Strapping the Mexican Woman Immigrant: The Convergence of Reproduction and Production

Although more than half of the immigrants to the United States since the 1930s have been women (Houstoun, Kramer, and Barrett 1984), until the last two decades males were exceptionally predominant among Mexican immigrants (Donato 1993, Zahniser 2000), especially the undocumented. The numbers are converging, however, for at least five reasons. First, on a transnational level, the once typical patterns of male recurrent migration, with multiple border crossings over a working career, has been replaced by a pattern of more permanent migration. This is partially due to the dynamics of migration network maturation, involving the establishment of "daughter communities" abroad (e.g. Massey 1990, Massey et al. 1987), but also, and perhaps more importantly, because of tightening of the border through adding border patrol agents and utilizing military technology for detention purposes and efforts such as Operation Gatekeeper in California and Operation Hold-the-Line in Texas, have made the border crossing both psychically and economically more costly and highly dangerous (Dunn 1996, Massey et al. 2003, Nevins 2002, Zahniser 2000). The mounting death toll along the border as the undocumented move toward the Arizona desert, where formal vigilance has been less, have lead to longer and longer time periods spent in the United States, and a greater tendency toward permanent or semi-permanent¹ settlement (Massey et al. 2003). This more permanent settlement has led to a desire for family reunification, especially on the part of wives, who may migrate to join husbands even if not under husband's auspices , but rather that of kin or friends (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994, Mummert 1994).

Second, on the U.S. national level, provisions of immigration legislation, such as that of the 1986 Immigration Control and Reform Act (IRCA) that provided amnesty to at least 2.3 million of the Mexican undocumented (Bean et al. 1989), had family reunification provisions paralleling other immigration legislation concerned with documented immigration. Thus women's (and children's) migration was facilitated (Cornelius 1989, 1991).²

Third, and on a more social-psychological level, is a changing family dynamic in Mexico which includes a stress on companionate marriage among women in their mid-thirties and younger (Hirsch 2000, 2003). As Hirsch (2003:150) explains:

Young women...make migration and marital togetherness an explicit negotiation point during courtship. Before they marry they tell their boyfriends that if they are planning to go north they should save or borrow to pay the coyote for both of them, because "no me voy a casar para estar sola"

(I am not getting married to be alone).

Hirsch (2003:150) concludes: "The ideology of companionate marriage lends weight to women's desire to participate in the previously largely male adventure of migration." Among other contributing factors were the increasing involvement of women in formal sector waged manufacturing work and services since the initiation of the Border Industrialization Program in 1965 and with tourism development programs begun in the early 1970s, and spreading throughout Mexico, even into some rural areas (Arias 1994, Mummert 1994, Wilson, n.d.). More and more women on the Mexican side of the border thus had experience in waged-labor. Also, during the 1980s job openings in the low-skilled, low-waged sectors of the U.S. economy offered more jobs to women.

Fourth, a higher proportion of Mexican women have entered and been driven into, the labor force because of periodic economic crises in Mexico since 1982 (Cornelius 1993:342; González de la Rocha 1991, 2001; Roberts et al. 1999:241-243). Due to successive peso devaluations, high inflation, structural adjustment policies that cut urban and rural subsidies and privatized the economy, women and children were forced into income-generating activities in the informal sector and wage labor in the formal sector at unprecedented rates, in an attempt to maintain the value of the household wage. Wives and sisters thus came to expect to work and many, before migrating, had work experience.

Fifth, there was a "feminization" of the labor force in the United States as will, with new job opportunities opening for women (Cornelius 1993:343) especially...