9 Transnational Biographies
The Delimitation of Motherhood
Elisabeth Tuider
“Identities [free themselves] of particular points in time, places,
pasts and traditions—
they are delivered and appear free-floating.”
(Hall 1994: 212)
The ‘deterritorialisation’ of economic and social connections, a ‘compression’ of space and time as well as a ‘delimitation’ of the lifeworld are part of the contemporary social scientific vocabulary, since, as a result of globalisation and migration, it seemed that societies have lost their nation-state identities in favour of a polyphonous character. Corresponding to this societal diagnosis, identities are also being conceived of as liquefied and decentralised. At the level of the individual, a “transnational spatial polygamy” (Beck 1997) can be observed, and life plans and forms of living that were previously localised are today being transported by the media throughout the entire world in the form of imaginations (Appadurai 1991).
With the delimitation of the lifeworld, however, as I would like to propose here, life plans are not necessarily being decoupled from specific resources. This means that even in a spatially polygamous world, access to resources (such as residence status, age, or gender) remains important for the social behaviour of people. Identities and biographies only appear there to be free-floating, as Hall (1994) has suggested to us in the opening quotation. The constitution of a person's identity and biography is influenced by intersectionally entangled power relationships as well as by new, transnational conditions of exploitation.
The simultaneity of delimitation and limitation is taken up in this chapter, and from this perspective the relationship between transnationalisation and biography is defined in more detail. Against the backdrop of the theoretical considerations that have been briefly articulated so far, I devote the following chapter to the repercussions that spatial, migration-related distance has on the family's system of relationships and the situation of women in the family, as well as on the way in which it shapes motherhood. By what actual practices do migrated women maintain an active motherhood in relation to their children in the region of origin and, in doing so, how do they establish continuity, closeness, and care? Does this lead to the development of new forms of motherhood or, quite the reverse, does it lead to a negation of motherhood (cf. Nobles 2006)?
I also investigate the thesis that new forms and practices of mothering emerge in (transnational) migration spaces. The Mexican-U.S.-American border region serves as a point of departure for understanding delimited biographies.1 Using the case study of biographical stories2 of women maquiladora labourers3 who live in Ciudad Juárez and are originally from Durango in Mexico, I illustrate the new challenges facing motherhood in transnational spaces. In doing so, my fundamental assumption is that a migration-related delimitation of motherhood does occur, but not its disintegration.
TRANSMIGRATION AND BIOGRAPHY
During the beginnings of transnationalisation research and under the influence of (economic) globalisation debates, transnationality was analysed under the perspective through which products and capital, technological achievements and knowledge, as well as labourers and services are exchanged and mobilised (Faist 2007). As an extension of this analytic perspective, eventually social research focused on the social practices by which human beings shape and arrange their migration-related, delimited lifeworlds.
The transmigration research4 that has arisen since the 1990s attends to the economic, social, cultural, and political connections that migrants maintain with their country of origin (cf. Basch, Glick Schiller, and Blanc-Szanton 1994). Alongside the forms of migration that had been discussed up to that point—immigration, return migration, and diaspora—from the end of the twentieth century a growing form of migration has been identified: transmigration. Transmigration is characterised by commuting between different geographical, national, and cultural spaces.
Migration flows from the ‘global South’ have elicited altered perspectives, especially in gender research and in migration research. Kron (2010) interprets this as a “transnational turn” (121) taken by migration research in and about ‘the Americas’. With this turn towards the transnational, crossborder migrants have come into focus as actors and subjects, and from a ‘perspective from below’ it was shown how by means of transnational (life) practices social arrangements may be shaped and, as a result, how power relationships can be avoided and confounded. In the perspective of transmigration, the shaping of life is taking place more or less simultaneously at various geographical locations. Therefore, the social practices of transmigrants in performing their lives stretch across several locations, as a result of which plurilocal social spaces, i.e., transnational spaces, emerge (cf. Pries 2000).
