Motherhood across Borders

by Gabrielle Oliveira

  If we are to understand transnational motherhood, we must look not only at the children in the country of origin, but also the children brought to the United States by the same mothers or born in America. Principally, we must look at the pre-migration care arrangements and the arrangements created between mothers in the host society and their own mothers in the sending country. Mothers in the host country are also somebody’s children, and they have also experienced separation. This aspect of transnational mothering has not received attention to date.

  Previous studies have theorized on the concept of “care chains” (Ehreinrich & Hochschild, 2002; Sassen, 2002, 2010; Yeates, 2005) and focused on the migrant women on one side of the border; some scholars have moved further to also consider the families they left behind (Parreñas, 2010; Dreby, 2010, 2009a, 2009b; Madianou & Miller, 2012; Yarris, 2011). The political economy of care and the feminist critique on which the care chains approach is based have made significant contributions to the literature on migration, with their emphasis on the economic motivations for migration. Yet, the focus on structural factors does not acknowledge the empowering potential of migration for women as it assumes a normative and universal perspective of motherhood that should be performed in a situation of co-presence (physically living in the same household). Ethnographically based studies such as those by Aguilar et al. (2009) and Dreby (2010) demonstrate that both global feminist discourse employed by Parreñas (2001) and globalized ideas about women’s responsibilities have to be complemented by grounded studies within countries, which may reveal very different and more nuanced expectations about mother-child relationships.

  Ideologies of Motherhood

  Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1995) argued that “Myth is language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at ‘taking off’ from the linguistic ground on which it keeps rolling” (p. 96). Lévi-Strauss breaks down his argument into three main parts. First, meaning is not isolated within the specific fundamental parts of the myth, but rather within the composition and the interaction of these parts. Second, although myth and language are of similar categories, language functions differently in myth. Finally, unlike the constituents of language, the constituents of a myth, which he labels “mythemes,” function as “bundles of relations.” The idea of bundles of relations becomes important when assessing how mothers in New York City relate to their children “here and there” and thus construct meanings for “caregiving.” In any society, Lévi-Strauss maintained, “the purpose of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction” (1995: 99). As he saw it, the human mind tends to organize thought and culture around binary opposites, and tries to resolve the resulting tension through the creative act of mythmaking. Barthes (1972) defined a myth as an uncontested and unconscious assumption so widely accepted that its historical and cultural origins are often forgotten. Ideologies, thus, are born when myths are combined into coherent philosophies and politically sanctioned by the culture.

  Feminist scholarship has long challenged myths of family and motherhood that relegate women to the domestic arena of private/public dichotomies and rely on the ideological conflation of family, woman, reproduction, and nurturance (Collier & Yanagisako, 1987: 36). Different scholars, including Chodorow (1978), Ruddick (1983), and Hays (1996), agree that maternal myths perpetuate patriarchy. Scheper-Hughes (1992) explains, “Mother love is anything other than natural and instead represents a matrix of images, meanings, sentiments, and practices that are everywhere socially and culturally produced … Consequently, mother love is best bracketed and understood as (m)other loves” (pp. 341–342).

  Widespread ideologies of motherhood hold that mothering involves the preservation, nurturance, and training of children so they will have a full adult life (Ruddick, 1989). As feminists have argued, mothers are held more responsible for this outcome than fathers. The ideology depends upon biologically and culturally essentialist notions of motherhood that have been critiqued by anthropologists. For example, in her ethnography of motherhood in a deeply impoverished community in northeastern Brazil, Scheper-Hughes (1992) shows that mothers delayed attachment until they saw that their child would survive. Scheper-Hughes insists, “As fatherhood is social, so is motherhood. Motherhood entails a choice. One as a woman is, you might say, existentially thrown into the world as a potential mother. But motherhood begins with an acceptance, an enfolding, a willingness to nurture a child” (1992: 4).

  Thus, even the biological is social; that is, humans interpret the biological in sociocultural ways. Hays (1996) termed this the “cultural contradictions of motherhood,” the concept of ideologies of motherhood that are often internally conflicting. As Drummond (1978) argues, “the cultural unit of mother is internally contradictory, and it should be emphasized that this means more than simple normative variation in the way particular women in particular societies mother” (p. 12). Hays (1996), in her work with American mothers, explains that women who are working mothers struggle with the demands on their time and also with how they are supposed to behave. Hays argues that the societies in which women live generate ambivalence if women are expected to work outside the home but are also expected to take on child-rearing as a full-time job. She calls this ideology intensive mothering and discusses how children become sacred and mothers become the primary responsible parties. In a similar vein, much of the discussion of sacrifice within female migration places tremendous pressure on migrant mothers to succeed and provide for their children. Thus, the very act of leaving their children in search of a better future, for them, goes against much of the discourse regarding what a “good” mother is.

