Providing children with educational opportunities in Mexico requires substantial economic resources.79 Tuition for public schooling through the university level is free in Mexico, but parents often have difficulties with the costs associated with attendance past the ninth grade. Most of the younger children I met attended schools in their home communities for kindergarten (three years, starting at age three), grade school (grades one through six), and middle school (grades seven through nine). Parents of young children described regular contributions for fees, supplies, and uniforms. Migrants said they varied remittances according to the expenses related to their children’s schooling. But because children attend schools near their homes, the cost of young children’s schooling is manageable. Caregivers walk a midday snack to children at school during the recess period, and children are home a little after 2 P.M. for lunch. In contrast, most children who attend high school (grades ten through twelve) have to travel to other communities to do so. Siblings Cassandra and Fernando, for example, both studied in the city closest to San Ángel, which was a 3½-hour bus ride on an unpaved road at the time. They lived in the city during the week, returning home on weekends. Cassandra recalled: “I remember how uncomfortable it was to ask for money to go to school.” By the time their younger brother Paulo attended high school, a new school had opened in the neighboring town. The expense for Paulo’s education was less, but transportation costs to this school were still significant. One eighteen-year-old I met in San Ángel attended the same school and nearly dropped out because she worried that her attendance strained the family budget.
Indeed, a common complaint among the fifteen teachers and school administrators I interviewed in the Mixteca was school retention. In one middle school I visited, enrollment dropped from 220 in 1985 to 27 in 2005. Some students were lost because of the addition of schools in three nearby communities that used to send their young people to this school. But this development cannot explain all of the population decline, for I visited one of these new middle schools and found only fourteen students enrolled. The director attributed the school’s severe drop-out rate to students’ aspirations to migrate to the United States. At the beginning of the year, ten first-year students had preregistered; only two remained in December when I visited. Of the eight dropouts, the director reported that only three had subsequently migrated. The other five remained in town but told him they were planning to leave soon. Retention problems are not unique to middle schools. In this same town, 260 students were enrolled in the primary school in 2001. When I visited in 2005, only 70 remained.
In the Mixteca, children may simply not see any concrete benefits to staying in school. For students in rural areas, teachers are often the besteducated role models they have. Yet teachers’ salaries have not recovered from losses in real income incurred after the Mexican debt crisis of the early 1980s, particularly in rural areas and in the southern state of Oaxaca. Although I was in rural Oaxaca before conflicts erupted in the teacher’s strike of 2006, teachers said that skilled masons in their communities earned more than they did.80 In fact, it is relatively common for these well-educated community members to migrate north, just as children’s family members have done.81 A social worker I interviewed told me: “My biggest illusion is to go there [to the United States]; the problem is I cannot.” She then complained that the students had no aspirations other than migration. And a teacher in San Ángel explained that he earned approximately 250 dollars every two weeks:
I don’t know [how much that is per hour]. We are supposed to not work that much. But here I work as much as I did when I was in Texas, which is like forty hours a week. . . . And, it isn’t enough. . . . Our president did it; he went north. So did Francisco [another teacher in town]. They took a year sabbatical to go north to pay off their debts. That is what happened to me. I did the same. I had a debt here to pay off, and I had to go and do it. And you know, on my salary here I could never buy a car. I had to go north in order to bring back a car.
Although migration to the United States from Mixtecan communities like San Ángel is not as long-standing as in other parts of Mexico, an undeniable orientation toward el norte permeates communities where many children’s parents have migrated.82 The economic contributions of migrants are vital to what some describe as a “culture of migration.”83 Aside from remittances to individual family members, migrants paid for fluorescent lights on the main thoroughfare in San Ángel. They paid for renovations of the central plaza. Migrants’ financial contributions even change the pace of life. The year I was in San Ángel, a party or wedding was held nearly every weekend between December 12 (the celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe) and the feria, or festival of the town’s patron saint, in mid-February. Return migrants paid for these private parties, participated in them, and often took videos to share with town members living in the United States.84
Migration in this region of the Mixteca is so prevalent that even a local D.J. service refers to the other side of the border with its name “Luz y Sonido Manhattan.” Photograph by Joanna Dreby
Children are aware of migrants’ vast contributions to their communities. Ideas of the north pervade children’s imaginations. Indeed, 81 percent of students I surveyed in the Mixteca said they would like to visit the United States: 72 percent were motivated by curiosity, saying they wanted to see the United States because they thought it would be a beautiful place, they wanted to learn about it, or they wanted to travel to a new place or meet new people. One fourteen-year-old girl explained that she wants to go “to see what it’s like there. I would like to know if it is really nice there, because some of my friends told me it is, so I want to go see.” A twelve-year-old boy wrote: “I want to discover new things not found in Mexico”; he also said he imagines the United States to be “like a city of gold.”
Even young children have clear ideas about the United States. I had children in three primary schools draw pictures of their families and of the United States: many drawings depicted el norte as a place of tall buildings, elaborate roads, snow, and Christmas trees and presents.85 Some students even included symbols of the United States in their drawings, such as the American flag and the Statue of Liberty.86
A game children played in San Ángel illustrates how U.S. migration shapes children’s ideas of place. I often took my son, Temo, to the playground in town, always empty during the hot mornings. The seesaw
A third-grade boy’s drawing of the United States.
The merry-go-round at the playground in San Ángel. Photograph by Joanna Dreby was broken, as were parts of the metal swings, and a number of steps on the three slides were missing. Not until the sun began to set and the temperature cooled did other children come out to play. They rearranged the long metal bar of the former seesaw to climb the steep slides or balanced it between the steps of the monkey bars. The most popular game was always on the merry-go-round. Children as young as four years old positioned themselves on the circular seat while older siblings and friends pushed them round and round as if on a super-fast airplane. The children would say that spinning around a few times took them to the next nearest city. A little faster would transport them to the state capital of Oaxaca. The next stop was always—and I never heard it played differently—the United States. The young children on board would laugh and shout, “Spin it fast, real fast! Send us to el norte!” The older spinners interjected: “Wait, wait, wait! We have to stop in Tijuana first.”
Children in the Mixteca grow up oriented toward the north. If for migrant parents opportunity lies in what they can do with their paycheck in Mexico, for their children, opportunities are unilaterally in the United States.
LEAVING CHILDREN
The vast difference in opportunities between Mexico and the United States are part of parents’ rationale for leaving their children