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TWO Ofelia and Germán Cruz

MIGRANT TIME VERSUS CHILD TIME

November 2007. I finally caught up with Ofelia. It had been six months since I had last seen her, before I moved to Ohio from New Jersey. When we had spoken that past spring, Ofelia had once again changed her plans to send for her thirteen-year-old son, Germán. In April, she had made arrangements to bring Germán to the United States over the summer, after he had graduated from the sixth grade. Ofelia had hoped that by the time school started in the fall, he would be living with her and her husband, Ricardo, and their six-year-old daughter, Stacy, born in New Jersey. As I sat on Ofelia’s sofa in May, just a few weeks after hearing these plans for the family reunification, Ofelia had announced: “Germán doesn’t want to come anymore.”

“What happened?” I had asked.

“Well, I finally had him convinced. Everything was in place. But then, you see, he went to these soccer tryouts in Puerto [Puerto Escondido] and was picked to play for Pachuca [a youth team for one of Mexico’s professional leagues]. So now he doesn’t want to come anymore.”

“Wow, what an honor! He must be very good at soccer.”

“He loves it,” Ofelia said. She added: “He said, ‘Mom, please, just let me play for a year and then I’ll come over there with you guys. Just let me try for a year.’ So he doesn’t want to come anymore.”

Ofelia had been disappointed. I later learned that Germán’s soccer gig had not lasted. Because he had anticipated joining his parents in New Jersey as soon as possible, Germán had not started middle school that September. Indeed, he had made one attempt to cross the border, but he was caught by the border patrol and, since he was a minor, was sent all the way back to his grandmother’s home in Oaxaca. Germán did not try to cross again that fall. In November, Ofelia told me that she and Ricardo were too worried about his safety and, having lost two thousand dollars in their first attempt to bring him to New Jersey, they did not want to waste any more money on another failed attempt. Instead, Ofelia told me, Ricardo would go back for Germán in December.

Four years earlier, when I had first met Ofelia, she had told me of a similar plan for a holiday reunion. At the time, Germán was nine years old. She had left him seven years before, when Germán was just two. By November 2007, it had been eleven years since Ofelia had seen her son.

PROLONGED SEPARATIONS

Most family separations are not as long as that of Ofelia and Germán. In fact, in seven of the twelve families I followed over a period of four years, parents and children have since been reunited. Although their case was unique, the difficulties that Ofelia and Germán encountered in their attempts to reunite exemplify a dynamic common in all the families I interviewed: periods of separation last much longer than originally anticipated. At times reunification came just a year or two later than expected; for most it was longer. The extreme of eleven years illustrates how such a dynamic unfolds even when parents and children long to be reunited.

A number of factors contribute to the prolongation of family separations. As low-wage, undocumented workers, parents have a difficult time meeting their economic goals in the United States; their limited resources make reunifications difficult. Over time, parents’ resources are strapped even further by new commitments in the United States. Children, for their part, have conflicting emotions about seeing their parents, whom they may barely remember. Children sometimes resist reunification, and parents do not want to coerce them. Children are also loyal to their caregivers in Mexico. Caregivers, who enjoy certain economic and emotional benefits from caring for children, may also act in ways that extend periods of separation. I address the nuances of each of these dynamics—the difficulties migrant parents face, children’s conflicting emotions, and caregivers’ stakes in the arrangement—in subsequent chapters.

More deeply, prolonged family separations reflect the mismatch between the time needed for parents to reach their goals in the United States and the pace of their children’s growth in Mexico. Families divided by borders lack what Eviatar Zerubavel has called “temporal coordination.”¹ Parents’ time in the United States is structured around irregular work schedules of forty to sixty hours per week.² I was often told by those I interviewed that “my life in the U.S. is all work.”³ Oriented toward future goals, parents are constantly scrambling to feel productive in low-wage, unstable jobs. “I did not do anything,” explained Armando, describing his first two years in the United States. “I just paid off [my debts]. Another year went by, and not until then could I start to make plans to bring my family here.” Parents do not want to give up their goals, because they want their sacrifices to be worthwhile; in the meantime, periods of separation grow longer. One father explained: “The problem is that we immigrants end up here a long time.”

