MOTHERHOOD ACROSS BORDERS
Motherhood across Borders
Immigrants and Their Children in Mexico and New York
Gabrielle Oliveira
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
© 2018 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Oliveira, Gabrielle, author.
Title: Motherhood across borders : immigrants and their children in Mexico and New York / Gabrielle Oliveira.
Description: New York : New York University, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017054993| ISBN 978-1-4798-7462-0 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4798-6646-5 (pbk : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Immigrant children—Mexico—Social conditions. | Immigrant children—New York (State)—New York—Social conditions. | Mothers—Mexico—Social conditions. | Mothers—New York (State)—New York—Social conditions. | Women immigrants—New York (State)—New York—Social conditions.
Classification: LCC HQ792.M6 O45 2018 | DDC 305.23086/912072—dc 3
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054993
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For all the families that live separated, may your stories be told.
CONTENTS
Introduction
INTERLUDE 1. Parallel Lives
1. Ideals and Practices of Transnational Motherhood and Care
INTERLUDE 2. When Caregivers and Mothers Don’t Get Along
2. Transnational Mothers and School-Related Decisions
INTERLUDE 3. Drawings
3. Children and Youth’s Perspectives of the Other Side: Ideas of Inequality and Sense of Belonging
INTERLUDE 4. Giving Birth in New York City
4. Educational Aspirations and Social Trajectories of Separated Siblings
INTERLUDE 5. Camila and Stella
5. For My Mother: Gendered Education Experiences
INTERLUDE 6. Letter to Carlitos
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Appendix A. Transnational Care Constellations
Appendix B. Schooling Systems Here and There
Appendix C. Mexican Migration to the United States by State and Sex, 2010
Appendix D. Demographic Profile of Research Sites in New York City
Appendix E. A Note on Methods
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Introduction
I lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side when I started this book and my neighbor was a busy mother who had a nanny helping her to take care of her two-year-old toddler. One day my neighbor asked what my research was about; I told her I wanted to learn more about maternal migration and how it influences children and youths’ lives. “Well,” she replied, “what kind of migration are you talking about? I live in the same country, city, and house as my daughter and she is not being raised only by me. Sara, my nanny, is from Mexico and she has a kid there, you should talk to her.” As the US media debates whether women can “have it all”—that is, a successful career and a family—migrant women like Sara wonder how they can care for them all: for their children in Mexico, children they have brought over to the United States, children who were born here, and (in some cases) children they care for professionally.
Sara, a Mexican migrant from a small rural town in the state of Hidalgo, became my first interviewee for this book. One day I saw her and told her I was headed to Mexico that summer to do research with children whose mothers were migrants in New York City. Sara told me she had a son, Agustín, whom she had left in Mexico seven years ago. I asked if she was willing to talk to me about her experiences of mothering from afar and her relationship with Agustín. She did not hesitate, as she seemed excited about the prospect of me taking some gifts to her son on my upcoming trip to Mexico. Sara instructed me to come to her house in the following days to meet her US-born son, Felipe, who was the same age as my neighbor’s child, whom she cared for professionally.
A day later I went to East Harlem to visit Sara in the one-bedroom apartment that she shared with her husband and Felipe. As we sat in the kitchen, enjoying some very spicy guacamole, I asked Sara about her crossing. Like all other mothers who participated in this study, Sara is undocumented. She crossed into the United States by foot via the Arizona border, from which point she reached the city of Phoenix. From there, Sara and many others were put into trucks and vans that took them across the country to destinations such as North Carolina, Chicago, New Jersey, and New York City. As it was for other women in this research, her crossing was difficult and painful, something that she hopes never to have to do again. Sara became dehydrated during her four-day crossing and passed out in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. She recalls members of her group discussing if they should leave her behind and continue their journey. One man, who was a friend of her family, carried her for miles until the group found a place to hide from border patrol. The crossing cost Sara more than $4,000. Sara’s sister, Rosa, already in New York City, helped her cover half of the cost. Sara used her savings to pay part of the other half and got the remainder from her other sister, Tami, also in the United States. A single mother, Sara migrated alone, leaving her son Agustín behind with his maternal grandmother, Clarisa. Sara later met and moved in together with Marco in New York City, and together they had a son, Felipe. I asked Sara how she felt being away from her child in Mexico, but also having a child in New York City. She responded: “One feels divided, you are here, but your heart sometimes is there. I know I left him with the best care I could ask for and … now I have a child here, with another man. It’s hard … but I think it’s better this way.”
