Motherhood across Borders Read online

  Mexican migrant women, in contrast to Mexican migrant men, reportedly continue to remit and stay in touch with children even after long periods of separation, yielding new transnational parenting and shared child-rearing practices that have been largely omitted from the literature on transnationalism and migration (Dreby, 2010). However, ideologies of motherhood are slow to change. In her studies of transnational Filipino families, Parreñas (2005a, 2005b) found that the care children received from relatives or other caregivers became obscured because it was not performed by their mothers. Parreñas (2005a) argues that the resulting “gender paradox” harms “children’s acceptance of the reconstitution of mothering and consequently hampers their acceptance of growing up in households split apart from their mothers” (p. 92).

  Women in developing nations often resort to migration as a means of family survival (Schmalzbauer, 2005), and transnational mothers struggle with the paradox of having to leave their children in order to care for them. Members of their society call their maternal role into question when Mexican women migrate, and grandmothers, aunts, sisters, elder daughters, or friends assume the role of caregiver for their children. Transnational Latina mothers find themselves negotiating the closeness of family through remittances, gift sending, and various transnational connections.

  Although women migrate to provide for their families, the question of how much remittances and migration help migrant families in Mexico is a matter of debate. Remittances can exacerbate economic inequalities in the sending society (Smith, 2005). Families with migrant members enjoy economic advantages (Kandel & Massey, 2002; Cohen, 2004). Children with a US migrant parent have better grades than children in non-migrant households; this trend is assumed to be associated with an increase in overall financial resources for families with a migrant parent (Kandel & Kao, 2001). However, parental migration exerts a heavy emotional toll. Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco (2001) find levels of depression to be higher among immigrant children in the United States who experienced separation prior to migration than those who migrate with their parents. Others find that in states with a long-standing tradition of US migration, the migration of a caregiver, including the mother, is associated with academic or behavioral problems and emotional difficulties among children (Carling et al., 2012; Heymann et al., 2009; Lahaie et al., 2009).

  Childhood and Migration

  “Children left-behind” is a term used in the literature to refer to children of immigrant parents who are in the country of origin while the parents are in the host country. The idea of “leaving a child behind” has bothered many scholars, as it is sometimes viewed as synonymous with a negative act, that of abandonment. Mothers who have migrated to the United States discussed openly the difference between “leaving” and “abandoning”: as one mother told me about her daughter, “la dejé, pero no la abandoné” [I left her, but I did not abandon her]. Other scholars feel the term “left behind” is negative; they prefer the term “stay-behind children,” which alludes to the idea that children “remain” in the same place though other members of the family have departed. During the three years I conducted research with mothers in New York City, they referred to their children in Mexico as “los que están” (the ones who are) or “lo que está” (that which is) in Mexico. All mothers interviewed used the verb “dejar” (to leave) when referring to their departure. In this analysis, I adopt the term “to leave” as a way to capture the differentiation mothers made regarding where their children were located.

  “Transnational mothering” has different consequences for children living in societies where the biological mother is socially valued for her provision of care and nurturing, as in Mexico (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994, 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo & Avila, 1997; Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2002; Hirsch, 2003; Parreñas, 2005a, 2005b; Horton, 2008; Dreby, 2010). Author Garcia-Zamora (2006), with the help of a 2006 UNICEF-UNDP (United Nations Development Project) field office survey of Zacatecas, Jalisco, and Michoacan (three Mexican states), reports that one-third of households with children in each state were without both a father and a mother. Studies on the lives of children born in the United States to Mexican migrants or brought to the United States by Mexican immigrants are better known, especially with regard to educational attainment. Thirty-six percent of first-generation and 11 percent of second-generation Mexican Americans aged 16 to 24 do not have a high school diploma (or its equivalent) (Brick et al., 2011: 9). College enrollment rates of Mexican Latinos are lower than their peers: among children of Mexican migrants, 33 percent had completed only high school in 2010 (ibid.). Indeed, the 2000 Census showed that more than 40 percent of foreign-born Mexican immigrants living in New York City had less than a twelfth grade education, with no diploma. Children of Mexican immigrants face significant educational challenges: 30 percent of Hispanic public school students report speaking only English at home, and 20 percent of second-generation students report speaking English with difficulty (Fry & Gonzalez, 2008: 11). Further, 28 percent of Hispanic students live in poverty, compared with 16 percent of non-Hispanic students (p. 13). Given the correlation of socioeconomic status, parents’ education level, and English-language ability with academic success, these indicators should give us pause.

  The situation becomes even more challenging for mixed-status families. Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco (2001) showed how special issues arise in families that have a mix of documented and undocumented children. According to these authors, in some cases the undocumented child may unconsciously become the family’s “scapegoat,” while the documented child may occupy the role of the “golden child” (p. 35). This inequity creates tensions and resentments, as well as guilt and shame. Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco state that one of the most demoralizing aspects of undocumented status is its influence on the educational aspirations of immigrant children. Yoshikawa and Kalil (2011) have found that children of parents without documents tend to live in poverty and overcrowded spaces while facing significant financial issues, including difficulties paying rent or bills.