While parents feel caught, spinning their wheels in the United States, their children are changing at a pace parents can barely keep up with. Children, particularly those living in small communities like San Ángel, live in places where the pace of life follows agricultural work patterns, seasonal celebrations, and the school calendar and is marked by various holidays.⁴ The slowness and even boredom of daily life in the Mixteca are also evident in Victoria Malkin’s description of her fieldwork site in western Mexico: “Residents often sat on their stoops labeling different aspects of their surroundings as ‘ugly,’ ‘boring,’ ‘backward,’ and ‘closed.’ They contrasted this reality with the idea of an elsewhere drawn from the trips they have made to larger cities nearby, the soap operas they follow on television, or the migrants’ stories about clean streets, shopping malls, escalators, planes, dishwashers and cleaning products.”⁵ As the pace of small-town life moves cyclically around them, children’s growth and development stand out.

Parents and children experience the passage of time at different paces in different social locations. For parents, harried work schedules make time fly, while the time it takes them to meet their goals is drawn out. For children, daily life is slow, but their developmental changes are rapid. No case better illustrates how a lack of temporal coordination affects parent-child relationships than that of Ofelia and Germán. When the son knows little about his parents’ life in the United States and the mother cannot keep up with her son’s development in Mexico, parent-child relationships are not only elusive, but also they are constantly changing.⁶ As a result, family reunification is unpredictable and may take longer to realize than expected.

A MOTHER’S CONSTRAINTS DURING MIGRATION

November 2003. I had arranged to meet Ofelia at her home at six o’clock on a November evening. I had known one of Ofelia’s brothers and her husband, Ricardo, for years. Among other things, they had both been students in one of my ESL classes. I had never met Ofelia, however, and did not know that she and Ricardo had a son in the coastal town of Las Cruces, Mexico, until I started interviews for this project. On this particular evening, I arrived at Ofelia’s house to find that she was out shopping. I sat in the narrow living room making small talk with Ofelia’s brother over the cartoons blasting from the TV as a number of family members came and went from the room. Later I learned they were all relatives who shared the small home and that Ricardo had been upstairs the whole time. Throughout this project, most of my contact with his family has occurred through Ofelia and her kin.

After a bit, Ofelia’s brother left for his class at the local community college. His wife, Chavela, politely waited with me and told me about what it was like to live in Las Cruces. Chavela was from the northern state of Jalisco but had moved in with Ofelia’s mother when she married Ofelia’s brother. “I grew up in the city. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor either. There was always enough to eat, and all I had to do as a child was worry about getting up, going to school, and doing my homework. . . . [Ofelia’s] family is of a much more humble background. When I first got married, they all said it wouldn’t last. But when I went to live in his town, I got along very well with his mother. She is a really patient person. I learned how to cook, make tortillas, and do other things around the house. It was hard, but I learned. And I learned that my husband’s family is much more united than my own.”

Chavela’s description was cut short when Ofelia arrived, lugging Wal-Mart shopping bags. She giggled nervously upon finding me in the living room, excusing herself by saying she had thought the interview was to have been an hour earlier. When I had not appeared, she had gone out to pick up some diapers for her three-year-old daughter. As if in proof, a chubby toddler with messy pigtails trailed in behind her. Ofelia went upstairs to leave her bags. Within minutes of her return, everyone cleared the room to give us privacy.

Ofelia smiled and giggled again. “I have been asking everyone what they think you will ask me about.” The laughter seemed a sign of her anxiety about being interviewed. It resurfaced every time we broached an emotionally charged topic. I tried to reassure her and asked simply that she tell me a little bit about how she had come to the United States and about her son who lives in Mexico.

“I came like everyone else,” she said, “because there is no work in Mexico. The economic situation is very bad, and I wanted my family to get ahead.” She explained that her husband was the first to leave. He worked in Los Angeles for about a year, and Ofelia stayed with her own mother and newborn son in Las Cruces. This was a hard time for Ofelia. “It was really difficult not knowing where he was, since it was the first time we had ever been apart. In Mexico, when the women are washing clothes, they say, ‘Watch out, you could be using your husband to wash your clothes.’ ” She laughed. “You see, since we don’t know anything about them when they leave, we joke that they come back as [laundry] soap.”

