managing migration, managing motherhood: the moral economy of gendered migration

Managing Migration, Managing Motherhood:The Moral Economy of Gendered Migration

Ricardo Contreras* and David Griffith**

ABSTRACT

For the past two decades, women have been migrating from Mexico to the United States ontemporary work visas to pick meat from blue crabs in small coastal factories. Within a theoret-ical framework that argues for the relevance of a moral economic perspective to genderedmigration, we examine the how participating in this migration influences migrants’ families,including their abilities to produce higher-quality lives. Specifically, we focus on the variousfactors that feed into the decision to migrate, the immediate consequences of those decisionsfor the relations among migrants, children, spouses and other family and community members,and the longer-term consequences in terms of gender relations, the restructuring of parent–child relationships and the material benefits of work abroad. We find that women negotiate avariety of contradictions and paradoxes to participate in the programme, many of whichdirectly influence their quest to reaffirm their abilities, as mothers, to produce quality humanbeings. These findings reflect more general global appeals for valuing human life by measuresother than those of conventional political economy.

INTRODUCTION: A RETURN TO THE MORAL ECONOMY OF GENDEREDMIGRATION

Female international labour migrants often engage in difficult and heart-wrenching exchanges towork abroad. As they negotiate the inherent contradiction of leaving a family to support a family,they initiate equally contradictory processes of breaking with, reshaping and reaffirming customarygender relations. Indeed, much work on gender and migration has highlighted the often contradic-tory roles that women adopt as they leave their children to provide for their children. In her workon Dominican migrants, for example, Levitt (2001) describes the complexities of transnational par-enting, considering it a kind of distressing extension of the traditional extended Dominican familyand the practice of raising children in neighbourhoods or whole communities instead of separatefamilies and households. Although this view may imply that the extension of the family acrosstransnational space was a natural or expected development, Levitt (2001: 76) is careful to show thedifficult emotional crises that can result from mothers living overseas, leaving their children in thecare of surrogate parents:

Raising children transnationally poses new challenges. These arrangements exacerbate conflictswithin the community and at the same time they reinforce its cohesiveness. For one thing, separating

* Department of Anthropology/Nuevo South Action Research Collaborative, East Carolina University.** Institute for Coastal Science and Policy, Department of Anthropology/Nuevo South Initiative, East Carolina

University.

doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2435.2012.00771.x

© 2012 The AuthorsPublished by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., International Migration © 2012 IOM9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, International Migration Vol. 50 (4) 2012and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. ISSN 0020-7985

parents and children for extended periods has clear emotional consequences. Though well loved andcared for, several respondents talked about how painful it was for them to miss out on that primary,maternal–child bond.

Among the conflicts she lists are the difficulties that parents, surrogate parents and children havein determining, deploying and maintaining relations of authority, something that shifts even moredramatically in transnational settings than it does normally over the course of the life cycle.Many other authors have documented the difficulties that migrant women face as they exercise

motherhood from a distance (e.g. Alicea, 1997; Bernhard et al., 2009; Foner, 2009; Schmalzbauer,2004), but few have situated the contradictions and paradoxes of this process within a broader the-oretical framework of the economics of migration. In this paper, we document the development ofsuch paradoxes that occur in the context of managed migration between Sinaloa, Mexico andNorth Carolina, United States (USA), focusing on the experiences of 20 women who migrate leg-ally to pick meat from blue crabs. At the same time, we consider gender and migration throughthe lens of the moral economy – a theoretical approach that some feminist anthropologists haveutilized in the past (e.g. Williams, 1996), while others have abandoned it (Pessar, 2003: 86).Although the paradoxes we describe here resonate with those that others have described in theWest Indies (Foner, 2009; Levitt, 2001), Central America (Menjívar, 2000; Schmalzbauer, 2004)and other parts of Latin America, we attempt here to enhance these works by addressing the rela-tions between the moral economy of gendered migration and the political economy of migration ingeneral, offering a renewed interpretation of the relevance of the moral economy to gender andmigration studies.The 20 women in our study express a wide range of contests and interactions with patriarchal

authority, with some of the elderly women supporting male dominance of younger female niecesand daughters, others questioning, undermining and resisting the roles prescribed for them by thefamily, and still others behaving as though they believe in the fiction of gender neutrality (Gune-wardena and Kingsolver, 2007). At the centre of their lives are their children, although some havematured into less maternal relationships with elder children while others remain deeply embeddedin their identities as mothers – many of them single mothers whose children live for eight monthsof the year with surrogate parents, with ideas of discipline and authority quite different from theirown. A few have been successful in managing their husbands or male partners, encouraging themtowards nurturing paternal roles in which they learn to cook, dress wounds, negotiate the emotionalhardships of separation and occasionally become conflicted over their new roles, enlisting mothersand sisters to help with domestic tasks and child care.It is from this shared sentiment of migrating primarily for their children that we apply a theory

of moral economy, recognizing that morality in economic activity is linked to quality production(Arnold, 2001; Thompson, 1971) – the production, in this case, of quality human beings (Griffith,2009). In another theoretical light, we might mistake this for reproduction, conceptually herdingour subjects back into kitchens, schools and bedrooms. Reproduction is occurring, but most ofthese women are not attempting to reproduce themselves and their social and cultural conditions,but to build from them, improving the quality of their children’s lives. In this sense, their produc-tion of quality human beings can be viewed as an acknowledgment that their children constitute“social goods” in Arnold’s (2001) sense of the term (that they are far more meaningful than theirmere economic value as productive workers, whether for the household or the general economy).The moral value, Arnold notes, ultimately derives from Thompson’s (1971) observations about theimportance of quality bread to eighteenth-century British workers: that poor-quality bread producedpoor-quality workers, undermining productivity and its contribution to economic value. As such,British workers believed that their right to high-quality bread was inalienable, and routinelyattacked farms, mills, merchants and bakeries found to be involved in producing or distributingbreads adulterated with dirt, sand or coarse grains.

