Across Generations: Immigrant Families in America

8. Negotiating Work and Parenting over the Life Course: Mexican Family Dynamics in a Binational Context

190 8 Negotiating Work and Parenting over the Life Course Mexican Family Dynamics in a Binational Context Joanna Dreby Every year, more than 500,000 Mexicans migrate to the United States.1 Tens of thousands leave children behind in Mexico when they do.2 These migrants make an unusual, but common, parenting decision. Taking advantage of the economic disparities between the United States and Mexico , parents move to places, where they can earn more for their human labor , while their children remain in hometowns in Mexico, where the cost of living is low. In this sense, migration is a gamble; by leaving children behind, migrant parents hope to better provide for their children. Their migration represents a sacrifice of the present for the future. In some ways, Mexican migrant parents’ strategy is not so different from those of other working parents in the United States. Like many American working parents, Mexican migrants put in long hours on the job and entrust the care of their children to others.3 They expect that through continued labor force participation, they will be able to enhance their children’s opportunities. They feel conflicted about their decisions over how to balance work and home life.4 Yet transnational parents work thousands of miles away from their children. Unable to see their children at the end of every day, these parents make an enormous sacrifice in their work-family life balance. Negotiating Work and Parenting over the Life Course 191 This chapter describes how Mexican migrants, both mothers and fathers , reconcile the demands of their work life with those of parenting their children from a distance. In what follows, I briefly review the differences between the sacrifices made by mothers and fathers. I then consider how social conditions, changes in family composition over time, and the sharing of parental roles with children’s caregivers affect parents’ relationships with their children and the gendered expectations of parents’ migrations . In doing so I focus on how migrant men and women seek to achieve a work-family life balance over time, in accordance with their— and their children’s—changing needs. Past Patterns Mexican fathers’ decisions to migrate without their children are not new. What scholars previously termed “split-family migration” was common a century ago for, among others, Chinese, Polish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants to the United States.5 From 1870 to 1920, more than two-thirds of Italian migrants were men; the majority supported wives and children in Italy with remittances.6 Male Chinese immigrants outnumbered women 18 to 1 in 1860 and 26 to 1 in 1890, and more than half left wives at home in China.7 Many men gradually brought their family members to the United States when possible, although return migration rates were also high; between 1900 and 1920, more than a third of immigrants to the United States returned home.8 Unlike Chinese and Italian immigrants, at the turn of the twentieth century Mexican families generally migrated together. Indeed, for most of the nineteenth century— even after the Mexican-American War (1846– 48), when the United States took more than 500,000 square miles of land previously belonging to Mexico—the U.S.–Mexican border was much more porous than it is today.9 In fact, family migration grew considerably during the upheaval of the Mexican Revolution (1913–20).10 Yet with the economic turmoil of the Great Depression of the 1930s, entire families were sent back to Mexico during deportation campaigns.11 By 1940, the Mexican American population was just half what it had been only ten years earlier.12 Not until the mid-twentieth century did typical Mexican migrants begin to look more like those from Europe and Asia years earlier. After labor shortages during World War II, the United States instituted the Bracero 192 Joanna Dreby Program (1942–64), which allowed Mexican men, but not women, to migrate on temporary labor contracts.13 Unlike immigrants from other countries , who generally settled in the cities, braceros worked in agriculture, returning to Mexico at the end of the growing season.14 The Bracero Program was instrumental in establishing an entrenched pattern of male-led temporary migration between Mexico and the United States. Ever since, many Mexican communities—and families—have come to depend on some of their members seeking employment north of the border.15 The migration pattern in which men worked abroad and women stayed in the...