Moving to the ‘Homeland’:

Children’s Narratives of Migration from

the United States to Mexico

Betsabé Román González

Tecnologico* de Monterrey

Eduardo Carrillo Cantú

Universidad de Monterrey

Rubén Hernández-León
University of California, Los Angeles

A growing number of minors have become part of the return migratory flow
from the United States to Mexico. Based on a longitudinal study started in
2012, this article uses life-history narratives to analyze the return experiences
of three children who arrived in the state of Morelos, Mexico, between 2010
and 2012. The findings presented here focus on a specific segment of the
children’s migratory journey: leaving the United States, crossing the border
and arriving in Morelos. The article contributes to the scholarship on chil-
dren’s narratives of migration, which has been under-emphasized in tradi-
tional studies of United States-Mexico migration.

Un número creciente de menores de edad forma parte del flujo migratorio

de retorno de Estados Unidos a México. Con base en un estudio longitudinal
iniciado en el 2012, este artı́culo hace uso de las historias de vida para ana-
lizar las experiencias de retorno de tres niños que llegaron al estado de
Morelos, México, entre el 2010 y el 2012. Los resultados que se presentan
están centrados en un segmento especı́fico del recorrido migratorio de estos
niños: partir de los Estados Unidos, cruzar la frontera y llegar a Morelos. Este
artı́culo contribuye a los estudios migratorios centrados en la narrativa de los
niños, la cual ha sido poco valorada en los estudios de migración entre
Estados Unidos y México.

*The Tecnologico de Monterrey requests the removal of the diacritic from the word
‘‘tecnologico’’ in order to facilitate identification in international searches.

Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Vol. 32, Issue 2, Summer 2016, pages 252–275. issn 0742-
9797, electronic issn 1533-8320. ©2016 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights
reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content
through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.
ucpress.edu/journals.php?p¼reprints. DOI: 10.1525/msem.2016.32.2.252.

252
 Román González, Carrillo Cantú and Hernández-León, ‘Homeland’ 253

Key words: return migration, life-histories, trajectories, decision making,

family strategies, children’s agency.

Palabras clave: migración de retorno, historias de vida, trayectorias, toma

de decisiones, estrategias familiares, agencia de niños.

We met Beto1 at a teachers’ conference2 we attended in Cuernavaca,

Morelos, Mexico, in 2012. During the conference, he watched atten-
tively as we introduced our research project and explained to the
audience our plans to work with children born in the United States
and Mexican children who had just arrived from the United States.
When he approached us at the end of the event, his mother and
teacher stood next to him; he was very shy. Finally, his teacher said,
‘‘Este es Beto. Anda Beto, di hola, no seas tı́mido (‘‘This is Beto. Come
on Beto, say hi, don’t be shy.’’) Beto stared at us for a moment and
asked, ‘‘Can you really speak English?’’—‘‘Sure we can!’’—‘‘Oh,
sweet! Can we speak in English please? It’s been forever since I spoke
English the last time.’’
Beto was 14 years old at the time we met him, and he was
enrolled in the third grade of secundaria (the equivalent to the
ninth grade in the United States). He was born in Ahuatenco, Esta-
do de México; when he was two, he moved to the United States
with his mother, with the purpose of reuniting with his father. He
came back to Temixco, Morelos, after being told that his grand-
mother was sick and was in need of assistance: ‘‘My parents said
we were visiting grandma, but then started packing everything. I
didn’t want to come, and now I’m here. I don’t like it; I wanna go
back.’’3 While Beto had learned Spanish at home, English had been
his preferred language of communication for more than a decade.
Now, back at his mother’s birthplace of Temixco, Morelos, Beto
lived in a community where most people speak Náhuatl.4 During
one of our conversations, he stated, ‘‘I can’t talk in Spanish that
much, and then my classmates speak Náhuatl all the time when the

