Essay I wrote as a freshman, be gentle (or not, it's old)

David Prince
December 1, 2011

Abandoned: The Struggles of Women and Families Left Behind in Mexico

Immigration from Mexico (specifically undocumented) has been a prevalent issue
for the last 15 years in the United States. The issue has divided the nation, with some
people saying these immigrants are taking all our jobs and are taking advantage of the
American system, while others assert that these immigrants are taking jobs that most
people wouldn’t take for salaries that are unacceptable, and that the undocumented
immigrants deserve some sort of amnesty. What is rarely mentioned in such debates
however are the reasons why so many people are migrating from Mexico in the first
place, and just as important, what these people leave behind in the process. While the
amount of families migrating to Mexico has been on the rise in recent years (McCarty, p.
108), there are still many men leaving their families behind in Mexico in hopes to find a
job in the US to support their families. In this paper, I hope to reveal the current state of
rural Mexico and the women and families left behind by migrant men, and through this,
add to the reasons why the US should take more strides in helping our neighboring
country.

When exploring the issue of the families left behind by men migrating to the
United States, it is important to understand why these men are migrating to the United
States. The great increase in migration can be traced back to the introduction of the
North American Free Trade Agreement. The North American Free Trade Agreement
(known as NAFTA) was created to break the economic borders between Canada, the
United States, and Mexico therefore facilitating the circulation of goods and capital
across North America. Early on it was believed that NAFTA would be beneficial to
Mexico. As Wayne A. Cornelius and Philip L. Martin said in 1993, “The NAFTA is
essential to create jobs in Mexico so that no more Mexicans cross the US border
looking for jobs” (p.485). However, this prediction was the exact opposite of what has
actually happened. While NAFTA has proved to be beneficial to US investors and
companies, it has been extremely harmful to the Mexican economy. In particular,
NAFTA had a devastating affect on the economy of rural Mexico. Mexican farmers
simply can’t compete with the prices at which subsidized US farmers are able to sell
their products; and much of the land that used to be communally owned by many
Mexican farmers has now been bought by various US and Canadian corporations,
again increasing the strain on Mexican farmers. (McCarty 107)

Since the introduction of NAFTA, the amount of employed farmers in the rural
sectors of Mexico has declined by over a million workers. As of 2004, 15,915,000
families in rural Mexico don’t own land anymore, putting them in the status of extreme
poverty. Overall participation in the agricultural industry has lowered from 26% of
Mexico’s population to about 16% (McCarty, p.108-109). Simply put, the state of rural
Mexico, which was not even that good before NAFTA, has deteriorated significantly.

As a result of this effect NAFTA has had, families that used to depend on
subsidized agriculture for a living have to resort to other means to survive; one of the
most common actions these families take is migration to the United States in an attempt
to find a more reliable source of income. This is one of the primary reasons for the
recent mass migration of Mexicans to the United States, with many of these migrants
being men looking for more money in the US to be able to support their families left
behind. As Dawn McCarty mentions “It is possible, in fact, common, to travel through
rural villages and never see a male between the ages of 15 and 60 years” (McCarty, p.
109). This absence of males has made the lives of the families, and more specifically
the women, left behind much more difficult in recent years.
The idea of the mass migration by the breadwinners in rural Mexican households
is that the men would move over to the United States so they could find a higher paying
job than they could in Mexico, and would send over money to their families still residing
in Mexico. Remittances from the US to families in Mexico have been on a great rise in
recent years. In 2006, a total of 22 million dollars was sent as remittances to Mexican
families, and these remittances currently make up about 2.7% of Mexico’s total GDP. To
put things in perspective though, the total remittance a rural Mexican family may receive
from their respective breadwinner averages to about 2,372 US dollars a year (Vasquez,
p.684).

This is not the case for many families however. While seasonal migration used to
be a common practice among these men, meaning they would work in the US part of
the year, and return to Mexico for other times of the year, the practice of seasonal
migration has decreased sufficiently in recent years due to the increase in defenses on
the US/Mexican border. As a result, it is becoming increasingly the case that the families
back in Mexico never see their migrant family members ever again, and don’t receive
any sort of contact or receive any remittances from them. Many of these women believe
that their husbands started new families in the United States. Many of these women in
such situations however are not considering divorce due to the cultural sanctity of
religion and marriage. More and more women in response to this however are refusing
to marry, or at least refusing to marry through the church. The disintegration of families
has become quite common in many rural communities. This is observed by Dawn
McCarty and J. Rick Altemose in one article: “The damage to the family structure
caused by the growing migration north, both in scale and force, can be seen in the
language. Terms such as sola (she is alone), meaning her husband or partner is in the
United States, or abandonada (abandoned), if that contact has been lost, are now
common” (McCarty, Altemose, p.292). The fact that such language has become so
commonplace in rural Mexican communities is discouraging.
The disintegration of the family is not only relevant to husbands of these women
unfortunately, but to their children as well. In recent years, more and more adolescents
are pressured into migrating to the US to find means to live as the opportunities for
them dwindle in their home villages. This pressure for adolescents to migrate to the US
has saddened many mothers, recognizing the hopelessness their children feel, these

mothers feel as if they have failed their children by not being able to provide for them.
(McCarty, Altemose, p.292-294)
How these women left behind have reacted to the migration of their husband has

varied. Sometimes, particularly with young women, they end up living with their parents-
in-law. In such situations, the parents-in-law in theory initially provide for their daughter

in law at least until remittances arrive. Such situations prove to become quite tense
however for these women. In Rosío Córdova Plaza’s article “Sexuality and Gender in
Transnational Spaces” he asserts. “As a consequence of her remaining behind, the
control exercised over the woman’s life by her husband’s family increases, while she is
ever more restricted to the domestic sphere. She is supervised constantly, such that she
becomes a married woman without a husband, alone but forbidden to have a formal
relationship with another man” (p.44). Of course that being said, it is not totally
uncommon for a woman whose husband’s in the US to engage in sexual services in
return for financial aid during times of desperate financial need. The term used for this is
“ayuda” (meaning help in Spanish). This sexual transaction is seen quite prevalently in
Quimichtepec and is tolerated by many people.

