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THREE Gender and Parenting from Afar

It was mid-February 2005, and the atmosphere in San Ángel and the region was lively. Since the New Year, there had been at least two private parties per week. A number of couples had planned their weddings for this time of the year, which were open events that anyone could attend, since most of San Ángel’s twenty-five hundred residents knew one another. Live bands played in the central plaza; these nights ranchera music rang throughout the town until the early morning hours. Many from nearby towns attended these events, and residents of San Ángel joined in the celebrations of neighboring towns. The festivities were even more exciting because the U.S. migrants who had come home for the holiday season had not yet returned north. With the arrival of migrants, there were new, even if familiar, faces in the crowds. Efrén, father of four, was one of them.¹

I had first met Efrén in New Jersey. At that time, he had not been back to see his wife and children, who lived in a town just ten minutes from San Ángel, for more than three years. Although money was still tight, in December 2004 he had decided to go home for an extended vacation because his father was quite ill. Before his return, I had visited frequently with Efrén’s wife, Claudia. Claudia was a schoolteacher and fun to talk with. We occasionally walked together for exercise and took our children on outings to the nearby river. I saw Claudia much less after Efrén returned. Understandably, they were spending more time together as a family. The couple’s four children did not come to San Ángel to play in the street with their cousins and my son Temo nearly so often. They spent the evenings at home, watching TV and playing with their father.

Although Efrén spent much time with his wife, children, and ailing father, on occasion he took on the role of host, showing me around his town. He had, for example, invited me along with his wife to a New Year’s Eve party. The night of the dance for the town feria, he invited me once again. That evening I joined Claudia, Efrén, Efrén’s adult cousins, and an aunt visiting from Mexico City at the dance. By the time the band stopped playing at 3 A.M., we had finished a bottle of tequila and Efrén invited us to continue the party at his house. As three of us had lived in New Jersey, we sat in their living room listening and dancing to merengue and bachata songs typical among Latino crowds in the United States but almost foreign in the region.

Our informal party was interrupted shortly thereafter by some commotion outside. Two drunken men were upset because a car had blocked their truck and they were not able to get out. Claudia had gone to the door and was trying to explain to them that it was not their car and there was nothing they could do about it. Efrén got up and joined her, speaking more forcefully. I was not listening to the conversation until Claudia’s loud voice, now directed at her husband inside the house, caught everyone’s attention. “Don’t be so stupid,” she spit out. “You are not going to start a fight over something like this. You don’t live here. I do, and I don’t want problems.” To this, Efrén erupted: “A woman doesn’t tell me what to do in my own house.” Before I fully figured out what was going on, he took a swing at her in front of us all. Claudia proceeded to run from him through the living room and into another room; Efrén followed and hit her once again.

Claudia wailed. The other family members followed and separated the couple. I sat shocked at the ugly face of violence and how it had caught me unawares. Then a small figure came out of the bedroom, rubbing his eyes to see what had happened. This got me to my feet, and I took the eleven-year-old boy—Efrén and Claudia’s oldest son—back to bed. I sat with the boy in the dark until the voices outside seemed more subdued.

Feeling out of place in this family affair, I eventually emerged from the bedroom and spoke to both Claudia, who was being pampered by the female relatives in one room, and Efrén, calming down with a beer and his cousin in the outer room. I briefly gave Claudia a supportive hug while she dabbed her eyes. With a nasty resolve she told me this was not the first time he had picked a fight and left her with problems. “Nunca le voy a perdonar [I will never forgive him].” When I apologized for being a part of the situation, Claudia shook her head and replied bitterly, “Nadie tiene la culpa menos él [No one is at fault but him].”

I spoke at greater length with Efrén. I said that he should not worry and that I would forget about the whole incident for my book. Efrén disagreed.

But—and you can write this in your book—that I, if right or not, will not accept that my woman intervene in my house. I try to be a little educated, and really I am a pretty tranquil man. Everyone can tell you this. It is rare that I get agitated like this. And I know I am being the typical machista man. Pero, simplemente es mi casa, y soy yo en frente, y no acepto que mi mujer intervenga en eses asuntos. [But, it is simply my house, and I am at its head, and I do not accept that my woman intervenes in these affairs.]

Eventually, I left with Claudia’s “Nunca le voy a perdonar” and Efrén’s “No acepto que mi mujer intervenga en eses asuntos” pounding in my head.

