Motherhood across Borders

by Gabrielle Oliveira

  This situation was very much a part of the relationship between Emilia and Esperanza. At the time of our interview, 17-year-old Esperanza lived in a house in a rancho called San Felipe, four hours outside of Jalapa, the capital of the state of Vera Cruz. She had two siblings who lived with her in Mexico and two half-siblings who lived with her mother, Emilia, in the Bronx, New York. The first time I met Esperanza, she was waiting for me at the plaza of a larger town close to San Felipe, called Maltla. Emilia told me that arriving to San Felipe was difficult and I would need someone from there to guide me along. Esperanza gave me a warm welcome and was excited to show me around and introduce me to her favorite spots in Maltla. It was a big holiday in Mexico, Mother’s Day, so many festivals were under way in the streets and people were cooking their favorite foods to celebrate their madres. Esperanza was not alone; her grandmother Enriqueta was there as well. Enriqueta could not contain herself and asked me ten questions at a time about her daughter Emilia. She touched my arm and said, “You hugged my daughter, right?”

  As we started to walk, Esperanza’s phone rang; it was Emilia. Emilia and Esperanza chatted for a few seconds and Esperanza passed me the phone. Emilia wanted to check if I had arrived safely and if they were going to cook me a big meal. I told Emilia “Happy Mother’s Day,” she thanked me, and I passed the phone back to Esperanza. During the rest of walk in Maltla, Esperanza and Emilia chatted on the phone. We got in the car to head to San Felipe and the two of them were still on the phone. In the car Esperanza put Emilia on speaker; thus I was able to listen to both sides of the conversation. Esperanza quickly transitioned from an excited mood to a more assertive and impatient mood. Even though that was the first time I had met Esperanza, I observed similar behavior in the days to come. In calmer moments, Esperanza justified her mother’s decision to leave Mexico. She said, “Look around where we live. There is nothing here but the family. She had to go and make something of herself, work, send us money, and support herself. Life may be easy for many people, but not for poor people. It was not a choice, she had to do it.” However, at that moment, on the phone with her mother, Esperanza’s logic fell apart and frustration took over:

  ESPERANZA: The teacher at my school told me that I can start teaching kindergarten next year because I’m really good with kids, I’m patient with them … I help them a lot.

  EMILIA: That’s good, but don’t forget that you have to finish your studies first, that is what the money is for … [baby crying in the background on Emilia’s side]

  ESPERANZA: Mamá! Calla la niña (Mamá, shut her up)! Hazme caso mamá (Pay attention to me, Mamá)! That’s why I hate talking to you on the phone, all you care about is your new family, the family you have there in the United States … I hate your new family!

  EMILIA: Calm down Espe … the baby is hungry, you know how babies get when they are hungry, hija.

  ESPERANZA: It’s always the same talking to you, you only want to talk fast and ask me about school, then you have to go with your kids from your new family. Nadie me quiere (no one loves me).

  Emilia continued her attempts to calm Esperanza, but with no success. The phone reception nearing the rancho got weak, until we could only hear every other syllable that came from Emilia’s side. Enriqueta told me: “It’s always like this. Esperanza thinks that Emilia and her children live in this beautiful house in New York and that her mother doesn’t care about her and about her siblings … but that’s not true. My daughter is a fighter.”

  After I showed Esperanza and her siblings Yago (age 13) and Juan Pablo (age 12) pictures of her mother and half-siblings in New York City’s South Bronx, Yago, who had been diagnosed with Down Syndrome since birth, yanked Emilia’s picture from my hand and ran to his bedroom. I followed him and asked if everything was all right. He sat on the bed and started kissing and hugging the picture and repeating over and over, “This is my mamá, my family.” Esperanza also followed us into the room and took the picture back from him. She stood up as he sat down and, holding the picture, she told him, “We are NOT part of this family [pointing at the picture]. We don’t belong with them Yago, they don’t even know who we are. Did you know that? They don’t care about us.… Look at them, they don’t even look like you and me.” She turned to me and asked, “Do you think they look like me?” I told her I thought they all had the same eyes. She looked at the picture for a few seconds. Then Yago got up again and yanked the picture from Esperanza’s hands. “It’s my mamá, my family.” Esperanza, upset, responded,

  Maybe yours Yago, but not mine.… They know nothing about me. Do you know what a family is, Gabi? A family stays together … they talk to each other, they know what is going on. What do they know? They are so busy living their life … together … under the same roof, like a family.

