Motherhood across Borders

by Gabrielle Oliveira

  Data from the Pew Hispanic Center show that there were 210,000 Mexican-born people living in New York City in 2011 (compared to Los Angeles, the largest immigrant epicenter in the United States, with 1.4 million Mexican-born residents) (Gonzalez-Barrera & Lopez, 2013). The Latino Project developed by the Center for Latin American, Caribbean & Latino Studies at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center also estimated that there are around 600,000 Mexicans living in New York City, with the largest concentration in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx; and more than one million Mexicans in the tristate area (Saiz-Álvarez, 2016).

  Women constitute 40 percent of all Mexican migrants in New York City (nationally, 47 percent of Mexican migrants are women) and they head approximately 22 percent of Mexican immigrant households. According to the US Census Bureau, in 2011 the median income of Mexican women who are head of household was a little more than $22,000. Estimating how many children migrant mothers leave in Mexico proved to be a daunting task. Fragmented statistics allowed me to only guess that this phenomenon was relevant and significant enough to be studied (Nobles, 2013).

  Theorizing Migration

  Migration has historically been a topic of study of different disciplines. In this book I draw primarily from an anthropological, transnational approach. Rather than prioritizing nation-states and assuming that people “assimilate,” transnational approaches focus on how mobile populations make decisions in relation to social, cultural, political, and economic conditions both at home and in the new location.

  In an article entitled “Approaches from Cultural Analysis in Anthropology to Latin@ Immigration,” Renato Rosaldo (2014) discusses key perspectives that distinguish anthropological research on migration. He describes how “studies of migration lead scholars to extend the spatial scope of the units of analysis. These works study collectivities, such as binational families [and] networks, rather than seeing the migrant as a discrete unit to be counted as she or he crosses the border” (p. 148). These studies include a focus on transnational family networks and community, and how those in the sending community are affected by the absences of those who leave. Second, anthropological studies of migration consider how immigrants represent their own experiences to themselves and to others. Third, cultural studies of Latin@ transnationalism consider how gender and sexuality shape the lives of immigrants. Young boys and girls face new and sometimes distinct risks and vulnerabilities. For example, boys may display their masculinity through involvement in gang activity; gay and lesbian teens may find that sexual discrimination compounds their marginalization. Fourth, Rosaldo (2014) explains that the association of “immigrant” with stereotypes about Mexicans rests on a racial bias that underlies immigration policy. He also discusses the criminalization and deportation of undocumented Mexicans and the militarization of the border under the Obama administration. This book is situated in the historical moment described by Rosaldo. Militarized borders, high deportation numbers, and the influence of transnational family networks on children and mothers are all central to the stories told in this book. I focus on the everyday lives of separated families and especially how children in the present generation adapt and respond to the present reality.

  In her book Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and Struggle for Citizenship Rights, Gálvez (2010) presents an argument that discusses the agency of those who are excluded from “first-class citizenship” or the idea of “good citizenship” (p. 16). This juridical definition of citizenship is “impoverished” according to the author. For Gálvez, Mexican immigrants in New York City make space in their new city while they negotiate notions of self-worth and belonging. Citizenship, according to Gálvez, “has been more rigorously defined in legal terms in the last decade” (p. 17).

  Dreby (2015), in her timely book Everyday Illegal: When Policies Undermine Immigrant Families, makes a poignant argument for how concepts of being an immigrant from Mexico become conflated with being a criminal. Thus, the illegality, which Dreby refers to as an administrative status, becomes a salient part of immigrant families’ identities. Her comparative work shows how families in Ohio and New Jersey deal with the everyday anxieties that come with being undocumented. The author, a sociologist, points to the micro-complexities of each family and children in both locations by showing how nonlinear and determined these pathways are.

  Building on this argument, I utilize a theoretical approach that allows for a nuanced understanding of immigrant experiences. Children’s trajectories are not as “linear” as described by dominant US-based sociological assimilation theories, and micro-contexts on both sides of the border influence each other in real time, every day. In order to build my argument and show the diversity of experiences within the same generation (in both countries), I use transnational care constellations as my unit of analysis. There are millions of people living in the same situation, divided and separated, but the ties they keep and the ways in which they act out these ties play an important role in their trajectories. As I will show throughout each chapter, a theoretical concept premised upon looking at mobility within generations in the same country does not account for and cannot accurately describe how immigrant families and children live their lives transnationally (Coe et al., 2011; Dreby, 2010; Boehm, 2011; Schmalzbauer, 2004, 2008; Smith, 2005; Grasmuck & Pessar, 2005; Gamburd, 2000).

  Anthropology of Migration and Transnationalism

  In anthropology, as in other disciplines, scholars have long argued that the social and economic lives of migrants are not always bounded by national boundaries or physical borders. Fredrik Barth (1969) pointed out that boundaries are not necessarily territorialized and that group membership is under constant negotiation. Thus, the concept of transnationalism has been a central anthropological frame since the 1990s.

  Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Szanton-Blanc (1995) have convincingly argued that transnationalism is part of an effort to reconfigure anthropological thinking so that it will reflect current transformations in the way in which time and space are lived. As in the United States, caregivers and children in Mexico are actively creating new arrangements to keep their status as members of the same group. Just as (for Barth) the idea of an ethnic group or a community becomes unbounded, parenting—and more specifically mothering—becomes an unbounded practice, where mothers do not necessarily live in the same household but are very much present and involved in the everyday lives of the children they have left behind.

  The questions that have traditionally shaped studies of migration in anthropology have focused less on migration flows and more on how individuals respond to these global processes. Culture, which includes the study of the interaction between beliefs and behavior and social relationships, has resulted in an emphasis on adaptation, culture change, identity, and ethnicity (Brettel & Hollifield, 2000, 2008). Historically, the discipline has articulated migration studies as belonging to two analytical approaches: the first was rooted in modernization theory, and the other was rooted in a historical structuralist perspective based on concepts of political economy and the effects of global capitalism.

  Modernization theory included a bipolar framework of analysis that separated and opposed sending and receiving societies, which brought attention to the well-known push and pull factors of migration. Push and pull factors are economic, political, cultural, and environmental forces that can either induce people to move to a new location or encourage them to leave their place of residence. According to anthropologist Michael Kearney (1986), this concern with push and pull factors and modernization is rooted in the “folk-urban continuum” formulated by Robert Redfield in 1941. Redfield’s model contrasted “traditional” folkways and “modern” urban life. The idea was that modernization theory marked the movement from country to city as people searched for more opportunities (or pull factors). This paradigm dominated much of the discussion regarding migration, linking people’s movement (urbanization) to hopes for economic development. Modernization, however, did not mean increased salaries and less povert
y; quite the contrary. Many urban centers became characterized by the presence of shantytowns and significant poverty. In addition, this model of looking at migration did not describe international migration. The historical structuralist perspective, with its intellectual roots in Marxist political economy and world systems theory (Wallerstein, 1980), posited that capitalism was responsible for the unequal distribution of economic and political power among developed and developing countries. Thus, countries considered “underdeveloped” were trapped at a disadvantaged position causing people to move because of cheap labor and unequal terms of trade (Haas, 2008). For historical structuralists, people do not have free choice; instead, they are constrained by larger forces. These forces compel them to migrate to another country or region to fulfill globalization’s demands.

  These theories failed to explain why some people migrate and others do not. As the world became more globalized, migration scholars took up the notion of transnationalism to rethink territories and notions of culture (Appadurai, 1996). Migration forced anthropologists to move away from studies of bounded communities and develop new forms of ethnographic work (later multi-sited ethnography) to account for people’s movement and the bonds they maintain with their countries of origin. Transnationalism appeared as a concept to describe a process that could account for these practices developed by migrants. As Kearney (1986) commented, “A heightened awareness of the magnitude and significance of migration among other things caused anthropologists to turn away from community studies in the 1950s and 1960s, when it became widely realized that such work was suffering from terminal myopia” (p. 332). However, Vertovec (2007) points out that even though transnationalism in anthropology meant that scholars would take on ethnographic work that went beyond geographical boundaries or “tribes,” “interrelations between multiple groups have not become the subject of anthropological inquiry as much as one might have expected” (p. 965). Dissatisfaction with how migration was always framed within a macro approach of push and pull factors led to a new form of migration theory. Critique of the bipolar model of migration culminated in a theoretical construct that proposed a transgression of geographic borders and a focus on how relationships and identities are maintained across terrains. Because the concept of transnationalism was developed through different disciplines simultaneously, it remains a complex interdisciplinary idea.

  As early as 1979, in a piece for the International Migration Review, Elsa Chaney described a certain category of immigrants as having “their feet in two societies” (p. 209). Even though she never used the word “transnational” to describe this type of immigrant, Chaney described the process in which migrants kept practices from their country of origin very much alive in the new land. In addition, according to Brettel and Hollifield (2008), “the roots of transnationalism within anthropology can be found in earlier work on return migration that emphasized links with the homeland and the notion that emigration did not necessarily mean definitive departure in the minds of immigrant themselves” (p. 17). Though not a new phenomenon, transnationalism gained traction in the 1990s with multi-sited ethnographic studies.

  Transnationalism is described by some scholars as a “catchall notion” (Ebaugh & Saltzman Chafetz, 2002) or, as Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt (1999) put it, a “highly fragmented field” (p. 218). The term, however, is central to the understanding and analysis of multiplicity in the daily lives of the families and individuals featured in this book.