52 Contreras and Griffith

© 2012 The Authors. International Migration © 2012 IOM

Interestingly, when we apply insights from a moral economic conceptual framework to contem-porary debates about economic value, they are highly relevant to the literature on globalization(Blim, 2005; Gunewardena and Kingsolver, 2007; Sen, 1999), of which international labourmigration is one key manifestation. Addressing global disparities in health, life expectancy, well-being and other quality of life measures, Blim (2005) considers at length how valuing equalityalong with conventional economic measures such as per capita GDP can open the door to differentmethods of valuing individual’s lives and the accomplishments of societies. In particular, Blimviews qualities such as well-being, freedom and longevity as valuable individual achievements andliteracy, economic equality and gender equality as valuable societal achievements, further viewingboth sets of achievements as equally important as gains in capital investment, material wealth, out-puts of goods and services, and labour productivity. Similarly, Sen (1999) focuses on the impor-tance of expanding freedoms among populations, giving equal importance to political freedom, thefreedom to establish social relationships, and freedom from violence and corruption as he gives tothe freedom to pursue economic opportunity. By expanding freedoms, people become capable offunctioning most effectively in their social environments, including fulfilling those economic func-tions that benefit the person and his or her society.From a different direction, feminist critiques of globalization and the economic processes associ-

ated with transnational capital demonstrate that the manipulation of gender ideologies and inequal-ity routinely generates economic value for capitalist enterprises, justifying underpayment of wages,differential treatment at work and other behaviours that reduce costs to the owners of farms, facto-ries and other economic enterprises. The works assembled by Gunewardena and Kingsolver (2007),for example, document ways in which women traders in the clothing industry and women carersand hospitality workers, among others, provide economic enterprises with valuable but largely gen-dered services even as they attempt to forge their own senses of agency via resistance, union mem-bership and collective social action. As successful as some of these individual activities and socialmovements have been, women continue to find themselves embedded in the many paradoxes thatglobalizing processes generate, such as increased buying power among Filipina migrant womenaccompanied by increased marginalization at home and abroad (Parreñas and Lok Siu, 2007), orSri Lankan women factory workers whose consumption performances are designed to negate theiridentities as factory workers (Gunewardena, 2007).It is within globalizing settings, such as the one in which women from Sinaloa pick meat from

blue crabs in North Carolina, that ideas drawn from a moral economic perspective become difficultto keep in view, given that many globalizing processes are designed specifically to separate moraleconomies from political economies, or at least subordinate the former to the latter. This derivesfrom the distinct developmental trajectories of moral and political economies. Moral economiesdevelop through “popular consensus … grounded upon a consistent traditional view of socialnorms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community”(Thompson, 1971: 79). By contrast, global political economies tend to be imposed by more power-ful classes on to local settings, and are concerned with propriety only in so far as it may influencecorporate image or when a lack of concern would violate local law (Harvey, 2010). Many anthro-pologists, following Thompson’s (1991) later work and others (e.g. Edelman, 2005; Sivaramakrish-nan, 2005), embraced the notion of moral economy for its recognition of the economic importanceof reproductive labour, subsistence production, unwaged work and other economic functions ofinterest to feminist anthropologists (Meillassoux, 1981; Williams, 1996). Later feminist anthropolo-gists, however, questioned the moral economic approach for its emphasis on consensus, arguingthat popular consensus about “proper” economic roles is often sculpted by men and imposed onwomen, and that even within households, achieving consensus across gender lines can be problem-atic (Pessar, 2003).In this work, we argue that the moral economic framework remains important conceptually to

understanding gendered migration. This is particularly so in cases where primarily women engage

The moral economy of gendered migration 53


in migration explicitly for the well-being, happiness, dignity and education of their children, hopingthat their work yields high-quality human beings. In this process, unfortunately, they confront threeparadoxes: constructing quality family life while separating the family; transgressing while reaffirm-ing traditional gender roles; and striving to become better mothers apart from their children.

BACKGROUND: FROM ONE INDUSTRIAL SETTING TO ANOTHER

Beaufort County, North Carolina and Guasave, Sinaloa are both rural regions of agriculture andfisheries. For the past 22 years, women have been migrating to Beaufort County on temporarywork visas from several communities stretching between the large Sinaloa marketing centres of LosMochis and Guasave, in north-west Mexico, across the Sea of Cortés from Baja California (Grif-fith, 1999, 2006). The communities range from small fishing and peasant villages of 2,000–3,000souls to somewhat larger service and shopping centres of 8,000–12,000, and most women whomigrate have experience working as seasonal farm workers and seafood workers. The latter workprepares them to work in the US mid-Atlantic blue crab processing industry, where they performthe same work as in Mexico but for wages around ten times higher. Women interviewed in Sinaloaagreed that wage levels in local agriculture and fisheries are barely sufficient to support a family;earning such low wages, many were forced to endure difficult living situations – crowded quarters,the presence of demanding kin, children complaining of too many adults telling them what to do –prior to migrating to the USA. Like many regions in Mexico, Sinaloa has a history of migration tothe USA, and the addition of migration facilitated by H-2B visas – visas granted for temporary,seasonal, non-agricultural work in the USA1 – has been sifted into local survival strategies particu-larly by women, although a handful of men also reported working in US fisheries with these visas(Griffith, 1999, 2006).Although many women we interviewed cited push factors such as crowded housing and abu-