  I noticed Juan Pablo standing at the door, watching the interaction between his siblings. I asked him if he had any thoughts about what Esperanza and Yago were discussing and Juan Pablo told me, “I feel like my mamá is my mamá. She is. I don’t know her husband there or her kids, so the rest of the family … I guess … I don’t know them. I don’t know if they would like me, but blood is blood, right?”

  In many regards, children in Mexico respected and appreciated their mother, but moments of frustration brought up really raw feelings of resentment. Children left behind sometimes resented siblings they largely did not know but were supposed to love, that got to live with their mothers. There is no denial that the opposing symbols of beneficiary as well as bearer of the consequence—distance—was a constant thought and struggle in the minds of children and youth in Mexico. As with other children and youth I interviewed, Esperanza could easily explain and justify the reasons for migration. However, they resented the “other family,” and the impossibility of reunification fed their resentment. It had been years since the three siblings had seen their mother. They struggled with the idea that they were the beneficiaries of their mother’s sacrifice.

  Perceptions Grounded in ICT

  Children in Mexico and in the United States wondered about how the “rest” of their family lived, if those family members knew who they were, and especially if they looked alike. Back at Gemma’s house in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, I was showing Yazmin (age 10), Gemma’s daughter in New York, pictures of Daniela (age 15), her daughter in Mexico.

  Daniela was Yartitza’s half-sister, but Yazmin believed Daniela was the daughter of both her parents. When a picture of Daniela came up, Yazmin looked puzzled. The last picture she had seen of Daniela was when Daniela was fairly young. Yazmin asked: “Is this my sister?” Gemma told her, “yes, hija … you knew that.” Yazmin continued, “That’s not how I imagined … I thought she would look like me and she doesn’t … she looks like someone else. It’s weird to have a sister so far! Where is she? I always thought she was like older and married [laughter].” When I later asked Yazmin to draw a picture of her family, Yazmin’s drawing did not include Daniela. Gemma asked her angrily: “Why are you not drawing your sister Daniela in the picture?” Yazmin seemed confused with Gemma’s reaction as she explained: “She never posts pictures of herself on Facebook … she only posts pictures of bands and boys. I know she can go out and do all kinds of things because she is old, too.… I never see her mamá, how am I supposed to know what she looks like? I can’t draw her if I don’t know her.” Yazmin’s younger brother Alejandro Jr. (age 10) interrupted her, “You are so dumb, you can see her if you click on the albums … I saw her party for graduation, it was so much bigger than mine.”

  Facebook is a major tool that now, more than ever, connects people around the world. It is no different for transnational families. Because the children in the constellations are generally younger in the United States, they rarely post pictures of themselves and use a parent’s Facebook account. In Mexico, youth posted revealing statuses such as, “I am really sad today because he broke up with me” or “This is the worst day of my life,” and some allude to supporting illegal activities like consuming drug
s and using firearms. For example, Agustín at age 16 posted pictures of himself holding fake guns and wearing masks. They post pictures and videos of bands and type portions of lyrics that sometimes are racy. Grandmothers in Mexico had no control over the content. In New York City, children were heavily supervised, and mothers worried about their children in Mexico not being careful and unwittingly exposing themselves to danger.

  The perceptions Yazmin and Alejandro Jr. had of Daniela’s life were largely based on Facebook information. Yazmin complained that the pictures she saw from Daniela were about bands and boys and not of her. Yazmin knew a lot of the songs and bands that were popular in Mexico and asked her parents to buy her the albums. Ever since becoming friends with Daniela on Facebook, Yazmin started to question much of the story her mother had told her about migration and leaving Daniela in Mexico.

