Consuming Childhood: "Lost" and "Ideal" Childhoods as a Motivation for Migration

Sarah Horton

Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 81, Number 4, Fall 2008, pp. 925-943 (Article) Published by George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research DOI: 10.1353/anq.0.0034

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SOCIAL THOUGHT & COMMENTARY

Consuming Childhood: Lost and Ideal Childhoods as a Motivation for Migration

Sarah Horton University of Colorado, Denver

n the introduction to her well-known edited volume, Children and the Politics of Culture, published in 1995, Sharon Stephens argued that fears of a crisis in childhood emerged in the 1970s and 1980s with a new, and more penetrating, phase of global capitalism. Media images suddenly brought affluent Westernerswho subscribed to an ideal of childhood as a protected safe spaceface-to-face with the conflicting realities of childhood in many developing nations (Stephens 1995: 8). The symbol of the endangered child embodied modern fears of economic exchange encroaching upon ever-more intimate, and previously uncommodified, spheres. Childhood, imagined as a universally idyllic and sheltered stage of development, had fallen victim to the merciless quest for profit. More than a decade later, Stephens cultural analysis seems unusually prescient. With ever-increasing global movements of people and capital, this discourse of lost childhoods has only intensified. In the industrialized West, pundits

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 4, pp. 925943, ISSN 0003-549. 2008 by the Institute for Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.

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and the media lament the fates of children in other countriesmotherless babes, toddlers sold into indentured servitude, and children trafficked as sex slaves (see Fass 2007). Normative Western discourses of the family have long portrayed the fate of women and children as inseparably interlinked (Malkki and Martin 2005: 220). It should not be surprising, then, that the discourse of lost childhood travels in tandem with the feminization of migration, as womenmany of them mothersare increasingly migrating in larger numbers. The phenomenon of diverted mothering has led to what Rhacel Parreas (2005) calls a crisis of care in the western industrialized core, and now in the peripheral countries from which their nannies immigrate (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 2001; Parreas 2001, 2005). Powerful moral discourses saturated with normative ideas about gender and generation bewail the breakup of the nuclear family in labor-exporting regimes such as that of the Philippines (see Parreas 2005). At the same time, there is no denying that the idyllic notions of motherhood and childhood that shape these laments are historically and culturally contingent. They are predicated upon bourgeois, and largely Western, norms that are increasingly globalized (Stephens 1995). In this commentary, I examine one form of lost childhood that is often lamented in Western media, exploring the case of Latin American children temporarily left behind during their mothers migrations to the U.S. Drawing upon interviews with Mexican and Salvadoran mothers in the United States, I examine the way that the circulation of Western ideals of childhood inform, and interact with, locally- and culturally-specific notions of childhood in Mexico and El Salvador. I argue that global flows of media, goods and people have spread bourgeois images of a commercialized childhood (see Fass 2007, Stephens 1995) that plays a largethough understudiedpart in precipitating and sustaining global migrations. Such ideal childhoods loom large in mothers imaginings of life in the U.S., forming part of a global imaginary of consumption (Surez-Orozco 2003) that propels migration. Mothers decisions to migrate were strongly influenced by ideals of a childhood free from want, ideals they construed as diametrically opposed to their own experiences of childhood in their countries of origin. Ironically, however, such women selectively appropriated from circulating global discourses of childhood, fusing classic Western ideals of childhood as a space protected from adult burdens and the sphere of monetized relationships
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with commercialized notions of an ideal childhood, creating hybrid visions of childhood in the process. Yet the idealized childhood such mothers pursued was attainable only at a price; mothers had to temporarily forfeit their physical presence with their children in order to attain the trappings of domestic comfort. While parents often migrated for the children (see Boehm, this volume), the transnational childhoods that ensued did not often mesh neatly with the ideals parents initially imagined. Due to the tightening of the U.S.-Mexico border, separations initially imagined (Horton 2009) as temporary were prolonged. Material gifts became the transnational currency of love and hope, assuring children of parental affections and symbolizing the better childhood they would soon enjoy in the U.S. Yet children often contested parents decisions to migrate as well as the transubstantiation of love into things, proffering their own visions of childhood that sometimes conflicted with their parents.