Precisely with respect to the migration between Mexico and the U.S, the reasons for assuming the burden of departure as well as the reasons for constantly returning are shown (cf. especially Pries 2000). The former, the reasons for leaving, lie above all in the hope of obtaining work, of finding better working conditions and a (higher) salary, as well as in the hope of fulfilling the ‘American Dream’. The reasons for returning are above all family—and socially related, which come to bear more clearly in the case of migrated women.
At the same time, transnational spaces should not be seen as mere geographical locations but rather as “invisible structures of multiply networked government, legal and cultural transitions” (Apitzsch 2003: 69), since in transnational social spaces people develop plurilocal networks and organisations that cannot be understood in terms of the traditional ‘nation-state-as-container model’. Instead, biographical experiences and biographies are constituted at the previously cited crossroads and transition points.
Ursula Apitzsch (2003) has identified biographical narratives as “locations on the map of transnational space” (69). Biography as the location of transnational and transcultural spaces is, according to Apitzsch, “an intersectional point of collective constitution and individual construction” (72). With this, Apitzsch is in keeping with the fundamental assumption of biographical research, which states that “the generally valid [lies] hidden in the concreteness of the individual case” (Alheit 1992: 20). Biographical research aims to reconstruct the traces of the socially general in individual biographies, since the methodological assumption of biographical research is that at the basis of the narratives there are generative structures of “a commonly shared reality” (Rosenthal and Fischer-Rosenthal 2003: 457), which can be brought to life and scientifically reconstructed in the interaction between researchers and narrators. At the same time, a dialectics of the individual and the social is assumed, one which is taken into account in the biographical analysis. And via the reconstruction of the biographical relationships in the context of migration, “insight can be gained into the process structures of legal, moral and emotional transgressions” (Apitzsch 2003: 71).
Characterising biography as a location and hence projecting a geographical terminology on to the social has been criticised by various authors. Helma Lutz (2004), for example, warns that by doing so the time reference that is created in very different ways in biographical narratives is missing. Following the views of Stuart Hall (2004), Lutz argues that biography cannot be conceived of as a location but rather as an articulation in which self-localisation and the localisation of others are being expressed, as well as the connections between them and the new connections between elements.
The stimulus on biographical research that proceeds from Hall's reflections is not exhausted, however, simply with reference to the issue of articulation. Rather, through Hall's concept of identity the basic methodological concepts (of society and subject) have to be revised. Quite in opposition to the notion of a free eligibility or a post-modern delimitation, Hall defines ‘identities’ as nodal points at which powerful subjectivating discourses and practices involving the situating of others coincide with discourse and practices of self-situation.
I use identity in order to refer to the suture point between discourses and practices on the one hand—the appeal to us to locate ourselves discursively as a particular social being—and processes that produce subjectivities on the other—which construct us as subjects who allow themselves to ‘speak’, who are comprehensible. Identities represent such points of temporary connections with subject positions that emerge from discursive practices. (Hall 2004: 173)
In Hall's view, identities are “positions that the subject must take”; they are, therefore, “not a being but a positioning” (173).5 At the methodological level, therefore, social researchers are confronted with the task of bringing together the powerful and regulating discourses and the constitution of the subject (cf. Tuider 2007). In using a combination of biographical research and discourse analysis, the simultaneity of different, overlapping subjective experiences and discursive attributions that are characteristic of transnational biographies can be understood.
