Synergies between feminist thought and migration studies in Mexico (1975-2010)

Abstract

This chapter addresses various points of intersection between feminist thought and migration studies in Mexico from 1975 to 2010, arguing that synergies occurred at these junctures and unleashed potential for change. To what extent did feminist consciousness raising, discourse and analyses contribute to recast the questions posed in migration studies? How did the several phases of migration studies and the emergence of myriad nongovernmental organizations, followed by the creation of government agencies to tend to women’s issues and migrants’ needs, inform debates about women’s responsibilities and rights in Mexican society? By means of a selective review of United States, Mexican and Canadian scholarship and policies concerned with issues of female empowerment through migration (and, more specifically, the impact of migration processes on male and female roles and identities, gender relations and family dynamics), questions are raised regarding the mutual engagements and intersecting agendas between feminist academics, government agencies and non-governmental actors and organizations dealing with migration. From a gendered and social constructivist understanding of human interaction, the lives of men and women touched by migration processes are examined: those who migrate but also those who stay behind, as well as the wider circle of kin involved in family dynamics. The historical overview of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries offered in the first section shows that academic, governmental and non-governmental institution building were important catalysts in the quest to frame and understand the migration-gender nexus. The second section deals with the central issue behind the convergence hypothesis: the debate over female empowerment linked to migration experiences. Early formulations placed this question in a before/after framework for marital couples; that is, in a linear progression from subordination to empowerment before and after the woman and/or her husband migrated. Later, the debate was recast to encompass complex, convoluted and non-linear migration processes (not just the flows) and to consider women without male partners. It then became clear that empowerment could be better grasped in terms of a disputed terrain where a gradual reshaping of gender relations and of the ideologies that sustain them take place. The final section develops two examples of sites of engagement and emerging gender dynamics in the state-family interface: (1) the case of wives and children abandoned by a migrant husband and the pathways they follow to attempt to obtain child support; and (2) female emigration sparked by domestic violence, sometimes leading to asylum-seeking in the United States or Canada. In these real-life stories, gender negotiations are played out on myriad stages where divergent discourses between migrants, their families, nongovernmental and state agencies are discerned and explored. The conclusions underline how feminist thought and cross-cultural networking have contributed to a recognition-in academic, activist and policymaking circles-of the need for gendered frameworks in order to study and tend to the many needs of intergenerational family units involved in migration.