Siblings by Telephone: Experiences of Mexican Children in Long-Distance Childrearing Arrangements

Siblings by Telephone: Experiences of Mexican Children in Long-Distance Childrearing Arrangements Gail Mummert As the proportion of children involved in migrant flows of Mexicans headed north to the United States and the number of youngsters left behind by migrant parents have increased during the 1990s and the start of the twenty-first century,1 a new phenomenon has emerged that merits the attention of family specialists: siblings separated by international borders who do not live together on a daily basis. In fact, as our title suggests, some of these siblings “know” each other only through technological means—photographs, videos, or telephone. The youngsters have been left behind in home villages, towns, and cities in Mexico, or sent back to their parents´ homeland, because the parents consider that move to be in the children’s best interest. Lacking daily face-to-face contact and shared experiences, these siblings find themselves “trapped” on opposite sides of an international border. From these different locations and understandings of their place in the world, they tend to forge dissimilar life trajectories in terms of educational, work, and residential choices. In some cases, the siblings face additional linguistic and cultural barriers to communication, having been raised by one or both biological parents or alternate caregivers in radically different family settings. When this occurs, feelings of alienation, personal sacrifice for the common good, parental favoritism, envy, and outright resentment may surface, distancing the siblings even more. Unlike most literature on children and migration, which basically concerns those who travel alongside their families as supposedly passive followers of their parents, this article focuses on the viewpoints and life experiences of a little-studied subgroup of children involved in the migratory phenomenon: those separated from their brothers and sisters by the U.S.–Mexican border (as a result of separation from Gail Mummert is professor and researcher at El Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora, Michoacán. Journal of the Southwest 51, 4 (Winter 2009) : 503–521 504  ✜  Journal of the Southwest father or mother or both). It deals with children belonging to transnational families whose members are geographically dispersed across the territories of two nation-states due to their participation in migratory processes; it includes both migrants themselves and others who have remained behind and never migrated. These children are being raised in long-distance arrangements based upon patterns of reorganization of productive and reproductive tasks across international borders and among several family members.2 Our anthropological gaze on the life experiences of siblings in longdistance relationships is through a transnational and gendered lens. Emerging around 1990, the burgeoning field of transnational studies posits the notion of a geographically discontinuous social field in which migrants, their families, and neighbors live out their lives.3 While simultaneously constrained and enabled by the power structures of two (or more) nationstates , members of transnational families establish social relationships and networks, set goals, make decisions, and attempt to prosper. The specific child-rearing practices to be studied here are judged and justified within gendered and ideological parameters which social actors dispute in the same transnational social field. We understand the family to be a unit that is hierarchically organized along gendered and generational lines; that is to say, access to resources and participation in decision-making processes is different for men versus women, young versus old, and is therefore constantly being negotiated. We draw on Stack and Burton´s (1994: 33) concept of kinscripts as “a framework for examining how individuals and families as multigenerational collectives work out family responsibilities” and in particular “how work and responsibility concerning the care of children is delegated.” Thus, we will be concerned with how kinship and gender ideologies are interwoven and inform the behavior of family members involved in child care over time. In order to analyze the experiences of the children themselves, we conducted ethnographic fieldwork in 1999, 2005, and 2006 with eight transnational families hailing from an agricultural valley nestled in the central-western Mexican state of Michoacán (see table 1).4 During multiple visits to their homes, we listened to the children’s voices and collected narratives from six boys and five girls whose siblings lived far away in the United...