The Mexican parents I interviewed were extremely busy, mostly because of irregular and long work schedules.67 A migrant father explained: “When you come to this country, you have things to do; you have bills to pay, and responsibilities. It is not like your country where you work normally and you have time, because here you have to work to get what you want. You come home just to eat, in a bad mood and tired, to take a shower and go to bed.” As Paula described in the opening vignette, migrant parents work hard to benefit from the wage differential between Mexico and the United States. They hope to work as many hours as possible to take advantage of the time spent away from their families and to make the sacrifice worthwhile.
Migrant parents do not spend a lot of time or money on leisure activities. Those I interviewed typically used their one day off to shop, clean, and go to the Laundromat. Some migrant fathers play soccer or basketball at community parks in their free time. Mothers and fathers occasionally attend baptism parties, weddings, and birthday parties. They also attend local festivals organized around Hispanic Heritage month, Cinco de Mayo, and Mexican Independence Day. Some participate in church outings. Migrant parents rarely take vacations. Only one family I interviewed took an extended vacation to the beach; it was their first vacation in nine years. Spending little in New Jersey enables parents to save money more quickly. They hope this will decrease the total time spent away from their children.
Parents’ primary strategy for economizing is to minimize their housing expenses.68 Migrant parents share apartments with other Mexicans to save money. A few rent their own room in a house or apartment, usually spending about three hundred dollars per month. Most, however, split these costs further by sharing the room with someone else, often a spouse or romantic partner. Unattached fathers skimp even more. One man I interviewed occupied a shed at the nursery where he worked. Another slept on a mattress in the living room of a two-room apartment; a couple and their two daughters occupied the other room. Some fathers rented out space in unfinished, unheated basements (a safety hazard for them, because they slept so close to the homes’ furnaces). The single women I interviewed had a hard time finding people with whom to share rooms. When Elsa separated from her husband, she rented an unheated basement room for a few months until she met a man and moved in with him. The few single mothers who remained unattached lived with their siblings. Overcrowded housing for migrant parents is the norm.69
THE LIVES OF CHILDREN IN MEXICO
The lives children lead in Mexico are quite different. Children may not have access to running water or a flush toilet as their parents typically do in New Jersey (regardless of the overcrowded housing). Children may even live in unfinished houses that are slowly added on to as parents send money for improvement projects. But children do not lack space. I visited the homes of the children of twelve parents whom I had interviewed in New Jersey. Some lived in urban centers, others in small cities, and yet others in small towns. I also interviewed an independent sample of thirty-five children of migrants and twenty-seven of their caregivers. These families lived in a small town of approximately twenty-five hundred residents in the lower Mixteca region of Oaxaca that I call San Ángel, where I lived for seven months. All of these children lived in homes with larger patio spaces than available in the homes of parents in New Jersey. Although most neighborhoods do not have multiple public parks like those in New Jersey, children frequent the streets and neighboring homes and patios. In San Ángel, children often play by the river and in the downtown plaza in the evenings. Neighbors typically keep an eye on other people’s children. When my two-and-a-half-year-old son, Temo, and his three-year-old playmate decided to go out alone to buy candy at the corner store, I was quickly alerted to his whereabouts. All in all, the children I met in Mexico were less confined than were the children I met in New Jersey. In Mexico, children have greater freedom in what Roger Hart calls their “experiences of place.”70
Children in Mexico most often live with caring family members, usually grandparents. Media portrayals of the plight of unaccompanied minors crossing the border suggest that they are the abandoned children of migrants and have experienced abuse prior to migration.71 Although many children of migrants do end up migrating themselves, I found that most were not neglected or in physical danger in their homes in Mexico. Indeed, a 2008 study shows that 92 percent of unaccompanied migrants in U.S. custody lived with family members prior to migration and that none reported escaping abuse as their reason for leaving home.72 Most of the children I met not only lived with family but also had a number of extended family members nearby, such as cousins, aunts, and uncles, who were a daily presence in their lives.
Although surrounded by family, children’s caregivers in Mexico do not typically take in boarders as is so common in New Jersey. Families for the most part own their own homes. In fact, housing construction is one of the primary goals of migration.73 They do not pay rent and do not have mortgage payments; therefore they do not depend on income from boarders to meet the costs of living in a given month. In 2003, only five of San Ángel’s 510 houses were rented. I met only one family who took in a boarder; Doña María told me she deliberated for months before deciding
A main street in San Ángel, which stays relatively empty until the school day ends, when children are frequently seen outside playing. Photograph by Joanna Dreby to let a young man rent one of the extra rooms in her house. “They keep asking me about the other two rooms in the back,” she explained. “I tell them I don’t want to rent them until the house is in better shape. People say they don’t care. But, you have to be careful because, you know, we have things, and you don’t know what someone might want to take.”
In some ways, the children of migrants experience greater prosperity than do their friends without access to remittances. Studies have found, for example, that child and infant health in some Mexican communities is better among families with U.S. migrants than among those without migrants, presumably because of the overall economic benefits of migration.74 I surveyed more than three thousand children in the Mixteca and other regional schools and found that in the Mixteca, 90 percent of children of migrants reported receiving money from abroad, compared to 77 percent among those with migrant relatives, but not parents.75 The average amount of remittances reported by children of migrants was more than twice that reported by children without migrant parents (3,393 pesos per month compared to 1,478 pesos per month).76 Access to remittances may give children of migrants greater social standing than their peers.77
Often, however, children of migrants told me they felt too embarrassed to show off the material advantages of having a parent working abroad. When I asked one fourteen-year-old who had just joined his father in New Jersey if he used to take things his dad sent him to school, he explained: “Some of the kids do that, but it is mal visto [looks bad]. The other kids make fun of them for it. When I was in grade school, I never took things from the U.S. to school and they never made fun of me.” In reflecting back on her childhood, a young woman remembered a backpack her father had sent her. “Oh how I wanted this backpack for school. But once he sent it, I was too embarrassed to take it with me to school. It just hung there on the shelf.” For children of humble backgrounds, displays of wealth from migration are perceived to be snobby and pretentious. Children do not want parents’ migration to differentiate them from their peers.
If migrants’ lives in the United States are organized around their busy workweek, children’s lives revolve around school. To be sure, children’s schooling is central to parents’ sacrifices.78 Parents hope their economic support from the United States will give their children the opportunity to have a good education in Mexico and not have the same economic difficulties as an adult that they have had. For example, single mother Paula, who had less than a sixth-grade education, dreamed her two children would become professionals in Mexico. She paid for private school with her remittances. Migrant father José explained: