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Chapter 5: The Changing Faces of Migration: Immigration, Gender, and Family Dynamics
- Oregon State University Press
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174 Mexicanos in Oregon Chapter 5 The Changing Faces of Migration: Immigration, Gender, and Family Dynamics Mexican immigrants are much more likely to settle permanently in Oregon today than they were in the past, at least in part because the most recent immigrant influx includes an increased number of women (Fry 2006). The arrival of women, who are more likely to stay, has a significant impact on immigrantcommunitiesbecausewomenhaveamajorroleintheformationof families, raising children, and building social networks. Mexican immigrant women are generally young (younger than foreign-born Jamaican, Filipino, Indian, and Chinese women studied by Zhou 2003). Three-fourths of Mexican women arrive with less than a high-school education, and they are more likely to be employed in farming and other unskilled labor-intensive occupations than most other foreign-born women who arrived during the 1990s (Zhou 2003).1 After passage of IRCA in 1986, we saw a marked increase in the number of women and children—undocumented and documented—coming to join their husbands and fathers, and subsequently to settle in the United States; we are also seeing a rise in the number of single women immigrants. In fact, IRCA has been marked by scholars as a decisive moment in the subsequent feminization of Mexican immigration (Massey et al. 2002), particularly undocumented immigration. Other factors have contributed to this trend. In Mexico, rising levels of education across the country2 but decreasing numbers of available jobs propelled not just men but also women into the U.S. migrant stream (Salinas 2007). In the post-NAFTA years, the displacement of agricultural households by multinational agricultural enterprises has forced both males and females in Mexico to become wage earners in a labor market that is already stressed. Labor restructuring and employment patterns in the United States have also contributed to the enticement of female workers from Mexico (Bacon 2008). As more American women enter the labor market, they are in need of caretakers for their children and immigrant women step in to fill this role. Today, Mexican men and women employed as farmworkers in the U.S. have completed about seven grades of schooling, are on average thirtythree years old, have two children, and earn an annual household income of about $20,000 to $22,000 (Carroll et al. 2005). The expansion of service 175 THEIR STORIES, THEIR LIVES Immigration, Gender, and Family Dynamics jobs, particularly in hospitality, health caretaking, and janitorial services has also enticed mexicanas, particularly at a time when the U.S. population is experiencing an imbalance in the number of available new workers as compared to older, retiring workers (Myers 2007). While macro-forces such as those cited above account in large measure for increasing migratory flows of workers to the United States, immigration scholars have also examined how micro-level decisions made at the household level act as an “adaptive strategy responsive to changing internal characteristics of households as well as to external structural conditions,” thus integrating micro- and macrofactors in the analysis of migratory flows (Crummett 1993, 153). Crummett argues, however, that micro and macro forces affect males and females differently. Hondagneu-Sotelo likewise affirms, “[M]igration is gendered. Women and men do not share the same experiences with migration, and their gender relations—patterns of separation, conflict, and cooperation— produce distinct migration patterns” (1994, 192). A gendered migration not only reshapes settlement but also redefines gender roles and family relations. Many Mexican women find themselves immersed in conflicting obligations, as they struggle to function simultaneously as wage workers, wives, and mothers—while they renegotiate gender hierarchies in their new homes (Zhou 2003). Gendered Mexicano Migration It is an accepted axiom that gender roles are learned, that humans are socialized to enact gender roles ascribed by a masculine/feminine binary construct. But gender roles are also contested and subverted in our everyday lives, and it is important also to understand how structural factors affect gender behaviors. When examining gender in Latino communities, there has been a tendency in the past to view Latinos as a monolithic pan-ethnic group in which gender-role behaviors are determined by “traditional” cultural moorings that are invariably linked to the patriarchal ideal of male dominance and female subordination. While it is true that such a perspective yields stereotypes that are consistently belied by a plurality of gender relations and impacted by structural and social formations such as class, education, generation, and race/ethnicity, cultural ideals frequently produce shared ideologies related to how social relations “ought” to function. These ideals then are...