  My research adds a third component of many family structures—children who stay in Mexico. With that in mind, I turn to the idea of transnational care in anthropology.

  Transnational Care in Anthropology

  Maternal migration is shifting gendered notions of care. Baldassar (2007) and Parreñas (2005b), among others, address the gendered nature of “kinwork,” the routines carried out to reproduce and maintain the transnational social space across the family network. Parreñas’s ethnography of Filipino migrant mothers who leave their children reveals how the issue of their gender comes to the fore as they negotiate the dual roles of transnational breadwinner on the one hand and absent mother on the other.

  Further, both roles are dependent on information and communication technologies (facilitating remittances and motherly contact, respectively). Baldassar (2007) observes that email has had the effect of making kinwork less gendered, as male family members with email access are more likely to take the initiative to contact other relatives individually, “thereby reinforcing and sustaining stronger and broader kinship networks” (p. 22). According to Baldassar, as a consequence of their absence and separation, migrants and their children long to be with each other. According to Rhacel Pareñas:

  Contemporary transnational households have a different temporal and spatial experience from the binational families of the past. New technologies heighten the immediacy and frequency of migrants’ contact with their sending communities and allow them to be actively involved in everyday life there in fundamentally different ways than in the past. (2005a: 317–318)

  However, while transnational migrants may adopt new information and communication technologies to suit their networking needs, the influence of these technologies on social networks, daily life, and community is largely contested. There have not been many studies concerned with how communication technologies affect the lives of children left behind in Mexico by their migrant mothers. Scholars do not automatically assume
that increased use of the Internet, mobile phones, or other information and communication technologies makes individuals feel more connected or leads them to become more community-minded.

  No doubt women and their children in this study longed to see each other. Longer periods of separation, however, did not necessarily reinforce kinship ties; instead, longer periods of separation allowed relationships to change over time. Mothers were still viewed as central in the children’s lives, but they also understood their role as a co-parent with caregivers in Mexico. Youth in Mexico had no problem asking their mothers for presents and money, but they also had a sense of loyalty to their caregivers. Thus, though children, youth, and mothers in this research all had cellular phones and participated in some sort of social network, communication was complex and did not always lead to feelings of longing for each other. Fights and discussions would erupt and communication was often cut off.

  Transnational Care Constellations

  To conceptualize care, I develop the notion of transnational care constellations. Dreby (2010) first developed the approach of looking for constellations of migrant parents to more accurately describe changes in family dynamics. Keeping in mind Dreby’s work focused on the parent-child-caregiver constellation, I further develop the concept by putting the mother in the center and focusing on how care crosses transnational terrains and how it influences the different groups of children in Mexico and in New York City. Some scholars of citizenship similarly use the concept of constellation. Author Rainer Baubock (2010) proposes that the study of citizenship move to a more systematic comparative approach. He suggests the term “citizenship constellation” to denote a structure in which “individuals are simultaneous(ly) linked to several such political entities, so that their legal rights and duties are determined not only by one political authority, but by several” (p. 848). In the same vein, I propose that these individuals are linked and that the relationships they develop are determined not only by interactions between them and the people they live with, but also by people who are away from them, whom they imagine to be a certain way.

  In astronomy, a constellation is a recognizable pattern of stars that has official borders and an official designation. The International Astronomical Union explains that throughout human history and across many different cultures, names and mythical stories have been attributed to the star patterns in the night sky, thus giving birth to what we know as constellations. Transnational care constellations became my unit of analysis for examining how everyday life happens across borders. My focus is on the relationships between mother, children, and caregivers. I use this unit of analysis as I seek to shed light not on the entirety of a family system, but on a recognizable pattern of who is involved in caregiving, as well as the everyday teaching and educating of children.

  Figure I.1. Transnational Care Constellation.

  Herein, a transnational care constellation is a recognizable pattern always composed by the mother (“the one who gave birth”), children (in both countries), and caregivers in Mexico. In addition, teachers and fathers have sporadic roles that change according to time, emotional proximity, and physical distance. In the model I propose as a frame of analysis (figure 1.1), the mother is in the center in a larger circle—not because I assign her greater importance, but because she mediates the relationships that occur around her. Financially she is also the one who contributes the most. The other members of the constellation put the mother in a position of power, and she takes on the position of primary decision-maker for many issues regarding parenting, schooling, education, travel, curfew, and finances. In short, transnational separations cannot be viewed solely as affecting mothers and children as isolated individuals; rather, transnational separations shape the intimately experienced bonds between mothers and children (Horton, 2009). I use the term transnational care constellation as a spatial concept that references how care and familial bonds travel across geographic and imaginary spaces.