sive husbands, overwhelmingly, the majority cited economic reasons for migrating to NorthCarolina to work. Further, the 20-plus year history of female participation in mid-Atlantic crabprocessing has been a significant force in creating support structures for and positive sentimentstowards women leaving their families. Male acceptance of female migration is by no meansuniversal in the region, however, with some women reporting continuing difficulties with hus-bands and boyfriends due to their work abroad. Nevertheless, their high incomes and conspicu-ous home improvements made by many women who have worked in US crab plants havehelped convince more than one family patriarch of the value of female migration. At more per-sonal levels, a variety of major and minor crises often precipitate joining this labour force,including the death of a spouse or close family member, divorce, poverty, domestic abuse, part-ners with substance abuse problems, an unbearable living situation or a combination of severalsimilar difficulties.Once in the labour force, women leave their families for around eight months per year (from

late spring to late autumn), live in a dormitory in Herring Creek (pseudonym) – a small, ruralcommunity in eastern North Carolina – and work as much as possible in blue crab processingand related fish processing, such as de-heading shrimp. During idle periods in seafood plants,they occasionally work in other jobs such as picking blueberries, cleaning locals’ houses orworking with a painting crew. In recent years, the growth of Latino neighbourhoods nearby,including the settling out of the labour force of many previous H-2 workers,2 and a growing ser-vice-provider network familiar with Latino migrants, have made their living situations somewhatless isolated. Still, they have few transportation alternatives. While in North Carolina, the womenare subject to occasional sexual harassment by some of the men who work in and around thecrab plants, although a few have found mates with locals and with settled Latinos. Others have



friends or relatives nearby, whom they visit on weekends or during slow periods in the crabhouses.

Methodology

We interviewed 20 women working at the same crab plant in Beaufort County during the summerof 2009, using a semi-structured interview guide devoted primarily to questions about experiencesworking in crab processing and the effects of that work on family and community relationships.This constituted a complete sample of all the women who worked the entire season at this crabplant. In the first weeks of 2010, we visited ten of those women in their homes in Sinaloa, makingan effort to revisit women from three different types of communities in the region that send womento US crab processing: coastal fishing communities, inland peasant communities and large shop-ping/service centre communities along the Pan-American highway. We visited the women again atthe crab plant during the summer of 2010 and again in Sinaloa in January 2011, and continue ourrelationship with them to the present day. In Table 1, we give some of the socio-demographicinformation about the participants in our study. Most come from one large shopping and servicecentre near the larger metropolis of Guasave, and a fairly large percentage – around 40 per cent –are related to one another.The table shows that the sample includes women who are fairly old, with nearly 20 years of

experience in the H-2 labour force, and as young as 20. The women who were interviewed for thisstudy have been participating in the temporary work programme for between 1 and 17 years, with40 per cent participating in the programme for more than nine seasons. Eight of the 20 are sepa-rated, seven are married or living in a common-law arrangement with their partners, three are wid-ows and two are single. All but one have children, and the one who does not have children has themost education and is the daughter of one of the elder women at the plant. Interestingly, too, themajority are single mothers – separated from spouses, single or widowed – living with their chil-

TABLE 1

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MIGRANTS (N = 20)

Migrant Age Years of schooling Years as H-2 Marital status Number of children

1 44 3 8 Single 32 42 3 2 Widowed 23 20 14 2 Separated 04 27 2 2 Union libre 15 49 9 14 Separated 36 35 6 1 Separated 47 58 1 19 Separated 48 30 9 11 Widowed 19 42 6 13 Separated 410 45 6 13 Married 311 48 9 1 Separated 512 39 4 1 Union libre 413 30 9 1 Married 314 53 3 12 Married 515 34 9 16 Married 216 27 4 6 Married 117 29 9 1 Separated 318 30 9 7 Separated 219 25 6 2 Separated 120 66 3 17 Widowed 6



dren, more or less on their own. The sons and daughters of the women vary in age between 4 and47 years old, with a concentration in the 0–6 age bracket (19 out of 47 of their children). All ofthe women work or have worked in Guasave in the off-season (December to February). A majority(70%) work in a combination of agriculture, crab picking and shrimp.

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND: GENDER, MIGRATION AND MORAL ECONOMY

My head cocked toward the sky,I cannot get off the ground,and, you, passing over again,fast, perfect, and unwillingto tell me that you are doingwell, or that it was mistakethat placed you in that worldand me in this; or that misfortuneplaced these worlds in us.

– James Tate, “The Lost Pilot”

Consideration of migration as a gendered process suggests that the consequences of people cross-ing boundaries and borders have been uneven historically, disproportionately influencing eitherwomen or men (Collins, 1995; Griffith, 1985; Gunewardena and Kingsolver, 2007; Pessar, 1999,2003). This unevenness need not refer to frequency: the fact that a larger number of men thanwomen emigrate from a community does not prove that men are more deeply or more profoundlyinfluenced by migration than women. By the same token, the receipt by women of the majorityof the remittances from family members living abroad does not prove the opposite. Questions ofgender and migration are most effectively addressed qualitatively – how much money a woman orman sends and receives because someone has left home is rarely as central to lived experience asthe absence of one close family member from one world and the presence of another close familymember in another.Our phraseology resonates with James Tate’s “The Lost Pilot” because the poem addresses a

father he never met, an absent father, a father who died, violently, in war, several months beforeTate was born. Migration, like warfare, can begin in violence, occasionally expressed as domesticabuse but more often expressed in the form or low-intensity disharmony between members ofhouseholds spanning transnational space. As noted earlier, feminist anthropologists questioned thenotion of the harmonious household – that mediating unit between structure and agency thatanthropologists have been drawn to as the most important unit of analysis in migration studies (Le-vitt, 2001; Menjívar, 2001). In the process of recognizing disharmony, however, many feministanthropologists distanced themselves from the concept of the moral economy of the household,suggesting that, in Pessar’s words (2003: 81), “Scholars who adopt the moral economy perspectivetend to view households as essentially passive units whose members are collectively victimized bythe larger market economy.” In this paper, we recover this concept, emphasizing the role of moraleconomic principles in the production of quality human beings. We also recognize, in line withrecent work on moral economy (Arnold, 2001; Griffith, 2009), that most economies have bothmoral economic and political-economic dimensions, the former driven primarily by popular consen-sus about proper, legitimate and just economic behaviours and the latter driven by more or lessimpersonal (and acultural) market forces.Specifically, we suggest that women participating in Sinaloa–North Carolina managed migration do