The Feminization of Migration and Mother-Child Separations

This paper is based upon in-depth interviews and observations of family life among Mexican and Salvadoran immigrant families in Mendota, California. Known as the Cantaloupe Capital of the World, Mendota is a predominantly agricultural town in Californias fertile Central Valley. Home to many immigrant families, the towns demographics encapsulate recent migration trends. The U.S. governments Bracero Program, a federal agreement with Mexico that officially imported 4.6 million laborers to work as agricultural laborers between 1942 and 1964 (Ngai 2004: 138) forged migration networks that directly linked Mendota to the classic sending states of western and central Mexico. Across parts of western and central Mexico, Mendotaa town of only 9,000 peoplebecame a household name. Single sojourner men flocked to Mendota for its summer Harvest Season, many of whom then often returned to Mexico. Thus the town has long been a destination point for the prototypical Mexican migrantthe single adult male. While Mendota has been a destination point for Mexican men since at least the 1940s, its migration profile changed dramatically during the 1980s and 1990s. First, Salvadoran migrants from the nations war-torn eastern provinces began arriving with the start of the Civil War in 1980. These immigrants came to stay, and many of them brought their families. Secondly, with the tightening of the border over the past decade, former927

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ly-migrant men and their families increasingly settled in the U.S. so as to avoid perilous crossings (Cornelius 2001). Together, these two trends meant that many more women began migrating to the Central Valley either as part of families or as daughters and sisters of migrant men. Once just a stop in migrant labor streams stretching north to the Yakima Valley in Washington and east to Yuma, Arizona, Mendota is now home to settled immigrant families. Yet as the feminization of migration has coincided with heightened enforcement of the U.S.-Mexico border (Hagan and Rodriguez 2002), separations between immigrant mothers and children have become increasingly common. Theorists of immigration have long noted that immigration occurs in a step fashion, with one family member, once established, then sending for a spouse or children (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). Structured by the demand for an industrial and agricultural workforce, the classic pattern of Mexican immigrationas exemplified in the Bracero programhad long encouraged the migration of single Mexican men. Such men were either temporary sojourners who returned to Mexico or eventually settled in the U.S., sometimes sending for their wives. As women are increasingly migrating to find work (HondagneuSotelo 2002; Sassen 1999, 2001), this is reconfiguring the shape of the immigrant family and transnationalizing the very meaning of motherhood. The coincidence of these two changesthe increasing inflow of women and the heightened militarization of the borderhas led to prolonged separations between immigrant mothers and their children (see Hondagneu-Sotelo 2002; Surez-Orozco et al. 2002: 631). Although many Latina immigrants initially intended their separations from their children as only temporary, heightened border enforcement after September 11, 2001 has made their return voyage more precarious. In interviews, both Mexican and Salvadoran women described how the coyote fees to illegally ferry children across the border had more than tripled since their initial migration, requiring them to spend more time working in the U.S. to pay for their passage. Thus women either found they had to remain in the U.S. longer than they had originally intended, or that more years had elapsed before they had earned enough to be reunited with their children. Because the Central Valley showcases these recent demographic changes in migration, I conducted interviews with immigrant mothers about their migration histories and experiences, ideas about childhood, and hopes for their children from September 2005 until May 2006. 1
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Consuming Childhood: Global Imaginaries and Dreams of an Ideal Childhood

The feminization of migration, and the mother-child separations that have ensued, have led to portrayals by the media, religious authorities, and nonprofit agencies of abandoned, mother-less children. These portrayals may be particularly pronounced in societies governed by gender ideologies that uphold patriarchy and the primacy of a male breadwinner. For example, Rhacel Parreas shows that the migration of Filipina mothers has engendered a public backlash against womens new economic roles and perceived abandonment of motherhood (2005). Yet while Parreas focuses on the way that normative ideologies of gender have shaped this public outcry about mother-away families, she does not analyze how normative ideologies of childhood also play a role in this fervent response. American English and Spanish-language media, for example, routinely dramatize the plight of immigrant families by focusing on children as the innocent victims of globalization; such stories depict children left to the mercy of the market or saddled with adult burdens. They show children migrating alone to rejoin parents (Sierra 2005) or to maintain entire families (Moreno 2005), toddlers left to the mercy of smugglers (Thompson 2003), and children abandoned by parents in Latin America (Aizenman 2004). Yet these laments of the loss of childhood are of course informed by a specific ideology of what childhood should bethat it should indeed be a safe space protected from adult responsibilities. Below I will explore the way that such normative ideologies of childhood also strongly influenced immigrant mothers reasons for migration, as they envisioned an idealized childhood awaiting their children in the United States.

