Returnees’ expectations upon return

I did not have any plan, but I knew I had to find a job immediately… My family were also deported a month after me, and I had to pay the bills of the entire family. The initial plan was to find a job where they paid the most, as I knew I was not in a position to choose and I would not be able to find something I liked or related to the experience I had in the USA; I took a job in a call centre. It was also necessary for me to find a job where I could use my English [language] since I knew I would not be able to survive just in Spanish… it was all a survival strategy.

Nadia’s (MC, 35) interview excerpt above highlights the way in which migrants’ expectations (or lack thereof) and needs are intimately related to their motivations and journeys of return. Similarly, other participants who were also forced or compelled to return, often did not have a chance to think about how their lives would be in Mexico due to the emotional struggles caused by the circumstances of their return. Others were so against the idea of having to make a life in Mexico that they planned to go back to the USA as soon as they crossed the border. For the half of my sample that mentioned having, in one way or another, expectations of their post-return lives, the expectation to vivir mejor (living well) was commonly mentioned. In this section, I will attempt to describe what constituted to ‘live well’ for the participants of this study.

As we have seen throughout this chapter, for some migrants their motivations to return were linked to their reasons to migrate (e.g. having completed building a house), and for some others to their lives while in the USA (e.g. wanting to study university). Therefore, their expectations upon return were intimately related to these motivations. For example, Lucy’s (H, 47) main expectation was to see her house completed; and for Luis (MC, 32), it was to

complete his college degree. As for participants who intended to carry out family responsibilities in Mexico, such as Berenice, their expectations were to be with their children and be able to better support them. Unsurprisingly, all of these expectations were attached to the need to have a certain level of material wellbeing (economic stability) to enable them to provide a ‘good enough life’ for themselves and their ‘loved ones’. Therefore, the overarching expectation that I encountered was that returnees were looking forward to finding a job and/or starting a business with the money accumulated while abroad. Other common expectations of life upon return were associated with their psychosocial wellbeing (needs of relatedness, life enjoyment, personal safety, autonomy and social status). In terms of relatedness, participants, particularly young men from Huaquechula, often mentioned that beyond their expectations of getting a job and starting a business, they were looking forward to “settling down” as the culmination of a period of loneliness and sacrifice. In Paco’s words (H, 37): “I wanted to have a business, work our land, maybe get some trucks, get married and have children… have a healthy and nice life.” Being able to enjoy the culture and having a more relaxed life were other common expectations mentioned by participants living in Huaquechula. Luis (H, 35), who during his years in the USA had invested in a sonido (sound system) business which was hired for various local celebrations, said: “I always wanted to be back… there is nothing like my people and the parties here [Huaquechula]. After all that hard work, I was ready to have some fun.” Personal safety was raised, at the same time, as a need and as a concern. On one hand, some participants, including Roberto (H, 40) who experienced detention while in the USA, and Pilar (MC, 39) who experienced domestic violence, shared their expectations of feeling free and safe upon their return. On the other hand, returnees such as Rodrigo (H, 59) mentioned their concern for their safety on both levels, physical and social, which made them feel rather uncertain and pessimistic about their future in Mexico. In his words,

I was afraid of the situation [insecurity] in the country. In the community there were rumours that return migrants and people who receive dollars [remittances] had been kidnapped… one gets afraid. Imagine if it happened to us, what would we do? We brought very little money; we would not be able to pay for any ransom. And beyond that, I was afraid people would discover us [the fact that they had very little money], I was ashamed.

With regard to autonomy and social status, during several years of living in the USA, Ana (MC, 43) dreamed of the possibility of having a professional job back in Mexico and enjoying a higher social position (see Constable 2004). During her interview, she mentioned feeling

“stuck” and needing to leave the USA to be able to make some progress in her career: “I wanted to have professional development, maybe study and have my own business, be my own boss! The children would go to school and grow with other (better) values, my husband would join us within a year, and everything would be finally alright.” Furthermore, in terms of social status, many participants were concerned about being perceived as a ‘failure’. While Rodrigo was one of the few participants to explicitly voice this concern, lack of economic wealth was a constant ‘shame’ that migrants, particularly men, experienced upon return. Rodrigo’s expectations (as those of many others) were intimately linked to his perceived need to conform to social norms and expectations which, as we will learn in Chapter 7, severely affected his wellbeing. In summary, the expectations of post-return life resembled those that participants had upon their arrival to the USA (e.g. to find a job to be able to support their families), yet a key difference was that people were more sceptical about their ability to fulfil their dreams in Mexico. For various reasons that I will describe later in this thesis, participants’ expectations were rarely met. While the majority of participants experienced disappointment upon return, others mentioned being satisfied with what they found, and a few expressed having found a better situation than expected.