  A mother is both a normative concept—the ideal as to what a mother should be—and the experiences of actually being, or having, a mother. What do we mean when we use the word mother? Madianou and Miller (2012) explain, “Moral panics regularly erupt about what constitutes good, or ‘good-enough’ mothering” (p. 10). In addition, motherhood is a constant trope in ideological debate. As Hondagneu-Sotelo states, “ ‘Rethinking the family’ prompts the rethinking of motherhood, allowing us to see that the glorification and exaltation of isolationist, privatized mothering is historically and culturally specific” (2003: 319).

  Transnational Motherhood

  Rhacel Salazar Parreñas states,

  Transnational mothering refers to the organizational reconstitution of motherhood that accommodates the temporal and spatial separations forced by migration. This arrangement forms new meanings of motherhood and expands the concept of “mothering” to encompass breadwinning. (2010: 1827)

  As Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997) explain, “immigrant women who work and reside in the United States while their children remain in their countries of origin constitute one variation in the organizational arrangements, meanings and priorities of motherhood” (p. 139). While these definitions and descriptions inspired the very origin of my own work, in this research I expand this concept by examining how these women engage with the perceived duties of motherhood. I use the concept of transnational care constellations to address the recognizable pattern of who is involved in the caregiving, everyday teaching, and educating of children.

  In contrast to men, when women migrate they undertake a journey that may clash with the gender ideology present in their country of origin. This journey may be transformative for women, but it can also reproduce patriarchal structures of their home country. During the Bracero Program, for example, Mexican men migrated to the United States as breadwinners to fulfill that role for the family. Immigrant women, on the other hand, have had to cope with prejudice, gossip, stigma, and guilt (Hirsh, 2003). In part because of gendered stereotypes, women are more likely to find work in the domestic world, taking care of other children. Studies of migrant women who leave the Philippines or Sri Lanka show precisely the difficulties they face when trying to “keep up” with the expectations of the role mothers fulfill in their countries. Pratt (2012) argues that transnati
onal mothering simply cannot overcome distance. She calls the experience of being separated from children “genuinely traumatic” and asserts that “cyborg mothering,” or the use of technology to fulfill maternal roles, is an illusion for most poor migrant mothers (Pratt, 2012: 70). In her book So, How’s the Family?, Hochschild (2013) describes how the concept of an “ideal mother” varied from one ethnic or religious group to another within Kerala (154). However, she states that “migrants from all these groups shared roughly the same vision of the ideal mother as a woman who lives with her children” (154).

  Like Scheper-Hughes (1992) and Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997), I understand motherhood as not biologically predetermined but instead as socially constructed. Even when mothers describe the physical aspects of being pregnant and giving birth, their narratives are socioculturally patterned and expressed. Transnational mothers are embedded in transnational families. The definition of family, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Sociology (Scott & Marshall 2009), is “a group made up of individuals who are related by bonds of blood, sexual mating or legal ties.” Family, as conceptualized by feminists, has been described as a gendered system of reproduction and cultural transmission or a space for gendered social relations (Sørensen, 2005: 3). In migration studies, the identification of family with a domestic, bounded group is problematic.

  Portrayals that equate migration with family disintegration are sometimes founded on ethnocentric bias (Zentgraff & Chinchilla, 2012). Parreñas (2010) describes the backlash against mothers who have chosen to migrate and are “vilified in the news media and local communities” (p. 1830). Transnational families, “being here and there” (Hondagneu-Sotelo & Avila, 1997; Dreby, 2010), are more fluid; they do not belong to only one nation or place. This fluidity influences the ideals behind caregiving. Women find themselves struggling between what is expected from them as mothers versus what they want and can do for their children. Thus, to analyze how members of families negotiate obligations and care for each other—especially the children involved—across borders, I take as a starting point the separation of kin, where biological mothers are physically separated from some of their children (see Baldassar, 2008). Duties such as taking care of children and parenting do not end when people move from one nation to another; instead, these concepts shift and adapt. I look at the practices and processes of transnational caregiving that are mediated by both mothers and caregivers, as well as cultural notions of obligation that appear through negotiated commitments within but not restricted to migrant female mothers in New York City, their children, and their children’s caregivers in Mexico (Baldassar, Baldock, & Wilding, 2007).

  The constellation in this chapter represents patterns in intergenerational relationships as well as in caregiving practices. The first pattern is that women struggle with a range of ideologies of motherhood as they make sense of their choices. They discuss the concepts of abandoning and leaving family members behind. Mothers and caregivers shared an understanding of the decision behind the biological mother’s departure. The decision to leave was described by mothers as fundamentally linked to the idea of being a good mother. The second pattern is that the decision to migrate was fed by other equally complex ideas such as “being a good wife,” leaving a violent and “shameful” social situation, and seeking a “better life” for themselves. Third, these women carry an emotional burden: mothers carried the guilt of abandonment and were more financially than emotionally present in the lives of their children left in Mexico. Fourth, at the same time, mothers established very high expectations for children left in Mexico. These expectations were expressed through weekly money transfers, phone calls to schools, and constant insistence that the migration “has to be worth it,” meaning that their migration to the United States has to have a visible payoff. Thus, the idea of motherhood is a blend of moralities; a set of habits that are constantly sanctioned. Finally, changing or adapting these customs was an everyday process, expressed, for example, by the act of leaving. The act of migrating is done in order to uphold and maintain norms of care and motherhood, yet the migration requires constant negotiation of ideologies of motherhood.