Lost Childhoods and Idealized Childhoods

Latino immigrant parents migration decisions were shaped by a notion of childhood as a special stage of life to be protected and cherished, and as requiring parental sacrifice. The notion of childhood espoused by most Mexican and Salvadoran parents drew upon Christian tenets of children as innocent, free from sin, and closer to God. Many mothers described childhood as the most sacred stage of the life cycle. As one parent said, Thats why God gives us [children]. So that we sacrifice for them. This may be a culturally-specific ideal of childhood rooted in Catholicism, in which children much like the baby Jesusrequire adult devotion and sacrifice. Yet this cul929

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turally-inflected conception of childhood innocence is fused with an increasingly global vision of childhood as a safe, secure realm that should be protected from the world of adult responsibilities (Stephens 1995). Because this ideal of childhood had not been attainable for many immigrant parents as poor rural peasants in their countries of origin, they hoped that migration would allow them to achieve it for their children elsewhere. If immigrant parents viewed children as requiring adult sacrifice, migration was often one way in which this sacrifice was realized. Childrentheir needs and future opportunitiesfigured prominently in both Mexican and Salvadoran immigrant mothers reasons for settling in the United States. One Mexican mother who had followed her husband to the area to work in the fields in Californias Central Valley in 2001 put it this way: I decided to come for the kids so that they can have a better future because the truth is that in Mexico there is no work. We came so the children could get ahead (para que los nios salgan adelante). Parents often used the popular idiomatic expression, para que salgan adelante, to explain their motivations in settling in the United States. Some mothers used even more powerful language to emphasize the forceful pushing required to propel and sustain their childrens forward momentum, employing the phrase, para sacar los nios adelante (literally, to push them forward.) As sacar literally means to take out, the phrase implies the rescue of children from a trap that constrained their forward movement. Norma, for example, had migrated from rural San Vicente, El Salvador, where as a child, she had helped her single mother to sell bread. Although Norma was unable to attend even a year of school due to her familys inability to pay for the shoes she would have needed to walk there, she had just seen her eldest son be admitted to California State University, Fresno. Thats why we came, she said, referring to his success in being admitted. We came to push them forward ( para sacarlos adelante.)

Escaping Lost Childhoods

When parents recounted their own reasons for migration, remembered lost childhoods often colored their vision of the different childhoods they hoped migration would allow their children to enjoy. The lost childhoods they described were full of adult responsibilitiessuch as family obligations and workand were exposed to the privations of difficult environments. Such childhoods thus deviated from the rapidly-globalizing norm of child930

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hood as a protected, safe stage of human development set apart from the sphere of labor and of instrumentalized relationships (Stephens 1995: 9-10). Norma, for example, remembers her childhood as a time of difficulties. She remained ashamed of the fact that she had never attended schoolnot one year, she says softlyand could not sign her name on the papers her younger son brought home from school. Meanwhile, Rosaura, who had grown up as the youngest daughter in a more well-off family in Guanajuato, Mexico, recalled that her childhood ended at the age of nine. When her mother passed away and her older sister married, Rosaura was withdrawn from school and pressed into service as a substitute mother for her younger brother, then seven. Her father was in Californias Central Valley at the time, helping support the family from afar. She remembered: We moved from aunt to aunt, depending on who would let us stay for a while. I would send my little brother to school and cook for him. I had to make home-made tortillas and I would have to go to the grinding place so I could grind the corn for the tortillas and I had to wash his clothes. It was like I was the mom and I was only nine years old. Rosaura migrated with her husband to the Central Valley at age 16 to escape this life of foreclosed possibilities. Similarly, Maura, who came to the Central Valley to accompany her husband, recalled her El Salvador-born daughters hardships as a main motivation for her own migration. Living in a rural part of Cuscatln, Maura had not been able to provide milk for her young children. She earned only ten dollars a month, and her husband, a soldier in the government army, was often stationed away from home. The Civil War, and her husbands military involvement, placed Maura and her daughters in a precarious position. She remembers huddling with them under the covers on evenings when there was gunfire nearby, and once having to walk past a naked, dead child on her way to the store. Thus the precarious position of not only her daughters, but of Salvadoran children in general due to the Civil War, made Maura seek safety in the U.S. Maura decided to risk a triple border-crossingto Guatemala, Mexico, and then the U.S.to provide her children with a better life. Clearly such mothers attempts to provide their children a better childhood also fulfilled their visions of themselves as good mothers. Yet the idea of a proper childhood as the end goal of migration, and as the meas931