  Yazmin wanted to know why her parents could not travel to Mexico and what was “wrong” with the life there that they had to leave. She told me, “Daniela has this free life; she is always going to places. Why are my parents not allowed to travel? What did they do wrong? Is it because they left Daniela there that the government wants to put them in jail?” Gemma expended tremendous effort to frame Mexico and life in Mexico positively for her New York children. But constant interactions, especially through Facebook, had this 11-year-old very suspicious about her parents’ country of origin. Gemma also did not want to tell Yazmin and Alejandro Jr. that Daniela was not their father’s daughter. She was afraid that the children would dismiss Daniela and deem her less important.

  Facebook can be a source of stress and tension between families. Emilia, a mother who lived in South Bronx, New York City for more than eight years, had a Facebook account. One of her friends, also in New York City, posted a picture of Emilia, her two US-born children Alonso and Alondra, and her husband Oliver. The caption of the picture was “beautiful family.” Thousands of miles away, in the small rural town of San Felipe in Vera Cruz, Esperanza, Emilia’s 17-year-old daughter, saw the picture on her own Facebook account. The caption of the picture infuriated her. Esperanza wrote a comment under the picture that read, “There are more people in this family, you don’t know us!” The friend responded, “I only know the family in El Norte and her babies are the most beautiful ones in the neighborhood.” To which Esperanza replied, “Don’t talk about what you don’t know, stay out of it.” Finally, Emilia intervened, writing: “Stop fighting! We are all family.” After that exchange, Esperanza started sending text messages to her mother telling her to “unfriend” or “de-friend” the woman who had posted the picture.

  In workshops I held in Puebla and Hidalgo with more than 80 children and youth, and in my interviews with children and youth in New York City, online social networks were often described as the source of much tension that fed into existing resentment between siblings. Henrique, age 15, was upset with his mother Karina because she did not send him a new pair of Nikes, but he saw her picture with his little sister Katarina, age 6, at an amusement park in New York City. Henrique asked, “If she doesn’t have money to give me a gift, how does she have money to take Katarina to the park?” In truth, there was a street fair in Sunset Park where many things were free and it was three blocks from Karina’s house. All Henrique got was an image that fed his thoughts about the divide between him and his sister and the attention and investments of his mother.

  Children and youth on both sides of the border with access to Facebook and computers (41 children total) described chisme or gossip as a problem when communicating with the other side. When on the computer or on their phones, they were hypnotized by images and text from the other side and tried to decipher what it all meant. Joaquín, Maria Fernanda’s son who lived in Mexico, asked me when I was in Mexico: “My sister Florencia dresses up her daughter with really fancy clothes … but I know she doesn’t work and I know her boyfriend, the father of her baby, is a bum.” I asked him how he knew that and he replied, “She always writes on her wall on Facebook, ‘God give me patience because Marcelino is driving me crazy,’ and I saw pictures of him and he is covered in tattoos.” Marcelino worked at a mechanics shop and was studying to get his GED. I offered that information to Joaquín, but he already seemed to have a story in his own mind.

  Children and youth became attached to the information they were able to find. For younger youth and children, Facebook was not as widely used as for the older kids. Madianou and Miller (2012), in their work Migration and the New Media, describe transnational communication as asymmetrical in terms of the ratio of inbound and outbound calls, and the urban/rural and class divides in Internet access. I did observe that children and youth in New York City had more consistent access to computers and phones, which allowed them to engage more often with social networking sites. In Mexico, even in the smallest, most rural areas, children and youth carried smart phones and constantly traced places where they could use a wireless Internet connection. From 2010 to 2013, I witnessed a tremendous difference in the number of cellular phones, Internet cafes in small villages in Mexico, and children and youth’s knowledge of the latest technology.