1. The names of all participants have been changed to pseudonyms to protect

their identity. The data for this article draws on research processes undertaken in
accordance with international human subject research ethics.
2. The conference was organized by the PROBEM (Programa Binacional de
Educación Migrante) of Morelos, for schools that had reported migrant students.
3. See Methodology section for details on the interview process.
4. According to the Mexican Population Census of 2010, Náhuatl is the most-
widely spoken Indigenous language in Mexico; there are almost 1.5 million Náhuatl
speakers, and it is mainly spoken in central and southern regions of the country (INEGI
2010).
254 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

teacher is outside [the classroom]. I don’t know what they’re saying; I

really miss my friends.’’
In Beto’s mind, he will someday go back to the United States.
Beto is now aware that he needs certain documents to cross the
border and is constantly asking about the possibility of either study-
ing or working in the United States. He further explained his strat-
egy to keep up with his language skills: ‘‘In the meantime, I watch
movies and listen to music in English at home, and also my video-
games are all in English. I don’t want to forget [the language] for
when I go back. So, can we please speak English whenever you
come?’’

Introduction and Framework

Beto is one of thousands of children who moved to Mexico between
2005 and 2015. Some of these children returned to their country of
birth while others, having been born in the United States, arrived in
Mexico for the first time. The Mexican Population Census of 2010
reported that about one million people living in the United States
returned to Mexico between 2005 and 2010, including children and
teenagers who arrived in the country with their parents (Passel,
Cohn and Gonzalez 2012; Giorguli and Gutiérrez 2011). Different
factors explain family return migration to Mexico: the economic
recession of 2007, which caused the loss of some 8 million jobs in
the United States (Ramı́rez and Meza 2011); the deportation of family
members; the need to help an ailing relative; and the desire to
reunite with children left behind. Other reasons include parents’
wishes to expose their U.S.-born children to Mexican culture; the
completion of the goals associated with migration (i.e. having saved
enough to build a house or establish a business); and, as in Beto’s
case, having been the subject of crime and violence (Escobar, Lowell
and Martin 2013).
Migrant children like Beto, who have conducted part of their
schooling in the United States and part in Mexico, are aware of the
distinct legal, educational, cultural and linguistic experiences that dif-
ferentiate them from their Mexican peers. They also know that family
dynamics change depending on the legal status of their parents, the
presence of relatives in a given locality, and the economic plans and
educational expectations of their parents (Zúñiga and Hamann 2014;
Sánchez and Zúñiga 2010; Zúñiga and Vivas 2014). In short, migrant
children experience family migration and dispersion in complex ways,
facing multiple ruptures when moving to another country and a new
school system (Hamann and Zúñiga 2011).
 Román González, Carrillo Cantú and Hernández-León, ‘Homeland’ 255

Children’s perceptions, narratives and experiences of migration

have been largely overlooked as a subject of study in the literature on
Mexico-U.S. migration. This vacuum results from the notion that
a person’s childhood is a stage of fragility, vulnerability, and inno-
cence, and that during this period of their life cycle, individuals fully
identify with and depend on their parents. In this adult-centric per-
spective, family and schools are responsible for making children ‘‘real
social actors’’ (Dobson 2009; Hatfield 2010; Prout 2011). Specifically,
adults (fathers, mothers, teachers, psychologists, and researchers) are
those people in a child’s life who determine which are the most
pressing needs of the child, often mediating the knowledge on chil-
dren’s lives that is available to researchers, thus obscuring the child’s
agency through what Ferrán Casas calls necesidades atribuidas
(Gaitán 2006).
A growing body of literature has raised the visibility and multiple
roles children play in the social processes of migration (Hatfield 2010,
Gaitán et al. 2011, White et al. 2011, Nı́ Laoire et al. 2012). Research-
ers identified children and youth as important actors of the culture of
migration that takes place in Mexican families, and within communi-
ties with a long-established tradition of circuit migrations in the
United States; while this literature emphasized the process of social-
ization into a culture of migration, it also showed how children and
young teens adopted migration as a desirable life-project and as
a pathway to success (Zúñiga 1992; Dı́az Gómez 2002; López Castro
2007). Other accounts showed how youth in urban contexts devel-
oped their own migration-support networks as an alternative to the
social ties commanded by parents and other adult relatives (Hernán-
dez León 1999). As the attention of the immigration scholarship
turned from the first to the second generation, researchers began
to focus on the educational experiences of children of immigrants
and on the variations in outcomes across different national origin
groups (Rumbaut and Portes 2001).
More recently, scholars of immigrant and transnational families
have studied the role of bilingual children as brokers of communica-
tion and integration between their monolingual parents and the
social institutions in the country of destination (Orellana 2009; Katz
2014). Studies that analyze the effects of border enforcement and
restrictive immigration policies on the lives of migrant families show
that the views and experiences of children are an important consid-
eration in the migratory decisions of their parents, including the
decision to return home. As these studies demonstrate, children are
not passive bystanders in the process of migration. Children negoti-
ate resources, express their feelings, and make decisions about
256 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

