Abstract
Although recent scholarship on transnational mothers has rigorously examined the effect of migration on gender constructs and ideologies, it neglects analysis of the lived experience of separated mothers and children. In privileging the exploration of transnational separations through the single analytical lens of gender, such research reduces the embodied distress of mothers and children to mere “gender false consciousness.” This paper calls upon anthropologists to redress this oversight by undertaking a phenomenological analysis of the lived experience of transnational motherhood. Eschewing an analysis of mothers and children as isolated social roles, I show that the suffering of mothers and children is profoundly relational. Through analysis of the narratives of undocumented Salvadoran mothers residing in the U.S., I show how the strain of such mothers’ undocumented status is lived and shouldered within the intersubjective space of the family.
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Notes
Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo calls transnational mothers who serve as domestic workers and nannies twenty-first century braceras, literally meaning “disembodied pairs of arms.” The term is the feminine version of bracero, denoting the Mexican immigrant men who lent their physical labor to help build the U.S. agribusiness industry and railroads during the twentieth century. Under the U.S. Bracero Program, the United States officially imported 4.2 million Mexican temporary workers, largely men, to offset a domestic labor shortage.
Among children from China, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Mexico, Carola Suárez-Orozco (2002) found that those from El Salvador and Haiti were most likely to have faced such a separation. Eighty percent of children from El Salvador had been separated from both parents during the process of immigration.
One study of immigrant children in the Pico-Union area of Los Angeles found that half the Salvadoran children in a first-grade class had siblings in El Salvador (cited by Hondagneu-Sotelo 2002, p. 260). Marcelo and Carola Suárez-Orozco found that 96% of Salvadoran children in their sample had been separated from one or more parent during the process of immigration, and 80% had been separated specifically from their mothers. They found that such separations also often last longer for Salvadoran children than for children from any other immigrant grous. Forty-nine percent of the Salvadoran children in their sample had been separated from their mother for 5 years or more (Suárez-Orozco 2002, p. 631).
I also conducted interviews with five fathers who had been or currently were separated from their families in El Salvador. I found that separated fathers expressed their pain over their separations from their children through different emotional registers; their interviews were less rich in discussions of their relationships with their children. I focus on the experiences of mothers here not out of an essentialized idea of the bonds of motherhood—that is, because I presume them to have closer bonds with their children—but, rather, because gender clearly shapes the manner in which such family separations are experienced and expressed. For a rich discussion of the way that undocumented Latino men’s experiences of occupational injury are refracted through their own roles as transnational breadwinners, see Walter et al. (2004).
The United States granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to an estimated 290,000 undocumented Salvadoran migrants living in the United States after the earthquakes of 2001. This initial TPS was due to expire in 2002, but the U.S. government has since extended it several times. In the fall of 2007, the U.S. government extended the TPS status of such immigrants for the fifth time. This extension of TPS for Salvadorans is now due to expire on March 9, 2009.
Some ethnography has explicitly challenged such damaging stereotypes. Debunking the myth of the “welfare migrant,” for example, Chavez et al. (1992) show that there is little evidence that immigrants migrate to the United States in search of health or welfare services. The authors instead show that undocumented immigrants underutilize health care services, often forgoing both preventive and acute, even emergency, care (21). They purposely avoid seeking public health services due to their fear of being labeled a “public charge” and being deported (Chavez et al. 1992, p. 8; see also Ku and Freilich 2001). Moreover, in rare cases in which the undocumented receive medical insurance through their employers, many are afraid that using it would upset them (Chavez et al. 1992, p. 18). Under the Immigration Reform and Control Act, even legalized immigrants cannot use health or welfare services for a period of 5 years after their legalization.
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Acknowledgments
Previous versions of this paper benefited from the helpful comments of the Friday Morning Seminar in Medical Anthropology at Harvard University, and from Arthur Kleinman, Mary-Jo Good and Sarah Pinto, in particular. I am also grateful for the helpful comments and encouragement of Cecilia Menjivar, Daniel Linger, Cecilia Rivas, Gina Nuñez, and the 2006 fellows at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego. The three anonymous reviewers for Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry also helped me refine this paper. This research was supported by a NIMH postdoctoral fellowship on Anthropology and Mental Health Services at the Department of Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School (NIMH Grant T32MH18006).
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Horton, S. A Mother’s Heart is Weighed Down with Stones: A Phenomenological Approach to the Experience of Transnational Motherhood. Cult Med Psychiatry 33, 21–40 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-008-9117-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-008-9117-z