so primarily for their children, oriented towards producing high-quality lives. Women’s participation



in this labour force involves no small amount of hardship, involving both the revision andreaffirmation of gender relations in their homes and communities, yet they gain acceptance of theirmigration by means of accumulating material possessions and underwriting the education of theirchildren. While the moral economic concept invokes notions of propriety – or the idea that peoplehave “proper” roles in economic systems – we are not suggesting here that these women arenecessarily repositories of a community’s morality. Instead, the work that Sinaloa women have under-taken has made it proper, legitimate and just for other women in their communities to migrate abroadto work.In this sense, the women from Sinaloa who migrate to North Carolina to work assert that it is

legitimate and proper for them to engage in this economic activity as opposed to those prescribedby more traditional gender roles. Their emphasis on working abroad for their children, however, isclearly in line with traditional gender roles, yet in their exceptional case they are moving beyondsimply reproducing themselves and their class positions, striving to produce children who enjoyhigher-quality lives than theirs. Ironically, by asserting this right, they come under the power ofpolitical-economic forces at work in the global economy – forces that privilege supposedly imper-sonal labour markets that separate productive from reproductive labour, and thus favour what Smithand Winders (2007) have termed “flexible bodies” – workers who are young, productive, reliable,readily available and disposable (see also Fussell, 2009). This has not been without risk, and theserisks have manifested themselves in the form of three overlapping paradoxes.

THE PARADOXES OF PARTITIONED PARENTHOOD

Here, we chronicle the involvement of Sinaloa women in this study in three paradoxes of parent-hood that has been partitioned in terms of time, space and social structure. Parenting two-thirds ofthe year from a distance and a third at home, parenthood for them is also partitioned social struc-turally: typically, through children who are cared for by multiple carers, including parents and sur-rogate parents. Mothers attempt to play their roles through telephone calls while away, yet are notalways successful in reaffirming that role when at home, instead yielding parental authority to thegrandmother, the maternal aunt, sometimes the maternal uncles and at times older siblings.Within this context, the women experience several contradictory circumstances. First, their deci-

sion to join the temporary work programme is motivated by their desire to improve the quality oflife of their families; yet, while accomplishing this, their quality of life is damaged by the socialand psychological tensions deriving from separation. Second, the women want to break with tradi-tional gender roles and reshape their self-images from dependent women into self-reliant breadwin-ners; yet, in the process, they reaffirm traditional gender specializations by leaving the childrenmostly in the care of women. Even in cases where women leave children with husbands or malepartners, the men often seek the assistance of their mothers and other female kin for child care.Third, they justify their participation in the temporary work programme by their desire to becomebetter mothers for their children, yet their long absence from home affects the quality of the parent–child relationship and commonly negatively influences their children’s well-being. We flesh outthese three paradoxes below.

Paradox 1: quality of family life under conditions of separation

As just noted, there is a consensus among the study participants that one leading factor shapingtheir decisions to join the temporary work programme is their desire to improve the quality oflife for their families. This involves improving their housing and house furnishings, being able topay for the children’s education, paying bills and providing the family with food and clothing. Inthe absence of stable and reliable male breadwinners in the family (12 of the 20 participants had



no stable male partner), many women view joining the temporary migrant workforce as an eco-nomic necessity as much as a path towards an improved quality of life. The obvious materialbenefits that have accrued to women who have worked in mid-Atlantic seafood plants beforethem – visible in improved houses, appliances, children’s clothes and other possessions of womenfrom the same or neighbouring communities – are daily reminders of the economic rewards oftemporary migration. However, coincidental with this sense of material fulfilment is the forebod-ing regarding the potentially harmful influence of their prolonged absence on the well-being oftheir children.The study participants state that the income they can obtain locally working in agriculture, agro-

industry or crab meat picking allows for the very minimum. By contrast, seasonal work in NorthCarolina permits them to expand the material possessions of the family beyond the imaginable ifthey had decided to stay in their home communities. Ms Jimenez, a 58-year-old woman in hernineteenth season working for the same crab meat picking company in North Carolina, describesthis as follows: “[I decided to come to North Carolina] because the work we do there [home com-munity of Guasave] doesn’t help too much. It is barely enough to eat and buy clothes. Workinghere [in North Carolina] allows me to buy a truck when back at home, to fix the house, all things Icannot do if working there.”3

Their desire to improve the quality of life of the family is well reflected in the emphasis that thestudy participants place on family housing. Expanding the house to provide more space for thenuclear family, building a house away from the extended family or just improving the currentdwelling are frequently cited as major reasons participants migrate. Ms Obregón, a 42-year-oldwoman who has been coming to the same North Carolina community for 13 seasons, described thisin the following terms: “I came to build my house. I lived with my mother and brother and mychildren in a little room. There were always many people in that house. The first year I came I wasable to build a little room. And I kept coming in order to be able to finish building the house.”4

The education of children – usually considered a step towards improving quality of life and thequality of an individual – is commonly cited as another reason for temporary work migration, againbecause income earned in Guasave will not fund a complete education. They cite the cost of mate-rials that children use at school, as well as the fact that without this income or a higher level ofeducation, the children would have to work earlier in their lives and at levels more or less compa-rable to what other working-class individuals earn in Guasave. Education also confers dignity andrespect, thus enhancing well-being. Ms Jimenez said the following as she discussed the educationof her children as the main reason for working abroad:

If I didn’t come, I would not have been able to educate my child, allowing him to succeed. Nowhe is about finishing his higher education. He would not be able to do that if I stayed there. Andhe understands that, he understands that is the reason I am coming to the United States. Peoplerespect him now (because of his higher education degree).5

Another study participant, a 20-year-old single woman with no children of her own, has beenparticipating in the programme for the past 2 years, in part precisely to fund her own universityeducation. She is now in her third year of university. This individual views her temporary work,along with the higher education degree she is striving to obtain, as mechanisms to achieve financialindependence and free herself from dependence on low-wage work and migration.The concern with the education of their children contrasts with many participants’ own experi-

ence of having joined the labour market as teenagers, interrupting their formal schooling. Indeed,14 of the 20 study participants did not complete elementary school. For instance, Ms Gonzalezreported leaving school at 13 to help her mother at the crab plant in Sinaloa. Interestingly, at thetime of our visit to Sinaloa, she had a 13-year-old daughter of her own and was working to stay inthe programme specifically to keep her daughter in school. Other participants described similar



experiences, emphasizing that they do not want their children to reproduce the trend of joining alow-wage workforce at a young age.As much as they would like to educate their children and improve their living conditions, the

study participants face yet another contradiction as they migrate season after season. Many childrenhave been affected by their absence in dramatic ways – including, ironically, becoming problemstudents at school. Others have become disciplinary problems at home while shuttled among multi-ple caretakers, have abused drugs or alcohol and, most commonly, have lost respect for the motheras an authority figure. Ms Luna, a 44-year-old woman who has been participating in the pro-gramme for eight seasons, and whose children are 20, 23 and 28, refers to this quality of life para-dox with the following:

I wanted to work so that my children would have a career, so that they wouldn’t have to suffer asI did working in the fields, or that they didn’t have to live away from home. I wanted my childrento have good jobs when married. That was my desire, but I didn’t accomplish it. Out of the three,only the youngest one is studying, she has a career in Political Science and Administration, but shehas also suffered … My other son consumed drugs. He tells me he is not doing it now, but I don’tknow, since I am not there with him. He was using crystal … For months I don’t know where heis, I am always looking for a phone to try to find him, calling other people to see if they have seenhim … The one in California, he also takes drugs. He has no plans for his life, he sells his shoes,pants, shirts – all things that I give him – things that I buy when I find sales here (in North Caro-lina).6

The story told by Ms Luna is a clear representation of the contradiction that seasonal temporarymigrants face as they seek to improve living conditions and qualities of life for themselves andtheir families. From the migration experience often emerges both satisfaction and frustration: satis-faction for mostly material accomplishments and frustration for the negative effects of separationon the children and themselves. Importantly, this frustration includes not being present when thechildren fall sick, celebrate birthdays, face problems or accomplishments at school, experience thetroubles of puberty and adolescence, find mates and, for some, when their daughters experiencepregnancy. As Ms Cardenas, a study participant in her thirteenth season in the programme, age 45,married and mother of three (ages 21, 26 and 28), said as she remembered the pregnancy of heryoungest daughter, “If I had been with her all of the time, perhaps she wouldn’t have done whatshe did, I mean getting pregnant. If I had been with my daughter all of the time, this wouldn’t havehappened.”7 Surely part of her dismay over this development was its implications for the daugh-ter’s ability to continue her education or live a life different from her mother’s – its implications,in short, for the reproduction of low-wage labour.Both the desire to improve housing and educational opportunities for their children are examples

of the shared desire among migrant women to improve the quality of their children’s lives – to pro-duce, in short, higher-quality children who, hopefully, will not have to bend to political economiesthat encourage migration. While these are moral economic sentiments, they are unfortunately under-mined by the fact that the migration experience separates productive from reproductive labour. Asreproductive labour includes the disciplining of children, they are deprived of this throughmigration.

Paradox 2: transgressing while reaffirming traditional gender roles

Along with improving their material conditions, the desire to achieve independence and self-reli-ance is another leading motivation for joining the temporary work programme. As Parreñas (2005:92) states, migration presents women with the opportunity to transgress gender boundaries. This isprecisely what occurs with women participating in the temporary work programme, marshalling



individual and group contests with patriarchal authority. In many instances, migrating women havebroken off abusive relationships with partners or husbands, loosened the social constraints that bindthem to older children, parents and even siblings, and have gained financial independence andfinancial control over the household’s resources by becoming the household’s main (or sole) bread-winner. Concomitant with this, a redefinition of gender roles and gender images takes place: for-merly more submissive women play more dominant roles vis-à-vis their partners, husbands andfamilies, and financially dependent women become financially self-reliant. However, also parallel-ing Parreñas (2005: 92) when she discusses the “gender paradox”, or Kingsolver (2007: 290) whenshe discusses “paradoxical globalizations”, transgressing traditional gender roles by gaining inde-pendence and self-reliance is accompanied by a process whereby women reaffirm traditional rolesby exercising motherhood at a distance through a variety of mechanisms. This simultaneouslyenhances the value of motherhood via improved material conditions and education yet dilutesmotherhood by sharing direct, hands-on childcare responsibilities with other, usually older, womenin the nuclear or extended family.The study participants gave accounts of lives characterized by a complex system of crises that

expanded and contracted continually. Abusive relationships with male partners were a principalcomponent of such crises, and they did not necessarily end with migration. Most of the participantsdescribed experiencing abusive relationships with partners at least once in their lives. For some,that experience directly motivated the decision to join the temporary work programme. For others,joining the programme occurred after having ended such a relationship, suddenly finding them-selves in need of finances after losing full or partial access to a partner’s income.Eight of the 20 participating women ended relationships with partners after experiencing, often

for years, spouse abuse and infidelity, in most cases assuming the risks of single motherhood.Ending relationships can be interpreted as a manifestation of taking control over their lives and, inthese cases, as preliminary steps in the process leading to the decision to migrate and beginning toplay an active role as the principal breadwinners in their households. In short, leaving one’s spouseis an expression of agency for many women, one that asserts that it is proper and just for womento become single mothers and to take over the household’s finances. In some cases, working inNorth Carolina provides the women with the opportunity, at a distance, to reflect upon the trials oftheir personal relationships and become empowered to end an abusive relationship. The case of MsTrujillo – a 30-year-old woman in her first season in the programme, mother of three (ages 10, 11and 13) – illustrates this point well: “I will go back, but not to him anymore. I tell him, perhapswhen I am back things will not be the same. And he asks me ‘Why? Who is opening your eyes?Who is giving you advice?’ I tell him that no one is giving me advice, that from here I see thingsdifferently.”8