GENDER ROLES IN MIGRANT FAMILIES

Efrén and Claudia’s relationship was not as one-dimensional as this incident suggests. In fact, Efrén and Claudia reconciled the next day and noticeably enjoyed each other’s company every time I saw them together afterward. Unlike other couples who frequently complained about their partners, Efrén and Claudia quite often expressed their great love for each other over the four years I knew them. And although Efrén was “machista” in some ways, he supported Claudia’s work as a schoolteacher in a town where it was unusual for women to work outside the home. Yet this dramatic incident between them illustrates how complicated family relationships can be, involving feelings of deep pain and hurt alongside those of profound love and support, when they are strained during periods of separation. In Mexico, as in the United States, approximately one in four women have experienced physical violence from an intimate partner, as did Claudia.² Although a painful feature of family life, domestic violence is not the focus of this book. Rather, I highlight the confrontation between Claudia and Efrén because it illustrates one of the major sources of tension in migrant couples that in this case erupted in an incident of physical violence. Mexican families have been characterized as highly valuing family unity, or familism [familismo], and as adhering to rather clearly defined gender roles, with men as providers and women as caregivers.³ These roles must be renegotiated during periods of migration.⁴

Specifically, when married couples live apart, men’s and women’s authority in their families may come into conflict. Men’s power in families is achieved mostly via honorable economic provision.⁵ As evident in Efrén’s comments, Mexican men, even when they are loving fathers, feel their masculinity is tied to some degree to their ability to be macho.⁶ When fathers migrate, they act honorably in the face of economic adversity, sacrificing their own comforts for the sake of their family. For men like Efrén, migration legitimizes their power as head of the household.

In contrast, women’s authority in Mexican families is related to their morality as the primary family caregiver. Women’s roles as caregivers are celebrated and likened to the self-sacrificing characteristics of the Virgin of Guadalupe—Mexico’s incarnation of the Virgin Mary.⁷ Latin American scholars describe this culturally specific version of maternity as marianismo. According to this ideal, a woman should be self-negating and a martyr for her children, because she is spiritually and morally superior to men.⁸ When men migrate alone, women must adjust to their husband’s absence by assuming full responsibility for the family and home, which involves a great deal of sacrifice. One mother explained how she achieved moral superiority while her husband was away: “I learned how to earn respect from men. . . . I learned how important it is to defend oneself and one’s honor as a woman.” Women like Claudia feel it is a slap in the face for their husband not to recognize this sacrifice and respect the authority they must assume at home and in the wider community while the husband is away.

It thus seems inevitable that fathers’ migrations cause some conflict in marital relationships as women and men must reconcile gender role expectations with the realities of living apart.⁹ Indeed, gendered adaptations to male-led migration patterns are well documented, as are incidents of marital conflict resulting from migration.¹⁰ While it is understandable that migration causes conflicts between women and men, the way gendered expectations influence mothers’ and fathers’ relationships with children has been largely disregarded. Too often children like Efrén and Claudia’s son hiding under his covers in the back bedroom are depicted as a sidebar to the marital drama that arises during migration. Although child rearing is a crucial phase in the process by which gender differences are constructed and maintained, gendered expectations in parenting when women join men abroad as family breadwinners have yet to be fully explored.¹¹

In this chapter I bring one dimension of inequality in families divided by borders to the fore: that which results from the differences between Mexican mothers’ and fathers’ migrations. The comparison of motherhood and fatherhood shows that differences in gender roles diminish when parents and children are separated due to migration. In analyzing migrant parents’ efforts to maintain contact with their children over time, I show that mothers’ and fathers’ interactions with children are quite similar.¹² Yet parenting from afar is not equal for mothers and fathers. Mothers and fathers differ in their processes of leaving and returning home, affecting their relationships with the children who remain in Mexico. Moreover, family members’ evaluations of migrant mothers and fathers are colored by conventional gendered expectations. In other words, although gender role differences diminish during periods of separation, gender continues to shape parent-child relationships. While parents and children live apart, family members ascribe meanings to their interactions, what sociologists have called “doing gender,” in a way that reinforces the expectations that mothers be family caregivers and fathers be family providers.¹³ Ultimately, migrant mothers bear the moral burdens of family separation to a much greater degree than fathers do.