5.8. Conclusion

In this chapter, I identified key factors that were integral to Mexican migrants’ return motivations: gendered life course constraints and responsibilities; emigration motivations; integration experiences in the USA as well as contextual and structural constraints. With regard to gendered life course contraints, this chapter draws attention to the return motivations of returnees from various groups (other than young undocumented males) who are not usually considered in the research on Mexican return migration, such as older migrants, women, the 1.5 generation, and returnees in non-traditional locations of migration. This research supports other researchers’ findings that higher numbers of men than women are forcibly removed from the USA as a consequence of a gendered and racial removal policy, or return as a consequence of the completion of their (financial) projects conferred to them as the family main breadwinners. It additionally identifies that older migrants are often motivated to return by their need to access healthcare services, and their perceived moral duty as parents to avoid becoming a burden on their children in the USA; that young migrants from the 1.5 generation return to attempt to fulfil their aspirations of accessing qualified jobs and higher education; and that women’s motivations to return are primarily linked to their

feeling of responsibility to ensure family unity and to support their next of kin conferred to them by the traditional gender roles established within the Mexican culture. This diversity of Mexicans’ return motivations highlights the necessity for researchers and policy makers to be cautious about making generalisations about returnees’ characteristics and circumstances while developing policies which aim to promote their (re)integration, based on their differentiated needs, particularly for those who are most in need of support.

With regard to the ways in which pre-return experiences shaped the participants’ return motivations, we can identify in this chapter that these are to some extent related to their original emigration motivations, but they are much more influenced by their lives in the USA. In relation to migrants’ emigration motivations, we could say that people under the ‘voluntary’ return category were the only ones whose motivations of emigration and return were linked. Hernan, Lucy and Simon went to the USA to earn enough money to construct their homes back in Huaquechula, and as soon as they achieved this goal they went back ‘home’. Conversely, with the exception of those who were pulled back to Mexico by their significant others’ care needs, the returns were much more related to migrants’ lives and integration experiences in the USA, primarily their inability to obtain immigration documents. For example, deportees’ reasons for return were intimately related to contextual aspects but also to their gendered life circumstances as undocumented men in the USA which made them jeopardise their stay there, such as joining a gang and committing crimes. As for older migrants and ‘dreamers’, they decided to return as a consequence of a deterioration in their health or life aspirations developed through their lives in the USA, respectively.

With regard to agency, as we have learnt from the empirical data, there is no clear-cut distinction between forced and ‘voluntary’ migration, creating an extremely wide ‘compelled’ category. For most participants, the decision to return was often a response to a complex set of factors that both motivated and deterred return, affecting their resource mobilisation and readiness to return. Some of these factors were emotions and experiences related to their pre-return lives on both sides of the border; their post-return expectations of gaining more scope of action (e.g. autonomy, job mobility, freedom of movement), fulfilling their gendered life course obligations and/or professional dreams; and the information and advice provided mainly by family members. More importantly, due to the inability to obtain immigration documents to re-enter the USA, any type of return for undocumented Mexican migrants may be considered as a ‘forced permanent’ one which, as we will see in the

following chapters, shapes and influences their (re)integration experiences and human wellbeing.

Gender-role understandings and arrangements during the migration experience, among them the adoption of ‘modem’ values by women due to their enhanced contributions to the family economy and the different arrangements induced by the migration process itself (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1992), had as a consequence enhanced self-esteem (seeing themselves more than a wife and mother) and provided them with a heightened leverage to participate equally with men in household decision-making. However, other researchers show that Mexican families may adopt increasingly egalitarian gender behaviour while still retaining elements of traditional culture (Baca Zinn 1980). This might explain why, no matter what their experiences were in the USA, at the moment of the decision about whether to return or not, women were confronted with the behavioural norms associated with being a ‘good wife and mother’. This resulted in complicated decision-making processes where women often had to choose to fulfill their moral duty as mothers and wives, leaving behind their more comfortable lives in the US and the equality they had gained (Olwing 2012). In the case of men, their migration experience is meant to fulfil their role as ‘good men’ by upholding the honour of the family and providing economically; at least by building a house and covering the household costs. The actual expectations are usually much higher still (e.g. start a business, purchase luxury things, support extended family members). These hopes represented a great burden for many of my interviewees, which made their decision to return very difficult. Several participants shared with me how being away from their families and communities made them feel very nostalgic which affected their psychosocial wellbeing and made them continually consider the possibility of going back. Not having been able to fulfil their own (financial) goal and family expectations always prevented them from going back and this made them feel worse still, which made them in many cases use alcohol as a coping mechanism. Furthermore, for those who were removed or decided to return without fulfilling their (and their family’s) goal, it was considered a sign of failure and shame for being ‘not men enough’, affecting them equally once back in their communities.

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, a great number of participants changed their family circumstances, the majority of them by getting married and/or having children. Therefore, for many of them, return implied family separation, which also affected men and women differently. Women’s return usually aimed to preserve family unity, particularly with their non- adult children. As a result of this, none of my female participants were separated from their

non-adult children at the moment of the interview, but as we will see in the next chapter, several got separated later on from their partners. As for the case of men, several were separated from their nuclear families (partners and children) due to their forced return. As we will see in the next chapter, the gender dimension of the migration and return experiences will add another level of complexity to the (re)integration of return migrants to Mexico.