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Preface

ORDINARY FAMILIES,

EXTRAORDINARY FAMILIES

Mexican families divided by borders are both ordinary and extraordinary. Parents who live in the United States while their children remain in Mexico experience many of the difficulties faced by all families in meeting productive and consumptive needs. Family members struggle to balance pressures at work with those at home. Gender and generation battles are common. Men and women negotiate the division of labor. Parents and children negotiate authority. In this sense, this book is about rather ordinary tensions in families.

At the same time, migrant parents and their children live in vastly different environments. Parents live hurried lives, struggling to work hard, economize, and send much of their money back to children in Mexico. For them, the joys of life are found in Mexico. Children live in places where everyday consumption depends upon remittances from parents and other migrants. Contributions from el norte [the north] permeate their daily lives, and many children think that when the time is right, they too will end up migrating for work. Divided by borders and by the lifestyle differences involved in such separations, Mexican migrants and their children find ways to make their relationships with each other meaningful. These efforts are not easy. The difficulties parents and children endure make their stories both remarkable and unique.

Indeed, the stories in this book skip along a fine line between the extraordinary and the ordinary. Within the chapters that follow, I describe the social conditions that make it hard for parents to provide for their children in Mexico and spur their migration to the United States. I offer explanations for why some women and men make the heart-wrenching decision to leave their children behind. I discuss how their social status as transnational migrants shapes families’ experiences.

Yet I also tell stories about fairly typical relationships between men, women, and children. Mothers anguish over their decisions to work. Fathers feel pressured to provide economically for their children. Teenagers complain that they need their parents while acting in ways that push parents away. Young children are jealous for their parents’ attention. Parents struggling to understand their children’s changing needs are unsure how to discipline them and worry about their children dating and becoming sexually active. Above all, parents hope their children will avoid their own mistakes and want to provide them with a better future. These themes are likely to sound strikingly familiar.

This was my experience as a researcher. I am not Mexican, nor Latina. I am not an immigrant. Yet I am a mother and a daughter. For a time, I was a wife. I often found during the four years that I conducted this study that my own life paralleled those of the families I was interviewing. My experiences are instructive about how I managed relationships with the more than 140 participants in this project, gaining access to what they often considered to be private aspects of their lives. They also illustrate the persistent tension between the ordinary and the extraordinary endemic in researching family relationships.

I ALWAYS THOUGHT YOU WERE NORMAL . . .

It was in January, after a day of sightseeing at the ruins of Monte Alban, in Oaxaca, and I was enjoying an evening of casual conversation with Armando, a migrant father and a member of one of the twelve families with whom I did in-depth work for this study. I had met and interviewed Armando in New Jersey and then traveled to Mexico, where I interviewed his three children and his mother, who cared for them. While I was living in Mexico for nine months, Armando returned to live with his children. Later I visited and stayed with the family twice more. On this occasion, Armando and I had met up at a friend’s house just a month after his arrival and spent three days touring the city and comparing notes on my time in Mexico and his return home.

That evening we drifted into a conversation about my research, how sociology differs from psychology, and how I planned to make my findings useful. We had previously talked about this in New Jersey, but Armando, who had already told me quite a bit about his life, was not the first to ask what I was “really” doing interviewing families like his in Mexico. He and I continued talking as the night wore on, moving into more personal topics long after the others had gone to sleep.

“You are always asking me all these questions about my life, but I never felt comfortable asking you before about yours,” he commented.

“I am an open book,” I responded. This was the attitude I took throughout the study. Separation was a sensitive topic for parents. When people I interviewed asked me about myself, my Mexican husband, or my son, I felt obligated to reciprocate with my own story. That night I elaborated.

Armando was a good listener. He quietly accepted the pieces of my story before responding, “I always thought you were normal, Joanna. But you are just like the rest of us.”

A WIFE

Armando was referring primarily to my marriage and recent separation from Raúl. At the time, Raúl and I had been separated for about a year; we subsequently divorced. To Armando’s surprise, I—who had served as a sounding board for his insecurities and concerns over his recent divorce—had similar skeletons in my own matrimonial closet.

In fact, there were a number of parallels in our experiences. Armando was twenty-nine when he married a woman ten years younger, and he felt that the age difference and her immaturity had caused problems in the marriage. Armando said he had very little in common with his ex-wife. “I fell in love with her smile,” he once explained, emphasizing how they had lacked shared interests and goals. I met Raúl when I was just twenty-one, not long after I had graduated from college. Raúl, six years older than I, was an immigrant from Veracruz who had been out of school and working for years. We had met as activists. Before starting this research, I had worked for a number of years in three different social service agencies and as an ESL teacher in central New Jersey. Aside from our work in the Mexican immigrant community, however, Raúl and I were very different. Eventually our differences in age, education, background, and most crucially, experience became problematic.

