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| 111 6 Por Mis Hijos/For My Children Early one morning, in Ciudad Juárez, on the U.S.-Mexico border, three young Mexican children—three, five, and six years old—waited with their grandmother in a relative’s home on the outskirts of the city. They had been apart from their mother, Susana, for more than two years, and had not seen or heard from their father since he had migrated to Los Angeles three years earlier. Susana described to me years later that she had migrated north “por mis hijos”—meaning both “for my children” and “because of my children”— out of necessity to support her family, a common experience for women abandoned by their partners. When Susana first went to the United States, the children stayed in the rancho with their maternal grandmother. As the children waited that morning for the coyota who would facilitate their border crossing, moods shifted from melancholic to anxious. Meanwhile, Susana sat by the phone in Albuquerque, frightened at the thought of her children crossing without her, and yet no longer able to tolerate years of separation . The children had become accustomed to living in the rancho with their grandmother and extended family. Leaving Mexico, and their abuelita, to migrate to New Mexico was not easy for these young migrants or their grandmother, and the oldest child, Tía, who is now eighteen and a U.S. citizen , still remembers and recounts the pain of that life-altering morning. As the children sobbed and reached out to their grandmother, they were taken by the coyota to begin the eight-hour trip to be reunited with their mother. The border crossing of Tía and her siblings—a story I have heard several times, from the perspective of the children, their mother, and their grandmother —points to several arguments related to migrant agency, age, and generation developed in this chapter.1 As discussed, migrations cannot be separated from the intimate relations that shape and structure transnational movement. A focus on the youngest members of Mexican migrant communities and their experiences as they migrate or not reveals the ways that generation and age structure migration. Young people directly and indirectly guide migration, and migration processes are always mediated if not consti- 112 | For My Children tuted by age/generation. This part of the book emphasizes how age intersects with family relations within global flows. Indeed, the migration of young people cannot be separated from the experiences of adults as they parent and care for children transnationally. Furthermore, the overlapping spheres of age and gender reveal expressions of—and restrictions on the—agency of young people. A focus on transnational children and youth problematizes categorization of one’s agency and generation, even as such analysis demonstrates the utility of theorizing similarities and distinctions according to different aspects of subjectivity and experience. My analysis of young people draws on two primary debates within anthropology and interdisciplinary migration studies. The first centers on immigrant “generation” and categorization by scholars that attempts to explain or understandthemigrationexperiencethroughone ’splaceinstagesofmigrationtrajectories . This work identifies the commonalties, for example, among first- or second -generation immigrants, and how migrant experiences differ by generation, accordingtothetimingofone’smigrationtoanewplace.Thesecondrelateddiscussion focuses on agency, considering the extent to which young people act or not, within global flows. Young people of all ages—babies, toddlers, school children , teenagers, and young adults—are primary transnational actors, yet their agencyiscircumscribedbyothersaccordingtoage,gender,andgeneration. The manner through which age is constructed and perceived is shifting ground: age and agency are relational or contextual, as is one’s identification by self and others to a collective “generation.” While fluidity characterizes multiple subjectivities, including gender, race/ethnicity, class, and sexuality , an understanding of age requires an especially flexible frame, in that the very character of age, however it may be constructed in diverse cultural contexts , is defined by change and movement through the life cycle (see Boehm et al. 2011). While there are arguably certain characteristics of the self that are more or less durable over one’s lifetime, all individuals and groups experience and interpret changes related to age. As young people migrate (or not), movement—transnationally and through the life cycle—is constituted through and brings about change and even transformation. The Transnational Generation: Children Who Stay and Children Who Go Despite an emphasis on adult migrants in much of the literature within migration studies, children are, in fact, prominent actors in migration flows. Children are both on the move and staying put, each...

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