Single Mother: The Emergence of the Domestic Intellectual

3. The U.S.-Mexican Border

The U.S.-Mexican Border Border woman/writer Gloria Anzaldúa describes the U.S.Mexico border as “una herida abierta,” an open wound, “where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.” Yet it seems this bleeding is productive: “Before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture ” (3). The border is both a line that divides “us” from “them” and a fluid space, the borderlands, whose inhabitants include the “perverse, the queer, the troublesome.” They are “los atrevasados,” those who “cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (3). The borderlands defy clear categories of identity and perhaps produce a “tolerance for ambiguity.” That very ambiguity produces fear, however, and that fear leads to increased surveillance of the border between “us” and “them.” Those green border patrol vans have no respect for ambiguity . This struggle is all very evident where Anzaldúa grew up, in the Rio Grande Valley, the southernmost tip of Texas, land that used to be and in some ways still is Mexico. I worked as a freelance journalist and activist here in the late 1980s, and I’ve decided to return in the summer of 2003 to interview undocumented single mothers from Mexico and Central America now living with their children in the valley. How does a single mother survive, build a life for herself and her children when she does not have legal status, when she is not recognized by the state, at least officially ? She is recognized in unofficial economic terms—as a worker in middle-class homes, in factories, restaurants, strip clubs, and fields. She is also recognized in national debates as a “breeder” who threatens the purity of the nation. To wit, the latest diatribe by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, whose article “The Hispanic Challenge” warns that “the most immediate and most serious challenge to America’s traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin 3 112 America, especially from Mexico, and the fertility rates of these immigrants compared to black and white American natives” (2). As with many single mothers, then, these women occupy an important position in national debates about immigration, citizenship, work, and the family, yet their voices are rarely heard. In returning to the valley to gather the stories, I also wanted to pursue how, in this particular space, undocumented single mothers might emerge as domestic intellectuals. Undocumented single moms face a particular set of issues connected to legal status, which in turn intensifies the problems many single moms face. Unlike most of us, they live in fear of deportation and separation from their children. The simplest acts, such as driving a car, become dangerous practices. “I’m very afraid every time I leave the house,” says Esperanza , a thirty-six-year-old single mother of nine-year-old Dolores who moved to the small south Texas town of San Benito from Zacatecas, Mexico , in 1990. “I ask God to help me, that la migra don’t arrest me, mainly because of my daughter, because I don’t want to be separated from my daughter. This is the biggest fear I have.” The freedom to work for a sustainable wage, to take English classes, to obtain a driver’s license—these are all rendered difficult or impossible when one doesn’t have papers. Hence, the intensification of the situations of most single mothers: the struggle to make ends meet, the feeling of isolation and the difficulty of building community, anxiety about being a good mother and ensuring the well-being of your children. Positioned by these political, economic, and social conditions, these mothers are poised to rearticulate them as well. Rearticulating these conditions sometimes requires one to work through the very policy realms that have made life difficult. In this case, “passing through the confines of the normal” means conceding that the route to freedom lies in going through immigration and welfare policy, with the goal of coming out the other side with greater mobility. Perhaps one must play the game of normalcy before becoming “abnormal,” or, in Anzaldúa’s terms, queer—if single mothers can be said to be “queer” when we live on the border of what’s still perceived to be the normal family. In many ways, these policies seem purely punitive. In addition to the imperative to deport undocumented people, welfare and...