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ure of the success of a familys migration strategy, illustrates the prominent role that ideals of childhood played in migration decisions. The story of Mauras familys attempts to provide an ideal childhood for their youngest member, Sindy, illustrates this. If Mexican and Salvadoran women often migrated to provide their children with better childhoods, their own foreign-born children often strongly supported this ideal. Securing a better childhood for their younger sister became a family mission to which Mauras Salvadoran-born children also subscribed. Maura often remarked happily that her older daughters were devoted to the goal of ensuring that their baby sister, 5-year-old Sindy, enjoyed a vida desahogada (a carefree life). Now clerks at a television station in Sacramento, Sindys older sisters spoke of the luxuries of which they themselves were deprived that they wished to help provide her. They pitched in money to ensure that Sindy, unlike them, would never have to work after school to buy her necessities. They want to make sure she has her little backpack, her pencils, notebooks, clothes and shoes, Maura said. Although the family could not afford to celebrate the elder girls quinceaeras when they came of age, Mauras daughters offered to use their own earnings to throw Sindy a party. They call Sindy la huerita, the little white one, a name that refers not only to Sindys perceived physiognomic whitenessshe is lighter-skinned than her older sistersbut also to her privilege due to her American birth. Both Maura and her elder daughters thus measure the success of the familys decision to migrate to the U.S. in terms of the relative ease of Sindys life. Maura believes that Sindy will indeed have the childhood she was never able to provide her eldest two daughters. She said of Sindy: This one will grow up better with better food like milk, fruit, vegetables and going to the doctor oftenthe other two girls didnt. In El Salvador, I would not have had so many things to give her. Thats why my husband says they grow up so different here. Meanwhile, she says of her elder daughters: Are they jealous? No. They tell us they hope she doesnt grow up like them. For immigrant families like Mauras, then, U.S.-born children like Sindy represent the promise of a better future life in the U.S., and their privileged childhoods mark the fruition of their parents migration dreams.

Consuming Childhood
If many immigrant parents undertook migration for the children, securing childrens material needs and future opportunities became a measure
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of the success of their efforts. Global flows of media, commodities, and people shaped mothers imagination of a different kind of childhood than the one they experiencedone free from material want and the need to labor. Thus among the imaginative possibilities (Appadurai 1996) opened up by a new era of global flows of media and goods was that of a different form of childhood. These idealized childhoods form part of a global imaginary of consumption (Surez-Orozco 2003) that propels immigration, as would-be immigrants were exposed to expectations unfulfilled by the standards of living available in their sending countries. The commercialized images of an ideal childhood that such mothers consumed loomed large in their decisions to migrate to the United States. Many immigrant mothers remembered that media images of healthy children and material ease were influential in their decisions to migrate. Specific commercialized images often left lasting impressions on wouldbe migrants, attesting to the domestic bliss that families in the U.S. supposedly enjoyed. Yadira, a Mexican mother from a small town in Jalisco, for example, was struck by the American commercials she first saw on her neighbors new television, itself purchased with help from her neighbors migrant husband. Not only did they depict well-dressed and impeccablygroomed mothers, but perhaps most noticeably, healthy, laughing, and carefree children. Everything was clean and pretty. And the children all had their little toys, their little things, she said. Yadira remained skeptical of the accuracy of these depictions until her neighbors husband returned to Jalisco, driving a new pick-up truck packed with toys for her neighbors children. My husband had been talking about crossing with [her neighbors husband] for some time. So thats when I started telling my husband, maybe it is a good idea for you to go. And better still, [their 2-year-old child] and I will go with you, she said. While the commercials full of laughing children helped convince Yadira to migrate, Mara, a Salvadoran mother, began thinking about leaving after seeing the photos of her friends American-born children. Her daughter born in El Salvador was always so skinny [flaquita.] But those children in the photos had more meat on their bones, she said. The ease of such childrens life came to symbolize the prosperity that might await such immigrant families in the U.S. Immigrant mothers consumption of such global images of a specific form of childhoodone free from material wantwere influential in their decisions to migrate.

