Motherhood across Borders

by Gabrielle Oliveira

  Gendered Education Expectations for Children in Mexico

  Girls between the ages of 13 and 18 had different ideas regarding the purpose of doing well in school, but a pattern emerged in which they saw education as a pathway for reunification with their mothers and as a possibility to find better opportunities elsewhere, as illustrated with the case of Brianna’s daughter Fernanda. Fernanda was disengaged in school and she was waiting for her parents to arrange her trip to the United States. Fernanda, who was actually born in the United States but returned to Mexico when she was a baby, went to school from morning until 2 p.m. When she came home, she watched television for hours as she battled her own sleepy eyes. When on the phone with Brianna (her mother), Fernanda only responded “yes” or “no” and repeatedly asked the question: “When are you going to take me to New York? You only make promises … stop making promises you can’t keep. I do everything [emphasis added] you ask me.” Fernanda’s grades in Mexico were good, even though she showed little enthusiasm for school, except for English classes. She had downloaded all of Justin Bieber’s songs onto her smart phone and practiced saying the words and translating the meaning from English to Spanish. Her teachers and principal commented on how much potential Fernanda had and how her writing abilities were among the strongest in her class. Fernanda told me that her main goal was to keep her grades up so her parents would take her to the United States sooner. One of the teachers explained to me, “she is that kind of student who is very cooperative and easy to get along with. She is kind and follows rules. However, she has no interest in going beyond that and becoming the best student in her class. She is content with being good.” The principal of Fernanda’s school described youth who had parents living in the United States as “spacey” and said they lived in “a limbo” where a person physically lives in one place, but daydreams about being elsewhere.

  Other girls interviewed showed the same approach toward education. Girls responded that they expected to apply for a student visa or a work visa in the United States so they could reunite with mothers as soon as they finished la prepa. One of them explained: “I know that they [US Consulate] don’t give visas to people that don’t have a high school degree. So I am trying to get all my documents in order.”1 Camila’s daughter Stella, who was in Mexico, also discussed the fact that she “would not be able to get a good job” in Mexico City or in the United States if she did not earn a high school degree. She was preoccupied with “ending up” like so many people in her own pueblo. The group of girls interviewed saw education and schooling and above all good performance as a “way out” of the lives they were living in their hometown. Ultimately, they also discussed the idea of education as a way out as part of what their mothers wanted for them. In many cases, girls wanted to migrate to the United States since parents had promised they would help them only if they did well in school; in other cases girls discussed the job market and the fact that, in order to be successful nurses and teachers, a person “needs to go to school and the person needs to do well” (Lilly, age 16). Their narratives matched their mothers’ narratives in terms of equating finishing high school with good grades and a better future. Unlike the boys, girls had no interest in going to the United States illegally; they believed that with their degree they would be better candidates for legal entry into America.

  The boys I interviewed did not have the same understanding of education as a way out; in fact, it was precisely the opposite. Dropping out of high school and becoming unemployed were common phenomena among the older male teenagers in this research study. In San Nicolas in Hidalgo, the principal estimated that as many as 70 percent of all boys in grade 9 would not return to finish high school. Among the participants in my study, only one boy in Hidalgo, Agustín (age 16), had dropped out while still in obligatory schooling. The other boys were enrolled in middle school but were not performing as well as the girls. Joaquín, Maria Fernanda’s son, finished high school and was about to start university. Andrés, who was in grade 8, performed well in school—in the 70th percentile. The other 12 boys of the transnational care constellations had average grades that put them between the 60th and 65th percentiles in their classes.2

  Girls seemed to be more amenable to their mothers’ education expectations and most sought to nurture their relationships with their migrant mothers by making them proud of their educational achievements. Nine-year-old Emilia described her conversations with her mother in the United States as being about how well she was doing in school. Emilia said, “I always tell my mom that I am doing really well in school. She likes it.” Before her mother’s departure, Emilia had a complicated relationship with her. Her grandmother caregiver reported that when Emilia was only three years old, her mother would try to force-feed her and was aggressive toward her. Emilia knew about this story and as her grandmother finishing telling it to me, Emilia said, “I don’t want her to get mad at me ever again, so when I say I’m a good student, she gets happy, she asks more questions, we talk longer on the phone, it’s fun.” Ashley’s story was similar. She was the best student in her class, won prizes, taught math and science to children who were older, and she was calm and respectful in class. She explained to me: “If I do well in school my mother gets happy and I think oh maybe now she will come back, you know? Because she is proud of me.” Of Brianna’s three daughters, Ashley was the one with whom establishing a relationship based on trust took the longest. She told me: “I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you in the beginning when you got here … I don’t like the idea that people come and go … and I am always here.” Ashley did not say that she wanted to go to school and do well in order to “leave” her pueblo. Quite the opposite. She explained to me that her effort was based on the premise that her mother would come back to see her graduate and maybe decide to stay. Ashley was the one who spoke on the phone the longest with Brianna and gave her detailed information about her routine in school. Brianna, in return, felt more invested in Ashley’s educational future, as evidenced when Brianna interfered by having her daughter moved to a different classroom (see chapter 3).

