Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration

6. Women Consolidating Settlement

CHAPTER SIX Women Consolidating Settlement As traditional family patriarchy weakens, immigrant women assume more active public and social roles, and these activities ultimately advance their families' integration in the United States. In this chapter I examine three dimensions of women's activities outside the family, and I argue that in the aggregate, these activities anchor family settlement. Women advance settlement for their families, and in the process, they consolidate their own newfound status in the family. First, settlement involves working at relatively stable, nonseasonal jobs. As others have noted, the presence of immigrant women allows immigrant men to work at permanent, stable jobs without interruptions caused by visits to see their families in Mexico. The vast majority of undocumented immigrant women also work at nonseasonal jobs.1 Second , due to immigrants' low wages and because the family no longer resides in Mexico, settlement often entails use of public and private financial support. These families use private forms of assistance, including loans and credit, to purchase medical services and consumer goods. Women are central in seeking and mediating both private and public institutional assistance. Finally, long-term residence in the U.S. entails the creation of, and reliance on, culturallydistinct immigrant communities, and women, through their informal and organizational activities, play a vital role in the development of these communities.2 Men and children also, of course, advance undocumented immigrant settlement, but in this chapter I primarily focus on women because their activities are crucial to establishing full family units and thereby fostering 148 Women Consolidating Settlement 149 settlement. Moreover, newly reconstructed gender relations in the family provide women with incentivesto organize and advocate for long-term settlement. PERMANENT, NONSEASONAL WORK Metropolitan and urban areas are conducive to settlement because they offer a diverse array of job opportunities, especially for immigrant women (Massey et al., 1987; Browning and Rodriguez, 1985). I now turn to the types of jobs Mexican undocumented immigrant women do in Oakview, as well as the strategies women use to stabilizetheir employment , and ultimately achieve long-term residence in the U.S. The ethnographic detail highlights how immigrant women informally collectivize and share information about paid domestic work, which is the most typical occupation for Mexican immigrant women in Oakview. Paid domestic work has historically played an important role in both "processing " migrant women into urban society (McBride, 1976; Jelin, 1977) and building settlement communities (Glenn, 1986). Before exploring these dynamics in contemporary Mexican immigrant settlement, I examine the area's changing structure of jobs for immigrant women. IMMIGRANTS AND SERVICE-SECTOR JOBS IN OAKVIEW Nearly all of the immigrant women and men I met in Oakview, including those not formally included in my sample, worked in low-end servicesector jobs, not in assembly or light manufacturing.3 Characterized by relatively low wages, few advancement possibilities, and manual labor, these jobs required few English-speaking skills and no extensive interaction with English-speaking clients, customers, or bosses. Such work included jobs in small competitive businesses (restaurants, hospitals, laundries, car washes) and in private households, and self-employment— usually, providing goods and services to other immigrants. For immigrant women in Oakview, the likelihood of falling into a particular job category has changed over time, and is affected by both the growth of the immigrant community and the shifting job structure in the area. When Mexican immigrant men first began settling in this area during the late 1950s and early 1960s, commercial and residential areas were expanding, fueled by postwar economic growth and westward migration . Mexican men who had worked as "illegal braceros" in the Salinas Valley and in northern-California fruit orchards found work in Oakview 150 Women Consolidating Settlement restaurants as busboys and dishwashers, and soon male friends and relatives from their municipio (town and surrounding rural county area) also began to seek restaurant work. Restaurant businesses depended on these workers, so many undocumented men were able to become legal permanent residents by acquiring employers' letters of labor certification.4 Restaurant employers needed employees who would work year-round, uninterrupted by biannual or unpredictably timed departures for family visits to Mexico, so they sometimes went out of their way to keep trusted and trained employees.5 When Manuel Galvan was deported in 1955, after working five years as a dishwasher in a local restaurant, his employer wrote to him in Mexico and offered to help him legalize his status if he returned to the U.S...