Economic difficulties also plagued both our marriages. Armando’s wife had pressured him to migrate, something he had not been eager to do, to help the family sobresalir, or get ahead. He felt she was more concerned with material goods and status items than he was. Raúl and I struggled to manage our finances as I pursued graduate school full time and he aspired to start his own business. Raúl’s multiple obligations to family members in Mexico, particularly after the birth of our own child, further strained our resources. We disagreed on how to prioritize our family’s needs.

Armando and I shared experiences common to many divorced couples. Economic difficulty, lack of common interests, and immaturity are typical sources of marital conflict. In fact, Armando’s observation about me had missed the mark slightly: we were actually both normal.

Marital conflict is a central theme of this book and was common in all types of migrant families I interviewed. In some families, it was fathers who had migrated, leaving their wives and children in Mexico. For these fathers, physical separation presented a number of challenges in maintaining the marriage. Accusations of infidelity (by both wives and husbands) were particularly common. In other families I met, single mothers had migrated alone. Often their migration had been precipitated by difficulties with the children’s father, which came either after an unintended pregnancy or after a divorce. Tensions in conjugal relationships were also evident in cases in which both parents were living together in the United States and had left their children in Mexico. I witnessed marriages breaking up in the United States or, in the case of one family I interviewed, after the couple had returned to Mexico. In the end, it was difficult to learn anything about parenting, the primary focus of this study, without first learning something about marriage. Men’s and women’s relationships with their children are inevitably intertwined with their relationships with each other.

A STEPMOTHER?

For Armando, it was the problems with his ex-wife that had prompted a deepening of his relationships with his children in Mexico and his return to live with them. I witnessed a similar dynamic while married to Raúl, who had two children in Mexico from a prior marriage. At the time, I did not know I would subsequently study families like his. At first I was primarily concerned with the plight of migrant mothers, and I had not considered Raúl’s life to be particularly telling. Yet I came to view fathers’ relationships with their children as key to understanding those of migrant mothers. I now see that my observations about Raúl’s relationship with his children during the five years we lived together and afterward (we had a relatively amicable divorce) are consistent with the experiences of others in this study.

When we first met, I often listened to Raúl’s phone conversations with his children, at that time ages four and six. Raúl maintained fairly regular contact with them and with his ex-wife, calling once a week and sending money once or twice a month. He would ask how the children were, if they needed anything, and what gifts they wanted him to send. At Christmas, Raúl sent money for bicycles. In the spring, we packed a box of toys and T-shirts that cost thirty dollars to send and took more than a month to arrive by mail. The following fall, when I visited Raúl’s parents in Mexico, I left remote-control cars and clothes to be taken to the boys.

About a year later, Raúl’s ex-wife, frustrated with her lack of work opportunities in Mexico, decided to come to the United States. Raúl was upset the day she called from Texas. He had no idea she had planned to leave the children with her mother, and he did not think this was good for them. After his ex-wife migrated, Raúl’s communication with his children suffered, because the boys’ grandmother did not let him talk to them.

Then there was an abrupt change. Raúl’s ex-wife moved in with another man. Her mother, back with the children in Mexico, was angry. She complained to Raúl and allowed him greater access to the children. He called the children more frequently, sometimes twice a week; he visited the children and even spoke with his ex-mother-in-law about taking custody of them. Later, when I became pregnant, Raúl talked to the boys about their having a new sibling. They did not act angry or jealous. Initially they seemed ambivalent. Then they became excited. Raúl’s oldest son gave us permission to name the baby after him (and my grandfather). When the baby was born, they wanted to talk to him over the phone. That December we traveled to Veracruz, and I met Raúl’s children for the first time. The boys did not seem to hate me, as I had expected, but rather were curious. They played affectionately with their little half-brother.

Throughout this time, we learned of Raúl’s ex-wife’s life only through the grapevine. We were told that she too had another child with her new partner. The baby was born a month before our son, and fearing their reaction, she had not told the boys about it until after the fact. They were upset. Rumor had it that her attentions to her children in Mexico had waned because her new husband was machista: he did not want to accept her children from a prior marriage. Eventually, however, it was she, not Raúl, who returned to Mexico. After living with the boys in Veracruz for a time, she left them with her mother again and moved with her youngest child to her new husband’s family home. After about a year of no communication, Raúl once again was able to communicate with his children freely. Later, Raúl’s oldest son moved to his paternal grandparents’ home to further his studies, and Raúl continues to visit his children in Mexico periodically.