  Methods

  A transnational project that focuses on the experiences and consequences of care constellations requires multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork. In the mid-1980s, George Marcus (1995) explained that even though the most common mode of ethnographic research was intensively focused upon a single site of ethnographic observation and participation, there was also a second mode. Marcus described the second mode as a “much less common” mode of ethnographic research associated with the wave of intellectual capital labeled postmodern, which moves out from single sites and local situations of conventional ethnographic research designs to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space (p. 79). Marcus (1998) explained, “for ethnographers interested in contemporary local changes in culture and society, single-sited research can no longer be easily located in a world system perspective” (p. 82). He explains that multi-sited research is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicitly posited logic of association of connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography. Marcus proposes that the ethnographer can: follow the people, follow the thing, follow the metaphor, follow the story, follow the life, or follow the conflict.

  Data for this book derive from a multi-sited ethnographic study that seeks to “follow the people” and their stories (Marcus, 1995: 106). As Abu-Lughod wrote, “by focusing closely on particular individuals and their changing relationships, one would necessarily subvert the most problematic connotations of culture: homogeneity, coherence, and timelessness” (1991: 476). Thus, all chapters in this book present findings, insights, and reflections on my engagement with members of transnational care constellations made up of mothers, their children, and their children’s caregivers. Although this study prioritizes the experiences of children with migrant mothers, I found that the interactions between children and caregivers, children and mothers, mothers and caregivers, teachers and children, and sometimes fathers were major parts of the experiences of the folks I studied. I used multi-sited methods to be able to more fully explain the social phenomenon of transnational motherhood. As such, I traveled between New York City and different states in Mexico numerous times over a 32-month period in order to capture the dynamism of communities who are both “here and there.” In Mexico, I conducted research in the states of Puebla, Hidalgo, Vera Cruz, Mexico State, Morelos, and Tlaxcala. I spent most of my time in the state of Puebla. In the United States, I conducted research in the New York City neighborhoods of East Harlem (Manhattan), Sunset Park (Brooklyn), Jackson Heights (Queens), and the South Bronx.

  Drawing on ethnography as well as surveys, I examined transnational caregiving practices among women with mixed-status children in New York and Mexico. After recruiting 20 families to participate in my study (see appendix A for a detailed description), I established three levels of engagement with participants. Eight transnational care constellations constituted the center of my qualitative research. I spent time with them in Mexico and in New York and tracked half of them for more than two years. The second level of engagement happened with the other 12 families, whose members I interviewed and observed in New York City but visited fewer times in Mexico. From the transnational care constellations, I interviewed and observed 30 children in Mexico (15 female and 15 male, ranging in age from seven to eighteen years) and 37 children in New York City (20 female and 17 male, ranging in age from four months to eighteen years).

  Finally, participants who belonged to the third level of engagement included 40 mothers in New York City, as well as fathers, caregivers, and more than 60 children and youth in Mexico who were not matched. In addition, I surveyed 225 children between the ages of seven and sixteen in three schools in Puebla to understand the ways in which maternal remittance influenced school achievement. Specifically, I compared the educational experiences and social trajectories of children who stayed in Mexico, undocumented children and youth brought to the
United States, and children born in the United States. The children and youth in a “care constellation” share the same biological mother who has migrated to New York City, but their lives differ dramatically in terms of education experience and familial support.

  Criteria for inclusion in the study were that the candidates were female Mexican migrants who have been in the United States for at least one year but no more than 15 years, were mothers, and had at least one school-age child in New York City and one in Mexico. I found participants for my research in New York City through three strategies. My first strategy included three sampling methods. Sara was my neighbor’s nanny and the first participant in my research. She introduced me to different women; they, in turn, introduced me to more potential participants. This sampling technique is what Bernard (2011) calls chain referral or network sampling (p. 147). My second strategy was snowball sampling, in which research participants were asked to identify other potential subjects. My third strategy was respondent-driven sampling (RDS), which involved asking each participant to identify two or more potential subjects, and then expanded through each of those social networks. Snowball sampling and RDS are approaches used for studying hard-to-find or hard-to-study populations. In this study, participants in Mexico were scattered throughout several locations, and in the United States many of my potential subjects were reclusive and “actively hiding” because their most common status of undocumented puts them at risk of deportation. The status of undocumented also infers a “catch-all” term referring to multiple complex statuses. According to Bernard (2006), when well used, RDS methods help the researcher avoid the following problems that sometimes occur with snowball sampling: (1) the people whom a participant names may be less anxious to grant an interview; (2) the recruiting process specifically deals with the likelihood that the target population was potentially reluctant to be interviewed; and (3) RDS methods may produce samples that are less biased than traditional snowball samples (p. 194). I looked for a balance in gender of the children “here and there.” In addition, I looked for families with comparable socioeconomic status so I could generate cohesive conclusions about this specific population.