TRANSNATIONAL FAMILIES
The increasing internationalisation and transnationalisation of migration movements also affect the shaping of family and parental relationships:
The transnational fields undoubtedly create varying impacts, such as, for example, on the shaping of identities and the feeling of belonging, on family and gender relationships, economic relations, processes of social mobility, religious practices, the labour market, perceptions and images of migration and on political participation, among others. (Parella 2008: 2)
Affected through migration the family now no longer refers to a common place of residence, but rather family relationships may extend over various geographically scattered locations. In current migration research the term ‘transnational families’ has recently been used.6 According to Bryceson and Vuorela (2002), the transnational family may be defined as a family
whose members live some or most of the time apart, and who are able to create ties that give family members the feeling that they are part of the unit and that their welfare is attended to within a collective dimension, in spite of the physical distance.(2)7
In this context we have to abandon notions of ‘family’ as a natural, biological unit. Instead, the family must be understood8 as a socially constructed community, in which case the creation and maintenance of family boundaries are a task of construction that has to be actively performed by all family members. Because the family is actively created at the everyday level, we can, following on the notion of ‘doing gender’ and ‘doing ethnicity’ speak also of ‘doing family’. “Family processes and relationships among persons defined as relatives comprise the basic foundation for all other transnational social relations.” (Basch et al. 1994: 238)
Whereas Suárez (2007) brings out the fact the transnational family does not represent a new phenomenon, Parella (2008) stresses that new possibilities for shaping the family may emerge today, since new technological advances mean that social family relationships may not only be maintained across vast distances and periods of time, but may also be nurtured through frequent and regular communication, for example, via Skype and webcams. In practical terms this means that, for example, the ritual Saturday evening meal may be practiced in front of the computer, household decisions may be made in common, and discussions involving the raising of children may be carried on together, regardless of the different geographic locations and different time zones the individual family members reside in (Tagmano 2003).
Therefore, communication technologies, such as the (mobile) telephone and the Internet (including webcams), become an important resource and enrichment for present transnational families in their efforts to live out and shape emotional commitment and responsibility, concern for other family members and involvement in family matters.9 In this context, different gender configurations may now arise (cf. Solé, Parella, and Cavalcanti 2007): the migration of the father and husband corresponds to the traditional gender attribution of the male as breadwinner and caretaker. At the same time, the male migration may be associated with a release of the woman who stays behind from traditional duties and functions, since it is now this woman left behind who administers the remesas (remittances).10 This may go hand in hand with the woman's greater independence and self-affirmation. In the case of sexualised violence in the family, the migration of the men is felt to be a form of escape and salvation (Solé et al. 2007). If the wife (and mother) initiates the migration process and thus becomes the breadwinner, this may trigger for her a process of empowerment, and also bring into question the traditional role of the husband. As Parella (2008) has stated, “The hegemonic patriarchal model is thrown into crisis” (10). Regardless of who leaves, migration represents a turning point in family and gender configurations as intra-family power balance is affected. But who takes care of the children who are often left behind in the region of origin?
TRANSNATIONAL MOTHERHOOD
The western notion of ‘motherhood’ includes the belief that physical and psychological closeness, that physical presence and emotional participation are coupled with one another and intertwined. The one conditions the other, or the two are inconceivable without each other. Transnational mothers muddle this notion. In her studies on Latin American women migrants in Los Angeles whose children remain in their country of origin, Hondagneu-Sotelo (2001) has been one of the first to show how new variations on the organisational arrangements of motherhood emerge, since in order to bridge the gap between spatial and chronological distance, migrated women create alternative childraising models. A transformation of the previous form of motherhood goes hand in hand with this.
In her studies of female Filipino migrants, Parrenas (2001) points to the fact that new forms and notions of motherhood arise after years of separation among family members, to the extent that motherhood is no longer linked to physical proximity to one's children. Motherhood is, instead, experienced through financial support or the financing of a child's education. Lauser (2005), too, in her analyses of the ‘transnational mother’ conditioned by marriage migration, points out the articulation of motherly love through gifts, financial remittances, or paying for a good school education. Therefore, some have asked the critical question of whether mothers are becoming ‘gift mothers’ (madres de los regalos) as a result of the migration process (Pedone 2006).11 Thus, transnational motherhood for migrating women usually also implies an unsolvable, ideologically charged contradiction: on the one hand, being a ‘good mother’ entails earning money for one's children and family; on the other hand, a ‘good mother’ is expected to be together with her children—and not physically separated from them (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Wagner 2005).
