There are several themes that emerge from the narratives of the four U.S.-based fathers, which I have organized into the following domains, Migration as a strategy for overcoming, Working skillfully in the New Latino South, and Undocumented Mexican male immigrant worker as a fathering model. There is an emergent theme, ‘Migration as the practice of everyday life’ which I am still trying to understand and articulate, and about which I include preliminary thoughts on it.
The themes intersect and are intertwined; to treat them as discrete experiences or dispositions allows me to analyze them separately, and I can introduce some of the fathers as exemplars of a particular theme. I offer an brief analysis in each section.
Migration as a strategy for and the practice of overcoming
Cómo a la vez, es una de las poco opciones pero a la vez es una decisión muy medida que rechaza de tener menos de lo suficiente.
[It is at the same time one of the few options (one has) and a very deliberate decision (one makes) that rejects having less than what is sufficient.] (Andrés on why he migrated to the United States)
The fathers in this study had several reasons for migrating. All four had aged out of the job market. Education also was a more frequent requirement; with plenty of jobseekers, employers could demand more from potential employees, and it seemed to at least one father, that a degree was required even for jobs similar to those he had held.
Immediate options for the fathers in México were to start a family business, work odd jobs or migrate to the United States. The four fathers presented here were under- or
unemployed and in a precarious situation, and by extension, their families as well. Fathers used migration as a strategy and practice for overcoming. By this I mean,
migration was a tool they deployed that involved a geographical relocation. The resulting dislocations that occur from this physical, social, and geographical change occur at the level of the social, the political, the cultural, the psychological, the emotional, the familial and the personal, and require migrations that become the practice of everyday life—a phrase used by de Certeau (1984[1980] in another context—as a way of overcoming. Facing diverse sets of hardship and circumstances, some with a trodden path to follow and others not, fathers could see possibility and opportunity in coming to the United States that they didn’t see as having in México. Migration was a powerful way to achieve immediate, intermittent and long-term goals.
Members of the fathers’ families of origin had used this strategy within México to find work or to give their children access to education. In some cases, migration was undertaken to prevent further descent into poverty. In others, it was simply a way to get a better job. Emilio recalls that his father left his home city to follow a public works project as a laborer, “Él trabajó en los proyectos de Manuel Ávila Camacho, en lo que es poner las instalaciones para los drenajes.” [He worked on Manuel Ávila Camacho’s projects, putting in the drainage systems.](president of México in the late 1940s). His father remained employed for more than half a decade and gained skills to later work on his own in small scale projects. The four U.S.-based fathers migrated both within and outside of México before coming to North Carolina. Emilio traveled first to Georgia and worked there several years before coming to North Carolina.
Alfredo met his wife in a port city of Veracruz known for its Danzón ballrooms. They both had migrated there separately in search of jobs. They soon married and left for México City, then to the Mexican state of Querétaro, later returned to México City, and then back to Alfredo’s home town in the state of Veracruz, where his wife remains with their son.
Carlos’s first migration was at the age of five with his family, living in various types of settlements, from farms to rancherías to large, cosmopolitan cities and U.S. villages. The most exciting migration for him was going to Dallas; it was a large, modern city like the one he grew up in, and he quickly found a job there.
Andrés experienced his first migration within México as a young adult and has the least number of migrations of the four fathers. He moved briefly to an industrial corridor within his home state to work in a maquiladora (sweat-shop type assembly plants where materials from other countries are sent to, assembled into a final product then sent back to the original country). After a short time there, he returned home and eventually made it to North Carolina.
Many of the reasons that their families of origin migrated for, exist for these fathers as well. Prominent is the desire to improve the living conditions of one’s children and offer them a more promising future, as well as to resolve a family or financial crisis or achieve a life goal. Often, these desires intersect and all act as prevailing motivations for coming to the United States. What follows are the four themes that emerged under this general domain of “migration as overcoming.”
Facing an Acute Family or Financial Crisis
relationships or family income created an acute crisis and pushed them into a ‘less than voluntary migration’ (Buff, 2008, p. 535). However, all four fathers faced financial hardship and found themselves in a difficult economic situation. One can say that
economic need is a defining characteristic of the fathers in this study, an existential given. The fathers must generate more income in order to address their families’ and their own basic needs, but I focus on Andrés and Emilio in this section.
Andrés. Just days before Andrés boarded a bus to migrate to the United States, Andrés and his wife had separated, and he had lost his job and not been hired for another. It was all a bit surreal—the cookie factory union boss who arranges for him to direct the factory choir to honor a virgin, la Guadalupana; the boss who demands that Andrés go across the street from the office, buy fresh shrimp and deliver them to his house and fires him after Andrés fulfills the order; the ‘ready for a reality-show’ employment hiring process in which Andrés has the opportunity to compete for a job by going into the field, actually doing the job without a salary but with expenses covered. After six weeks of meeting all goals, he is told he is not among the two hirees. And then something he had never considered, a trip north.