  Scholars agree that transnationalism is a notion that captures a process that goes beyond geographical borders in the form of political organizations or family relationships. Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Szanton-Blanc defined transnationalism as

  The processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. We call this process transnationalism to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural and political borders. (1994: 7)

  Whether or not a transnational approach might be an outcome of ethnographic research, or, rather, a lens through which ethnographers have come to see the world, transnational ethnographies of Mexican families like those written by Robert C. Smith (2005), Dreby (2010), Schmalzbauer (2009), Boehm (2011), and Hamann and Zúñiga (2011) have contributed to developing a methodology that is transnational in approach and enhances our understanding of ways in which migration, in association with processes of globalization, transforms everyday life such that people might sustain connections across time and space despite their mobility. A focus on care also allows us to point out the shortcomings of transnationalism. Not only do individuals have their “two feet” in two different worlds, but they also have hands, embraces, and kisses that are disembodied by the separation. Technology may mediate relationships, but it is simply not the same. I use this working definition of transnationalism to allude to the social field created through care. Instead of focusing primarily on political and economic links between the societies being studied, I emphasize “care” as a concern that both unites and divides families across borders.

  Another development of anthropological research related to migration occurred when transnationalism came to be closely linked with postmodernism and feminist theory, which conceptualized space and place in new ways. Gender and migration are important components for the analysis of data collected in this book as I focus on maternal migration, care, and children’s educational trajectories.

  Gender and Migration

  More than half of the migrants in the world today are women (Population Facts United Nations, 2013). As the principal wage earners for themselves and their families, many women are driven to migrate in search of a living wage, leaving their families and children behind (Castles, 1999; Forbes Martin, 2003). Gender, historically, has not been an important piece in the dominant economic and sociological theories of migration (Cerrutti & Massey, 2001). Ethnographic research challenges this notion as it shows how gender reveals power differences within households and families. Cerrutti and Massey have found that most female migrants have left their country of origin to follow a husband or a parent (p. 196).

  The reality is that an increasing number of Mexican female migrants migrate to the United States alone, leaving their children behind in the care of relatives or friends (Fernández-Kelly, 2008). Although mothers leaving children behind is not a new phenomenon, the number of years mothers stay separated from their children has increased due to longer periods of settlement stemming from the need to reduce the risks of exit and re-entry to the United States. Although some women migrate to reunify with family, Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997) found that 40 percent of their sample of undocumented mothers were working to support children left behind in the country of origin. Studies suggest that transnational migration challenges norms and ideals of family life that involve gender hierarchies (Coe et al., 2011), especially gendered roles and the division of household labor. However, women’s roles in the household and outside of the home vary tremendously according to social and geographical locations (Dreby & Schmalzbauer, 2013). Only recently have scholars begun to examine the life experiences of children of migrant parents, especially children of migrant mothers, in their home country (Bernhard et al., 2005; Dreby, 2010; Boehm, 2011; Hamann & Zúñiga, 2011; Fresnoza-Flot, 2013).

  Mexican women’s migration to the United States has always been relevant, but it was not until 1986, with the passage of the Simpson-Rodino Act, which prompted entire families to move to the United States, that scholarly work on female migration developed. The “feminization of migration” (Dwyer, 2004: 36) reflects a global demand for low-priced labor that led women from poor countries to migrate to prosperous countries for jobs.

  Undocumented immigration has been, and continues to be, a complex issue of enormous sociopolitical and economic consequence for Latina women who migrate to the United States in search of jobs.1 Single women’s migration is increasing relative to total female out-migration from Mexico and C
entral America (Valdez-Gardea, 2009). Compared to earlier generations, single women leave their countries with several objectives in mind and under vastly different social and economic conditions. This mobility has prompted interest in “transnational motherhood,” the practice of mothers living and working in different countries from those of their children, thus resulting in a “care deficit” in many nations in the global south (Hondagneu-Sotelo & Avila, 1997; Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2002: 8: Yarova, 2006). In addition, the lack of immigration status contributes to low salary and lack of accountability of employers. Scholars are examining the impact of transnational mothering on children and partners or spouses, as well as on mothers themselves, asking how earning a wage affects women’s engagements with gender hierarchies (Parreñas, 2005a, 2005b: 103; Gálvez, 2011).

  Maternal migration may economically benefit children, as mothers may be more regular remitters even though they typically earn less than male migrants (Abrego, 2009). However, the emotional costs of “transnational mothering” may affect children differently when compared to the absence of fathers (Hondagneu-Sotelo & Avila, 1997; Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2002; Parreñas, 2005a). Because the mother is a nurturing and caring figure in Mexican society and her role is socially valued, mothers are often primary caregivers (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2003; Hirsch, 2003; Paz, 1985; Lewis, 1959); hence, the consequences of maternal absence may be significant. Maternal migration may prompt changes in traditional understandings of gender, motherhood, and caregiving.