  According to Dreby (2006), aside from reported behavioral problems, a more widespread difficulty for families with migrant parents was in-school performance. In her research she found that more than 40 percent of children interviewed dropped out of school in the middle of their studies. Dreby (2006) found that the pattern of problems contradicts the expectations of most parents who have migrated. Similarly, I found that that the expectations of migrant mothers do not always match the actual performance of male children in Mexico. However, the expectations mothers have for their sons were more flexible than those they had for their daughters. As Sara said of her son Agustín, “Of course my priority for him is to go to school and finish his studies, but he is also a man that has to be able to make his own choices, there is very little I can do.” On the other hand, Camila explained with regard to her three daughters she left in Mexico, “The problem is that if my girls drop out of school I know it’s because of a man … pregnancy, moving to another town for a man, to serve him … and I think they are too young for that.”

  In the cases described here, girls understand that getting a formal education may provide a way out of the reality they live in. In many interviews girls alluded to the idea that they did not want to “end up” being dependent on a husband and they needed to be able to support themselves. In part this thinking is the result of the analysis of the labor market that the children and the mothers do. These claims were usually followed by ideas of a stable and happy marriage and children. Like many teenagers around the world, these girls had conflicting ideas of what their future aspirations looked like. They knew what they did not want, though, and that usually meant not having a violent, “drunk husband” who would not take care of them. Mothers and caregivers used their academic expectations to control and “keep an eye” on girls and prevent them from making decisions they thought to be bad; in this way, mothers created a narrative that implied that if their daugh
ters performed well academically, their chances of going to the United States to find good jobs and their prospects for a good life would increase.

  Much of the conversation that took place on the phone and via Skype between mothers in New York and their daughters in Mexico started with comments much like those offered by Gemma to Daniela in one conversation I witnessed: “Hija, you need to make a life for yourself, you need to do things that I wasn’t able to do.” When mothers talked to their sons on the phone, the conversation was slightly different and had more to do with ideas about being a hombrecito, a “good” and “respectable man.” Grandmothers in Mexico were raising all of the boys in this study, and mothers in New York worried about what Sara expressed as “the lack of a male figure to teach him the value of work.” Mothers also regularly instructed their sons not to impregnate their girlfriends. Mothers were concerned with alcoholism and with the idea that their sons would end up having a child or children while they were still teenagers themselves.

  Gender Role Expectations for Children in Mexico

  Girls discussed the difficulties of arriving home and having to clean, cook, and wash their uniforms before dinner every day. They complained about the lack of time to do homework and about the disparity of treatment between girls and boys. Even though I found girls did better in school, the girls accumulated more housework because the mothers were gone, which impacted their academic performance. They spent less time doing homework and finishing assignments. Other scholars have explored the idea of the double burden for girls. Results from the survey administered in three schools in Puebla show that trend as well: on average girls have 1.8 jobs at home and boys have 1.2. Housework included in the survey encompassed cooking, cleaning, taking care of siblings, feeding the family, helping with homework, and feeding the animals.

  These tasks were chosen after two pilot surveys on housework division and qualitative interviews with more than 60 participants in which people described what the primary jobs within a household entailed. For male respondents, housework increased significantly only when both parents were gone (3.3 jobs versus a little over 1 job when mothers were home). Even though the number of chores also grew for female respondents when both parents migrated, girls performed significantly more chores even when only the mother had migrated. My observations show that girls take over many of the roles of their mothers when a mother leaves home and there are changes in the division of household chores.

  The household arrangements of the children in Mexico and the tasks that come along are important indicators of how their lives are shaped by the migration of their mothers. All 20 caregivers interviewed reported that girls take over the tasks their mothers would be responsible for if they were home. Tami, Pilar’s grandmother, explained to me, “Ever since Guillermina left I tell Pilar (age 13), ‘Listen (Pilar) you will have to do your Mamá’s job, do you understand that?’ ” They did not mention boys taking up any of the tasks of mothers who left. Tami continued, “I tell Pilar every day, hija your Mamá is gone, you better grow fast into a mujercita and do her job.” When I inquired what a mujercita was, Pilar and Tami told me the three key duties of a female in these households in Mexico: lavar, limpiar, y cocinar (to wash, clean, and cook). Pilar told me,

  Well, all the Mamás, the ones that stay-at-home, say household duties never, never end. Because you might clean one place and then it gets dirty, because the kids came in all dirty, and you need to clean again. And the dishes that we use to eat, you need to wash again and again … like every time you eat, because you can’t end without plates to eat. Then you have to wash your uniform before you go to school … then if there is someone visiting—an uncle or another señor—you have to prepare him food and then clean. They say, “you need to work a lot to have this place clean.”