With little prospects of getting a new job in México, coaxing by a family member to join him on the journey north felt like the only option he had and the only decision he could make. Andrés would not have left México had he not felt hopeless about his opportunities there. He was very close to his two sons. Playing music together or having them join him on his freelance jobs is something Andrés especially misses:
Como te comentaba, yo siempre andaba con ellos, con mis
hijos…Con mis hijos para todos lados. Yo salía ahora sí que a los coros o a las serenatas y me llevaba a mis hijos…O los llevaba y los dejaba con mi mamá y me iba a las serenatas, llegaba y los recogía, pero siempre
andaban conmigo. Más que nada po's yo siempre trataba de apoyar al cien por ciento a mis hijos.
[As I was mentioning to you, I was always with them, with my children…with my children to all places. I would go to the choirs or the serenades and I would take my children…Or I would take them and leave them with my mother, and I would go to the serenades. I’d come and pick them up, but they were always with me. More than anything, well, I always tried to support my children 100%.]
Andrés also enjoyed his circle of friends from work:
Una vez nos fuimos…a otra ciudad, con unos compañeros, bueno, como unos ocho compañeros y compañeras de ahí del trabajo de
Galletas…Entonces este, fuimos a lo que fue un cerro donde está una, una cascadita y…Y nos fuimos a convivir, o sea, llevábamos carne, comida y cerveza…
[Once we went...to another city, with some friends, well, with about eight male and female friends from Galletas…we went to a hill where there’s a small cascade…and we went to hang out together, and we took meat, food and beer…]
He had cultivated a certain closeness to a community of musicians made up of brothers, cousins, friends and other family members. “We have always felt “inquietud,” [[“restlessness”] to sing,” he told me. He has recreated this community to some degree in North Carolina with his brothers, cousin, nephews, sister-in-law and cousin-in-law, who migrated before him to North Carolina.
In a lot of ways, as Andrés told me about his decision to leave México, it seemed like he was looking for a place to fall apart, like the betrayed husband in the Merle Haggard song. In my fieldnotes, I wrote: Andrés sits in the scorching sun. Across the way, he sees a small almost barren tree. Andrés walks over to it and sits under its light shade. “Me vine buscando el beneficio,” [I came in search of some benefit], he says as he cowers under the brittle, leafless branches a place to sit in the dry parched sand. I have another set of notes that are part of the coding, and I write out what I start to call the
Revolutionary México versus Neoliberalized México archive. The archive tracks accomplishments and failures of each. Andrés’s school and work history are important here:
‘Andrés finishes secundaria, or middle school, the only one of seven children not to go on to la preparatoria. He is hired to be a school janitor once he is 15. His next job is at Galletas where he is a line worker in the packing and shipping department. He is hired, fired, rehired and fired in Galletas’s revolving door job hiring process. He moves to something akin to Aichi Prefecture where instead of car manufacturing cities prevailing, hundreds of maquiladoras await him. The wages he earns don’t cover his living expenses even there. He goes on to work as an administrative clerk/tech specialist in an accounting firm where his knowledge of the accounts makes him vulnerable and where the union bosses did not challenge his firing over a shrimp delivery, and finally he is an outreach worker in a land title company wanting to convert communal land owners into private ones. He loves to sing, [“love” circled].’
If I were to check his trajectory against the archive, Revolutionary México would have three tallies: basic and free education, entry level job as school janitor with benefits; and a not so weak, not so strong union labor at Galletas that helps him keep his job a little longer. Neoliberalized México would have seven tallies: lack of job security, low wages, no labor rights, weak labor unions, maquiladoras, privatization; destruction of communal farming. Singing would stand alone and so would Andrés.
Emilio. For Emilio, it wasn’t personal. It was financial. Or so he thought. He would come to see that these things are never separate. But, at first, it was with the excitement and sense of possibility that characterize newly married couple, that Emilio
and his wife, Teresa, purchased a large tract of land to build their home on. To buy this property, they borrowed a lot of money. Because they were both working, he as a delivery truck driver for a large Mexican ceramic tile manufacturer and distributor, and she as a sales assistant in a fashionable department store, they were able to keep up with the payments. They were making it. A job-related driving accident that disabled Emilio for several months changed all of that. Although his medical bills were paid for by the company, and the disability insurance covered his full salary, Emilio faced pressure from the company as they tried to release themselves from the responsibility of paying Emilio.
