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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520945838 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 02/17/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 926,687 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Divided by Borders
Mexican Migrants and their Children
By Joanna Dreby
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-94583-8
CHAPTER 1
Sacrifice
Paula is lucky. 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.
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. Tens of thousands like Paula have voluntarily left their children in Mexico to come across the international border to work. 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. 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. 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." In this book I look at the other end of the spectrum: migration as an inherently personal process. 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." 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. 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. Unmet expectations, particularly of migrant mothers, cause tensions and hurt feelings in parent-child relationships. Meanwhile, children in Mexico feel resentful of parents' absences. They have a difficult time proving their parents' sacrifices worthwhile. The emotional fallout of parents' work decisions is a great source of hardship in families.
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. 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. Technological advances have enabled migrants to maintain more dense social and economic ties in home and host countries than in times past. 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.
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." Transnational families are not new; international separations were also common in earlier periods. 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.
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. 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. 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. When men left women and children to work abroad, migration accentuated gender inequalities within families.
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. In some cases, women migrate before their husbands and children, radically reversing migration patterns of times past. 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. 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. 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. 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." 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 non-migrants in their home communities and from immigrants in receiving countries who have severed ties with family and community back home. Researchers have found complex ideas of identity among this new class of citizens, who feel they belong to two or more nations. 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. 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." 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.
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. 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. Between the 1940s and the 1960s, leaving their families, Mexican men moved north en masse to work seasonally on bracero contracts. Many Mexican families, and even entire communities, became dependent on their laborers working abroad. 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. 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.
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. 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. The cost of an undocumented crossing tripled between 1995 and 2001. 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. 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.
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. 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. Mexicans in the United States have few opportunities to legalize their status and reunite their families. As they are also increasingly settling farther away from Mexico, return trips are even more difficult and costly. Prolonged family separations are common.
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." 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. 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. 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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Divided by Borders by Joanna Dreby. Copyright © 2010 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Preface: Ordinary Families, Extraordinary FamiliesAcknowledgments/Agradecimientos
1. Sacrifice
2. Ofelia and Germán Cruz: Migrant Time versus Child Time
3. Gender and Parenting from Afar
4. Armando López on Fatherhood
5. Children and Power during Separation
6. Middlewomen
7. Cindy Rodríguez between Two Worlds
8. Divided by Borders
Appendix A: Research Design
Appendix B: Family Descriptions
Notes
References
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Dreby analyzes these themes through a transnational lens.
In doing so, she offers new and important insights into the lives of immigrant families."—Journal of Sociology
"Offers insightful analysis."—Choice
"An excellent introduction to immigration, globalization, gender, childhood, immigration policy, and transnational family issues."—Journal of Marriage & Family
"An important contribution to immigration scholarship."—Social Forces
"Illuminating. . . . An important addition to both family and migration scholarship."—Du Bois Review & Transition