schooling and life; they grow emotionally and intellectually, they

have an emotional response to the distance care and concern given
by the adults in their lives, and they suffer the consequences of long-
term separations (Dreby 2010; Abrego 2014). New scholarship on
return migration from the United States to Mexico has analyzed how
children who were either born or raised abroad face social, emo-
tional, linguistic, and educational challenges in the processes of inte-
gration into the homeland. This emerging literature demonstrates
that children are not just victims of adverse circumstances; instead,
they are active participants of unequal encounters, interactions, and
negotiations with teachers, school authorities, relatives, and new
friends (Zúñiga, Hamann, and Sánchez 2008; Hamann, Zúñiga, and
Sánchez 2006; Hamann and Zúñiga 2011; Zúñiga and Hamann 2011;
Zúñiga 2015).
In this article we present preliminary findings from an ongoing
longitudinal and multi-sited study, which we initiated in 2012, focus-
ing on the experiences of children who, like Beto, have recently
returned to the state of Morelos, Mexico. We seek to answer two
research questions: How do children understand and experience
the social process of family return migration? How do children’s
accounts of return migration shed light on dimensions of family re-
turn migration not found in the narratives offered by adults? We
argue that it is important to answer these questions for interrelated
scholarly and public policy reasons. From a scholarly perspective,
analyzing the views and experiences of children allows an under-
standing of the agentic role of children in the process of family migra-
tion. Here, we build on the epistemological and ontological insights
of authors who argue that children are not just incomplete indivi-
duals or adults in the making but active participants and contributors
to the social and emotional lives of families (Willis and Yeoh 2000;
White et al. 2011).
As distinct actors in the process of family return migration, chil-
dren perceive and experience cross-border mobility, separation and
reunification in unique ways. Needless to say, the experiences of
children are intertwined with the strategies of migrant families to
cope with dispersion. Studies conducted in Mexico show that more
than half of return migrant children report having lived away from at
least one parent, suggesting that family separation is a temporary yet
pervasive part of their biographies (Zúñiga 2015). Patterns of family
dispersion and separation vary by state, also suggesting heteroge-
neous patterns of return (Zúñiga, Hamann and Sánchez Garcı́a
2008). In states with a long history of migration, such as Nuevo León
and Jalisco, separation from parents is less common and shorter than
 Román González, Carrillo Cantú and Hernández-León, ‘Homeland’ 257

