Latinidad
Transnational Cultures in the United States
Matt Garcia, Series Editor, Professor of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies, and History, Dartmouth College
This series publishes books that deepen and expand our understanding of Latina/o populations, especially in the context of their transnational relationships within the Americas. Focusing on borders and boundary-crossings, broadly conceived, the series is committed to publishing scholarship in history, film and media, literary and cultural studies, public policy, economics, sociology, and anthropology. Inspired by interdisciplinary approaches, methods, and theories developed out of the study of transborder lives, cultures, and experiences, the titles enrich our understanding of transnational dynamics.
For a list of titles in the series, see the last page of the book.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Martinez, Isabel, 1979 author.
Title: Becoming transnational youth workers : independent Mexican teenage migrants and pathways of survival and social mobility / Isabel Martinez.
Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2019] | Series: Latinidad: transnational cultures in the United States | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018032220 | ISBN 9780813589800 (cloth) | ISBN 9780813589794 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Foreign workersUnited States | Foreign workersMexico. | Teenage immigrantsUnited States. | Teenage immigrantsMexico. | Mexican-American Border RegionHistory.
Classification: LCC HD8081.M6 M35 2019 | DDC 331.3/470973dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032220
A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copyright 2019 by Isabel Martinez
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.
www.rutgersuniversitypress.org
In the Shadows of Skyscrapers and Ivory Towers
Almost two decades ago, I found myself gearing up for yet another Martinez family reunion in Harlingen, a South Texas town approximately thirty miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Prior to this event in July 2000, I had never inquired into, nor knew about, the history of our family. Yet laid out before us by my uncle, Tio Felipe Salazar II, was the history of the Martinez family from my paternal grandparents early twentieth-century emigration from Mexico to the beginning of the twenty-first century, a narrative printed in its entirety in a slim, gray, Kinkos-bound volume.
Central to this family history is the story of a young girlmy paternal grandmotherwho, by the age of sixteen, would flee violence and poverty in Mexico and cross the U.S.-Mexico border without her parents. Born poor in 1902, Josefa Cermeo Luna was brought into the world in El Molino, Guanajuato, to a campesino (farm worker) and an ama de casa (housewife). Subject to early twentieth-century rural gender norms and without nearby schools, she would be taught how to become a good woman, skilled in the ways of the home. She would learn how to cook and clean and care for her brothers.
By the time Josefa turned twelve, her older brothers twenty-two-year-old friend, Baltazar, took notice of her, and in 1915, as she approached her thirteenth birthday, she wed. The ceremony was, according to her account, a simple but solemn occasion with only a few family members serving as witnesses (Salazar 2000). After the ceremony, Baltazar would take her to his familys jacal, or mud and straw-thatched home, where, not much unlike rural areas of Mexico today, they would live, and he would work from sun up to sun down in the fields, and she would help rear her sister-in-laws children.
Josefa came of age in poverty amid the violence of the Mexican Revolution. Although El Molino was not yet a site of conflict, by the time Josefa was approximately sixteen years old, rumors had reached the small town that both Villistas and Federales were coercing men to join their armies and were forcibly seizing food, women, arms, ammunition, and horses from campesinos. These reports worried both Josefa and Baltazar. Left with little recourse, they made plans to leave and go to el norte. On a brisk October or November day in 1918, the barely sixteen-year-old wife and now mother would wrap Margarita, her infant daughter, in her rebozo (scarf), hug her parents good-bye, and leave the only home she knew to travel more than four hundred miles in an ox-driven cart, or carreta, with her husband; her eleven-year-old brother, Victoriano; and another family, the Colungas. This young girlnow affectionately known as Mama Chepa to more than a hundred U.S.-born children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildrenwould arrive two months later in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, and cross the Rio Bravo River to Peitas, Texas, a town founded in the sixteenth century by a splinter group of survivors of the Pnfilo de Nrvaez expeditiona priest, five military officers, and their slaves. Nearly four hundred years after that expedition, Josefa and Baltazar encountered a new group of explorers, a campsite of Mexican families who had crossed in the days and weeks before them. Joining them, Josefa would care for young Margarita and prepare meals with the other women while Baltazar would seek backbreaking labor with the other men.
When told today, this story is usually met with loud gasps and questions about why my grandmother would engage in such grown-up actions at such a tender age. The short answer is fairly uncomplicated. Born a poor girl, young Josefa was simply following her community and her familys understandings of age, class, and gender norms. She was not precocious; rather, young Josefa was simply abiding by the social time, or the set of norms that specify when particular life transitions or accomplishments are expected in a particular society or social milieu (Clausen 1986: 2). Shaped by her communitys and familys socioeconomic conditions, as well as the broader sociohistorical and political contexts in which her community and family were located, Josefas acts, for her time and place, were deemed perfectly on-time (Burton 1996; Neugarten and Hagestad 1976). Early marriage, early childbearing, and eventually migration without parents were simply normal.
But what about in contemporary times? One hundred years later, why would teenage Mexican minors continue to leave their parents to seek better lives in el norte? A century after the crossing of Josefa Cermeo Luna, this book focuses on a group of Mexican teenage minors, albeit mostly male and unmarried, who followed Josefas lead and, indicative of new destinations of Mexican immigrant settlement that extend beyond the U.S. Southwest, sought better lives in New York City. Challenging the characterizations of immigrant minors as luggage More accurately referred to as