  The caregivers interviewed told me that boys do little in the house. As Agustina (age 52) pointed out, “there is not much for boys to do,” regardless of having a migrant mother. According to Agustina, Brian’s grandmother, girls need to be mujercitas (little women) from as early as seven years old, when they start making tortillas, cleaning the house, and washing clothes. I observed girls as young as three years of age helping to cook by using knives to slice tomatoes, onions, and avocados. Girls in Mexico learn to care for others from a young age: They learn to serve their brothers, fathers, and uncles or to help their mothers and grandmothers. Even though this is not a generalized finding of an entire society, gendered division of labor was prevalent in the families researched.

  Fifty-six percent of the girls reported cleaning the house as their primary responsibility within the household, whereas boys reported feeding the animals (48 percent) as their primary duty. The only housework boys overwhelmingly reported not doing was cooking. Thus, there is a gendered division of labor within the house. Many girls were having trouble completing their homework assignments. Alondra told me, “If I had as much time as some of these other boys have I would be the best in school!” Boys were, however, involved in extracurricular activities: swimming lessons, martial arts, and soccer were part of their afternoon routines. Andrés, age 13, was taking swimming lessons at a nearby community pool. Agustín, age 15, was taking jujitsu classes in the afternoon.

  It is also possible that the discipline and responsibilities girls assume at home influence their school achievement. Mirna, a caregiver and grandmother, told me, “Learning to be a mujercita, you know, a good girl, is about obeying rules … is about obedience. I think Carolina [her granddaughter] obeys me, her teacher, her mother … she is a good girl.” During my observations it became apparent that girls were indeed obeying their caregivers more regularly than boys. However, the girls explained that obedience was coming, in part, from a place of appreciation of the caregiver. In many instances, girls said that the one person who took care of them, helped them, took them out, and fed them was their grandmother caregiver, therefore girls felt that “the right thing to do” was to take care of their grandmother.

  In contrast, none of the boys strived to excel in their academic pursuits. They were interested in going to school if that meant that they could play sports. This is not to say that they necessarily underperformed, but to illustrate how even though mothers had expectations of all their children being successful in school, it was acceptable for boys not to perform well. Levinson 1997) found that, in Mexico, dominant norms of masculinity stipulated modest involvement with academics, and excessive attention to studies was occasionally stigmatized as effeminate, mainly because of the assumption that to do a lot of after-school tarea (homework) means spending more time in the domestic, feminine space of the home (p. 10).

  Transnational gossip and stigmatization, a phenomenon observed by scholars like Joanna Dreby and Robert C. Smith, influenced children’s schooling experiences in this research. Seven-year-old Brian was disinterested in school. He reported being teased by peers about being raised by his grandmother or, as he described, “having many mothers.” Brian’s grandmother caregiver Agustina reported that, one day on returning from school, Brian pointed to her stomach and asked, “Did I come from here?” She told him that he did. She did that to comfort him and, as she told me, to show him love and protect him from the “ugly truth.” When she talked to me about enforcing school attendance, Agustina expressed feeling “guilty” and being willing to let Brian stay home from school to avoid being hurt:

  If he doesn’t want to go to school, he won’t go to school. The poor baby already went through so much with his mother leaving him and he doesn’t like it when other children make fun of him for having two mothers, I feel guilty.

  Avoiding discussions that were difficult (where he came from) and situations that were hard (peers at school teasing him) seemed to be Agustina’s way of dealing with Brian’s emotional reactions to his mother’s absence. Though Agustina wanted to defend her daughter and justify her departure to Brian, she did not want Brian to feel that he was the reason his mother left. Agustina explained, “It’s hard for my daughter,
I know … but it is harder for Brian, so I might change the story to him a little bit, but it is out of love.”

  Brian’s mother did not know about any of these challenges. She told me she had not called Brian in a while because she was embarrassed that she had not been able to send money for uniforms and books, which were at the top of her priority list when sending money home. Brian’s grandmother worked hard to provide for him. With her own husband incarcerated in Texas, accused of human trafficking, she took a job selling peanuts and corn in order to make ends meet. She was also going through their savings to support her own two daughters and Brian.

  School Performance Incentives: Gifts from the United States

  Tina (age 8), the youngest of the sisters in the Osorio constellation, loved to dance, and she had the most outgoing personality in the family. She liked to tell jokes and perform for the camera. Her interest in dance and performance accrued costs for Brianna and Ronald, as Tina needed new tutus, skirts, and entire outfits depending on the dance she was going to perform in school that week. Tina had no problem picking up the phone and calling Brianna or sending her text messages to ask for costumes for plays and school performances. Brianna told Tina multiple times: “hija, I will send you clothes, but you know what I need from you, right?” Tina rolled her eyes and said “Si, si … I know … but my reports are good mamá.” Tina took pride in going to school wearing her bright pink Dora the Explorer T-shirt and her matching backpack.