  Siblings Coming Together

  “I want to be like my brother Agustín … I don’t want to go to school. I want to stay at home and sleep and go out with my friends and get girls [laughter]” (Felipe, age 6). I had known both Felipe and Agustín for more than three years. At age four Felipe refused to talk about his brother Agustín; he would repeat, “My mother is only my mother, she is not his mother.” When Felipe was five years old, his mother Sara sent him to Mexico for a month so he could visit his grandmother and meet his brother Agustín. By age six, Felipe had been to Mexico twice and had become his brother’s biggest fan. He once said, “Agustín plays video games all day … it’s the best. He has stuff that I don’t have, like Xbox and all the new games and I decided that I don’t want to go to school anymore.”

  Sara sent Felipe with cousins to spend one to two months in Mexico every summer. She saved all her money to pay for the ticket. This was an expensive arrangement that few of the families in the study (3 of the 20) could afford, especially when the mother herself was not authorized to travel. During Felipe’s first visit he was very excited about his grandmother’s house. It was a medium-sized house that sat on a very large lot. They had sheep, cows, donkeys, chickens, dogs, cats, and turkeys. Felipe played all day outside with his cousins and brother and was in bed by 6 p.m. because he was so tired. I was able to observe them together in Mexico. His second day visiting his brother, he asked Agustín if he could sleep with him in the same bed. Agustín, who was 12 at the time, used to sleep in the same bed as his grandmother. Felipe became increasingly attached to Agustín. They looked alike and both of them knew that. Agustín was proud to take Felipe around the village and show him to neighbors and other family members. Felipe asked Agustín to please come back with him to New York City. Agustín replied, “I can’t leave my mamá.” Felipe was puzzled. “But our mamá is over there in the other side.” Agustín stayed quiet as Felipe kept begging him to go back with him. By the end of Felipe’s stay he wanted to go back to New York. He missed his mother Sara and wanted to see his friends. He had also gotten sick twice from the food and water, and Sara started to worry about him.

  On the one hand, it was incredible to watch Felipe’s first visit to Mexico and how he became enamored of the lifestyle his brother and grandmother had there. On the other hand, it was clear that Felipe did not want to stay in Mexico for the long run, especially without his mother. In the following years Felipe grew more independent and so did Agustín. Three years later when Felipe visited, Agustín just wanted to play video games and spend time with his girlfriend. He had dropped out of school and fought with his mother Sara on the phone every other day. She insisted that she would only send him money if he went back to school, and he responded that nothing could come out of high school. “There are no jobs here. And I want to join the army, handle guns and stuff,” he told her. Felipe was fas
cinated by his brother’s skills with the games that involved fighting and killing and started to ask Sara for an Xbox with games for him to play. Sara refused repeatedly, but Felipe kept pushing and saying, “Why does Agustín have it, then?”

  Agustín also started to use Facebook strategically. He found jujitsu classes (martial arts) that he wanted to enroll in Pachuca, the state of Hidalgo’s capital. The classes were expensive and he needed his mother to send him the money. He sent his mother a group message on Facebook that included me. He told his mother he had spoken with me and that I had supported him. Both Sara and I knew that the story was not true.

  Felipe heard the discussions Sara had with Agustín about dropping out of school and, like other children and youth in this study, began to question his mother about why he had to stay in school if his brother in Mexico did not. Agustín also started posting Facebook pictures of him wearing masks and making symbols with his hands that suggested affiliation with a group known for criminal activity in the region. Felipe, on the other side, started to imitate Agustín. One day at their New York apartment I was talking to Sara in the kitchen and Felipe showed up with a sweater wrapped around his face and toy gun in his hand.

  He looked at us and said, “Everybody down, I’m a Guadalupano!” I asked him where he had learned about the guadalupanos, and he took me to the computer and showed me Agustín’s page. Those situations were unforeseen for mothers and caregivers. Relationships that were once mediated by mothers and caregivers were now occurring directly between siblings. What did these interactions mean to children and youth’s perspectives on their future? In the long term, it’s hard to say. But in the short term these interactions fed daily discussions about schooling, jobs, and the prospects of living in Mexico or in the United States.