Migration processes involving women are often easier, or even possible in the first place, in a setting of extended family relationships and networks, the redes de cuidado (networks of care). In such settings especially the grandmothers help out with taking care of the children (Wagner 2005; Oral 2006; Nobles 2006; Parella 2007), but also other relatives, neighbours, or girlfriends could look after the children and the household of the migrated woman.12 By doing so, the reproductive work is usually passed on from one female hand (that of the mother) to another (that of the grandmother, sister, aunt, girlfriend, etc.) (Nobles 2006). Both the women who migrate and those who stay behind remain captive to a particular logic of reproduction. Hochschild (2000) problematises with this “globalisation of motherhood” (130) the worldwide unequal distribution of both material and emotional resources.13
Hochschild speaks of an “emotional surplus value” which results from the fact that the countries of the so-called ‘First World’ import maternal love from countries of the so-called ‘Third World.’ What might be expected now in western terms is the disintegration of the female migrant's family. But rather than that, what ends up happening in this “exploitation of care” (Hochschild 2000: 133) is a shift in family and maternal responsibility.
PORTRAIT: SONIA ORTIZ MARTÍNEZ14
Sonia Ortiz Martínez is thirty-eight years old (born in 1970) and the sixth of thirteen children. She was born in a small village near the city of Durango in the middle region of Mexico. Since both of her parents were employed in agriculture, she too spent her early childhood in the countryside. On entering school she—as well as her brothers and sisters—moved to Durango City and lived with a paternal uncle, visiting her parents and siblings on the weekend. Her parents followed a teacher's advice and decided to send her, as the only one of the thirteen children, to secondary school and thus give her access to an academic education. Shortly after completing her training as a paralegal, at the age of nineteen, she met her future husband Héctor. After being engaged for six months, they were married and currently have two children: Carina, who is eighteen, and Nora, who is five.
Nine years ago Sonia migrated with her daughter Carina for the first time to Ciudad Juárez, where her parents and three of her sisters were already living. About this, she says:
Well, we came here, the reason why we came here is because the family is here. My mum, my dad emigrated … I guess it was about 13 years ago? because of economic problems. Life here is better, um … well, more work. They came here. I stayed there, married, with one daughter.
Ciudad Juárez offered above all for the female members of the Ortiz family the opportunity to work and thus the prospect of ‘a better life.’15 At the end of the 1980s, Sonia's eldest sister Andrea was the first in the family to migrate to Ciudad Juárez, and in 1994 Sonia's mother, Doña Rosa, and her five youngest siblings joined her. Barely arrived in the border region, all of them began to work in a maquila. For that purpose, some birth certificates had to be forged in order to obtain a residence permit. In her interview, Doña Rosa tells, giving the term a quite positive connotation, that with the help of gringos who recycled factory cardboxes and wooden pallets in their neighborhood the Rosas family was able to use these materials to build their first dwelling in Ciudad Juarez. Up to this day her house has no water supply or sewer connection, but over the years she and her daughters succeeded in buying a total of four plots of land in the immediate vicinity and building ‘houses’ on them.17
Sonia, too, migrated with her daughter because of the prospect of a better financial situation through work in a maquila. Like many other female labourers, Sonia too judges the employment in the maquiladora to be pleasant and satisfactory. It offers her—despite the fact that she is not employed in the occupation for which she was trained—a good income and various other advantages such as a regular meal during shift work. Sonia's brothers and sisters and her mother agree that the maquila work has improved living conditions for her and her children. Even though they have to move from one maquila to the next, they stress the benefits of this type of work. In quite concrete terms, Sonia and her sisters speak of the fact that they now earn more money, or earn anything at all, they speak of the regular meals which they receive in the maquila, and of the possibility of buying clothes at the weekly second-hand street sales. In one interview passage Sonia compares her previous work in Durango with the maquiladora work in Ciudad Juárez:
That is, none of the advantages they give you here in the maquila [in Ciudad Juárez] are given to you there [in Durango]. Then … I had to take on two jobs in order to manage. I worked from Monday to Monday, every day of the week. And so, in the end I noticed that by doing so I was earning the same as here. Here I work from Monday to Friday. That gives me time off three days and I earn what I earned there in a week. And, but I have savings, I have a car, special shifts, two meals, all things that were missing there. Then, so, no, money makes you freer, a little freer than there. And so, that was the reason why we came here.
