Despite mounting evidence about the lives of transnational migrants, we actually have very little understanding of how these contemporary legal structures shape migrant parents’ sacrifices. This is particularly important at a time when the lengths of family separations among Mexicans, the largest immigrant group in the United States, are rising. A research emphasis on transnational processes and on transnational migrants as a distinct social class has obscured the systemic differences in the experiences of family members who are divided by international borders. Pioneer social scientists W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki recognized such differences in describing early immigrant families as internally divided between “new and old world values.”47 More recently, the sociologist Dalton Conley has proposed that “inequality starts at home” and that unequal outcomes within families are more pronounced among those who are racially or economically disadvantaged.48 Even though contemporary transnational family members may move back and forth between two geographic spaces, the daily lives of family members residing in Mexico and the United States are fundamentally different.49 At a time of increasingly rigid immigration policy, geographic separation—and the migratory status it entails—complicates gender and generational inequalities within families. A true assessment of the ways immigration as a political process shapes families’ lives must move beyond the treatment of transnational migrants as a homogenous social class. It requires an in-depth study of the experiences, not the values, of different members of families while they are living apart.50
THE LIVES OF MIGRANT PARENTS
This book is based in part on fieldwork and interviews with twenty-three fathers and twenty-two mothers conducted between 2003 and 2006 in Central New Jersey.51 I met most of these migrant parents in one new destination for Mexican migrants: a city of approximately fifty thousand residents where the proportion of Mexican foreign-born individuals grew 869 percent between 1990 and 2000.52 It is also a city where I had lived and worked with Mexicans in numerous social service agencies, including as an ESL teacher, starting in 1997. I had developed lasting friendships with many Mexicans, some of whom helped me to locate parents to interview. Despite my community connections, I found the topic of family separation to be delicate. Many interviewees, for example, brought up issues of marital conflict or personal failures, such as problems of alcohol abuse. Snowball sampling did not work in the traditional sense; I generally gained parents’ confidence one by one or via referrals from individuals without children in Mexico. Being accompanied by my young son, Temo, born in 2002, facilitated conversations about the sensitive topic of parenting from afar.53 I ended up having multiple contacts with more than half of the parents, some of whom I have known for years.
The migrant parents in this study struggled economically before coming to the United States but were not living in abject poverty in Mexico. In fact, the poorest in Mexico usually cannot garner sufficient resources to move north for work.54 The parents I interviewed came from a range of middle- to lower-class backgrounds. Five had some college-level training, ten had been to high school, fourteen had seven to nine years of schooling, and sixteen had been to school for less than six years. The high concentration of mothers in the latter group is consistent with findings from a Pew Hispanic Center survey that transnational mothering is more common among women with low levels of education.55 Among my sample, parents’ prior work experience in Mexico also varied. Fathers had previously worked as farmers (eight), government administrators (three), a baker (one), a police officer (one), electricians (two), and an accountant (one). Most of the mothers had not been regularly employed outside the home in Mexico; however, two were college educated and four were working professionals prior to migration.
The mixed socioeconomic status of migrant parents is not surprising. The majority of Mexicans in New Jersey had previously lived in the three-state region of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Guerrero, with many from a relatively arid region known as the Mixteca. Although internal migration is a long-standing practice in the region, it was not until after the Mexican debt crisis in the 1980s and again in the 1990s that U.S. migration rates from the Mixteca swelled.56 It is an economically depressed area with low returns on education. Researchers have found that Mexican migrants from such areas are more likely to have heterogeneous educational backgrounds than are those from other regions where migrants may be less educated than nonmigrants.57
Once arriving in New Jersey, migrants of diverse class backgrounds find themselves on a relatively equal playing field. Legal status, in particular, prevents those with higher levels of education from gaining an edge. All but one of the forty-five parents I interviewed was undocumented at the time they first migrated without their children. Only three had obtained legal status by the time I interviewed them. Lack of legal status is a widespread problem among recent Mexican immigrants; it is estimated that between 80 and 85 percent of Mexicans arriving in the United States between 1995 and 2005 were undocumented, and that in 2008 nearly 55 percent of all Mexicans immigrants were undocumented.58 Family separations are concentrated in this group.59
Above all else, the migrant mothers and fathers I interviewed, regardless of educational background, came to New Jersey to work.60 Men who had been both government officials and farmers found themselves working side by side in landscaping, construction, factories, or private restaurants. Men typically earned between eight and twelve dollars per hour in such occupations. This is roughly ten times the typical rate of one hundred pesos per day that male laborers earned in the Mixteca at the time. The women I interviewed mostly worked in local fast-food restaurants and factories.61 They earned less than men did, averaging between six and nine dollars per hour. Since most had not worked for pay prior to migrating, women viewed such salaries as quite productive. Migrant mothers complained that women in their hometowns simply could not find work, and this was one of their reasons for coming north. One mother explained: “The people are so poor. There isn’t any work for women. Sometimes the women work helping to pick fruit, mostly lemons, and sometimes they make candies from coconuts to sell in other towns. Mostly they do not work at all.”62
Work in New Jersey, however, is not always as easy to obtain as parents expect. Arising, perhaps, from the long-standing pattern of circular migration between Mexico and the United States, the impression that work is plentiful in the United States permeates many Mexican communities.63 According to one migrant father, “I would say 75 percent of the people come fooled by this country. They are fooled by us immigrants who go back. We get a nice pair of shoes, good clothes and we say, ‘I earn so much and I have a car.’ . . . Everyone thinks that by coming they will make money quickly. They think coming here is living well.”
Mexican parents may find it difficult to maintain a steady job. Most parents initially use temporary employment agencies that offer irregular jobs and deduct their services, including transportation, from workers’ salaries.64 Even once better established and able to obtain jobs directly with employers, migrants are frequently unemployed.65 Many Mexican women work in factories that depend on a fluid labor force that fluctuates in size; the employers offer no benefits or job security. One mother I interviewed had worked for over two years at a factory, but she was fired when she took off too much time to care for a family member who had been diagnosed with AIDS. Ever since, she has moved from job to job, part of the temporary workforce. Work is also irregular in construction and landscaping, common jobs for Mexican men in central New Jersey. Work may be plentiful during the summer; some of the men I interviewed earned between six hundred and nine hundred dollars per week in cash. But when it rained and during the winter, they did not work at all.
Health problems, coupled with a lack of health insurance, also affect migrant parents’ ability to work. One mother, for example, had to leave her job when she underwent an emergency kidney stone operation. Others stopped working during and after pregnancies. A father, Armando, had health problems when he first arrived in New Jersey and landed a job in landscaping with his brothers: “I didn’t think it would be so hard here. . . . I first worked mowing lawns. But I didn’t last because my health wasn’t good when I got here. . . . I couldn’t last at that job. Instead I went to work in a factory.” As factory