MANAGING SEPARATION

Given descriptions of conventional gender roles in Mexican families, I was surprised to find that migrant mothers’ and fathers’ experiences converge in parenting their children across borders.¹⁴ Their methods for staying in touch with children are remarkably similar. Separated from their children, mothers and fathers rely on the same three techniques to communicate with their children: weekly phone conversations, the sending of gifts, and regular remittances. Physical separation results in standardized mechanisms of transnational parenting. Mothers and fathers also perceive similar risks associated with changes in their family life abroad to potentially erode their relationships with children in Mexico.

Phone Calls

Although seemingly straightforward, regular phone conversations are not always easy to arrange. Not all parents have easy access to a phone in the United States. Many do not have land lines and either use cell phones or public pay phones. Nearly all use calling cards, which offer the best rates to Mexico, but numbers often ring busy during peak calling times.¹⁵ Also, parents have to ensure that their children have a place to receive their calls. Many do not have a home phone in Mexico and call their children at a neighbor’s home or at a local caseta. (A caseta is a small business in Mexico where people can receive phone calls from abroad for a minimal fee.) Despite technical difficulties, most parents interviewed, regardless of gender, reported calling home once a week, fitting calls around work schedules. Likewise, 61 percent of the children of migrants I surveyed in the Mixteca reported talking to their parents in the United States once a week or more. Children of migrants report more frequent phone communication with relatives in the United States than do children without migrant parents.¹⁶ There is no significant difference between children’s frequency of communication with migrant mothers and migrant fathers, nor in the frequency of phone calls reported by daughters and sons.¹⁷

Both mothers and fathers gave a similar checklist of things they discussed with their children over the phone. They ask about school, how siblings are behaving, and what things children want sent from the United States. School progress is particularly important to parents, and many offer material rewards to children who work hard in school. I listened to José, father to fifteen-year-old Brian, when he called home one Saturday. Brian answered the phone. José said hello and asked how Brian was doing. Then he asked when Brian would have his high school entrance exam. I assume he learned the date of the exam, because José next asked, “What do you want me to get you, a stereo or a tape player?” They discussed the benefits of each, and José concluded that a stereo was better and he would send that. He asked what else Brian would like as a gift before asking to speak to the boy’s grandmother.

Typical conversations also focus on the economic aspects of the parenting relationship and future migration plans. A migrant mother of four said her children “tell me they are good, and they ask me when I am going back there. . . . They ask me for shoes, clothes, toys and money.” A migrant father told me: “My son asks me when I am going back and asks me to send him money.” A migrant mother said her six-year-old says, “Take me north. I want to go north with you.”

Children’s versions of conversations with parents are surprisingly similar; differences in conversations are not dictated by the parent’s or the child’s gender, but rather by the child’s age. The youngest children talk mostly about material goods and migration. A six-year-old boy said that when his mother calls, “I ask when she is coming and she says she is coming soon.” A six-year old girl explained that her mother says “she is going to send clothes, a dresser, a bed and a mirror.” As children grow older, they talk with their parents about school performance and behavior. For example, an eleven-year-old girl who lives with her maternal grandmother and siblings said, “My mom asks if I want something—I say yes—clothes, shoes, and school supplies. Then she tells me not to hit my little sisters because my sister tells her that I hit her. But I hit her because she hits the youngest one.” The oldest children are concerned about parents’ emotional well-being, saying they talk about the family news and give and receive advice from their parents. Fifteen-year-old Brian described conversations with father José as follows: “[We talk about] how he is, that he works harder there because there are a lot of things to do. I tell him to work harder because he has been there a long time and hasn’t done much, and I tell him not to get discouraged, that he can trust us and tell me anything.”

Gifts

Although phone conversations are filled with talk of gifts, parents said they preferred to send money, as it is expensive to send goods either through mail services or via courier businesses. Most only sporadically send gifts with friends or relatives or bring things back on their own trips home. A father who had been migrating seasonally for seven years gave me the following list of items he takes to his wife and four children whenever he returns: one pair of shoes each, two to three sets of clothing for each child, toys (almost always remote control cars for the boys), and an electronic item, once a TV, another time a VCR, and most recently a video camera. Another migrant father said he collected random toys throughout the year to send to his four-year-old son. As proof, he disappeared into his basement bedroom to retrieve a small teddy bear from his collection to give to my son, Temo.