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Idealized Childhoods in the U.S.: Illusions and Achievements

Immigrant mothers like Yadira and Mara could easily visualize the idealized childhoods they wished to provide their children, and felt that they were on the path to attaining them. Their narratives were filled with the concrete benchmarks of such progressunlike themselves as children, their U.S.-raised children were able to eat meat, afford clothes and shoes, and buy the supplies necessary to attend school. Yet many mothers also recognized this better childhood was achieved at some cost to the familychildren left with grandparents in El Salvador or Mexico until parents could afford to bring them, children left with babysitters while both parents worked, children parents could only see on Sundays. Moreover, unlike in their rural towns of origin, life in the U.S. carried a hefty price-tagthere were bills for rent, electricity, and heat, not to mention food and material goods. Thus for financially-strapped farm working parents, the idealized childhood they had migrated to provide often appeared just out of reach. Historians have noted that although a childhood devoted to education and play has long been a cultural ideal, it is contingent upon class position and material wealth (Mintz 2007). For many immigrant parents, the better childhood they hoped to provide for their children in the U.S. was in fact predicated upon the ability to buy material goods. As Paula Fass argues, toys evocatively symbolize the Western bourgeois value of play and childrens freedom from workand thus have become a new [global] realm of desire (2007: 212). Toys indeed featured prominently in immigrant parents narratives of the better life they hoped to provide their children. One mother said of her three young children: Yes, their life is better here because they have their toys, shoes, their little notebooks, and we have enough money (el dinero alcanza). Parents bought candy and toys for their children, they said, largely because they could. Yes, when we go to the store, and if she has her eye on something, Ill buy it. I buy her everything I couldnt have, said another mother. The ability to spoil children may be seen as a potent symbol of a family life characterized by freedom from want. As Yadiras explanation of how she decided to come to the U.S. illustrates, the toys Americans were seen to lavish upon their children epitomized the domestic bliss such immigrants were seeking in the U.S. Certainly not all parents subscribed to this commoditized notion of childhood; some in fact resisted it as a sign of becoming less Mexican.
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Amparo, for example, a mother from rural Michoacn who had immigrated from Mexico five years ago, explained how she attempted to keep her family traditional. She prepared home-made soups, tortillas, and beans by hand, and tried to keep her children away from fast foods like pizza and hamburgers. Her 5-year-old son is allowed to buy Matchbox cars, but nothing battery-operated. While her eldest daughter was allowed to have a quinceaera, she was not allowed to use her supplemental earnings to buy the latest fashionable jeans. Despite such cases of resistance, however, childrens toysmuch like adult toys such as trucks and VCRsserved as a display of conspicuous consumption. Ironically, then, while the bourgeois Western ideal of childhood firmly situates children outside the sphere of economicsas a reprieve from the market (Fass 2007: 239)immigrant parents visions of ideal childhoods were saturated with consumption fantasies. Immigrant mothers visions of an ideal childhood combined notions of the sanctity of childhood with an understandable concern for material security. Thus the idealized childhoods such mothers strove forand their very difficulty in attaining such childhoodsillustrate the way a secure childhood in highly capitalist societies has become a commodity dependent upon material gain. The difficulty immigrant parents faced in attaining this commoditized vision of an ideal childhood only further attests to its class-marked nature.

