Divided by Borders. Joanna Dreby
husband was the first to leave. He worked in Los Angeles for about a year, and Ofelia stayed with her own mother and newborn son in Las Cruces. This was a hard time for Ofelia. “It was really difficult not knowing where he was, since it was the first time we had ever been apart. In Mexico, when the women are washing clothes, they say, ‘Watch out, you could be using your husband to wash your clothes.’ ” She laughed. “You see, since we don’t know anything about them when they leave, we joke that they come back as [laundry] soap.”
Within a year, Ricardo asked Ofelia to join him. Ofelia was eager to migrate to New Jersey to see the place where her father and brothers had worked for a number of years when she was a teenager. “You see, my father left when I was thirteen. He was in the United States for nine years before he went back. While he was away [and after I married], it was my husband who was really the man of the house there in Mexico, helping out with the work. But just my luck, once I came to the United States, my father returned to Mexico. We crossed paths. I am the only one who doesn’t know him. It has been fifteen years now. Oh, how I want to see my father.”
According to Ofelia, Ricardo had wanted her to migrate with their only child, Germán. But Ofelia was concerned about where she would live when she got to the United States and who would take care of the two-year-old boy. At the urging of her mother, she left Germán behind and planned to send for him once she settled in the United States.
After Ofelia’s arrival in California, the couple moved to central New Jersey to live with Ofelia’s siblings. She started working at a factory; it was the first job she had ever had outside her home. “I felt really bad at first, it was like . . . ” Ofelia struggled to find the words and instead laughed drily. “But then at the factory where I worked I found out that so many women had their children in Mexico, and then I didn’t quite feel so bad, although I still really missed him, especially at the beginning.”
“Do you like working?” I asked.
Ofelia answered: “No. If I could, I wouldn’t work. I never worked in Mexico except in the house helping my mother out with things. But, you know, when you get older and get married, you need to do things for yourself, for your own family. So, that is why I came to work in the United States.”
“Do you think you will miss working if you ever go back to Mexico?”
Again, Ofelia said that the work is not important to her. “It is not the work that people miss back there. It is that [in Mexico] no one pays you to sit around eating all day long. That is what everyone misses when they go back to Mexico, getting a check at the end of the week.”
“Every day, everything in Mexico is more and more expensive,” she continued. Recently, one of her brothers had returned from visiting Mexico and had told Ofelia that a pair of pants costs between 250 and 300 pesos (roughly twenty-five to thirty U.S. dollars). She was shocked. For this reason, Ofelia explained, she feels satisfied that her earnings in the United States are helping provide for her son’s needs. “I know my son is missing the love of a mother. But I also know that he eats well, that he doesn’t suffer from hunger, that he has clothes, and that he can study. I know that he is okay.”
At the time of the interview, Ofelia had not seen nine-year-old Germán in more than seven years. “I don’t have any recent pictures,” she explained, “but when I first left, my mother sent me pictures all the time. I watched my son grow up through photographs.”
Ofelia said she calls home about once a week. Her son is the only grandchild living with her mother and father, and although she wants to bring him to the United States, she is making no progress toward this goal. She said that Germán did not want to migrate and added that she was reluctant to take him away from her parents. “When I call him, he asks me to come home. But he says he doesn’t want to come here, because he doesn’t want to leave his mama in Mexico. You see, he calls my mother “Mama.’ But he does know that I am his mother, because he says so. He says, ‘I know you are my mother, but I don’t want to leave my mother here.’ And I don’t want to force him to do something he doesn’t want to do, even though I know there are more opportunities here in the United States than in Mexico.”
When I interviewed Ofelia, she had recently lost her job at the factory because of a downturn in production. Even though a trip to Mexico would mean a risky border crossing on her return, Ofelia explained that if she did not find another job soon, she wanted to go home for the holidays. If not in December, she would travel back home in May. “Ricardo doesn’t want to go home at all, but I do. I cannot wait to go back. But I would just stay for three months or so. This way I would have time to warm up to my son again so I can bring him back with me.”
LIFE WITH GRANDMA AND GRANDPA
October 2004. Ofelia did not go back that year or the next. I first met Germán and his grandparents in 2004, when I visited their family home in Oaxaca. I had vague directions from Ofelia’s brother, who had told me I should look for the house across from the basketball court. We first drove by the ice-cream shop and arcade, where a skinny, shirtless boy was hanging out with four older men, and then doubled back after realizing that we had been in the right place and that the young boy must have been Germán. His grandmother, whom I had talked to the day before to confirm my visit, was not there, Germán told us brusquely.
Germán’s grandfather, also shirtless and in grubby pants, lay on a petate (a woven straw mat) on the dusty floor of the arcade. He instructed Germán to bring us chairs. Once seated, I was uncomfortable, feeling evaluated by these men and unsure what to say. Germán’s wary eyes monitored me closely as well. I struggled through the awkward silences in conversation with Germán’s grandfather, Don Francisco, who had worked in New Jersey for a number of years.
It was not until my second visit that I fully appreciated Don Francisco’s gold-tooth smile when we spoke more comfortably. He described himself as a homebody, explaining that he had spent most of his eight years in the United States either working at an industrial factory job or holed up in his room watching TV. Don Francisco also explained that he was the first in the family to leave for el norte. He had been quite successful working abroad. The family used the money he sent home to move from a house in a nearby rancho to one he built in the town of Las Cruces. He and his wife were also later able to purchase the store where they currently live. They owned a number of cattle and also a palm tree grove. “I like life in the United States better than here, because here it is so hot. And there, things are more orderly, and they are cleaner,” Don Francisco told me. He came back only because his sons migrated, and once they were no longer in Las Cruces to work his land, it began losing value.
Doña María was more outgoing than the reserved Don Francisco. On subsequent visits she admitted that it had been hard living with Don Francisco again after he came back from the United States. “I didn’t get used to it, and I’m still not,” she said, laughing. Doña María, a woman filled with an often-contagious exuberance and energy, was well respected in town. She introduced me to the directors at the local schools, all of whom she knew personally, facilitating my research in the schools. On my visit during the town feria, a number of indigenous women in town who did not speak Spanish were selling their wares. They all frequented Doña María’s shop, because she was one of the few who readily allowed them access to the bathroom and to water.
On that first visit, I learned little directly from Germán, who was then ten years old. He did, however, scoff when I jokingly mentioned expecting to see him in New Jersey in a few years, which suggested he did not expect to join his parents there. He also seemed suspicious of me. On the last day of our visit, when we went to the beach, I mentioned to Doña María that Germán looked more like his father than his mother. Germán looked up from his soda at me warily. “So you really know my dad in the United States?”
“Yeah,” I answered. “He was once in my English class and played soccer with some of my friends there.”
“And what is his name?” Germán challenged me. He looked rather surprised when I successfully answered “Ricardo.”
March 2005. Five months later when I visited, I learned more directly from Germán, who was still playing it cool but was noticeably excited when