in relatively new sending states, such as Puebla, where children

endure notoriously long stints away from at least one parent (Zúñiga
2015). Many international migrant children move from the United
States to Mexico as a consequence of the deportation of family mem-
bers. Return migration is therefore a family strategy for reunification,
which takes place under difficult and often dramatic circumstances
(Zúñiga 2015; Giorguli et al. 2013). As the evidence presented in this
article confirms, children express interest in remigration, but they
understand that the opportunity to do so is partly determined by
their access to U.S. citizenship. Children are also aware that the geo-
graphic dispersion of their extended families in the United States
constitutes a resource that can be used in future remigration (Zúñiga
2015).
From a public policy standpoint, understanding the experiences
of children in the process of return migration can help applied
researchers, teachers, and public officials create programs that assist
in the reintegration of both minors and their families to Mexico.
Recent research on return migration from the United States to Mex-
ico has shown that international migrant children do not constitute
a homogenous population. Using place of birth and patterns of
cross-border mobility, researchers have written about different cate-
gories of international migrant children: those who were born in
Mexico and returned to the homeland, those who were born in the
United States and moved to Mexico, and those who regularly circu-
late between both countries because of their parents’ employment
in seasonal agriculture (on the latter category see the article by
Panait and Zúñiga in this Special Issue; Vadean and Piracha 2009;
Arzubiaga et al. 2009).
Researchers have also determined that international migrant chil-
dren are often ‘‘invisible’’ in the eyes of Mexican public institutions.
For instance, when they arrive in Mexican schools, the unique needs
of return migrant children go unattended by teachers and adminis-
trators (Hamann and Zúñiga 2011; Zúñiga 2013). According to
Sánchez et al. (2012), these children share multiple characteristics
with their non-migrant peers (e.g. physical appearance, family name,
and locality of residence) and therefore remain undistinguishable
from their classmates. Consequently, teachers, administrators, and
officials in Mexican public education institutions do not make any
formal efforts to identify them. This invisibility is compounded by the
fact that older migrant children feel comfortable with their Spanish
oral skills, speaking it fluently with teachers and peers. However, these
children face significant challenges when they engage their reading
and writing Spanish skills (Panait 2011). Whether in the context of the
258 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

family or in key institutions, such as schools, international migrant

children experience return migration as a series of fractious transi-
tions, which require negotiation and adaptation to new social, familial,
educational and linguistic environments (Hamann, Zúñiga and
Sánchez 2006).
In this article, we argue that children perceive and experience
family return migration in unique ways. These experiences are quali-
tatively different from other actors within the family, most notably, the
adults. As the data analyzed below demonstrates, children are often at
the center of an adult’s decision to return. Yet, instead of functioning
as passive objects of adult decision-making, children actively reshape
their identities, challenge notions of belonging, and mediate and nego-
tiate the terms of return with their parents and other members of the
family, even as return and resettlement to the homeland unfolds. We
also contend that by listening to the voices of children and understand-
ing their experiences in the context of return, scholars can broaden the
analytical lens of family migration and go beyond adult-centric per-
spectives (Kirova 2007; Orellana et al. 2001; Punch 2007).

Methodology
The empirical evidence for this article comes from the state of Mor-
elos, located in south-central Mexico. Researchers note that, in the
year 2000, Morelos began to exhibit high rates of emigration to the
United States (Tuirán, Fuentes and Ávila 2002). Ten years later, data
collected by the Consejo Nacional de Población (CONAPO) revealed
an unexpected finding: Morelos was now one the states with the
highest rates of return migration (CONAPO 2011). In contrast to other
states in Mexico where returnees hailed primarily from historic desti-
nations, such as California, Texas, Illinois and Arizona, return migrants
in Morelos were returning from 40 different U.S. states, including
less common destinations, such as Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Maine and
Delaware.
We identified cases of return migrant children in Morelos thanks
to the efforts of the Programa Binacional de Educación Migrante
(Binational Program on Migrant Education, or PROBEM for its Spanish
acronym).5 In 2010, the authorities of PROBEM in Morelos decided to

5. PROBEM was originally created to connect educational authorities in Mexico’s

main sending states with their counterparts in the United States to attend to the
schooling needs of migrant children. In a handful of states in Mexico, these authorities
have also used the resources of PROBEM to support the reintegration of return migrant
children.
 Román González, Carrillo Cantú and Hernández-León, ‘Homeland’ 259