This thoroughly positive assessment of maquila work, which is characterised in international solidarity literature as ‘exploitative’ and ‘sexist’,18 was surprising for the interviewers. Sonia refers to these depictions and at the same time she rejects them: “There are no unions here but with all of the advantages that you have here, they are wealth.” At the foreground of Sonia's biographical presentation there is instead the acquisition of options for acting and shaping which she gains from her maquila-work in the border region, since Sonia's migration to Ciudad Juárez and her work in the maquila was also an escape from her marriage. Sonia repeatedly separated from her husband because of his violent behaviour and his drug abuse, but she also kept returning to him. Under pressure from her husband, she again became pregnant six years ago and had her second daughter Nora. One year before the time of the interview she definitively broke ties with her husband and with the aid of her mother again migrated to Ciudad Juárez. Her youngest daughter Nora accompanied her. Since then both of them live on the sofa bed in Sonia's sister's and her family's living room-kitchen. This living arrangement and life situation entails a great deal of solidarity among family members. The costs and duties, such as for the care and supervision of the children, can in this way be reduced. At the same time, however, the space for solitude and privacy is restricted.
MOTHERHOOD AT A DISTANCE
Carina, Sonia's oldest daughter, remained in Durango, at first with a maternal aunt and then with a paternal uncle. Today she lives in the house of Sonia's best girlfriend and the latter's daughter and attends, with the help of financing from a scholarship, upper school and plans to study medicine. Sonia has repeatedly tried to bring her oldest daughter to Ciudad Juárez but without success. Carina prefers to live in Durango.
Last year Sonia saw her daughter three times. Christmas, Easter, and Carina's birthday were the occasions on which she undertook the twenty-two-hour bus ride to Durango. Despite this limited physical presence, Sonia continues to maintain an emotional, involved, and active motherhood in relation to her oldest daughter by means of regular telephone calls and through mobile phone messages. The practices of motherhood at a distance are described by Sonia in her biographical self-presentation as follows:
Um, everyday she sends me messages or I send her a message. Um, so, I talk to her on the phone on Mondays. Then for sure. Sometimes on Wednesdays. And so, if I still have enough money left, then also on Friday. And if there is not much money left, I send her a message [SMS], almost always. Now I've found a possibility. . . . A co-worker of mine has, um, an Internet connection.
Thus, the new media help Sonia to organise the ‘motherhood at a distance’ (Parreñas 2005). Today, through electronic means family networks can be nurtured over vast distances, even overcoming national borders (Solé and Parella 2005). In this sense the Internet and the mobile phone are supporting migration movements, crossing and transforming borders and social spaces and enabling family relationships.19 Sonia can remain an emotional reference person for her daughter Carina and fulfill her childraising duties in spite of the distance.
In doing so, Sonia has to master various challenges: First, she and her daughter need to gain access to the Internet; second, she has to coordinate her working hours with the rhythm of her daughter's life. In the latter case, Sonia's position as a person in charge in the maquila gives her certain room for manoeuvre:
A colleague has, um, an Internet connection. Well, so, now we are in contact with each other via Internet. In my girlfriend's workshop, across the way, there is an Internet café. Then, somehow, we'll manage to communicate soon. On Monday, on Monday I am more …, the fact is that I don't have a lot of opportunities, since during work you can't leave your workstation. Then, um, this, my colleague, he told me: ‘If you'd like to speak to your child,’ well, um, ‘then we can get on the Internet and you can talk to her for 20 minutes.’ But at that time of day it is already pretty late there. We'll try and find another time to speak.