As Sara talked to me, she also checked her phone, only to find a text message from her 14-year-old son Agustín in Mexico that read: “hi I want to go out with my friends.” Sara paused. She took a deep breath and typed a response while uttering the words out loud: “It’s late already, what did your grandmother say?” Agustín texted back: “She said it is ok as long as you allow me to go.” Sara responded: “You can go, but you need to text me when you come back home. It can’t be after 9 p.m., tomorrow you have school.” Agustín responded: “Ok, thank you.” A couple of hours later Sara sent a text message to her cousin to confirm Agustín’s whereabouts. Agustín did not come back at 9 p.m. and his grandmother, instead of calling Agustín on his cell phone, called Sara in New York and asked her to call Agustín, because she was worried.
In between the exchange of text messages and my interview with Sara, Felipe showed up in the kitchen, crying, because his cousin did not want to share her Spiderman toy with him. Sara tried, unsuccessfully, to convince him that he had so many other toys to play with that he did not need his cousin’s action figure. When he kept insisting and crying, Sara told him, “Felipe, if you keep being like this I will send you and your cousin to Mexico to be with your abuela.” At that moment, I observed one of th
e many daily actions related to “care” that constituted what I began to call a transnational care constellation. In the few hours I spent at Sara’s house during my very first interview, the small town in Hidalgo and the reality in East Harlem were intrinsically connected. The constant communication among caregivers, children, and mothers regarding everyday decisions and daily discipline made the physical border between Mexico and the United States more fluid. In a split-screen moment, I was able to visualize Agustín going to school in San Nicolás, a town in Hidalgo of 300 residents, and Felipe getting on a bus to attend a public school in New York City. During my fieldwork I was able to accompany both Felipe and Agustín as they got up and went to school. They both woke up before 6 a.m. and ate breakfast before they left. They both complained on the way to school and wished they could have slept another ten minutes. Agustín received money from Sara every week and all his school costs were taken care of, but he wanted to drop out of school as soon as he finished junior high school. Even though Sara did not want Agustín to drop out of school, she felt she had no control over the matter. Alternatively, with Felipe, Sara was confident that dropping out of school would never be an option as she felt completely in control. I reflected: When and where was school important? How did Sara’s absence influence or shape Agustín’s choices? Conversely, did Agustín’s choices influence Felipe?
Sara took center stage in her care constellation because of her decision-making power. This power was attributed to her by her sons and her mother, but at times she claimed it for herself. Her role as the biological mother, or, as she described it, “the one who birthed him,” was celebrated for better or for worse. She was the one who got asked for permission, she was the one who sent financial support, she was the one who bought gifts, and she was the one who made decisions about school-related activities. However, when she did not deliver on the activities related to care that were expected from her, she was criticized; she was blamed for everything that went wrong; she felt guilty and at many times helpless. Sara and other mothers interviewed played a large role in the academic and educational lives of their children. Though mothers and children frequently had a tough time communicating about feelings, love life, personal desires, and dreams, when the discussion was about schooling—homework, classes, teachers, uniforms, books, summer classes, field trips, grades, parent-teacher conferences—the mothers were able to communicate their desires and assert their authority by giving children orders. Providing a better education was the topic that participants in the care constellation thought to be the most important or the reason behind familial separation. The act of talking about school, according to another mother, “made everything worth it.”
Agustín and Clarisa shared a relationship that Sara respected and did not compete with. As Sara said, “I left him with my mother. I can’t fight with my mother and tell her off … If she lets him do things that I do not agree with, sometimes I have to let it go. I know at this point he loves her more than he loves me. But that’s all right. She is the one that takes care of him.” At the same time, in my interviews with Clarisa in Mexico, she seemed concerned about not “going over Sara’s head” with regard to Agustín’s life. She stated: “Whenever she is ready, she should come back to enjoy her son … they are only young for a certain period in their lives … and those are the most beautiful years. She should really enjoy him.”
This book explores the ways in which maternal migration shapes the lives of the children of immigrant women who are in New York City and in Mexico, with a specific focus on children’s education experiences. It focuses on the care arrangements and family relationships that follow maternal migration, specifically by examining how these changes shape children’s lives in Mexico and the United States. I argue that the influence of migration cannot be understood by looking at only one side of the border; understanding how mothers in one location negotiate their care for children in different spaces requires a methodological approach that entails transnational multi-sited fieldwork. Children’s lives are an important, yet often overlooked, part of the story of what feminist scholars have referred to as “global care chains.” I show that caregiving practices regarding decisions about education that derive from maternal migration shape and influence children’s experiences of education in a broad sense. Schooling, achievement, and education experiences differ for separated siblings in Mexico and in New York City. Moreover, the self-identified gender of the child plays a role in how these experiences unfold.
