Over time, however, parents and children show remarkable resolve to overcome such hardships. Unmet expectations are not absolute. Parents cling to their parenting roles even when those roles are difficult to fulfill. They often adjust their goals and aspirations in reaction to their children’s negative experiences of family separation, and children are able to influence their parents’ subsequent migration decisions. Parent-child relationships at a distance are constantly in flux. The hardships arising from separation paradoxically reinforce family members’ commitments to each other. A story of both adversity and the intensity of family ties, this book depicts the ways in which Mexican families struggle and persevere in a global economy.
TRANSNATIONAL FAMILIES
The dawn of the twenty-first century marks what some consider to be the third major wave of global migration.11 Today, men, women, and their families are moving not from densely populated areas to frontiers, as was typical before the mid-twentieth century, but rather from less developed countries to highly industrialized nations, such as from Mexico to the United States.12 Technological advances have enabled migrants to maintain more dense social and economic ties in home and host countries than in times past.13 Migrants from Latin America, for example, sent more than 50 billion U.S. dollars back to their home countries in 2006, accounting for significant portions of many countries’ gross domestic products.14
Contemporary researchers describe individual families who are divided by international borders and who maintain significant emotional and economic ties in two countries as “transnational families.”15 Transnational families are not new; international separations were also common in earlier periods.16 Yet today this migration pattern is most common among those moving from less wealthy to more prosperous nations. When the most economically productive members of the family—men and women in the prime of their lives—move to areas of concentrated capital in industrialized nations, and children and the elderly remain in developing areas with few resources, inequalities between contemporary wealthy and poor nations are reproduced and reinforced in individual households.17
The inequalities experienced by today’s migrant households are different in another way. It used to be that men were the primary movers in families. Although migrant mothers were not unheard of during earlier periods, these cases appear to have been unusual.18 A study of family separation among U.S. immigrants in 1910 found that only 7 percent of mothers across ethnic groups had left their children in their home country when they came to the United States, compared to more than 50 percent of fathers.19 Among Mexicans, the bracero program (1942–1964) institutionalized male-led migration patterns by providing men with temporary agricultural work visas but offered no provisions for the migration of their wives and children.20 When men left women and children to work abroad, migration accentuated gender inequalities within families.21
Today, however, mothers who migrate without their children are increasingly common, suggesting a major shift in the ways families around the world fulfill individual and household needs. Transnational mothers have been reported around the globe: Turkish women in Germany; Sri Lankans in the Middle East; Ecuadorians, Colombians, and Peruvians in Spain; Filipinas in Canada, Hong Kong, and Italy.22 In some cases, women migrate before their husbands and children, radically reversing migration patterns of times past.23 Among the more than 11 million Mexicans currently living and working in the United States, estimates suggest that 38 percent of fathers and 15 percent of mothers have children living in Mexico.24 Although rates of male migration still outpace those of females, Mexican women, especially those who are unmarried, widowed, or divorced, are migrating at higher rates than ever before.25 A mother’s choice to migrate is often reluctant, with deep emotional repercussions; such choices mark the pervasive impact of global inequalities on individual families.26 At the same time, some suggest that migrant mothers are “actively, if not voluntarily, building alternative constructions of motherhood. . . . Transnational mothers and their families are blazing new terrain, spanning national borders, and improvising strategies for mothering.”27 Migrating mothers simultaneously replicate global disparities of wealth and—albeit inadvertently—challenge gender-based inequalities within families.
Scholarship on today’s migrating mothers and others divided by international borders categorizes them, for the most part, as a new class of “transnational migrants” who can be distinguished both from nonmigrants in their home communities and from immigrants in receiving countries who have severed ties with family and community back home.28 Researchers have found complex ideas of identity among this new class of citizens, who feel they belong to two or more nations.29 Transnational migrants are often politically active in organizations from their hometown and support development projects there, and national policies and actions shape, and at times constrain, transnational migrants’ activities.30 Economic contributions of this new class of citizen may end up dividing communities of origin between those who have little or no access to remittances and those who have become the “remittance bourgeoisie.”31 Transnational migrants also may forge different types of social relationships, what some call “social remittances,” because they negotiate gender in their families in new ways, reconfiguring the rituals and expectations associated with courtship and marriage in a binational context.32
Much of our understanding of the lives of transnational migrants comes from the experiences of Mexicans in the United States; perhaps no other immigrant group has as lengthy a history of transnational migration. Since the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, migration of Mexicans to the United States has ebbed and flowed. During the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution (1913–1920), Mexicans moved north along the railroad lines to work both in agriculture and in the expanding industrial centers in the United States.33 After the economic crisis of the Great Depression in the 1930s, Mexicans—U.S. citizens and immigrants alike—were rounded up and sent back to Mexico in deportation campaigns.34 Between the 1940s and the 1960s, leaving their families, Mexican men moved north en masse to work seasonally on bracero contracts.35 Many Mexican families, and even entire communities, became dependent on their laborers working abroad.36 After the Mexican debt crisis of the 1980s, broader sectors of Mexican society, including urban dwellers and people from the middle class, have come to rely on migration to the United States.37 Estimates suggest that today one in ten Mexicans lives in the United States, accounting for more than 30 percent of the U.S. foreign-born population.38
The Contemporary Legal Context
Over the past twenty-five years or so, the circular nature of Mexican migration has begun to decline for the first time.39 After an amnesty program was passed in 1986, U.S. immigration policy became ever more punitive toward undocumented immigrants. There are currently no legal pathways to permanent residency for Mexicans who have entered the country illegally. In addition, the militarization of the U.S.-Mexican border has made it increasingly difficult and expensive to come to the United States.40 The cost of an undocumented crossing tripled between 1995 and 2001.41 Death rates on the border have also skyrocketed. Between 1994 and 2000, there was a 1,186 percent increase in deaths among unauthorized border-crossers in Arizona.42 Although United States immigration policies are intended to deter Mexicans from working in the United States illegally, they have had the opposite effect. Mexicans continue to come north, and they are not returning home, as they used to.43
Meanwhile, labor demand has meant that Mexicans are moving to new destinations throughout the continental United States—to places such as Georgia, Nebraska, and New Jersey, where sizable Mexican communities did not exist prior to the 1990s.44 Because of the difficulties in coming and going, Mexican immigrants are now settling in these communities at higher rates and in greater numbers than ever before. Family separation among Mexicans may have been the norm for years, but today separations are likely to be of a longer duration.45 Mexicans in the United