Sonia thus manages to maintain a regular contact with her oldest daughter by using a mobile phone and the Internet. In doing so, she is not only a financier for her daughter, but also takes an active part in her daughter's life. Decisions, for example, about her later educational career, are discussed together just as are the everyday events in Durango. Sonia and Carina are successful in being present reciprocally in each other's lives and in maintaining an emotional and caring mother-daughter relationship. In the following interview passage it becomes clear how Sonia takes part in her daughter's life and how she shows emotions as well as authority in her relationship with Carina.
Sure, if something goes wrong, my girlfriend sends me a message. ‘This happened and that, that, that.’ Um, ‘don't tell her I told you that’. ((laughs)) And then I am already calling up there: ‘Hey, tell me, what's happened? Do you have something to tell me?’—‘Hm, something has happened. You already know that, why ( . . . ) are you asking me!’ ((laughs))—‘Well, because I want you to tell me about it.’ Or sometimes she herself calls me up. Or I call her and she says ‘This and that happened and my aunt became angry.’ Well. And, then, I scold her. And she knows that when I'm peeved, I'm peeved. And apart from the fact that it bothers me, I don't speak to her anymore. And that hurts her more than anything else. It hurts her that I don't even speak to her.
Through this regular contact and the actively shaped relationship, the ‘emotional costs’ of migration, which were often the result of information and communication gaps and significant time delays (via snail mail) are also reduced.
CONCLUSION
In her migration Sonia has crossed no national border. She ‘only’ lives at the northern border to the U.S. and not in the U.S. itself. Nonetheless, in the way in which her motherhood is shaped with regard to her oldest daughter Carina, characteristic features can be seen of transnational aspects and practices which are currently being discussed under the term ‘transnational motherhood.’ Sonia's biography can be seen as a prime example which illustrates the delimitation of the life world ascertained at the outset. This delimitation, according to the subsequent thesis, includes not only transnational biographies in the framework of migration but is also at work beyond the limits of migration research.
NOTES
1. Parnreiter (1999) has pointed out that the various programmes of the U.S. government as well as its tightening-up and militarisation of the southern U.S. border cannot contribute to a reduction in the migration flows from the south, but rather only to an official distinction being made between legal and illegal residents. The function of the border then lies in separation and in the ‘regulation of the population’ as well as in the (dis)qualification and illegalisation of workers (on this point, see also Massey 1998). “In this sense transnational spaces could be understood as a precarious cultural expression of a politico-economic strategy that relies on the transnationalization of part of the population, i.e., on mobility plus the outsourcing of social reproduction. The phenomenon of transnational parenthood, which means above-average rates of transnational motherhood, is the very symbol par excellence of this migration regime. Here the creative utilisation of transnational space as one of the few resources available to female migrants from the east and the south is closely entangled with the politico-economic strategy of the appropriation of just such lived transnational flexibility” (Hess 2004: 4).
2. The here presented discussion is based on biographical interviews that were conducted by Marcela Gualotuña, Mauricio Carrera, and Elisabeth Tuider during a study trip in March 2008 in Ciudad Juárez. A total of five biographical interviews in a family context were compiled, i.e., a sixty-four-year-old woman and her four daughters who had migrated each participated in separate interviews. This chapter concentrates mostly on the interview with Sonia Ortiz Martínez. All names have been changed to protect people's anonymity.
3. Within this chapter I do not go into discussions of the working conditions in the maquila and the question of the impact of maquila work on the empowerment of women (on this point, cf. De la O 2007; Quintero 2007).
4. On the discussion and the model of transnational social spaces in the German context, cf. especially Pries (1997), Faist (2000); decisive for the U.S.-American debates on the topic are: Massey et al. (1994), Goldring (1996), Smith (1995), and Glick Schiller et al. (1992).
5. At this point Hall objects to both the feminist and antiracist politics of identity of the 1970s, as well as to the deconstructionist dissolution of the acting subject. Instead, he speaks in favour of the opportunity and the necessity of ‘politics of positioning’.