Mothers often justify their decisions to migrate by stating that their goal is to provide a better education for their children, and indeed much of their transnational mothering is focused on that goal. But to stop at this statement would be a mistake. By focusing on the relational dimensions of maternal migration as experienced by members of what I refer to as a transnational care constellation, this research contributes to existing scholarship on how transnational migration and people’s mobility shape the lives of children and youth “left behind,” “brought over,” and “born here.” By arguing for the importance of attending to children’s lived experiences of familial separation and participation in care constellations, this research provides a nuanced analysis of migration’s many faces.
Even though I was looking for transnational practices of families’ everyday lives, I was puzzled by how the concept of care worked across transnational boundaries and also by the shifting nature of kinship relations in the context of global political economy, increased migration, and gender hierarchies that are characteristic of a highly integrated and globalized world. Although I am not arguing that maternal migration necessarily provokes a shift in familial power structures, I am describing a shift in familial dynamics, through transnational care constellations and the structures of care that influence the lives of children involved, especially regarding their education trajectories.
In this book I argue that, in order to understand how maternal migration affects children on both sides of the border, one must understand how they are cared for and how caregivers and mothers share child-rearing practices. Although the ideal of care within the relationships in transnational migration oriented the initial steps in my research, throughout my fieldwork I became fundamentally concerned with how these arrangements influence sibling relations across borders, as well as their schooling, and gender roles. Thus, this book aims to answer these two overarching questions: How do mothers with one (or more) offspring living in New York City and one (or more) children in Mexico negotiate care, educational support, and investment in their children’s education? And how do high levels of Mexican maternal migration influence the education, migration aspirations, and social opportunities of the children in Mexico and their siblings born in or brought to the United States?
This book aims to answer other questions as well: How do ideas and practices of motherhood shape mothers’ attitudes toward their children? How do children on both sides of the border imagine and describe “the other side”? How do the educational experiences and social opportunities of children in Mexico compare to those of their siblings living in the United States? And, how might maternal migration influences vary by the gender of the child?
Mexican Migrants in New York City
Since the 1960s, Mexicans have been the largest group of Latin American immigrants in the United States. Mexicans in the United States are also the largest group of unauthorized immigrants in the country. Since the time of the Bracero Program (1942–1964), which brought significant numbers of Mexicans to the United States as manual laborers, Mexicans only began to experience a reduced rate of overall population growth after the 2007 economic recession. In 2011, 11.4 million undocumented Mexicans were estimated to be in the United States (Stoney & Batalova, 2013). Compared to other immigrant groups, Mexicans have the lowest chance of legalizing their citizenship status by becoming citizens or lawful permanent residents, or receiving refugee status from the government (Dreby, 2010). It is important to note that families are, for the most part, separ
ated not by distance but by immigration status. If they had the ability, they would be going back and forth and so would their kids. Immigration status is a crucial factor for mothers in this study as it constitutes a tangible physical barrier to physical closeness.
US-bound Mexican migration has changed dynamics since the mid-1990s. Militarization of the border combined with stricter immigration enforcement activities and legislation interrupted a long-standing tradition of circular migration. Dreby (2010, 2015) has explained that there are virtually no pathways to citizenship available to Mexican migrants, and this factor changes the configuration of families separated across borders that had enjoyed more flexibility in the past.
According to Gomberg-Muñoz,
But for people who have entered and lived in the United States unlawfully, whom I call unlawful entrants, the road to a green card is neither smooth nor easy—even for those with spouses who are U.S. citizens. This is because when they attempt to gain legal residency, two parts of the U.S. immigration system collide: The first part makes them eligible for a green card but requires them to leave the United States to get it. The second part then bars most of them from returning for 10 years. The only way they can return lawfully is if their U.S. citizen petitioner can prove he or she would suffer “extreme hardship” in the event of a 10-year separation. (2016: 340)
Mendoza (2008) explains that the interruption of this circular migration changed trips that in the past averaged 38 months to 72 months. The status of being undocumented, thus, has been created by a number of different factors, including militarization of the border, failed trade negotiations, economic recession, and specially the inability of the American government to pass a comprehensive immigration reform. In addition, issues arise when mixed-status families in the United States experience fear of deportation and detention of parents who are undocumented. According to Rojas-Flores and colleagues (2017), the chronic risk of arrest, detention, and/or deportation contributes to anxiety and tension within families. Enforcement by the government knows no bounds sweeping through residences and workplace. According to Passel, Cohn, and Gonzalez-Barrera (2012), during the five-year period from 2005 to 2010, a total of 1.4 million Mexicans immigrated to the United States, down by more than half from the 3 million who had done so in the five-year period of 1995 to 2000. In the meantime, the number of Mexicans and their children who moved from the United States to Mexico between 2005 and 2010 rose to 1.4 million, roughly double the number who had done so in the five-year period a decade before (ibid.).
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