Raúl’s experiences in fathering from afar, I now see, are typical. Like that of other parents, Raúl’s relationship with his children fluctuated greatly over a short period of time. It was dictated to some degree by his relationship with his ex-wife and also by gendered expectations of mothers and fathers. These two themes, gender and the passage of time, are central to understanding the extraordinary aspects of how family members’ lives unfold while living apart.

A MOTHER

When Armando said, “I always thought you were normal,” he was ribbing me for my complicated relationship with Raúl and his children in Mexico. But Armando’s comment also points to another parallel in our experiences: we both worried greatly about how to provide our children with a stable and loving home environment. This was something that tormented Armando. He struggled over how his decision to migrate had affected his children. He felt guilty that his decisions and his difficulties with his ex-wife had adversely affected his children. He deliberated over how to explain his problems with his ex-wife to them. He considered his children carefully as he planned for the future.

That evening I shared with Armando my concerns regarding my son’s adjustment to living in Mexico, so far from his father. Already separated from Raúl at the time, I was determined that two-year-old Temo would not lose touch with his father while we were away. I hoped that Temo would have an ongoing, positive relationship with his father, as I had with my own father after my parents divorced. Thus, during my first few months of living in a small community in Oaxaca, Mexico, I found myself anxiously anticipating Raúl’s calls. I empathized with the women awaiting calls at the caseta (public phone) on the first floor of the house where I stayed for seven months. Though not economically dependent on such calls, as the other women were, I got frustrated when calls would not come through or when the phone card ran out of minutes, cutting off our conversations mid-sentence.

More strikingly, as I explained to Armando, I was surprised at how my son reacted to living without his father. Temo could not remember a time when he had lived with Raúl; the same was true of Armando’s four-year-old daughter, who had never met him before he returned. For Temo, Daddy was someone who visited several times a week. Yet after we moved in with a couple in Mexico who had a three-year-old daughter, Temo was instantly interested in fathers. For a time he insisted that the taxi driver who accompanied us on a ten-day trip to visit families (including Armando’s) was his father. At the beach, Temo requested that I draw pictures in the sand of not only the mommy and baby fish but the daddy fish as well. When we visited a woman who had a pet squirrel, he repeatedly questioned us as to where the squirrel’s daddy was.

Even after his obsession with daddies wore off as the year progressed, Temo generally asked after his father several times a week. Here is one conversation we had before getting out of bed one morning, about a month before Temo turned three:

J. D.:	Temo, what do you want to do today?
TEMO:	With my daddy.
J. D.:	You want to go with your dad?
TEMO:	Yes [nods, smiling].
J. D.:	But he is in the U.S.
TEMO:	What is he doing?
J. D.:	Hmmm. . . . Maybe he is clearing snow, or maybe he is resting.
TEMO:	And “Sonido Tecos”? [Raúl’s D.J. business]
J. D.:	Well, since today is Tuesday, I don’t think he is playing. He only does it on the weekends, like on Friday or Saturday. Maybe this weekend he will play.
TEMO:	At parties? To dance?
J. D.:	Yes.
TEMO:	Hmmm. . . . And it is very far?
J. D.:	Yes, your dad is far away.
TEMO:	And that is why I can’t go look for him?
J. D.:	Yes.
TEMO:	Hmmm . . .

Children’s responses to parental absences and their ability to influence their parents is another topic of this book. For Temo, as for the children of migrants I interviewed in Mexico, the thousands of miles that separated us from Raúl did not diminish the importance of his father in his life. Unlike in New Jersey, where we lived with another single mother and her child, in Oaxaca, Temo was more aware of his father than he had ever been before. Reactions to separation are in part a function of a child’s developmental stage. My second son, Dylan, for example, emerged, at age two, from his own “daddy” phase, a much shorter one than Temo’s. But I also believe that Temo’s heightened awareness of his father was related to our living in a small community where the roles of migrants, and particularly fathers, are celebrated. I found that children as young as five understood that their parents have migrated to el norte in order to provide for them. For children, physical separation does not diminish their expectations of their parents and, in some ways, augments them.

In turn, parents like Armando and me—and the migrants I interviewed—worried about our children’s reactions to separation. We scrutinized little interactions—like Temo’s requests for sand drawings of daddies or Armando’s son’s refusal to talk to his mother on the phone—for clues about how they were adjusting. While migrant parents may be the ones to decide where family members will live, they are preoccupied with the effects these decisions have on their children. Such concerns may be typical among all parents, but they are intensified when parents and children live apart.

THE ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY

The themes central to this book are familiar ones. Marital conflict, gendered expectations of mothers and fathers, the changes brought on by the passage of time, and children’s power in families have been evident in my own experiences as a mother and wife and may be familiar to you. Parents’ social status as transnational migrants, however, creates unique dynamics in families. I turn now to the persistence of family ties in the transnational context and the hardships that make these families’ experiences extraordinary.