A substantial portion of Guatemala's population—about 10—15 percent of a population of 12 million—emigrates to the United States. Although this northward movement has produced significant social change, few studies have examined it from the perspective of the increasing involvement of household structures in transnational migration processes. Ethnographic research focused on transnational families reveals the social relationships that develop between caregivers and children and between parents and caregivers because of the necessity for transnational migration and identifies the emotional costs of these arrangements.While violence and economic stress are clearly contributors to the recent surge in unaccompanied minors to the US, so too is family reunification. In this article, Moran-Taylor looks at what happens when one or both parents leave their children in Guatemala to seek out a better life in the US. In many ways, it isn't pretty.
Extended family, particularly grandmother and aunt caretakers, often watch the children of those who have left for the US. The caretakers raise the kids as their own. However, the parents who have traveled to the US often don't appreciate the sacrifice that their relatives are making in caring for the children. The children, while they appreciate the caretaker immensely, still have that unbreakable bond with their parent or parents in the US.
Over time, lots of negative effects are seen. The children left behind in Guatemala become almost single-mindedly obsessed with the remittances that they receive from the US. They get upset if they are interrupted or decreased. It often becomes the only thing that they care about.
The caretakers often have trouble when the parents send for the kids that had been left in their care. They've raised them as their own for years. The caretakers often do not want to expose the children that they have cared for to the dangers of the journey north through Mexico. That has led to conflict between the relatives. Sometimes they have paid their own way to accompany the children to the border.
They wanted me to send her [the niece] illegally. But I didn’t want to because I knew the mishaps she could potentially endure along the way. Because you hear of so many despicable things that happen, right? When we spoke on the telephone my brother-in-law would even insult me. He would say that I didn’t want to send their child because I was taking the money, the U.S. dollars they sent. But I never took any of the money for myself. I did, however, lump it together with mine to use for the household expenses, but even that wasn’t enough. They would send me $75 each month. And with these funds, I placed my niece in a private school. My youngest son, who just turned twenty, was very distressed about this whole situation. He then decided to go there [the United States] to accompany my niece along the way and drop her off at her parents’ house in Arizona. So now, there she is.
Since her arrival over there [Phoenix], my sister and her husband don’t even write to me—and they don’t even want my niece to have anything to do with us. My husband now tells me: ‘you see… since you raised her, they don’t even want anything to do with you now.’ But my little niece still keeps in touch—she calls me when they [the parents] are not around. Her father, though, always tells her that she needs to forget about us altogether. After children who have been cared for leave for the US, the remittances to the caretaker (the grandmother or grandmother-in-law, sister, sometimes friend) end abruptly. They might have sent a few hundred dollars a month to an aunt to take care of their nieces and nephews but once the kids are no longer in their care, the relationship ends.There are a great number of actual family scenarios described in this 2008 article, most of them negative.
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