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CHAPTER FIVE Reconstructing Gender through Immigration and Settlement After immigration, marriage patterns that once seemed set in stone may shift as spousal separations, conflicts, and negotiations and new living and working arrangements change the rules that organize daily life. Compared with patterns prior to migration, many of the immigrant families in this study exhibited more egalitarian gender relations in household divisions of labor, family decision-making processes, and women's spatial mobility. I now discuss these transformations by examining how gender relations are both reconstructed and selectivelyreproduced through migration and resettlement. Listening to what people actually say about staying in the United States provides some insight into the meaning that settlement assumes for immigrant women and men. I discovered that, regardless of the years or even decades of continuous residence in the U.S., men are more apt than women to saythey wish to return to Mexico, while women are more likely to say they wish to remain in the U.S. These stated preferences are not necessarily indicative of what people will do, but they provide some clues to differential feelings and perceptions about life in the U.S., and I will use these as a prelude to examining the reconfiguration of gender relations through the process of migration and settlement. THE MEN: "AS SOON AS I WIN THE LOTTERY, I'M GOING BACK TO MEXICO." Most of the men I interviewed said they longed to return to Mexico with enough U.S. dollars to invest in a ranch or small business that would 98 Reconstructing Gender 99 provide a livelihood less degrading than their jobs in the U.S. Marcelino Avila, an energetic man who did the bulk of housework in his family, reported that he maintained the dream of retiring in Mexico: I've passed more of my life here than in Mexico. I've been here for thirty-one years. I'm not putting down or rejectingthis country, but my intentions have always been to return to Mexico. ... I'd like to retire there, perhaps open a little business. Maybe I could buy and sell animals, or open a restaurant. Here I work for a big company, like a slave, always watching the clock. Well, I'm bored with that. Marcelino's well-established position in the U.S.—he enjoyed permanent legal status and had lived in Oakview for thirty-one years— makes him atypical among my respondents, but the preference he voiced was characteristic of the men I got to know. Geronimo Lopez, unmarried, undocumented, without property, and tenuously employed , said he hoped to escape the exploitation of his nine-to-five jobs in the U.S. and to return to a life characterized by greater autonomy , where periods of intense work would be interspersed with periods of idleness and rest, and where he would assume the family role that his deceased father previously held: I don't want to stay in the U.S. anymore. [Why not?} Because here I can no longer find a good job. Here, even if one is sick, you must report for work. They don't care. I'm fed up with it. I'm tired of working here too. Here one must work daily, and over there with my mother, I'll work for four, maybe five months, and then I'll have a four- or five-month break without working. My mother is old and I want to be with the family. I need to take care of the rancho. Here I have nothing, I don't have my own house, I even share the rent! What am I doing here? The rancho is now in my name and I have to take care of it. And I'm not that well. I broke my hand and my foot, and being here I must be on my feet eight hours a day. Over there, I'llgo take care of the cows when I feel like it. I take life easier there. Money isn't worth as much in Mexico, but one lives easier. We have livestock, we manage to live. Many of the men expressed a desire for individual autonomy and independence, and a wish to get away from bosses and the cycle where their hard-earned monthly wages were turned over as payment toward exorbitant rent. Research conducted in Mexico and the United States by Roger Rouse (1992) and Luin Goldring (forthcoming) revealed similar findings.1 Regardless of whether two or twenty years had elapsed...

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