The most common gifts from parents are photographs, school supplies, clothing, and shoes. Among the students I surveyed in the Mixteca, 74 percent of those with migrant parents reported receiving emotionaltype gifts (like photographs or home videos) from the United States, 80 percent reported receiving clothing or shoes, and 59 percent reported receiving school supplies.¹⁸ There is no significant difference in the types of gifts they reported receiving from their migrant mothers and their migrant fathers.¹⁹ Daughters of U.S. migrants in the Mixteca more often reported receiving all types of gifts than did sons.²⁰

Despite parents’ intentions to provide for their children by sending things from the states, children and grandparents said parents often get sizes wrong since they have been away so long. One grandmother gave me a pair of her grandson’s almost new shoes for Temo; her daughter had sent them two sizes too small. Tina said her father sends “clothes, shoes, toys, because he still thinks I am a little girl and I like them.” The twelve-year-old rolled her eyes, pointing to a row of Barbie dolls on a shelf in the room. “But,” she added, “my cousin likes to play with them.” Age-inappropriate gifts exemplify the ways parents lose track of their children’s development over time, signaling the time dislocations characteristic of parent-child separations.

Children may also feel embarrassed about the material aspect of their relationship with their parents. When I asked what kinds of things they want their parents to send them, many children grew shy and simply answered “I don’t know.” Tina said that she does not ask her father for much: “What I ask for, he sends. But I try not to ask for much.” When I asked a six-year-old if he asked his mom for toys, he answered defensively, “Not me,” causing his five-year-old sister to object and call him a liar. Children seem aware that material objects are not equivalent to parental affection, and some are wary of parents’ use of gifts as replacements for time together.

At the same time, children recognize parents’ gifts as markers of love. One fourteen-year-old girl, for example, told me she does not love either her mother or her father. Her parents are divorced, and both have remarried and live in the United States. She said she was most uncomfortable with her father, who recently had tried to reestablish a relationship. Her maternal grandmother, the girl’s caregiver, told me a story of a small jewelry box with a gold locket inside that the girl’s father had recently sent: “It was a small box. And we had just read in a book about a father who gave his daughter a small box, like that one, but it had nothing inside. Supposedly every time the girl opened the box, she would receive a kiss from her father. So [she] joked that the box her father sent her was like that; she would keep it in her dresser and open it when she wanted a kiss.” As this grandmother eloquently concluded, gifts “make them [children] feel special and loved. But the gifts don’t inspire love from children for their parents. They cannot bring trust and affection.”

Remittances

Gifts are symbolically significant.²¹ But money is the most important item both mothers and fathers send home. In New Jersey, mothers and fathers reported similar frequency of remittances: once or twice a month. However, parents were reluctant to disclose the amount of remittances and were more sensitive about financial matters than about their undocumented status, which other scholars of Mexican migration have also noted.²² Most mothers and fathers were vague or dismissed my questions about the amount of remittances by giving what seemed to be generic answers. While other research suggests that women send less money home than men do but send a larger proportion of their income, among the parents I interviewed, variations in reported remittances were greater among mothers and among fathers than between them.²³

Among the children I surveyed in the Mixteca, 96 percent of those with migrant mothers and 89 percent of those with migrant fathers reported receiving money from their parents. Children who had only their father in the United States reported higher amounts of remittances per month as compared to those of single migrant mothers and those with both parents abroad, although differences are not statistically significant.²⁴ There is no statistically significant difference in amount of remittances reported by sons and daughters.

In interviews children, like their parents, were vague in discussing monetary remittances. All children, however, even those of very young ages, understood the economic nature of their parents’ migrations. A five-year-old girl said her parents went to the United States “because they are earning money there.” An eight-year-old told me his mother migrated after his parents split up, “because there we were going to have a different life and she was going to earn more money.” A nine-year-old boy explained: “My dad is there so that he can send us money.” I asked, “How much does he send?” The boy replied, “I don’t know.” Virtually all children responded similarly; they understood that their parents had migrated to support them, but few told me how much money their parents sent home and how often. Interestingly, 77 percent of students of migrant parents in the Mixteca reported specific details about how much money parents sent home and how often. It is not necessarily that children do not know details about parents’ remittances; it is that they do not want to talk about them.

Given the importance of money to parents’ sacrifices—that parents leave home in order to provide for their children financially—and children’s ability to answer survey questions about monetary matters, the reluctance of children and parents to describe the financial aspects of their relationship during periods of separation is interesting. It suggests their unwillingness to use remittances as a measure of the quality of their relationship once away. For children of divorce, suggests Gry Mette Haugen, “money may symbolize a currency for both love and care.”²⁵ Yet for transnational families, money risks replacing love and care. While money matters perhaps more than anything else, parents and children resist defining their relationship as purely economic in nature.