Within a year, Ricardo asked Ofelia to join him. Ofelia was eager to migrate to New Jersey to see the place where her father and brothers had worked for a number of years when she was a teenager. “You see, my father left when I was thirteen. He was in the United States for nine years before he went back. While he was away [and after I married], it was my husband who was really the man of the house there in Mexico, helping out with the work. But just my luck, once I came to the United States, my father returned to Mexico. We crossed paths. I am the only one who doesn’t know him. It has been fifteen years now. Oh, how I want to see my father.”

According to Ofelia, Ricardo had wanted her to migrate with their only child, Germán. But Ofelia was concerned about where she would live when she got to the United States and who would take care of the two-year-old boy. At the urging of her mother, she left Germán behind and planned to send for him once she settled in the United States.

After Ofelia’s arrival in California, the couple moved to central New Jersey to live with Ofelia’s siblings. She started working at a factory; it was the first job she had ever had outside her home. “I felt really bad at first, it was like . . . ” Ofelia struggled to find the words and instead laughed drily. “But then at the factory where I worked I found out that so many women had their children in Mexico, and then I didn’t quite feel so bad, although I still really missed him, especially at the beginning.”

“Do you like working?” I asked.

Ofelia answered: “No. If I could, I wouldn’t work. I never worked in Mexico except in the house helping my mother out with things. But, you know, when you get older and get married, you need to do things for yourself, for your own family. So, that is why I came to work in the United States.”

“Do you think you will miss working if you ever go back to Mexico?”

Again, Ofelia said that the work is not important to her. “It is not the work that people miss back there. It is that [in Mexico] no one pays you to sit around eating all day long. That is what everyone misses when they go back to Mexico, getting a check at the end of the week.”

“Every day, everything in Mexico is more and more expensive,” she continued. Recently, one of her brothers had returned from visiting Mexico and had told Ofelia that a pair of pants costs between 250 and 300 pesos (roughly twenty-five to thirty U.S. dollars). She was shocked. For this reason, Ofelia explained, she feels satisfied that her earnings in the United States are helping provide for her son’s needs. “I know my son is missing the love of a mother. But I also know that he eats well, that he doesn’t suffer from hunger, that he has clothes, and that he can study. I know that he is okay.”

At the time of the interview, Ofelia had not seen nine-year-old Germán in more than seven years. “I don’t have any recent pictures,” she explained, “but when I first left, my mother sent me pictures all the time. I watched my son grow up through photographs.”

Ofelia said she calls home about once a week. Her son is the only grandchild living with her mother and father, and although she wants to bring him to the United States, she is making no progress toward this goal. She said that Germán did not want to migrate and added that she was reluctant to take him away from her parents. “When I call him, he asks me to come home. But he says he doesn’t want to come here, because he doesn’t want to leave his mama in Mexico. You see, he calls my mother “Mama.’ But he does know that I am his mother, because he says so. He says, ‘I know you are my mother, but I don’t want to leave my mother here.’ And I don’t want to force him to do something he doesn’t want to do, even though I know there are more opportunities here in the United States than in Mexico.”

When I interviewed Ofelia, she had recently lost her job at the factory because of a downturn in production. Even though a trip to Mexico would mean a risky border crossing on her return, Ofelia explained that if she did not find another job soon, she wanted to go home for the holidays. If not in December, she would travel back home in May. “Ricardo doesn’t want to go home at all, but I do. I cannot wait to go back. But I would just stay for three months or so. This way I would have time to warm up to my son again so I can bring him back with me.”

LIFE WITH GRANDMA AND GRANDPA

October 2004. Ofelia did not go back that year or the next. I first met Germán and his grandparents in 2004, when I visited their family home in Oaxaca. I had vague directions from Ofelia’s brother, who had told me I should look for the house across from the basketball court. We first drove by the ice-cream shop and arcade, where a skinny, shirtless boy was hanging out with four older men, and then doubled back after realizing that we had been in the right place and that the young boy must have been Germán. His grandmother, whom I had talked to the day before to confirm my visit, was not there, Germán told us brusquely.

