Lilia Soto - Girlhood in the Borderlands: Mexican Teens Caught in the Crossroads of Migration

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Girlhood in the Borderlands: Mexican Teens Caught in the Crossroads of Migration

Lilia Soto

Lilia Soto

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

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NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

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2018 by New York University

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Soto, Lilia, author.

Title: Girlhood in the borderlands : Mexican teens caught in the crossroads of migration / Lilia Soto.

Description: New York : New York University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017045036 | ISBN 9781479838400 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479862016 (pb : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH : Teenage girlsMexico. | Teenage immigrantsUnited States. | Transnationalism. | MexicoEmigration and immigrationSocial aspects. | United StatesEmigration and immigrationSocial aspects.

Classification: LCC HQ799.M6 S68 2018 | DDC 305.235/20972dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045036

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To my parents, Matias and Maria Elena Soto, gracias por todo. Soy por ustedes.

To my sisterslas chiquillasLupe, Olivia, Silvia, Martha and Lorena, thank you for being with me.

To my nephew Jiulian, I welcome you back.

To my niece Sofia, thank you for being so lovely.

To my nephew Eztli, my chiquilinguis, I love you to the moon and back.

To my sobrino-nieto Jay, thank you for brightening our lives.

I have moved this project forward by looking backwards. I began this research in the early 2000s looking back on my childhood experiences of migrating to the United States in the 1980s. I decided to conduct a multi-site research project in the U.S. and Mexico focused on young im/migrant women to see if contemporary migrant girls had the same aspirations, anxieties, expectations, and experiences that I had had. My father had made repeated trips back and forth between Zinapcuaro, Michoacn, and Napa, California, before he settled in the United States permanently. My mother and siblings remained in Mexico where we anticipated moving north someday. Fragmentation and transnationalism defined our family life. It was fragmented by moves to the U.S. and back to Mexico, and then to the U.S. once again, and by visits, phone calls, letters, and other efforts to share affection and intimacy with family members living in two different countries. We did not simply move from our country of origin to our country of arrival, but lived physically and psychically inside and across national borders, simultaneously and sequentially.

I was born in Napa and raised in Zinapcuaro until the fourth grade. After living in a transnational family for ten years, my mother, five sisters, and I reunited with my father. I know Zinapcuaro and Napa very well, and have witnessed how migration, globalization, and the flow of transnational products have altered both locations. In this study, my insiders perspective allows me to have an intimate and personal understanding of girls lives and place in which they live, yet my training as a researcher enables an analytic and impersonal understanding of social structures and social forces. I can view my objects of research both from close up and from far away. Over the years, I have witnessed how the city of Napa has grown to cater to its tourist industry and wine economy, while my annual trips back to Zinapcuaro allowed me to trace the changes in the town that were due to the national and transnational dimensions of its diaspora caused by new international trade policies and neoliberal restricting of the social wage. Having lived in the U.S. since 1986, I am no longer considered an immigrant, which removes me from the immediate immigrant experience. Still, I am able to ask interviewees about details I may have otherwise missed if I were a complete outsider, such as the importance of schooling, afterschool activities, and family life. Unlike most of the girls I interviewed, I was privileged enough to have been born in the U.S., allowing me to move legally within and across transnational social fields. Such privilege and mobility places me as a member outside of the immediate migrant community. I try to make the best of my contradictory and ambiguous identitiesto negotiate my positionalityby listening to the girls, by not interrupting them or inserting myself in their interviews. Once I pressed the stop button to cease recording, the girls invariably asked me questions about me and my relationship to migration. During these moments, I usually revealed my story and shared why this project matters, why their stories need to be heard.