Changing Families over Time

Because of their status as low-wage, undocumented workers, both mothers and fathers have difficulties in meeting their economic goals of migration. The longer it takes to meet these objectives, the more likely it is for parents’ relationships with children in Mexico to be affected by changing family dynamics. For both mothers and fathers, new marital relationships and additional children challenge relationships with children back home.

Marital discord frequently arises in immigrant families as couples find they must adjust their relationships to the U.S. context.²⁶ For fathers who migrate without wives, accusations of infidelities affect relationships with children in Mexico.²⁷ One migrant father said his relationship with his oldest daughter was damaged by false rumors that he had had a baby with his sister-in-law. When this daughter migrated as a young adult, she refused to live with him; he complained that to this day she does not trust or respect his fatherly advice. A migrant father of four teens told me that his wife suspected he had another wife in the United States. He said this about his most recent trip home: “My two older boys came to me together and they said, ‘Dad, if you have another wife, we don’t want you here. You can leave.’ ” At times, such accusations were based on rumors; at other times, men I interviewed did have a new partner in the United States, although they still maintained ties to their wife and children in Mexico.

For women who migrate on their own, it is fairly common to remarry once in the United States. Relationships with stepfathers can be very difficult for children in Mexico to accept.²⁸ Moreover, a new partner may not recognize a woman’s children back in Mexico as part of their new family. Neighbors criticize mothers who have lost touch with their children in Mexico, saying these women have remarried and that the new husband is unwilling to provide for another man’s children. One woman I interviewed praised her husband for not being like others; he had accepted her two daughters back home as his own. “My girls even call him papi.” Couples migrating together are not immune from marital problems.²⁹ Many divorce or separate once in the United States. For these couples, relationships with new partners are a source of tension with children in Mexico.

It is also hard for children in Mexico to share their parents with siblings born abroad. A consistent theme in interviews with parents was how the birth of children in the United States threatened their relationships with children in Mexico. One migrant father, for example, wondered whether his two children in Mexico would accept his newborn son, but then he decided, “they are young enough to grow attached to him.” Another explained that his daughters in Mexico are jealous of his U.S.-born child: “Once one of the girls asked me to go home because [she worries that] if I don’t I am going to love the one that was born here more than them.” A mother who joined her husband two years earlier left her daughters in Mexico and subsequently had a baby boy in the United States. She complained that on the phone “the girls reproach me. They are jealous, extremely jealous, the younger one more than the older one.”

Children in Mexico view U.S.-born children as a potential threat. Younger children, in particular, fear that U.S.-born siblings or half-siblings will compete more successfully for their parents’ love and attention because they live with the parents. Fatima’s mother, for example, had a baby in New York City, brought the baby back to Mexico to live with Fatima and her grandmother in San Ángel, and then returned north. Fatima—age eleven at the time—said, “Sometimes I think my mom loves my little sister more because she was born there with her. I feel like she gives her more love. When she [the sister] arrived, I didn’t like her.” A sixteen-year-old told me, “I don’t understand—it is so ignorant [that his father has a child in the United States]. If he [father] cannot make it with us, how can he with another one?” In effect, U.S.-born children not only compete with children in Mexico for scarce parental resources, but also undermine parents’ statements that migration to the United States was undertaken for the sake of their children back in Mexico.

Children’s fears are not entirely unfounded. For mothers, the pain of separation is so great that having a new child in the United States may make them feel better. According to one mother, who had a daughter in Mexico and two U.S.-born children, “It is like you carry the weight of all the love that you have been holding in and then you put it on them,” that is, the U.S.-born children. Fathers are often much more involved with the care of U.S.-born children than they had been with children in Mexico; when both partners work in the United States, they tend to share child care, and many men migrated while their Mexican-born children were still infants.³⁰ In fact, a surprising number of fathers (ten) left a pregnant wife and did not get to meet their youngest child until they returned home to visit. One father explained: “In fact, she didn’t even tell me about the baby until I had arrived here, because she didn’t want me to worry.” A father who returned to San Ángel with his U.S.-born daughter and his wife to reunite with the couple’s son said that his son is not close to him and that the son thinks that the father loves his daughter more. The father insisted that he loves his son but admitted it is not the same. “I also feel different [toward him]. I raised my daughter since she was born. I bathed her, I changed her diapers, I prepared her bottles. I never did that for my son, because I was away working in the north when he was little.”