create a database of return migrant children and to share this data

with researchers. The original database was composed of some 800
individual files containing birth certificates, U.S.-school transcripts,
new addresses in Morelos, and the names of the schools where
children were enrolled. During our first visit to Cuernavaca, More-
los in 2012, PROBEM offered an even larger list of 1,051 students
who had been in the United States and had arrived in the state
between 2010 and 2012; 74 percent of these students were under
18 years of age. Today, the state of Morelos database has more than
2,000 cases, making it an important resource for the study of inter-
national migrant children.
The state of Morelos database was also designed to follow stu-
dents over time. In order to take advantage of this feature, we
decided to implement a four-year longitudinal and multi-sited
research design to follow children throughout schools, neighbor-
hoods, localities, and countries. We decided to adopt this design to
overcome the limitations of previous cross-sectional studies, often
based on a single wave of data collection. These studies are often
restricted to brief periods of time, obscuring the range of experiences
for children over time. Researchers often lose track of the children after
the initial survey or interview, they overlook information on the ways
in which migrant children experience integration in their schools and
neighborhoods, and they are unable to document whether the chil-
dren moved elsewhere in Mexico or if they re-emigrated to the United
States.
The analysis of the Morelos database showed two elementary
schools and two middle schools with large numbers of return
migrant children. In these four schools we fielded a total of 1,395
surveys with students who were eight to sixteen years old and who
were enrolled in grades four (in elementary school) through the last
year of secundaria (which is the equivalent to the ninth grade in the
U.S.) In these schools we implemented three different question-
naires. The first survey, composed of fifteen items, was applied to
the entire student population and asked questions about the pupils’
birthplace, age, and whether they had studied and had relatives in the
United States. If students answered ‘‘no’’ to the question ‘‘Have you
studied in a school in the United States?’’ we handed them a twelve
item questionnaire, which asked about their perceptions of students
who they knew had been to the United States or were born there. If the
student answered ‘‘yes’’ to the same question, we handed a different
47-question survey. In this questionnaire, we asked about their trajec-
tory in U.S. schools (how many years they studied abroad, in which
schools and what grades, and we asked about their reading and writing
260 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

skills); we also asked about their family and plans for the future. Stu-
dents were also asked, ‘‘Why did you come back to Mexico?’’
The survey results revealed eighty-five children who had lived in
the United States, sixty-two of whom had attended U.S. schools.
Thirty-six of these students agreed to be interviewed at a later time.
We subsequently selected eighteen of them for further study using
two criteria: 1) that these children had attended schools in the
United States for at least three years, and 2) that they had returned
to Morelos in 2010 (the year when PROBEM started compiling files
on migrant children) or later. Eight of these children were girls and
ten were boys; eleven were enrolled in school at the elementary level
and seven were middle-school students. After we conducted a short
interview with each of these children, we proceeded to contact their
parents to obtain their permission for follow up interviews and
home visits over a period of three to four years. Contacting parents
and getting them to consent to the long-term participation of their
children in the study proved to be particularly difficult. When we
finally managed to talk to these parents, some told us that they
avoided our requests because they were afraid. Having recently
arrived in Mexico with their U.S.-born children, they thought we
represented, as one parent put it, ‘‘the United States government,
looking for our children and wanting to take them back.’’ Others
simply found odd that someone was interested in their children
given the many obstacles they had faced enrolling them in local
schools and the generally unkind attitude of teachers and adminis-
trators. In the end, six parents (of ten minors) agreed to have their
children re-interviewed.
In sum, over the past three years, we have researched the return
and reintegration experiences of ten children and six families, con-
ducting participatory observations at homes, schools and neighbor-
hoods. In doing so, we have observed the changes taking place in the
lives of children and have listened to the narratives of their day-to-day
experiences and behaviors (Ruiz 2012). We asked these children
about family and friends, schools and teachers, about their home-
work and reading and writing skills in English and Spanish and new
things they have learned, their likes and dislikes and plans for the
future; at times, we simply listened to whatever they had to say. As is
customary and previously noted, we used pseudonyms to identify the
children. In this article, we focus on three of the ten individual cases
we have followed since 2012. The cases of Beto, Lulu and Flor rep-
resent three common return migration trajectories in our sample,
namely, a) children who left Mexico at a very young age and who are
now back in Mexico; b) children born and raised in the United States
 Román González, Carrillo Cantú and Hernández-León, ‘Homeland’ 261

who moved to Mexico for the first time; and c) children who were
born and raised in the United States, lived in Mexico for a period of
time and then moved back to the United States. Beto’s migration was
from Santa Ana, California to Temixco, Morelos at age 15. Lulu’s
migration was from Los Angeles, California to Tlaltizapán, Morelos
at age 13. Flor’s migration was from Portland, Oregon to Jiutepec,
Morelos at age 11, and back to Portland, at age 12.
In the next section, we use the interviews we conducted with
these three children to reconstruct their experiences and trajectories
of migration to Mexico. As we analyze these three cases, we identify
the ways in which children, their voices and agency are implicated in
the decision to return to Mexico and to re-emigrate to the United
States. We incorporate evidence drawn from conversations we had
with the parents when helpful, in order to shed light on the circum-
stances and motivations for their return migration.