Many women however, use other means in which to ensure support for their
families. With jobs being close to impossible to obtain in many rural areas of Mexico,
women have started to work together to create cooperatives as means of making
money. These cooperatives have varied from quilt making to growing different types of
vegetables or plants. Often motivated by their desires for their children to stay home,
women in these rural communities work together to try to take strides towards
entrepreneurship, trying to forge opportunity from where there used to be nothing. The
results of these cooperatives vary, but it certainly is encouraging to see these women
rise above their cultural stereotypes and take action.

Women in these rural communities have started to break away from their
previous submissive roles and have started to take roles that are more often associated
to men in the Mexican culture. As mentioned earlier with the cooperatives, many women
have also have been put into a leader-like role in their families. The amount of
households with a woman as head of the household in rural Mexico has increased by
10% in the last five years, as has the occurrence of single parenthood in these areas
(Vasquez, p.687). Women have started to take leadership positions in their respective
communities. Since the government hasn’t been helpful to their communities, these
women have started to take many responsibilities themselves to better improve their
situations. These women took initiative to get business education, negotiate contracts,
and gathered resources to create work for themselves and the others in their community
and through this are slowly improving their economy (McCarty, Altemose, p.296).

What does this mean for us though? Has the US been doing anything to help
Mexico? After all, if a country like the United States of America will go out of their way to
help create a democracy for Iraq, wouldn’t one think our government would also go out
of their way to help our direct neighbors in an obvious time of need? Unfortunately, that
is quite the opposite of the United State’s reaction to the economic devastation of rural
Mexico. Instead of extending bridges to Mexico, we have been building walls, securing
borders, and ignoring the obvious troubles they have been in. Just as simple proof:
Dawn McCarty mentions “the US shares a common 2,000-mile border with Mexico, a
country of 105 million people with whom it is tied economically as each other’s largest
trading partners and socially by a long history of conquest and migration, yet Mexico
has the same 20,000-visa quota as that of Botswana, Africa.”(McCarty, 2007, p.109).
20,000 visas, for a country that sends over 480,000 immigrants annually (Vasquez, p.
684).

For a neighboring country riddled with so much trouble such as Mexico, one
would hope that the United States would be more willing to at least extend more visas.
After all, it is kind of our fault that rural Mexico is in the state it is in. With the arrival of
NAFTA, US corporations were quick to buy land that once was reserved for Mexican
farmers known as ejidos. With the disappearance of these ejidos, came a
disappearance of a way of life for many farmers who had been living on those lands for
generations. Those who were still able to farm couldn’t compete with US prices and live
in poverty. We destroyed a Mexican tradition, and now continue spit in the country’s
face by not allowing its citizens any sort of welcome in our country. I find it surprising
that a country, once seen as a haven for people who wanted to seek a better life, can so
easily ignore the needs of our neighboring country.

This needs to change. It is intolerable that we as a nation have been trying to
avoid the situation entirely. If we really want to help, we should first increase the visa
quota for Mexico, and perhaps go as far as give amnesty to those who are in our
country undocumented. It is obvious that there are many families in Mexico struggling to
simply make ends meet, if that. If we were to provide more visas for people, chances
are those companies that do hire undocumented immigrants wouldn’t be able to get
away with paying these people such low wages. Even more, chances are with visas
these immigrants would have an easier time finding jobs in the US, making it easier to
make a living for themselves, but more importantly, be able to pay proper remittances to
their respective families, because at this point, these families have been abandoned.
Abandoned by their breadwinners, abandoned by their government, abandoned by
everyone, and only have each other. Anything we can do as a nation to make these
women and families not feel this way I believe should be done immediately.

Sources
Cornelius, W. Martin, L. (1993). “The Uncertain Connection: Free Trade and Rural
Mexican Migration to the United States”. International Migration Review. Volume 27
(Issue 3). p.484-512.
McCarty, D. Altemose, J. (2010). “The Voices of Mexican Women Left Behind:
Responses to their Challenges”. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies. Volume 8
(Issue 3): p.284-300.
McCarty, D. (2007). “The Impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
on Rural Children and Families in Mexico: Transitional Policy and Practice Implications”.
Journal of Public Child Welfare. Volume 1 (Issue 4). p.105-123.
Plaza, R. (Fall 2007). “Sexuality and Gender in Transnational Spaces: Realignments in
Rural Veracruz Families due to International Migration”. Social Text. Volume 25 (Issue
3). p. 37-55.
Vasquez, K. (Jul 2011). “A Pluralist Alternative: Mexican Women, Migration, and
Regional Development”. American Journal of Sociology. Volume 70 (Issue 3). p.
671-698.