Germán’s grandfather, also shirtless and in grubby pants, lay on a petate (a woven straw mat) on the dusty floor of the arcade. He instructed Germán to bring us chairs. Once seated, I was uncomfortable, feeling evaluated by these men and unsure what to say. Germán’s wary eyes monitored me closely as well. I struggled through the awkward silences in conversation with Germán’s grandfather, Don Francisco, who had worked in New Jersey for a number of years.

It was not until my second visit that I fully appreciated Don Francisco’s gold-tooth smile when we spoke more comfortably. He described himself as a homebody, explaining that he had spent most of his eight years in the United States either working at an industrial factory job or holed up in his room watching TV. Don Francisco also explained that he was the first in the family to leave for el norte. He had been quite successful working abroad. The family used the money he sent home to move from a house in a nearby rancho to one he built in the town of Las Cruces. He and his wife were also later able to purchase the store where they currently live. They owned a number of cattle and also a palm tree grove. “I like life in the United States better than here, because here it is so hot. And there, things are more orderly, and they are cleaner,” Don Francisco told me. He came back only because his sons migrated, and once they were no longer in Las Cruces to work his land, it began losing value.

Doña María was more outgoing than the reserved Don Francisco. On subsequent visits she admitted that it had been hard living with Don Francisco again after he came back from the United States. “I didn’t get used to it, and I’m still not,” she said, laughing. Doña María, a woman filled with an often-contagious exuberance and energy, was well respected in town. She introduced me to the directors at the local schools, all of whom she knew personally, facilitating my research in the schools. On my visit during the town feria, a number of indigenous women in town who did not speak Spanish were selling their wares. They all frequented Doña María’s shop, because she was one of the few who readily allowed them access to the bathroom and to water.

On that first visit, I learned little directly from Germán, who was then ten years old. He did, however, scoff when I jokingly mentioned expecting to see him in New Jersey in a few years, which suggested he did not expect to join his parents there. He also seemed suspicious of me. On the last day of our visit, when we went to the beach, I mentioned to Doña María that Germán looked more like his father than his mother. Germán looked up from his soda at me warily. “So you really know my dad in the United States?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “He was once in my English class and played soccer with some of my friends there.”

“And what is his name?” Germán challenged me. He looked rather surprised when I successfully answered “Ricardo.”

March 2005. Five months later when I visited, I learned more directly from Germán, who was still playing it cool but was noticeably excited when we arrived. On this visit he warmed up to us considerably, playing affectionately with my son, Temo, and talking more openly with me. He agreed to an interview. When I asked Germán if he remembered living with his parents, he answered, “No, because I was two when they left me.”

“Do you remember anything about them?”

“Just from pictures.”

“Why do you think they left?” I asked.

“To go where the money is,” Germán explained.

Germán said he spoke with his parents often, usually once a week, and that he liked talking with them on the phone. “I mostly [talk] with my mom, not so much with my dad because he works.”

“How do you feel when you hang up the phone?”

“Sad . . . because they are on the other side.”

Germán told me he wanted his parents to come back to Mexico. When I asked, “Would you like to go over there to be with them?” he answered decidedly, “No, I don’t want to go.”

“Why not?” I wondered.

“Because it is cold.”

“What’s that about? When it’s cold, you wear gloves, a hat . . . ”

“It’s just that I am used to living here,” Germán explained.

“So you prefer that they come back?”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t want to go there?”

“Nah, I am all right here with my grandma.”

I asked Germán about his sister; other children had complained about their U.S.-born siblings. Germán denied feeling jealous, said he loves his sister, and even talks with her on the phone. He could not tell me how old she was, however, and called in to his grandmother for an answer. I asked him, “Do you feel closer to your mother or your father?”

“Both the same.”

“Do you feel like you need your parents, or are you okay the way you are?”

Germán did not hesitate in answering, “I feel like I need them.”

“Why?”

“Yes, I need them because they are my parents.”

Doña María told me later that Germán did feel uncomfortable about his U.S.-born sister and that this was one reason he did not let his parents send for him and insisted that they come back to Mexico if they wanted to see him. “Once he said to me, Gram, I think my parents love Stacy more than they love me.” Doña María confirmed repeatedly on both my visits that Germán did not want to join his parents in the United States. “[Germán] talks to his mother about once a week. You know, they want to take him there. His father says they are ready to send for him. But he doesn’t want to go.”