Return and first-time migration to Mexico: three children’s

stories and trajectories
Beto
Beto was only two years old when he and his mother moved to
California. Beto’s father migrated first in order to save enough
money to pay a ‘‘coyote’’ to cross the rest of the family into the
United States. Beto was too young to remember the incident at the
border, which was relayed to us by his mother: ‘‘Beto almost didn’t
make it into the United States. A lesbian couple took him first and
they were going to take me across afterwards, but Beto was already
talking back then and didn’t want to leave with these women. I had
to tell him that his dad was waiting for him en el otro lado and then
he more or less agreed to go. But border cops are very smart, per-
haps because they see this sort of thing every day. They asked Beto if
one of the women was his mom and he said ‘‘no.’’ The women had
another boy who spoke English with them; the boy told the officer
that he was Beto’s brother and that he (Beto) was upset because
their mother didn’t want to buy him a toy. Then the officers asked
Beto again who he was visiting (in the United States) and he said he
was going to play cars with his dad; well, they didn’t ask anything
else and let them go through.’’
Beto had vague memories of how happy he was when he saw his
father and was able to play with him; before the reunion, Beto would
only see his father in pictures and would talk to him on the phone.
Beto told us that, once they reunited, his father always provided him
262 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

with whatever he needed: ‘‘If I wanted a game or shoes or a ham-

burger or whatever, he would give it to me, my mom too, but my dad
always came home and played with me a lot. I enjoyed recording
things we did together with my PSP or my cell phone, I still have
some videos.’’
Beto was on summer break when his parents told him that they
were visiting his grandmother in Mexico. He did not remember what
Mexico was like but recalls being excited to go and meet his relatives.
His parents also told him that there was a beautiful two-floor house
waiting for them, which they had been building with the savings and
money they had sent to Mexico. After a couple of days of seeing his
parents pack everything they owned and getting things ready to go,
Beto started to suspect the motives of the trip and began asking
questions: ‘‘Why are you packing all my clothes and toys? How long
are we going to be visiting grandma?’’ Beto’s parents replied that they
wanted him to be comfortable in Mexico and to have all his toys with
him. ‘‘I knew something was wrong! If I knew we wouldn’t come
back, I would have stayed by myself or convinced them not to come.’’
Clearly, Beto was not consulted on the decision to return. Although,
as we show below, his wellbeing and safety were at the center of his
parents’ decision to move back to Mexico, the actual reason for
return was hidden from him. Interestingly, Beto (retrospectively)
expressed a sense of agency regarding his role in the decision to
return: had he known the real motivation, he would have persuaded
his parents to remain in the United States.
According to Beto, the trip to Mexico was fun. They traveled by
plane and all three of them (Beto and his parents) wore Mexican
(cowboy) outfits: ‘‘Yeah, everyone wanted to take pictures with us,
we were wearing our hats and boots and big belts, we even had our
santos with us. My parents told me that when they were given those
santos, they promised to take them back to Mexico with them if
everything went well.’’ But not everything went as planned. When
they got to Ahuatenco, Estado de México, where Beto’s paternal
grandparents lived,6 they found out that some of the boxes they had
shipped a few days earlier went somewhere else in Guadalajara, so
they had to call the company in California to fix the problem. Also,
Beto’s mother was disappointed that some of Beto’s toys and items
from her wedding, which she left safe in a room, had been stolen or
given away. Finally, the house in Ahuatenco that they had been build-
ing (and paying for) for almost ten years was not even half finished.