The decision to end a relationship is not always simple and straightforward. The case of Ms Gua-dalupe, a 48-year-old participant, in her fourteenth season in the programme and mother of five(ages 14, 24, 28, 29 and 34), is a good example of this. Marrying for the first time as a teenager,Ms Guadalupe experienced abuse in her marriage combined with her husband’s extramarital affairsand chronic consumption of drugs. After 2 years of marriage, she left the husband with her daugh-ter and married another man, with whom she stayed married for 30 years and had three children.Early in her second marriage, her husband also developed an addiction to drugs and alcohol, andengaged in extramarital affairs. Thirty years into the marriage, with the children grown up, MsGuadalupe made the decision to leave the house, the husband and the grown-up children, explain-ing her decision as follows:

I didn’t want to have anything to do with the house. What do I get with having this house? I toldmyself, I will work and will build my own house. So I did, I left, I decided to work and build myown little house, if God allows. That is why I made an effort to come here, because I would nothave been able to do that there.9



It is important to recognize that mere relationship problems do not, by themselves, shape thesedecisions. Instead, they occur in a context of frustration due to the impossibility of becoming finan-cially independent from their partners given the limitations of the local economy, thus implicatingpolitical economy in the crisis, and facilitating critical reflection on how it confines them to tradi-tional gender roles. From the examples of other women – in many cases, others from their own fam-ilies, who have either participated or currently participate in the temporary work programme – thesewomen see joining the programme as an escape from both bad relationships and a bad economy.In negotiating these personal and political-economic crises, Sinaloa women who migrate to North

Carolina redefine their relationships to their children, to the men in their lives and to the localeconomy. Many authors who write about moral economy suggest that the “popular consensus” thatemerges in a moral economy – a consensus regarding the proper economic roles of the people –emerges from some kind of crisis: a crisis of subsistence among peasants, for example (Scott,1979), a crisis of access to marine resources among artisanal fishermen (Griffith et al., 2007) or acrisis of the withdrawal of state support among tobacco farmers (Griffith, 2006). In Guasave, thecrisis that propels women towards migration consists of the ways in which traditional gender rolesallow or even encourage domestic violence and infidelity, combined with the lack of opportunitiesfor women in the local economy.The desire to protect children from early entrance into the labour market through education can

be viewed as another manifestation of the process of acquiring financial and social independenceand self-reliance. Here, their own struggle for self-reliance corresponds to the desire to have theirchildren achieve that same independence, adding value to their lives through education. It is adesire for the children to become better individuals than they were – to produce, in short, higher-quality human beings. It is also an expression of how the process of breaking with traditional gen-der roles, as the women become the principal breadwinners, is projected on to the children, anddaughters in particular.The paradox of gender roles transgression is that while the women are in fact able to gain inde-

pendence from male partners and become self-reliant breadwinners, they also reaffirm and reinforcetraditional gender roles related to child rearing and parenting. Most often, women leave the childrenin the care of other women – usually mothers, older daughters, sisters, sisters-in-law and other lat-eral female kin. On occasion, caretakers rotate, so that the child may end up being in the care ofmore than one woman during a season. Ms Marquez, a 44-year-old woman in her first season inthe programme, married and mother of four (ages 15, 17, 18 and 21), exemplifies this well: “I askmy nieces to please wash the clothes of my children. They tell me, ‘yes aunt, do not worry, we’lldo it’. My sister sometimes cooks for them, although my children can do it”10.Although absent from home for eight months a year, they make efforts to exercise motherhood

through frequent telephone calls to their children and the family members left in their charge. In away, they reaffirm the traditional dual shift roles that working-class women usually play as theyinsert themselves into the labour market, simultaneously breadwinners and mothers (Kingsolver,2007). In these telephone calls, which they make as frequently as three times a week, the womeninquire about the well-being of the children and the family, find out about problems, receive specialrequests for monetary assistance, promise children gifts at the end of the season in exchange forgood behaviour and, importantly, reaffirm to their children how important their work away fromhome is for the family’s well-being. Ms Blanco, a 25-year-old separated woman in her second sea-son in the programme, mother of a 5-year-old son, said that in her conversations with her youngson, she justifies her absence as follows: “I want my son to have a beautiful childhood, I don’twant him to grow with hate towards his parents. So, every time I talk with him, I tell him that Iwill come back. ‘I come here to work because of you. But don’t think I will leave you alone. I willcome back, I will not stay here.’”11

Justification of the absence is usually presented to the children and family as a necessary trade-off:sadness and suffering derived from separation is traded for the economic benefits that derive from



migration. This trade-off lies at the root of the women’s temporary work experience and is a criticalcomponent of the system of paradoxes that characterizes that experience. It is, too, a sacrifice similarto those experienced by people who challenge traditional roles. Ironically, viewed objectively, with-out the benefit of subjective meanings that women attach to their experiences, this behaviour couldbe seen as maximizing, promoting one’s own economic interests at the expense of family.