6. The ‘transnational family’ is not a unified type but rather subsumes different forms of geographical and physical separation of family members (for a discussion of the term, cf. Guarnizo 1997). The strategies and practices of transnational families differ depending on the particular economic and political setting, as well as according to the individual class, age, and gender affiliation and the ethnic, national, and sociocultural background (Solé et al. 2007).
7. But not every family whose members reside in different regions or nationstates is necessarily a transnational family. Rather, social relationships and practices constitute the main criteria for defining a family as such.
8. The family represents a co-habiting association of people (one which in Germany is quite privileged), which comprises at least two interrelated generations and includes motherhood and/or fatherhood. Since up to now no studies exist on transmigration in homosexual or transgendered families or homosexual partnerships with children, in the following discussion the term ‘family’ will refer to the heteronormative family.
9. In this way, the increasing diffusion and penetration of telecommunications does not necessarily have this effect but instead, it favours and supports processes of transnationalisation, for only through telecommunications may daily and continuous contacts be maintained in a financially affordable way despite geographical distances. Especially among people from the lower social classes and in regions that are not connected to the telephone network, the spread of mobile phones strengthens the maintenance and cultivation of social relations, since they offer a comparatively inexpensive form of communication across distance (Galperín and Mariscal 2007).
10. Remittances (remesas) to those back home represent the most important source of income in Mexico. Currently, the remesas amount to approximately 20–24 billion U.S. dollars and exceed the income derived from the petroleum industry or tourism. For many families the remesas are a principal source of income that serves to stabilise the family income. An increasing number of families, most of them from the rural regions of Mexico (40 percent of all households with a migration background) are dependent on remesas for securing their livelihood. Therefore, the remesas are rarely used to finance investments. (cf. Hamann 2005).
11. Pedone (2006) writes, concerning Ecuadoran children who grow up with their grandparents because their parents have migrated, of a story according to which a grandmother who had been having difficulties with a child asked the child's mother to refrain from sending ‘gifts’ as long as the child misbehaved. As a result of not receiving gifts from his mother, the child changed his behaviour.
12. At the same time, migrating women are often subjected to significant stigmatisation as ‘uncaring mothers’, ‘family destroyers’, or ‘sexual libertines’ (cf. Herrera and Martínez 2002).
13. “Are First World countries such as the United States importing maternal love as they have imported copper, zinc, gold and other ores from Third World countries in the past?” (Hochschild 2000: 135).
14. The interview with Sonia Ortiz Martínez was conducted on 16 March 2008 in Ciudad Juárez. All the textual quotes not otherwise referenced in the remainder of this chapter derive from the script of this interview.
15. The maquiladoras, the free export production zones along the northern Mexican border—just as in Latin America as a whole—gained in economic and political importance in the last twenty years. They are the main goal of domestic migration in Mexico and have attracted and are attracting particularly women (Berndt 2004; Zamorano Villareal 2004). For the year 2006, INEGI records that 388,019 female labourers and 340,446 male labourers worked in the maquilas in the border region near the U.S. (INEGI 2007a: 13).
16. The term gringos is used in Mexico to describe ‘white’ U.S. Americans. The phrase ‘with the help of gringos’ used in the interview also includes the international and transnational corporations that have settled in Ciudad Juárez. The terminology used thus forms part of the very positive attitude of the women interviewed towards the maquiladora and the corporations.
17. Having one's own piece of land in Ciudad Juárez means having a piece of independence, in light of the horrendous rental prices. Property is also a symbol of successful migration. The importance of the family at whose centre Doña Rosa stands is thus reflected in the explicitly desired vicinity of her sisters and her mother. At the same time, the family association is extended by having separate houses for one's own children and grandchildren.
18. See, for example, the Maquila Solidarity Network (MSN):http:// en.maquilasolidarity.org/.
19. In Mexico there are approximately nineteen landline and fifty-five mobile phone connections per one hundred inhabitants (INEGI 2007b). That means that three out of every four people have access to a telephone.
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