6. The family later moved to the neighboring state of Morelos.

 Román González, Carrillo Cantú and Hernández-León, ‘Homeland’ 263

Beto’s parents kept this information to themselves so that their son

would enjoy his stay; and he did. He thought that the visit was tem-
porary, and the first few days went well. Beto’s grandparents were so
happy to see him and made him feel welcomed. Beto liked being with
members of his extended family who noticed he was different; the
way he walked, dressed and spoke Spanish made him the center of
attention: ‘‘This (was) the first time I met my family, I mean I left
when I was two years old but I didn’t remember them. I like it
because they treated me nicely, my grandparents gave me money and
people here called me ‘the Californian’.’’
A few weeks later, as the summer break was coming to an end,
Beto was eager to go back to school, visit the nearby lake and see his
friends and play videogames and basketball with them. When his
parents explained that they had come to stay, he tried to convince
them to go back or let him go by himself. ‘‘I felt really bad and started
crying, I didn’t say bye to my friends, there were so many things I had
planned with them, and here I was not being able to go back home,
I stopped talking to my parents for some days, I stopped talking to
everybody, I didn’t want to go out of my room, it was unfair.’’ Beto’s
behavior and habits began to change: he preferred staying at home to
play videogames; he barely wanted to spend time with his cousins
and did not like the local music, so when there were parties he stayed
at home watching television. These behaviors were a marked contrast
from those of the child his parents recalled in California—a happy
and funny kid who was also a natural dancer.
Beto still does not know the actual reason why his mother and
father decided to go back to Mexico in such a hurry. During an inter-
view, Beto’s parents shared with us that they were running away from
a gang member who had threatened to kill Beto if they didn’t leave,
after Andrea, Beto’s mother, had turned the gang member in to the
police. As Andrea explained: ‘‘Nothing was worth risking the life of
our only son: a good life, a house, a job and many friends. We didn’t
want to come back, I even cried, it was unfair to leave everything
behind because of that bad person . . . but when I thought about my
son and how he made us happy, I didn’t have to think about it twice;
I told my husband that we should start packing and we left in less
than a week.’’
The reasons Beto’s parents first volunteered to explain the fa-
mily’s return were not entirely untrue. He was told that her grand-
mother was sick with azúcar (diabetes), which she had for years, and
that the rest of the family wanted to see him now as a grown boy after
a twelve year absence. Still, his parents had never explained what it
meant to no tener papeles (not to have legal permission to live in the
264 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

United States) until the moment he wanted to go back home to

California. Soon after he learned he could not go back to the United
States, he also found out that he had to enroll in the local school even
though he was very reluctant to do so.
Beto experienced an abrupt and unjustified return migration. In
his eyes, everything was taken away from him—friends, school, and
home—without a valid reason. Clearly, his parents’ decision to return
did not take into consideration Beto’s opinion. Like many children
and adolescents, Beto had to abide by the decisions his parents made
on his behalf. At the same time, the family’s decision to return to
Mexico fundamentally responded to Beto’s safety and wellbeing.
Instead of simply showing the subordination of children, we argue
that this story illustrates the significance of children in the migratory
decision-making process (Orellana et al. 2001, Nı́ Laoire et al. 2012).
Two years later, Beto appeared to have adapted well to his new
environment and is now a more active participant in family decisions:
he influenced his parents’ decision to move from Cuentepec, More-
los to Ahuatenco, Estado de México; he selected the school he
wanted to attend, and he now spends more time socializing with his
friends after school. Nonetheless, he thinks about returning to the
United States. As Beto explained, ‘‘I still want to go to the States, but I
will study here first, I need to practice my English and find a good job,
a job that sends me legally to the States to work.’’