Paradox 3: striving to become better mothers apart from children

For study participants, the desire to be better mothers to their children is yet another motivation forjoining the temporary work programme. As is evident by now, superior motherhood involves pro-viding for their children economically, giving them a better life than the one they have lived. Thecost of this is their incapacity to provide emotional support and care for the children, thus creatinga tension within motherhood, their interest in providing economic well-being competing with theirdesire to provide emotional support. This occurs, moreover, at key moments in their children’slives, which in turn influences their own well-being. As Ms Garcia, a woman in her eighth seasonin the programme, and mother of three, aged 20, 23 and 26, said:

[When coming to the USA] you just think that you can accomplish things. But you don’t think ofthe other people. I didn’t think it would affect so much my children. I didn’t think that my childrenwould suffer so much. But I wanted to fix the house, I wanted to put floors in the house. But weemphasize the material too much, that is what I think. Thinking of what I have lived, on my expe-rience, I consider myself a fool. A fool because I am struggling for the material well-being, but notfor people’s feelings. I love them (the children), they love me, and I have hurt them. That is what Ithink now.12

Most study participants who have experienced this tension have been absent for a significant num-ber of years during their children’s childhood or adolescence. Several of the women, and Ms Garciaamong them, deal with the emotional distress of this tension through a number of mechanisms.These include skipping a season abroad to deal with a problem at home, seeking emotional andspiritual support from local churches in North Carolina and migrating with other family members,be they members of the nuclear family, the extended family or even, in one case, a husband. MsGarcia, for instance, comes to Herring Creek with her 20-year-old daughter, her 66-year-old auntand her cousin. In the dormitory where they live while in Herring Creek, others replicate a commu-nity of support with other women from their home community in Sinaloa. As one of the women saidduring a field visit to the dormitory, “we are all friends, but we are closer to the ones who comefrom our same community”. With those people they create a close-knit, fictitious family, one thatshares, through examples if not words, ideas about their proper economic roles in a difficult world.

CONCLUSION

Overshadowing the three paradoxes described above is a fourth that applies to guest-worker pro-grammes generally, and to which the German Minister of Labour alluded when referring to Ger-many’s guest-worker programmes after the Second World War. He said something to the effectthat, “We thought we were importing workers, but learned we were importing people.”13 In otherwords, guest-worker programmes are based on a political-economic argument that bringing foreignworkers into a country to work without their families separates productive from reproductive labourin a way that is preferable to having immigrants who arrive with all the social and economic bag-gage of children and other family members. In terms of economic efficiency and political expedi-ency, this argument makes perfect sense, allowing employers access to highly reliable, easily



controlled labour without having to find housing for their children or positions for their spouses,and appeasing anti-immigrant activists with the claim that foreign workers will return to their homecountries following the end of their contracts (Hahamovitch, 2003).Yet guest workers, as people, do have all the social baggage of family, community and culture,

and their participation in guest-worker programmes satisfies political-economic needs while initiat-ing moral economic behaviours. This may be the case especially when guest-worker programmestarget women and, through this, both undermine and enhance motherhood, reshaping traditionalgender roles as they reaffirm them. We are by no means the first to point out the contradictions thatface women who become separated from their families through migration. Our contribution hasbeen to situate the three paradoxes described above into a moral-economic theoretical frameworkthat relates directly to recent work on globalization, questioning the ways in which global politicaleconomies value human beings. We have, as well, demonstrated that managed migrants, althoughreturning every year, still suffer from problems similar to those of mothers who live and work formany years at a time away from their families (Levitt, 2001; Parreñas, 2005; Schmalzbauer, 2004).These three paradoxes are those of partitioned parenthood, yet they are reflections of a broader par-adox that exists between moral economy and political economy, and that faces many internationallabour migrants in the world today.Ironically, whatever independence the women from Guasave attain by virtue of their working

in North Carolina is achieved within a work setting that is highly restrictive, facilitating depen-dence on employers for transportation, housing and work. In many countries that import guestworkers, guest-worker programmes are characterized as highly confining, restricting participants’physical and economic mobility by means of a variety of legal and informal mechanisms, andcreating conditions in which guest workers are often compared to slaves and indentured servants(Griffith, 2006; Hahamovitch, 2003; Preibisch and Encalada, 2010). Further, migration streamsthat draw primarily women into transnational labour markets often utilize gender as a tool tocontrol female workers both on and off job sites even as they challenge patriarchal authority athome. Crab picking in the mid-Atlantic was gendered long before processing plants began bring-ing in female Latino workers, through a reliance on African American women from the localarea (Griffith, 1999, 2006). From the employer’s perspective, then, it has been customary orproper for them to rely on a female labour force in much the same way as other small-scalefood-processing companies rely on female workers as though their work is an extension of tasksnormally performed in kitchens.Yet mothers leaving children to join international labour forces bring motherhood to the fore-

ground of their overall work experience, raising questions concerning the legitimacy of womenentering migrant streams, generating discussion and argument about the “proper” roles of womenin the global economy and in domestic spheres, rearranging household, family and communitysocial relations over issues of surrogate parenting, and generally reaffirming the central anchor ofmotherhood on traditional gender relations, in which the needs and desires of women are second-ary and subservient to the needs and desires of children. In their quest to produce high-qualitychildren, migration may contribute to the undermining of motherhood, including damaging thebases for parental discipline and authority and thereby lowering the quality of children in termsof their abilities to recognize and respond to leadership, role models and other social positionsthat depend on authority. This may be an initial step in the process of severing migrants fromthe spaces of social reproduction – the local spaces of the moral economy – that is a prerequisitefor the creation of “perfect immigrants” (Hahamovitch, 2003), “flexible bodies” (Smith andWinders, 2007) and “rapid response workers” (Fussell, 2009), which scholars view as increas-ingly common in low-wage labour markets – or at least increasingly preferred by employers.Thus severed, these mothers become situated squarely within the global political economy. At amore abstract level, guest-worker programmes – especially gendered guest-worker programmesthat utilize women – manifest the paradox between moral economy and political economy around



the world. If in the latter the women from Sinaloa are workers and in the former they are peo-ple, perhaps somewhere in the spaces and places between, they are the mothers they hope tobecome.