The Price of Ideal Childhoods: Childrens Views of Transnational Childhood

How did children view the childhoods their parents had worked so hard to secure for them? What did they think of their mothers migration decisions and their aftermath? To explore this, I will present below the story of Pablo, the son of Rosalia, a Mexican immigrant to the Central Valley, and of Esmeralda, the daughter of Maura, a Salvadoran immigrant to the Central Valley. In each case, mother-child separations stretched out longer than mothers had initially intended, and mothers pursuit of material security for their children exacted an emotional price. To remind their children of their continued love, mothers sustained ties with remittances and gifts. Yet not all children subscribed to their mothers visions of a better childhood, as we shall see below. Pablo, for example, contested his mothers decision to migrate, and the necessary substitution of gifts and remittances for her presence. Meanwhile, Esmeralda complained that
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her familys separation had forced upon her sudden adult responsibilities, as new family arrangements temporarily thrust her into a mother-like role to her younger siblings.

Rosalias Bargain, and Pablos Anger Rosalia and her husband decided to leave the city of Colima in 2000. Like many undocumented immigrant families, they lacked the money to pay coyotes for each family members simultaneous crossing. In a classic pattern of step-migration, Rosalias husband crossed the border first, and then worked for five months to pay for Rosalias crossing. Then it was Rosalias turn. One evening, she steeled herself, told her children she was going to the store and tucked them into bed. Her own mother, who was living with them, would be their caretaker. Then, as planned, she took a bus to the border and looked for a coyote to ferry her across. Rosalias white lie has led to constant recrimination from Pablo, her eldest son, then 7, who accused her of betrayal. He couldnt understand that what I did, I did for them, she says. When she first called her sons, Pablo refused to talk to her. This continuing cycle of recrimination and guilt only contributed to Rosalias desire to prove her love through gifts and remittances. Rosalia worked in the fields in the Central Valley for nearly two years straight in order to earn enough money to pay for her three childrens crossing. Even in the winterwhen farm work involves heavy weeding and clearing and is typically reserved for menRosalia found work; her husbands friend hired her because of the familys desperate situation. While Rosalia worked hard to support her children from afar, she also had to save money to pay the coyote fees to ferry them acrossfees that had spiked to $3,000 a child due to heightened border enforcement since 2001. Thus the intensified policing of the border only prolonged their separation, and increased Pablos feelings of betrayal. Rosalias situation grew more complicated when she became pregnant. Soon, she had two American-born children to raise along with her three Mexican-born sons. Raising a transnational family became a source of great anxiety for Rosalia and her husband. Before, she says, she and her husband had lived like dogs; they had only paid for their necessities, saving half their earnings to send to their children in Colima. Yet the arrival of two U.S.born children meant they had to maintain two separate households, delaying their ability to accumulate enough money to be reunited with
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their children. The arrival of such children also complicated her relationship with her eldest son, who began to feel that he had been replaced. Because of Rosalias new children, assuring her sons of her continued love assumed greater importance, and the only means available was through the continued flow of gifts. When Rosalia speaks of her absence from her children, her visible remorse is only temporarily assuaged when she discusses the material things her children could enjoy due to her absence. She says she sent them toys, clothes, and whatever else I could through her grandfather, a legal permanent resident who ferried them from Los Angeles to Colima. For a time, these gifts seemed to assuage her childrens feelings of abandonment: My son who is in kindergarten, I sent him a gold chain with his name on it. He was really happy. He told him that everyone was asking him who had bought it for him, she said. Gifts became the lifeline that connected her with her children, and that carried with them the spirit of their mother (Mauss 1976). If expectations of reciprocal care and respect structure the relations between generations within many immigrant families (Menjivar 2003), gifts became a means through which parents could discharge their care obligations to their children. These gifts attempt to substitute for parental presence, transmuting parental emotionboth love and guiltinto material support (see Horton 2009). Yet Pablo resisted the logic of substitution behind such gifts, and the maternal absence they sought to help assuage. My oldest would tell me, I dont want your toys. I want you to be back here at home. He would tell me, These toys are stupid. Theyre ugly. I bet you gave all the pretty ones to your children over there. Thus while gifts were the only currency available for Rosalia to express her love, Pablo contested the terms of this exchange. He challenged his mothers decision to migrate through the only means available to himthe logic by which material things substitute for maternal love. Pablos anger was shaped by the reactions of his peers and teachers in Colima, a city that is not among the classic sending areas of Mexico. Few other children in his school had transnational parents who were raising them from afar. As Rosalias mother later told her, the other children taunted Pablo in school, telling him that he didnt have a mother or father. When she talked to her sons on the phone, Pablo scolded her. My oldest would tell me, Why did you leave me? Why did you tell me to go to sleep if you were going to leave and not come back? Why did
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you tell me that you were going to the store if it was not true?He would tell me that I was not going to love [my children] anymore that I would just lie to them, that I was not going to bring them here. Two years after her arrival in the U.S., Rosalia and her husband had finally saved the $9,000 necessary to pay for their three childrens arrival. Yet Pablo remained jealous and angry for several months. He barely talked to me, and the smallest would just cry and cry, she said. For Rosalia, then, gifts and remittances sustained her connection to Pablo, allowing her to mother at a distance (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997). These gifts served not only to assure her children of her affections but also to symbolize the better childhood they were to have in the U.S. Yet while Rosalia felt it necessary to temporarily exchange her presence for her childrens material security, Pablo contested the grounds of this exchange. Meanwhile, as we will see below, Esmeralda found that migration forces upon them adult burdens, forging a different experience of childhood than that which their parents had initially envisioned.