La empresa trata de… una de otra forma recuperar, hasta, hasta el último centavo, ¿me entiende? de la forma que sea, de la forma que sea. The empresa [company] will try … in one way or another, to recuperate the very last cent, do you know what I mean? In any way that it can, in any way that it can.
The experience of having been bullied by a large, powerful company made Emilio feel vulnerable as a worker, and in fact, he was reassigned from being a delivery truck driver where tips were lucrative, to a warehouse worker taking inventory, a change that resulted in a salary decrease.
Tiene [la empresa] abogados, tiene, tiene todo…para cualquier situación…la única ventaja de trabajar en esa empresa …tener un seguro…las propinas…eran bastante buenas…[pero la empresa] todo el tiempo estar pagando el mínimo.
[It (the empresa) has lawyers, it has everything…for every situation…the only advantage of working in that empresa…is having insurance…the tips…they were very good…but the empresa paid the minimum wage all the time.]
Emilio started to look for other jobs within México. He, like other fathers in this study, was surprised that he was very close to aging out of the Mexican job market:
Creo que ya, deben de ser, menores de 35 años…Ya una persona que ya rebasa los treinta años, ya es mucho muy difícil para que le den trabajo… estamos hablando de... una persona joven…
[I think that now they are required to be below the age of 35…A person older than 30 finds it very, very difficult to get a job…we are talking about…a young person…]
Emilio kept looking, but at this same time, because of the lower salary he was bringing home, he and his wife began to fall behind on their loan payments and both started to feel the pressure of the lender. Teresa was able to reach out to family members in Atlanta restaurant scene. They offered Emilio a temporary job and told him of an opportunity in North Carolina. Emilio made the journey to Atlanta and eventually found his way to North Carolina.
Más que nada yo me vine con la idea…de hacer mi, este, mi casa para mi familia, tener…mi casita, y más que nada, pues…vivir diferente a la, tener una vida diferente a la vida que llevé, a la vida que
llevé…que…mi familia no fuera vivir lo mismo…Y más que nada, esa fue mi idea, y hasta la fecha…es mi idea. Creo que siempre, para siempre, todo con la idea de estar mejor, de…superar todo lo, todo lo pasado.
[I came primarily for my family, to give my family a home, to give them a life different from the one I had growing up, that they not go through what I went through. That was my idea more than anything else, and until now, you know, that’s my plan. This will always be my plan, to overcome everything, everything from the past.]
Section Analysis
Andrés and Emilio are men in their 30s who face erasure from society through denial to access to work because of their age. Examining their work record, one can see that from the time they started working until the present moment, there has been an ongoing process of social marginalization. This plays out like a direct attack on the Mexican family as a construct, as a set of relationships, and as a site of love, hope, courage and cobijo [protection]. The rejection of Andrés and Emilio by the formal
employment sector is a form of degradation of work and what a father can offer his family. By degrading and devaluing labor, corporations are able to justify their unjust wages and the reassertion of relationships based on power. This relationship is bifurcated by the state, which stands in the middle giving unprecedented rights to corporations while with greater swiftness takes them away from workers. In acting this way, the state
attempts to disconnect the worker from affective relationships and ignores his
embeddedness within social contexts that affirm his humanity beyond the workplace. The prepotencia (despotism) of corporations and the impotencia (impotence) felt by the worker has no resolution without the state as protagonist. The worker can join social movements to try to change the equation or he can leave the country, which is also part of the state’s failure toward its citizens, but which allows the worker to fulfill his obligation, sense of responsibility and love for his family. In leaving México to come to the United States, Andrés and Emilio see work as more than just “labor for wages,” and through its articulation to family, reclaim it as love. This appropriation, rearticulation and transformation, or what Sandoval calls meta-ideolizing (Sandoval), permits Andrés and Emilio to free themselves of the predatory view of labor. They, can instead remain steady in trying to break the intergenerational poverty that truncated their education and limited their opportunities, in the hopes that their children’s lives will be made better with this rearticulated meaning of work.
Para seguir adelante [To Keep moving Forward, to Progress]
This was a cross-cutting theme; all fathers saw migration as a trajectory of progress, a vector or a bearing towards a betterment for their families and themselves. Carlos and Alfredo exemplify the sort of openness that is required to appreciate the small
gains along the way and see these as evidence of a longer process that cumulatively is “seguir adelante.” Alfredo’s reflection captures the essence of this bearing towards progress that is made available to him by migrating to the United States. He doesn’t discount that this “seguir adelante” can also happen in México, but opportunities widen through migration:
…yo creo que estamos aquí con un fin de seguir adelante y lo será allá también, aunque, este, sea un poco más estrecho el panorama en cuanto a oportunidades de trabajo.