. Paula’s housemates have schedules as busy as her own; in any given week they rarely interact. Even when they are home at the same time, they usually do not spend time together. Paula and the others typically use their little free time resting or watching TV in their bedrooms, behind closed doors (or behind the sheet of the makeshift bedroom in the living room). The only common area, the kitchen, sits largely unused. Paula eats most of her meals at work, and the men she lives with do not cook. When Paula lived in Oregon, she made extra money between shifts cooking for the family she lived with. But now, after working in kitchens all week long, cooking is the last thing Paula wants to do on her only day off.
Thousands of miles away, in Puebla, Mexico, the home where Paula’s daughter, Cindy, lives with Paula’s cousin and his family is quite different. The house is rarely unoccupied. In the morning, while Paula’s cousin and his wife are at work as schoolteachers, fifteen-year-old Cindy is at home with her seventeen-year-old second cousin Lola. The two teenagers tend the family’s storefront fruit and vegetable stand while doing homework. Around 2:30 in the afternoon, the adults return from work with their eight-year-old daughter in tow. Cindy sits down with the family to enjoy the midday meal before heading off to school in the afternoon. In the evening, Cindy watches TV with her “sisters” or talks on the phone with friends before going to bed. Though the three-story home is teeming with life, it is not overcrowded. Once the addition was added about five years ago, with the help of Paula’s earnings, everyone got his or her own room. Cindy’s weekend routine is also busy, but not hectic. She often helps shop for fresh food supplies for the store, and she attends Mass. Paula’s cousin and his wife have many friends and often are invited to various social functions; Cindy attends most of these events with them as part of the family.2
The contrast between Paula’s life and that of her family in Puebla may seem striking, but it is familiar to the nearly five hundred thousand Mexicans who migrated to the United States every year between 2003 and 2006.3 Tens of thousands like Paula have voluntarily left their children in Mexico to come across the international border to work.4 These migrants have made a remarkable but common parenting decision: they have chosen to move to places in the United States where they can earn more money for their labor while their children have remained behind in Mexico, where the cost of living is low. In this sense, migration is a gamble; by leaving their children, migrant parents hope to better provide for them. Their migration and hard work represent a sacrifice of everyday comforts for the sake of their children and their children’s future.
Mexican migrant parents’ commitments to their children may not be all that different from those of working parents in the United States. Like many others, Mexican migrants put in long hours on the job and entrust the care of their children to others.5 They expect that through continued participation in the labor force, they will be able to enhance their children’s opportunities. They feel conflicted about their decisions over how to reconcile the demands of work and family life.6 But transnational parents work thousands of miles away from their children. They are unable to see their children at the end of every day, and the sacrifice involved in their work decisions is enormous.
How do migrant parents and children manage living apart? What are the costs of such a sacrifice? Drawing on interviews and fieldwork with more than 140 members of Mexican families and in schools in both central New Jersey and south-central Mexico, this book answers these questions. It is the first contemporaneous study of family members’ experiences of separation that includes the perspectives of mothers, fathers, children, and children’s caregivers. Although restrictive U.S. immigration policies and the rise in deportations at the turn of the twenty-first century may do their part to increase the forced separation of Mexican migrant families, this book focuses on the much more common experience of parents deciding, under such policies, that they must migrate without their children. I explore the lives of families in which married fathers and single mothers have migrated alone and those in which mothers and fathers have migrated together. I pay particular attention to the ways in which gender and family structure shape family members’ experiences. I also include the perspectives of children, to evaluate the consequences such migration patterns have over a child’s life course.
“International migration,” asserts the social scientist Aristide Zolberg, “is an inherently political process.”7 In this book I look at the other end of the spectrum: migration as an inherently personal process.8 By following the experiences of select families over a number of years, I provide an up close and personal account of private aspects of the lives of the Mexican men and women working in low-wage jobs in the continental United States, their hopes and aspirations, and those of their family members living in Mexico. Rather than in the workplace, street, or neighborhood, I explore the migratory experience within the domains of family life, in what might be considered a “domestic ethnography.”9 In doing so, I reveal the impact that political processes of international migration have on the everyday experiences of families.
The interviews show the lives of parents and children divided by borders to be extremely difficult. Parents and children are tied to each other by the expectation that parents will make economic gains during their time abroad and that children will make their parents’ sacrifices worthwhile.10 Yet the lives of parents and children divided by borders are essentially unequal. Parents and children live in different worlds, with different daily routines, different opportunities, and different sources of tension. As their lives unfold in the United States, parents are unable to meet the expectations of migration as quickly as they had hoped.