NOTES

1. Every year, the USA issues around 60,000 H-2B visas to workers to work in fisheries, forestry, landscap-ing, tourism and other non-agricultural industries that can prove that they are seasonal. Around the samenumber of H-2A visas are issued to workers for work in agriculture, many of them in North Carolina aswell.

2. While no one knows the extent to which workers with H-2 visas have left H-2 labour forces and becomeundocumented immigrants, we know personally of several women in the region who have become more orless permanent residents, some marrying local North Carolina men and others opening businesses servingLatino or mixed Anglo-Latino clienteles.

3. “Porque el trabajo de allá no lo saca a uno de ningún apuro. Así ya tiene uno por decir se va de aquí ycompra un mueble, arregla su casa y allá no. Allá nada más si le alcanza a uno para estar comiendo, para aveces comprarte una ropa o algo. Pero no más.”

4. “Pues yo para poder hacer mi casa, porque yo dejé mi casa en Tijuana y pues se me hacía feo estar con mimamá, pues era un cuartito chico, y pues no cabíamos mis hijos y todavía ahí estaba viviendo mi hermano,el más chico que yo y siempre pues éramos varios los que estábamos en esa casa con mi mamá. Y yo puespor eso mismo decidí venirme para acá para poder hacer mi casa. Ya pues el primer año que me vine, sílogré hacer mi cuartito. Pero yo me seguí viniendo para terminar mi casa”.

5. “Peor como yo le digo pues, si uno no se viene, no lo saca uno adelante. Mira ahorita ya está por terminarsu carrera. Allá no lo iba a poder sacar adelante, y él si lo entiende. Porque él si ha habido ratos que me hadicho a mí que él se siente solo. Pues, le falta su mamá. Y pues como yo le digo, pero si entiende. Y elpues según para él como dices ahorita, le tienen un respeto yo para él y dice que sí, que yo soy lo másgrande que él tiene”.

6. “Yo quería trabajar ya después que tenía casa para que mis hijos tuvieran una carrera de algo, que notuvieran que sufrir como yo en el campo o estar lejos, no sé. Yo quería que mis hijos estuvieran prep-arados para cuando se casaran o tuvieran una mejor manera de trabajar. Esa era mi intención, no lologré. Solamente ella está estudiando ahorita. Tiene su carrera de ciencias políticas y administración, laniña, pero pues también ha sufrido conmigo todos los problemas de la casa. Pues ha sufrido mi ausen-cia, ha sufrido ver que mi hijo grande está mal. A ella la agrede también. Y pues también mi otro hijousaba drogas. Dice que en éste momento no. Yo no sé, yo no estoy con él. Pero dice que ya no. Else estaba metiendo cristal, fuma mucho … no sé … No sé donde está. Por meses no sé donde está.Siempre tengo que andar buscando un teléfono dónde buscarlo. Llamándole a otras personas a ver si lohan visto … Al que está en California que también se droga. Y el otro pues ese no tiene planes denada. Vende sus zapatos, vende sus pantalones, vende sus camisas … que mami le lleva, que le com-pra aquí cuando hay ofertas”.

7. “Y yo digo, a lo mejor si yo hubiera estado siempre con ella, a lo mejor ella no hubiera hecho lo que hizo,que salió embarazada pues. A lo mejor si yo hubiera estado con mi hija siempre, a lo mejor no hubiera pa-sado eso”.

8. “Yo si pienso volver pero a lo mejor con él ya no. Yo le digo, a lo mejor llegando yo contigo ya no va aser lo mismo. ¿Pero por qué, quién te dice eso? ¿Quién te está abriendo los ojos? Y que están aconsejando.No, le digo yo, es que de aquí ya miro yo las cosas diferentes.”

9. “No, es que yo no quería ya nada con la casa, dije yo, pues que me gano tener casa. Y no, yo preferí mejorsalirme. Dije yo pues voy a trabajar y voy a hacerme mi casita, si Dios quiere. Y esos son mis pensamien-tos. Por eso yo hice lucha de venirme para acá. Porque pues allá en el campo nunca iba a poder. Y aquípues …”.

10. “ … yo cuando hablo así que me toca hablar con ella (niece) le digo: por favor y me hacen un paro y leslavan a los niños. Si, dice, tía no se preocupe yo les hago aquí. Mi hermana en veces les da la comida …aunque ellos son muy buenos para andar haciendo, ellos no se atrasan”.

11. “Yo quiero que mi niño crezca con una niñez bonita, que no crezca con rencor hacia sus papás. Entoncesyo cada vez que le hablo, hablo con él y le digo que yo voy a volver. Yo vengo por ti, le digo, a trabajar.Pero no creas que yo te voy a dejar solo. Yo voy a regresar, yo no me pienso quedar aquí.”



12. “Piensa nomás en que puedes y puedes y puedes a lo mejor lograr cosas. Pero no piensas en los demás.Yo no pensé que iba a afectar tanto a mis hijos. Que mis hijos sufrieron mucho y yo ya hice mi casa yquería arreglar mi casa después, quería ponerle piso … ya te vas sobre lo material creo yo. A lo que yoya he vivido, con la experiencia que yo tengo, me considero una persona tonta. Tonta porque estoy luch-ando por lo material y no por los sentimientos de los demás. Que me quieren y que los quiero y que loshe afectado. Eso creo ahora”.

13. This quote captures the spirit of what was said of Germany’s guest-worker programmes, but may not beexact. Different authors attribute the quote to different German government officials as well. In the guest-worker literature, however, it has become as classic a statement as “There is nothing so permanent as atemporary worker.”

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managing migration, managing motherhood: the moral economy of gendered migration

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