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| 53 3 Family “Reunification” In a room filled with colorful balloons and the remains of a piñata, the mood was, for the most part, celebratory. The guest of honor, a three-year-old girl in a cloud of white taffeta, was opening her gifts, relishing an enormous heartshaped lollipop. Although a crowd of family and friends was gathered around the birthday girl, another smaller grouping was in the kitchen, speaking in hushed voices and comforting Dulce, whose husband, Francisco, had been deported the previous week after a raid at his workplace. “We will find a solution ,” Dulce’s brother told me with conviction. “But this is a difficult time for our family.” Most of the Laredo family is undocumented—Francisco, Dulce, and their two eldest children, Javier and Mina—although their youngest daughter, Beatriz, is a U.S. citizen. The Laredo family reunited in the United States after Francisco had been living alone in Albuquerque for several years. Dulce said that the time apart was unbearable and though she thought it was the best decision at the time, now she wondered if their move was worth the risks. In the months after the deportation, Francisco’s and Dulce’s siblings put together funds to cover the cost of a coyote with papers, choosing to spend the extra money to have Francisco cross with documents because it is considered more secure. Eventually Francisco was able to return to the United States. Today, Dulce, Francisco, and their children again—though tenuously—live as a family “reunited” in the United States, but they still fear deportation and agonize over what would happen to the children should they be taken into state custody. Javier, who left Mexico when he was young, told me he would like to visit Mexico, but he looks forward to attending the high school down the street from his Albuquerque apartment. He said he would not want to return to the rancho permanently, joking that he has no idea how to farm pinto beans. Mina, who was an infant when she arrived in the United States, has no recollection of her country of origin. The experiences of the Laredo family demonstrate that the state’s reach into family life is strong and point to some of the contradictory dimensions of U.S. immigration policies.1 Actions of the U.S. state can impact, construct, define, 54 | Family “Reunification” (re)produce, reunite, and/or divide families. More often than not, it is through state-migrant interactions that family is (re)constituted in a transnational space, and exclusion itself stems from the state’s prerogative to “regulate membership according to family ties” (Stevens 1999: 7). An emphasis on the multiple experiences of transnational migrants within family networks and as actors vis-à-vis the state reveals both state actions and the (re)structuring of transnational families. The ethnographic study of the negotiations between Mexican migrants and the state, and especially the production of (il)legality, provides a starting point for understanding how the U.S. state structures migrant families, as well as the ways transnational Mexicans navigate the shifting terrain of state power, building lives and kin relations in the U.S.-Mexico transnation. Chapter 2 considered how family relations guide and change through migrations; this chapter focuses on the notion of “family reunification”—an underlying principle of U.S. immigration policy—to understand state actions and how the state penetrates family life. State control can, for example, influence decisions to migrate or not, family residence patterns, and migrations that separate or reunite family members. Family reunification can include state-sanctioned and state-regulated family reunification, as well as the multiple ways that migrants construct and reunite family outside of state controls . While Mexicans and the U.S. state privilege family reunification, it is in clearly distinct ways, and ideas of when and how it should happen often diverge. Paradoxically, U.S. immigration policy based on family reunification can both join and divide family members. A focus on how migrants navigate state regimes and state categories of “legal” and “illegal” uncovers this contradictory character of U.S. family “reunification.” Here, the focus shifts from emic understandings and experiences of family life to examine state practices as they play out on the ground. There are multiple layers of power—including individual action, family strategies, and state policies and practices—that coincide, cooperate, and conflict with one another as families come together and are divided within a transnational space. The ethnographic study of the...

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