Divided by Borders. Joanna Dreby
with both parents abroad, although differences are not statistically significant.24 There is no statistically significant difference in amount of remittances reported by sons and daughters.
In interviews children, like their parents, were vague in discussing monetary remittances. All children, however, even those of very young ages, understood the economic nature of their parents’ migrations. A five-year-old girl said her parents went to the United States “because they are earning money there.” An eight-year-old told me his mother migrated after his parents split up, “because there we were going to have a different life and she was going to earn more money.” A nine-year-old boy explained: “My dad is there so that he can send us money.” I asked, “How much does he send?” The boy replied, “I don’t know.” Virtually all children responded similarly; they understood that their parents had migrated to support them, but few told me how much money their parents sent home and how often. Interestingly, 77 percent of students of migrant parents in the Mixteca reported specific details about how much money parents sent home and how often. It is not necessarily that children do not know details about parents’ remittances; it is that they do not want to talk about them.
Given the importance of money to parents’ sacrifices—that parents leave home in order to provide for their children financially—and children’s ability to answer survey questions about monetary matters, the reluctance of children and parents to describe the financial aspects of their relationship during periods of separation is interesting. It suggests their unwillingness to use remittances as a measure of the quality of their relationship once away. For children of divorce, suggests Gry Mette Haugen, “money may symbolize a currency for both love and care.”25 Yet for transnational families, money risks replacing love and care. While money matters perhaps more than anything else, parents and children resist defining their relationship as purely economic in nature.
Changing Families over Time
Because of their status as low-wage, undocumented workers, both mothers and fathers have difficulties in meeting their economic goals of migration. The longer it takes to meet these objectives, the more likely it is for parents’ relationships with children in Mexico to be affected by changing family dynamics. For both mothers and fathers, new marital relationships and additional children challenge relationships with children back home.
Marital discord frequently arises in immigrant families as couples find they must adjust their relationships to the U.S. context.26 For fathers who migrate without wives, accusations of infidelities affect relationships with children in Mexico.27 One migrant father said his relationship with his oldest daughter was damaged by false rumors that he had had a baby with his sister-in-law. When this daughter migrated as a young adult, she refused to live with him; he complained that to this day she does not trust or respect his fatherly advice. A migrant father of four teens told me that his wife suspected he had another wife in the United States. He said this about his most recent trip home: “My two older boys came to me together and they said, ‘Dad, if you have another wife, we don’t want you here. You can leave.’ ” At times, such accusations were based on rumors; at other times, men I interviewed did have a new partner in the United States, although they still maintained ties to their wife and children in Mexico.
For women who migrate on their own, it is fairly common to remarry once in the United States. Relationships with stepfathers can be very difficult for children in Mexico to accept.28 Moreover, a new partner may not recognize a woman’s children back in Mexico as part of their new family. Neighbors criticize mothers who have lost touch with their children in Mexico, saying these women have remarried and that the new husband is unwilling to provide for another man’s children. One woman I interviewed praised her husband for not being like others; he had accepted her two daughters back home as his own. “My girls even call him papi.” Couples migrating together are not immune from marital problems.29 Many divorce or separate once in the United States. For these couples, relationships with new partners are a source of tension with children in Mexico.
It is also hard for children in Mexico to share their parents with siblings born abroad. A consistent theme in interviews with parents was how the birth of children in the United States threatened their relationships with children in Mexico. One migrant father, for example, wondered whether his two children in Mexico would accept his newborn son, but then he decided, “they are young enough to grow attached to him.” Another explained that his daughters in Mexico are jealous of his U.S.-born child: “Once one of the girls asked me to go home because [she worries that] if I don’t I am going to love the one that was born here more than them.” A mother who joined her husband two years earlier left her daughters in Mexico and subsequently had a baby boy in the United States. She complained that on the phone “the girls reproach me. They are jealous, extremely jealous, the younger one more than the older one.”
Children in Mexico view U.S.-born children as a potential threat. Younger children, in particular, fear that U.S.-born siblings or half-siblings will compete more successfully for their parents’ love and attention because they live with the parents. Fatima’s mother, for example, had a baby in New York City, brought the baby back to Mexico to live with Fatima and her grandmother in San Ángel, and then returned north. Fatima—age eleven at the time—said, “Sometimes I think my mom loves my little sister more because she was born there with her. I feel like she gives her more love. When she [the sister] arrived, I didn’t like her.” A sixteen-year-old told me, “I don’t understand—it is so ignorant [that his father has a child in the United States]. If he [father] cannot make it with us, how can he with another one?” In effect, U.S.-born children not only compete with children in Mexico for scarce parental resources, but also undermine parents’ statements that migration to the United States was undertaken for the sake of their children back in Mexico.
Children’s fears are not entirely unfounded. For mothers, the pain of separation is so great that having a new child in the United States may make them feel better. According to one mother, who had a daughter in Mexico and two U.S.-born children, “It is like you carry the weight of all the love that you have been holding in and then you put it on them,” that is, the U.S.-born children. Fathers are often much more involved with the care of U.S.-born children than they had been with children in Mexico; when both partners work in the United States, they tend to share child care, and many men migrated while their Mexican-born children were still infants.30 In fact, a surprising number of fathers (ten) left a pregnant wife and did not get to meet their youngest child until they returned home to visit. One father explained: “In fact, she didn’t even tell me about the baby until I had arrived here, because she didn’t want me to worry.” A father who returned to San Ángel with his U.S.-born daughter and his wife to reunite with the couple’s son said that his son is not close to him and that the son thinks that the father loves his daughter more. The father insisted that he loves his son but admitted it is not the same. “I also feel different [toward him]. I raised my daughter since she was born. I bathed her, I changed her diapers, I prepared her bottles. I never did that for my son, because I was away working in the north when he was little.”
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