I was not sure if Doña María was holding on to Germán. After all, Germán seemed highly affectionate with his grandmother, especially given his rather independent manner. Moreover, Germán seemed to enjoy being the only child in his grandparents’ home. Clinging to Germán, however, did not seem to be Doña María’s style. Doña María had many friends in town and a clear identity independent of caring for her grandson. She often chatted and joked with those who passed her store and was frequently out doing errands. On a day-to-day basis, she often acted indifferent to Germán, going about her daily routine with little oversight of Germán’s activities. For example, during the town feria, Doña María was not concerned that the ten-year-old went to the rodeo with some friends. And on the evening of the dance, Germán meticulously ironed his own pants and shirt to get ready to go out on the town. Doña María’s hands-off style did not seem to match Ofelia’s concerns that her mother would feel lonely and abandoned if Germán left for the states. Wondering about this, I asked Doña María how long she thought the current arrangement would continue. “Of course I will be sad for him to go,” she answered. “But I cannot stop it, because they are his parents, and they should be with the boy. I know it is not the same to be [raised] by grandparents as to be with your parents. I am always conscious of this.”

STANDING STILL

July 2005. Back in New Jersey months later, Ofelia stopped at my house to pick up some pictures of Germán I had brought her from Mexico. She sat at the edge of my sofa that afternoon, shaking her head with a nostalgic smile while looking at her son playing on the beach. “You know, he doesn’t want to come,” she said abruptly while flipping through the pictures yet again. “We tell him to come, but he doesn’t want to. I have wanted to bring him since the first year we were here, but he never wanted to. He is like resentful that we left him. Sometimes on the phone he says, ‘Mom, why did you leave me?’ ”

I asked, “What do you tell him?”

“I tell him, so that we could have more things, that he wants us to buy him lots of things, and this way we can buy him whatever he wants. I tell him that if I hadn’t come, maybe he wouldn’t have the things that he has and that he likes his things.”

“And what does he say to you?” I asked.

“He says it is okay. Then I tell him that if he comes here, I am going to buy him lots of things too. But he tells me that it is better that I send the money there to buy things there. He says that I should go back there to get him.”

“Maybe you can win him over if you go.”

“Yes, that is why I tell Ricardo to go. He was going to go this month to get him. But since they say it is really dangerous, he couldn’t go.”

“Is that why you don’t go, because it is dangerous?”

“Yes, you see, when I came, it was with papers. I didn’t cross like the others. I went to Tijuana and they gave me some visitor’s papers to cross with. And you see, because of the cost and everything [of the crossing], I can’t go back.”

OF STAGNATION AND CHANGE

January 2006. The next time I went to Las Cruces, the standoff between Germán, Ofelia, and Ricardo persisted. Although I had spoken with Doña María a few times since the previous visit, I had not seen Ofelia or Ricardo again. I did, however, occasionally talk to Ofelia’s brother and learned that his family life had radically changed as his wife Chavela had returned to Las Cruces with their children to permanently resettle the family in Mexico. Ofelia’s brother planned to join Chavela and their children after he worked a few more years in New Jersey to help save money to finish and furnish their house and store in Las Cruces. So while Ricardo, Ofelia, and Germán’s relationships remained in a deadlock, other family members were making changes in their lives.

On the first evening of my visit, Doña María showed me to Germán’s room, which I would use temporarily. After admiring changes in the house since my last visit, including the new computer Ofelia and Ricardo had bought for Germán, I sat with Doña María out front in the humid evening. While Doña María sold tacos of carne asada [steak], I sharpened two boxes of three hundred colored pencils I was using for a project at the local schools. When my hands grew sore, I convinced Chavela’s son to help me. Germán joined us at the table to have a dinner of his grandmother’s tacos. He listened warily as his younger cousin told me in a mixture of Spanish and English that he missed almost everything about his life in New Jersey. Germán’s face showed that he disagreed with his cousin’s opinions about the virtues of life in the United States. After a customer moved on with his order of tacos, Doña María idly told me about her taco sales and how much she made during the last town dance in December. Germán finished his tacos, wiped his mouth, and declared, “That is just how I like it: a poor and humble house but with lots of money.” Doña María scoffed at his comment, aimed at his “Americanized” younger cousin. Germán laughed drily and left the table, making clear his resistance to the materialistic influences of the United States and his preference for the more modest way of life in Mexico.

