Siblings by Telephone: Experiences of Mexican Children in Long-Distance Childrearing Arrangements

Abstract

As the proportion of children involved in migrant flows of Mexicans headed north to the United States and the number of youngsters left behind by migrant parents have increased during the 1990s and the start of the twenty-first century,1 a new phenomenon has emerged that merits the attention of family specialists: siblings separated by international borders who do not live together on a daily basis. In fact, as our title suggests, some of these siblings know each other only through technological means photographs, videos, or telephone. The youngsters have been left behind in home villages, towns, and cities in Mexico, or sent back to their parents' homeland, because the parents consider that move to be in the children's best interest. Lacking daily face-to-face contact and shared experiences, these siblings find themselves trapped on opposite sides of an international border. From these different locations and understandings of their place in the world, they tend to forge dissimilar life trajectories in terms of educational, work, and residential choices. In some cases, the siblings face additional linguistic and cultural barriers to communication, having been raised by one or both biological parents or alternate caregivers in radically different family settings. When this occurs, feelings of alienation, personal sacrifice for the common good, parental favoritism, envy, and outright resentment may surface, distancing the siblings even more. Unlike most literature on children and migration, which basically concerns those who travel alongside their families as supposedly passive followers of their parents, this article focuses on the viewpoints and life experiences of a little-studied subgroup of children involved in the migratory phenomenon: those separated from their brothers and sisters by the U.S.-Mexican border (as a result of separation from