  Mexican Migrant Mothers

  Women in Mexico deal with a range of ideologies of motherhood, which influence their own practices. First, there is a strong tradition, rooted in a Catholic matrix, of marianismo. As Maria Fernanda (age 44) answered when I asked her what motherhood meant to her, “It is what God and what the Virgin of Guadalupe want from us … to be good mothers and good women.” Many of the women I interviewed frequently referred to God and the Virgin of Guadalupe when discussing their responsibilities and duties toward their children and families. References to God and the Virgin of Guadalupe as a “good” role model versus “bad” and/or “disgraced” can be traced to symbols, myths, and models of femininity in Mexico (Paz, 1985; Anzaldúa, 1987).

  In Mexico, Mexican mothers’ caregiving role is often celebrated and linked to the self-sacrificing characteristics of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Dreby, 2007). According to Gutmann (2007), “certain prevailing notions of maternal instincts are some of the products and reflections of standard Catholic doctrine promoting female domesticity” (p. 64). Anthropologist Antonella Fagetti explains that motherhood is a rare source of prestige for some women:

  Motherhood is highly valued by men and women, because to be a mother the woman fulfills the destiny God assigned for her and they should implement God’s will. The duty of a couple is to care for their children in a relationship where they complement each other: the man should find through his work a way of supporting his family, and the woman should suffer the pains of giving birth, should nurture and raise her children. (1995: 303–304)

  Marianismo is a strong, traditional gender ideology that influenced many of the women I interviewed. However, this research was conducted in a context of significant social transformation. Other gender ideologies emerging from Protestant traditions, secular discussions, popular culture, and feminism were also ambient.

  Certainly, these women encountered new ideologies as they migrated. Thus, they drew upon a broad repertoire of gender ideologies in their efforts to recast transnational motherhood. Napolitano (2016) in her book Migrant Hearts and the Atlantic Return also explores the complex feelings Latin American women have while living in Rome. Even though they are closer to the Catholic religion, they struggle with the lived experience of religion which differs from what is being preached.

  Women in New York described their experience as being mothers “here” and “from here,” comparing their relationships with their children who were in the United States and in Mexico. These comparisons involved discussions of school, money, curfew, respect, and how to discipline children. Even though most caregivers in Mexico were not actively trying to take over the role of the biological mothers, intergenerational tensions between mothers in New York and grandmothers in Mexico became apparent. I observed mothers disciplining their children in their homes in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens.

  Most of them were impatient with the children, constantly putting them in “time out,” yelling, smacking them on the top of the head, or threatening them with “no playing today” or “no soda.” Caregivers in Mexico were more permissive and affectionate with the grandchildren they were raising. I observed multiple phone calls between mothers in New York City and caregivers in Mexico during which the mother would warn the grandmother to be stricter and the grandmother would imply that strict discipline is for the mother to mete out. For example, in one weekly phone call about everyday decisions regarding her daughters in Mexico, Emilia in the Bronx insisted, “you know you can’t let her do that,” and Ester in Mexico responded, “well I can only do so much, you are the mother.” Emilia then questioned why Ester had been such a strict mother and pointed out how differently she is now raising her granddaughters. The fact that mothers in New York provided for all their children—through different strategies and choices that included money, gifts, co-caregiving, and single care
giving—created spaces and ways of “taking care” that they had not known could exist.

  As much as archetypes in Mexican literature shed light on the phenomenon of transnational motherhood, they are also easy traps to fall into when analyzing women’s words. Throughout multiple interviews over a period of two years, I found that the use of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the language of sacrifice also worked as ways to comfort these mothers and help them deal with the guilt they have suffered. For instance, most of the sacrifice language appeared in the first and second interviews as a way to “open up” about their experiences, and perhaps test in the reaction of the researcher as to how they would be judged. To lock the analysis within the symbols of marianismo and the cultural analysis of the role of women and religion in Mexico is to ignore the narratives these women had after talking about sacrifice, the duty of motherhood, and God’s expectations. They were also women with desires for a better life for themselves. As Sara struggled to verbally express the fact that she also wanted a “chance” to live a better life, she told me, “it’s hard to say [it] because it sounds so selfish “I feel bad, but I didn’t want to stay in that little town, there was nothing there for me [to do].” She paused and then continued, “you know the things women are supposed to do … I didn’t want that.”