The next afternoon, I spent time in Germán’s school asking students to draw pictures of their families and how they imagined the United States. Germán’s class was small, just twelve students on the day of my visit. Now eleven years old, he was in the fifth grade, and though I knew he had been held back a year, he was not markedly older than the others. Later, during recess, Germán’s teacher described him as being extremely popular with the girls, quite a flirt, and also a bit uncontrollable in the classroom. During the drawing exercise, Germán sat sectioned off with three other boys; they appeared to be the unruly students of the classroom. But Germán was respectful during the exercise, and the others followed suit. While students drew their families, I went one by one to their desks, asking whom they lived with and who in their family lived in the United States. The other three boys in Germán’s group of friends all had parents in the United States. When I came to Germán, I noticed he had drawn two figures: one he labeled “papa” and the other he labeled with the name of his young sister (whom he had never met). I was struck that he had not drawn his mother. Later when he turned in his pictures, I saw that Germán had scratched out the name of his sister and replaced it with the label “mama.”

That evening, Doña María sold tacos once again. We sat and chatted as on the previous evening. This time, when Germán came out and declared he was hungry and wanted a cheese sandwich for dinner, Doña María snapped at him: “You are way too young to be demanding things like that.” Germán retreated inside to prepare his own sandwich.

Although at Germán’s urging we had originally planned another beach trip that Saturday, at lunch on Friday, Doña María told me that she had not been able to change the catechism class for Germán’s Communion the next morning, so we would not be able to go to the beach. “Since his mother is not here,” she explained, “I am the one who has to be there for him.” When I told Germán that we would not be able to go to the beach after all, he looked disappointed. I left the next morning. As Doña María accompanied me to the bus stop, Don Fernando and Germán were busy washing the truck. Don Fernando mockingly faked wailing at my departure: “When are we going to see her again,” he cried, and we laughed. I called out a good-bye to Germán, but he concentrated on cleaning the tires in the back of the truck, completely ignoring me. Doña María shook her head as we walked away. “You should have called out to him, ‘See you in New Jersey’,” she said. “Then he would have responded.”

THE LONG ROAD TO REUNIFICATION

April 2006. As had been the case since I first met with Ofelia in the fall of 2003, talk of Germán’s reunification with his parents continued. Once, when I called Doña María a few months after returning from my visit, Germán answered and chatted away about the party his family threw for his First Communion. “It was a big party. There was a D.J.,” he reported eagerly. “My dad said that he would either put [money up] for a D.J. or a cow [to provide the meat for the party], but then my dad put [money] for the D.J. and my grandfather put the cow so I had both.” After a bit, Germán asked, “So when are you going to come again so we can go to the beach?”

“I don’t know,” I explained. “Probably not for a little bit. When are you coming here? I bet you’ll come here before I go there.”

I was surprised when Germán answered decisively, “April 30th.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah, my dad says he is going to send for me. I am going to go with my cousin Trini. Antonio [Chavela’s young son and Germán’s cousin] is going to go back also.”

“Wow.”

“But I don’t want to go,” Germán added, although the excitement in his voice seemed to belie his reluctance.

After we spoke for a bit, Doña María came on the line. We exchanged news, again of the party and also reports on who in the family had been ill. I then added, “So are they really going to send for Germán?”

“His father says that he is going to come back for Germán and take him to the United States. But I don’t know. I tell them to wait until he finishes school. You see, now he is in fifth grade, and he just has one more year left to graduate, so I think they should wait until he is done with school.”

“Oh. Well, Germán said he is going to come in April,” I explained.

Doña María simply laughed and changed the subject.

April came and went. Germán remained with his grandparents. Germán’s cousin Trini, a single mother, did migrate to New Jersey and left her three children, then ages four, six, and seven, with Doña María. Although talk of Germán’s migration still hung in the air, the next year he went on to the sixth grade in Las Cruces.

