"I'm Here, but I'm There"The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood [chapter]

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Ernestine Avila
2003 Gender and U.S. ImmigrationContemporary Trends  
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more » ... ation in the organizational arrangements ofmotherhood. The authors call this arrangement "transnational motherhood. "On the basis ofa survey, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic materials gathered in Los Angeles, they examine how Latina immigrant domestic workers transform the meanings of motherhood to accommodate these spatial and temporal separations. The article examines the emergent meanings of motherhood and alternative child-rearing arrangements. It also discusses how the women view motherhood in relation to their employment, as well as their strategies for selectively developing emotional ties with theiremployers' children andfor creating new rhetorics of mothering standards on the basis of what they view in their employers 'homes. While mothering is generally understood as practice that involves the preservation, nurturance, and training of children for adult life (Ruddick 1989), there are many contemporary variants distinguished by race, class, and culture (Collins 1994; Dill 1988 Dill , 1994 Glenn 1994) . Latina immigrant women who work and reside in the United States while their children remain in their countries of origin constitute one variation in the organizational arrangements, meanings, and priorities of motherhood. We call this arrangement "transnational motherhood," and we explore how the meanings of motherhood are rearranged to accommodate these spatial and temporal separations. In the United States, there is a long legacy of Caribbean women and African American women from the South, leaving their children "back home" to seek work in the North. Since the early 1980s, thousands of Central American women, and increasing numbers of Mexican women, have migrated to 548 Hondagneu-Sotelo, Avila / TRANSNATIONAL MOTHERHOOD 549 the United States in search of jobs, many of them leaving their children behind with grandmothers, with other female kin, with the children's fathers, and sometimes with paid caregivers. In some cases, the separations of time and distance are substantial; 10 years may elapse before women are reunited with their children. In this article we confine our analysis to Latina transnational mothers currently employed in Los Angeles in paid domestic work, one of the most gendered and racialized occupations.' We examine how their meanings of motherhood shift in relation to the structures of late-20th-century global capitalism. Motherhood is not biologically predetermined in any fixed way but is historically and socially constructed. Many factors set the stage for transnational motherhood. These factors include labor demand for Latina immigrant women in the United States, particularly in paid domestic work; civil war, national economic crises, and particular development strategies, along with tenuous and scarce job opportunities for women and men in Mexico and Central America; and the subsequent increasing numbers of female-headed households (although many transnational mothers are married). More interesting to us than the macro determinants of transnational motherhood, however, is the forging of new arrangements and meanings of motherhood. Central American and Mexican women who leave their young children "back home" and come to the United States in search of employment are in the process of actively, if not voluntarily, building alternative constructions of motherhood. Transnational motherhood contradicts both dominant U.S., White, middle-class models of motherhood, and most Latina ideological notions of motherhood. On the cusp of the millennium, transnational mothers and their families are blazing new terrain, spanning national borders, and improvising strategies for mothering. It is a brave odyssey, but one with deep costs. Immigration: Gendering Transnational Perspectives We pursue this project by drawing from, and engaging in, dialogue with literature on immigration and transnational frameworks; family and motherhood; and women's work, place, and space. The last decade has witnessed the emergence of transnational perspectives of migration. Emerging primarily from postcolonial, postmodern-inspired anthropology, and explicitly challenging the linear, bipolar model of "old country" and "new world," of "sojourner" and "settler" that is typical of assimilationist models and other well-established immigration paradigms, transnationalist proponents argue that the international circulation of people, goods, and ideas creates new transnational cultures, identities, and community spheres (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 1994; Kearney 1995; Rouse 1991). Accordingly, these fluid entities become semiautonomous spheres in their own right, transcending national borders. The new emergent cultures and hybrid ways of life resemble neither those in the place of origin nor the place of destination. Although we welcome these insights, we raise three objections to the transnational perspective. First, we object to transnationalism's emphasis on circulation 550 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 1997 and the indeterminance of settlement. While significant segments of foreign-born Latinos regularly return to their countries for annual fiestas or to visit family members, most Latino immigrants are here to stay, regardless of their initial migration intentions. Most Latina/o immigrant workers in California are not working in industries with seasonal labor demand-agriculture employs only a small fraction of Mexicans for example-but in urban-based jobs requiring stability of employment.2 A glance at cities, suburbs, and rural areas around California testifies to the demographic transformation, as new Latina/o communities have emerged in neighborhoods that were previously African American or White. While some of the Latina/o residents in these diaspora communities are involved in transnational political organizations and hometown associations, many more are involved in activities and organizations firmly rooted in the United States, with local Catholic parishes or storefront Evangelical churches, Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs) and schools, or workplace associations. Transnationalism emphasizes the ephemeral circuits and understates the permanency of Latina/o settlement. The celebratory nature of the transnational perspective merits caution. In some of the writings, it is almost as if "resistance" is suggested merely through movement across borders and by the formation of circuits, which enhance the possibility of survival in places full of uncertainty. In these renditions, the power of the nationstate is often underestimated, and the costs-financial, social, and emotional-to the individuals involved in transnational migration may be overlooked. A final objection to the transnational perspective is the assumption of genderless transnational migrants. In recent years, literature on women and migration has flourished (Pedraza 1991; Tienda and Booth 1991), but many studies that do look at women in migration-especially those informed by demography-examine gender as a variable rather than as a construct that organizes social life. With the exception of Mahler's (1996) recent work, transnationalism, like the assimilationist models that it counters, ignores gender altogether. Examining transnational motherhood, defined not as physical circuits of migration but as the circuits of affection, caring, and financial support that transcend national borders, provides an opportunity to gender views of transnationalism and immigration. Rethinking Motherhood Feminist scholarship has long challenged monolithic notions of family and motherhood that relegate women to the domestic arena of private/public dichotomies and that rely on the ideological conflation of family, woman, reproduction, and nurturance (Collier and Yanagisako 1987, 36).3 "Rethinking the family" prompts the rethinking of motherhood (Glenn 1994; Thorne and Yalom 1992), allowing us to see that the glorification and exaltation of isolationist, privatized mothering is historically and culturally specific. The "cult of domesticity" is a cultural variant of motherhood, one made possible by the industrial revolution, by breadwinner husbands who have access to employers who pay a "family wage," and by particular configurations of global and
doi:10.1525/california/9780520225619.003.0015 fatcat:ijywkz6bpvebxkfi4tyg37uarq