Esmeraldas New Responsibilities: Mothering a Younger Sister Mauras husband left for the Central Valley in the early 1980s. Two years later, she left her daughters with their grandmother and crossed three borders illegally to join her husband. Then began what she calls the problems; she began suffering from nervios, a culturally-specific form of anxiety/depression (see Horton 2009). The younger one was three and the older one was seven and it was very difficult because I had never left them before, she said. I had never even left them with a babysitter, and then here I was so far away. There were nights she could not sleep for fear for their safety, worrying about the latest Civil War developments in the village where she had left them. For three years, she worked yearround to earn enough to pay for each daughters crossing. Mauras desire to provide a better childhood for her daughters in the U.S. thus also created considerable emotional hardships for her daughters and for herself. During the three years she was separated from her daughters, Maura tried to create family time (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Parreas 2005: 93-109) despite spatial and temporal distance by sending remittances, letters, and the occasional phone call. She sent letters more frequently; she was only able to hear their voices every few months. At that time, there were no calling cards and Maura and her husband had to dial
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El Salvador direct; she used up nearly an entire weeks salary to pay for a 15-minute phone call. Yet the conversations, she says, did little to assuage her anxiety; they often left her feeling distraught for days. The older one didnt like to talk because she would cry. The smaller one would talk to me, but the older one wouldnt, she remembers with pain in her voice. Her one solace was talking with her daughters just after they had received the new clothes and toys she had sent. Then theyd be happy and tell me that it was good that I was here, she said. When Maura was finally able to be reunited with her daughters, the threeyear-long separation had forged a new family configuration. Maura recalls: The younger one didnt even know her father because when he came, she was only seven months. But when they arrived, she was already six and she was just staring at him wondering who he wasShe only knew him from pictures, but not in person. Meanwhile, the daughters had grown inseparable through sharing the years apart from their parents. Once they had arrived in the U.S., they wouldnt even sleep in separate beds, Maura remembered. When the eldest graduated from high school to work in Sacramento, the youngest dropped out of school to follow her. Mauras daughters have their own memories of the time apart as well as the difficult time adjusting to life in the U.S. Esmeralda, now 20, remembers suddenly feeling responsible for her younger sister when Maura left them with their grandmother 13 years ago. The inversion of age roles continued after she arrived in the U.S., when she had to adjust to caring for her younger sister while her mother was working. We had always had abuelita with us, and my mom had never worked before, she remembered. As her parents were struggling to make do with their combined annual income of $12,000, she remembers that childhood in the U.S. was not so different than it was in El Salvador. On top of taking care of her younger sister, she went to work in a drugstore so she could buy herself the necessities for high school. We always had food here, but I still had to work. Otherwise I couldnt buy myself stuff for school, like notebooks or clothes, she says. Thus for Esmeralda, life in the U.S. did not necessarily lead to the ideal childhood her parents had hoped; instead it brought new adult responsibilities such as working and mothering her younger sister.
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Conclusion