May 2007. Exactly one year later, I visited Ofelia, who spoke of her plans to return for Germán over the summer. Although this was only one of many conversations I had had with her about Germán’s migration, this time it seemed that a number of factors had converged to make the reunification more likely.

First, Germán would now graduate from the sixth grade, which was the benchmark his grandmother had set for his migration. Second, according to Ofelia, Doña María was overwhelmed with the care of Trini’s three children. Trini, now pregnant and living with a new boyfriend in the United States, was not sending enough money to provide for the children properly. Ofelia was providing most of the economic support for their care and had hired a girl locally to help her mother, much to Ricardo’s chagrin. “My mother is getting too old to look after these kids; they are all young, not like Germán. And when I left Germán, she wanted me to. That was one of the reasons I left him, to give her company. But these three, they need a lot of work. My mother is getting too tired to look after them.”

Not only did the changed circumstances in Las Cruces make Germán’s migration seem likely, but Ofelia and Ricardo’s economic situation seemed to have improved markedly since I had last seen them. They now rented a three-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of the city, which they shared with just one young woman. The living room was furnished with a new white sofa and love seat (covered in plastic to protect against spills), a large TV, and a bookshelf displaying pictures of the family. I looked over the framed pictures of Germán as a little boy, and Ofelia pointed out the pictures of her, Ricardo, and their daughter, Stacy, from their vacation the summer before. Ofelia had a new job with benefits, including a yearly two-week vacation, which they used for the first time to go away to Virginia Beach. Both Ofelia and Ricardo owned vans they drove to work, providing rides for coworkers at the going rate of twenty-five dollars per week per person, which augmented the family income. When I asked if they planned to have more children, Ofelia gave a decisive no. “When they are little, it is so hard economically. I didn’t work for two years to stay with Stacy, and we only had Ricardo’s [income]. But now she is in school, and I can work too. We are much better off. No, it is too hard when they are little. Two are enough for me.”

Aside from the improvements in Ofelia and Ricardo’s economic situation, Ofelia explained that she now had a concrete plan for bringing Germán back with her to the United States. She had finally caught up with the woman who had helped the family cross the first time. The expense would be great, two thousand dollars more than it would have cost ten years earlier, but she and Ricardo felt it was worth it. Over the summer they hoped to take Stacy back to Mexico, so she could meet her grandparents for the first time. If all went according to plan, the family would be living together in New Jersey by September.

As I was leaving Ofelia’s house that afternoon, I admired a wall hanging I had overlooked earlier. It was a painted family portrait, depicting Ofelia and Ricardo at the center and Stacy just below them. Never forgotten, Germán was in the portrait as well. Ofelia explained that they had had a photograph sent so the artist could add him to the painting. Although recognizable, it showed Germán as he must have looked years before I had met him. The two siblings looked at most a year apart in age, while there is actually seven years between them. The wall-hanging captured the time disparities that governed the families’ memories and realities: American-born Stacy had an up-to-date portrait, as did the parents who stood with her, while Germán was incorporated into the family as he had been years before.

PARALYSIS

What accounts for the dynamic between Germán and Ofelia, which led to indefinite postponement of their reunion? It is possible that caregivers in Mexico, in this case Doña María, resist family reunification so they can continue to garner economic support from parents’ migration. Grandparents do rely on the remittances of their migrant children and develop close emotional bonds with their grandchildren while parents are away. Yet caregivers are not responsible for preventing the reunification of parents and children. Caregivers, in fact, respect the priority of parent-child bonds. They often reinforce these ties, and the obligations they entail, as did Doña María when she told me in front of Germán that she had to go to his Communion class because his mother was not there to go. If the prolonged separation of mother and child did not result from the grandparents’ wishes, why did it occur?

Ofelia and Germán’s standoff arose in part from differences in how family members perceived each other over the passage of time. For Ofelia, Germán remained a young boy bonded with his grandmother, even while her own life changed radically with the birth of another child and the work required of her and her husband to create an economic foothold in New Jersey. For the grandmother, another year or two in her care were worth it if Germán could reach a more natural stopping point at his local school. And for Germán himself, time brought big changes in both his feelings and his understanding of his situation.

From Germán’s perspective, and that of other children like him, migrant parents are a presence even when physically absent. Germán felt that his parents were important to him, and he knew that they should provide and care for him. He felt resentful that they left him and now gave more attention to his U.S.-born sister. At the same time, Germán understood that they had migrated out of economic necessity and, in part, to support him. He liked living with his grandparents and in Las Cruces; in fact, that was the only life he knew. In essence, he did not want his life to change drastically, except that he would like his parents to return to show they care. With each passing year, the ways Germán communicated these mixed emotions to the adults in his life changed. Germán’s jeers at my suggestions that I would soon see him in New Jersey gave way, within a little more than a year, to his boasts that he would soon be in the United States, even if against his will. More recently, Germán left school in Mexico and more wholeheartedly accepted the idea of coming north. As for children anywhere, each year brought developmental and emotional changes, and those changes affected his interpretation of his parents’ sacrifice.

But for parents, the gains won each year as a migrant come painfully slowly. Stability in housing and employment may take years to achieve. Migrants invest huge amounts of energy and resources to carve out successful lives in U.S. cities. These investments made it hard for Ofelia and Ricardo to return for Germán, as he wanted them to do. They had to weigh the cost and the risk of doing so. They had to consider that Ofelia’s family in Mexico depended on remittances from the United States and that their standard of living would fall if Ofelia went back. Moreover, Ofelia had a strong link to New Jersey through her U.S.-born daughter. If she returned to Las Cruces and had trouble crossing the border on her return, who would look after Stacy during her absence? What would happen if she could not return? Ofelia reasoned that she might convince Germán to join them if she could spend some time with him, but the danger of the border crossing made a short return visit a great risk. It would also be extremely costly and would require economic stability that Ofelia and Ricardo were unable to achieve until Stacy started kindergarten and they both were working full time and did not have to pay for child care. Like Germán, Ofelia felt conflicted in deciding on her best course of action. As a migrant father explained to me, “Sometimes, Joanna, you simply cannot have everything you want at once.”

Over time, parents become more engrossed—and invested—in their lives in the United States and even more conscious of the rising price of having left their children. Trapped by the lifestyle they adopt in the United States, scheduled almost entirely around the workweek, parents worry about their relationships with their children. Being absorbed by work at the expense of the family is not a novel concept. Working parents in the United States may have similar reactions of being in a “time bind.”⁷ Yet the physical distance considerably increases the dissonance between the pace of parents’ lives at work and the pace of the lives of their children at home.⁸ One migrant father’s comment summarizes the effects of migrant parents’ unique time bind on relationships with children whom they do not get to see at the end of each day:

For a time, the phone works wonders. It is like your weapon, your love, your everything, because you talk, you listen; it’s everything. But after a time, you lose that passion of talking. You lose that dream of waiting for Sunday to call your kids and talk to them. Why? Because you realize that it starts becoming ordinary. . . . Instead of seeing it as [a means of] affection, love for your children and to your family in Mexico, it becomes ordinary, like a line you have to follow. And you just don’t feel the same anymore. . . .

The distance makes you forget, it makes you lose something, it makes you . . . How can I explain? It makes it so that the affection, that which was love, becomes almost ordinary. It becomes commercial. Why? Because you only think about working, sending money, and that they [the kids] are okay over there. . . . [It is routine] because you cannot enjoy what you sent and take your child out to eat, take him on an outing, or buy him some clothes. All of this makes it so that you forget what the love of your child is like.

Conflicting emotions that result from the passage of time at different paces in different places often prolong periods of separation. Ironically, it is also the passage of time that can resolve standoffs between parents and children, like the one between Ofelia and Germán. Because parents and children have few opportunities for interaction, they do not have the ability to negotiate small solutions to their difficulties. They must wait for a combination of factors to converge, including economic stability, opportunity, and the willingness of children to migrate, in order to plan a reunification. In some cases, parents and children are reunited within a few years. In other cases, as for Ofelia and Germán, reunification is delayed for most or all of a child’s childhood. I now turn to what happens to families from the perspectives of parents, children, and caregivers during these periods.

Regular phone calls home help fathers like this one maintain contact with family members in Mexico. Photograph by Joanna Dreby