Arjun Appadurai suggests that global flows of media offer new resources and new disciplines for the construction of imagined selves and imagined worlds (1996: 3). Yet few scholars have examined the way that such media offer resources for the imagination of better childhoods elsewhere as symbols of the better future migration may provide. While Western discourses portray childhood as an idyllic and protected spaceone ideally outside the realm of the marketglobal images circulate that contradictorily portray a childhood of material security as a prized commodity. Thus immigrants consumption of images of an ideal childhood elsewhere often propels and sustains migration. To such immigrants, the ability to spoil children stands as a symbol of the luxury afforded by life in the U.S., and toys become the epitome of material prosperity. Yet while commercialized images and toys circulate freely in the global economy, the children who would partake of the ideal childhoods they speak of face restricted movement. This highlights a central paradox of state regulatory regimes in a global economy. As Saskia Sassen argues, a global regime in which commodities and media are allowed unfettered movement, but not the people influenced by them, is indeed not viable (Sassen 1996: xv). While in theory, U.S. immigration policy has historically privileged family unification, in practice the policing of the border and of mixed-status families promotes family separation (see Hagan and Rodriguez 2002). Recent media portrayals of U.S.-born children separated from their undocumented parents during Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids have highlighted the human cost of US immigration policy (Hopkins 2007). Moreover, the states definition of children specifically as dependent minors rather than as progeny of all agescombined with other loopholes in U.S. immigration lawsworks to impede family reunification (Parreas 2005: 141-160). An examination of the ideologies of childhood that inform U.S. immigration policy as well as media portrayals of childhoods sacrificed to globalization is thus vital. Much of the seminal literature on global childhoods to date has ironically focused more on the ideologies of gender that create portrayals of mother-less children rather than on the ideologies of childhood that inform such laments (for example, see Parreas 2005). Yet while religious authorities, the media, and advocacy groups often bewail such lost childhoods, the mothers who migrate are often in fact seeking a better childhood for their children elsewhere. In their search for childhoods free from
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material want and adult responsibilitiesconstrued as the opposite of their own lost childhoodssuch women temporarily forsake traditional mother-child relationships. Thus as we have seen, lost childhoods and ideal childhoods are not mere mirror images of each other, but are rather inextricably linked. While a growing body of literature expertly examines ideologies of gender in shaping and constraining womens migration (Hirsch 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Parreas 2001; Pessar 1999, 2001), a similarly probing treatment of ideologies of childhood in shaping migration is noticeably absent. It is incumbent upon scholars of transnational families to explore the ideologies of childhood that shape both concerns about the feminization of migration in sending and receiving countries as well as the flow of migrants that sustains them.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research upon which this paper is based was supported through a National Institute of Mental Health fellowship at the Department of Social Medicine, Harvard University (NIMH Grant # T32 MH18006) and through a cooperative agreement with the US DHHS National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research and National Center for Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIH/ NIDCR & NCMHD U54 DE 14251) to the Center to Address Disparities in Childrens Oral Health (CAN DO Center) at the University of California, San Francisco. Jane A. Weintraub, DDS, MPH, is Principal Investigator of the Centers grant. Judith C. Barker, PhD, is Principal Investigator of the specific study, Hispanic Oral Health: A Rural and Urban Ethnography, upon which this article is partly based.

ENDNOTE
1

This paper is based on interviews conducted with immigrant mothers as part of a broader research project led by Judith C. Barker, Principal Investigator, on immigrant families health, and entitled Hispanic Oral Health: A Rural and Urban Ethnography. The analysis for this paper was also shaped by the research conducted for my previous study directly on mother-child separations in Salvadoran families, Family Separation and Mental Health among Salvadoran Mothers, conducted while at the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard University (see Horton 2009).

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