Lulu
Lulu was the first girl we interviewed in Morelos. During the imple-
mentation of the survey instrument at her school, a teacher pointed
at Lulu and said ‘‘ella no sabe español, acaba de llegar’’ (she doesn’t
know Spanish, she just got here). When we asked her to come to the
principal’s office and asked if she wanted to complete the survey,
Lulu replied: ‘‘I can’t read in Spanish, or in English, because of my
problem, but if you read me the questions I can answer.’’ She later
told us that she had been diagnosed with dyslexia in the United
States, a condition that made it hard for her to read or write in
English.
Lulu was born in the United States and had arrived in Morelos
two months before our visit to the school. Her mother had unsuc-
cessfully tried to become a legal resident for years. After Lulu’s uncle’s
arrest and deportation a few weeks before, Lulu, her three sisters, and
her parents jointly decided that it was time to move to Mexico. ‘‘My
parents told us they wanted to talk to us; we sat in the living room and
they asked us what we thought about moving to Mexico. They also
 Román González, Carrillo Cantú and Hernández-León, ‘Homeland’ 265

explained how much they worried about one of them being deported
and how that would make it difficult to be together, the six of us. They
told us that things [in Mexico] would not be as good as they were
there [in the United States], that we would have to work hard for the
things we wanted and that we needed to stick together. We didn’t
mind that, we wanted to be with our parents, and that’s why we
didn’t take long to pack our things; that same week we were leaving
California and moving to Mexico.’’ They rented a trailer and Ernesto,
Lulu’s father, drove with all their belongings to Morelos, while Palo-
ma, her mother, brought Lulu and her sisters in a van and stopped at
the beach on the way. Traveling apart from her father was not diffi-
cult. Lulu, her mother and sisters were used to traveling without him
because he was working all the time. Although the return of Lulu’s
family was voluntary and motivated by the desire to stay together, her
uncle’s arrest and deportation loomed large in the decision to go
back to Mexico.
As their parents had told them, things in Mexico were not easy.
Lulu remembered how uncles, aunts and cousins did not welcome
them with open arms, which made it difficult to adjust to the new
place. Her cousins did not want to play with them. According to Lulu,
‘‘they called us ‘fresas’7 because we spoke English, but we are not, we
just talk different. My parents even organized a quinceañera for my
sister when we arrived so that our family here was part of the party,
but I don’t know, maybe they think we have a lot of money or some-
thing.’’ The family did not have a place to stay and Lulu’s parents
decided to rent a house from an aunt, sending payment for an entire
year in advance. But as Lulu explained, ‘‘Whenever it rained every-
thing got wet so we had to start looking for a new house; also, the
house was scary, we heard things at night and my little sister was
always crying.’’ When they found a new house, Lulu’s aunt did not
want to return any of the money they had paid, despite the fact that
they had lived in the house only one month.
Once they moved to a new home, the girls were happy. According
to Lulu, ‘‘We like being here (in Mexico) because we get to spend
more time with our dad. We barely saw him when we were in the
United States; he was always working.’’ An important component of
Lulu’s migration to Mexico has thus been transitioning to new family
dynamics: in California, she spent her free time with her cousins, her
grandmother and mother because her father worked both day and
night shifts. Lulu recalls seeing her father only a few minutes after

7. Fresa is a Mexican Spanish slang word referring to people who generally

belong to the upper social classes and who are perceived as snobs.
266 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

school, while he was sleeping or getting ready for his second job. Her
relationship with her grandmother (on her mom’s side) was very
close. They spent the afternoons together and Lulu helped her grand-
mother sell fruits and vegetables in the neighborhood. Things are
different in Morelos; according to Lulu, some things are better, and
others ‘‘are not that bad.’’ She smiled while sharing with us that her
father has a 6–8 hour workday in his job, and that he stays home on
the weekends. She enjoys the time she spends with her father now;
he has taught her how to hunt and fish, also helps her with home-
work and does chores at home. She prefers to have her dad at home
even though she misses some of the comforts they used to have in the
United States. Lulu is aware that it was hard for her parents to find
a proper house for the six of them, to find jobs to pay for their
expenses and to develop a strong network of family and friends to
help them transition into the new community.
Lulu mentioned that her father had invested money in a new
business, where he fixed cars and tires. But he had to close the busi-
ness because of threats from drug dealers; he subsequently lost all his
investment and had to go to work for her grandfather to be able to
feed the family. In order to contribute to the household economy,
Lulu and her sisters started selling their own clothes and toys: ‘‘We
put them in a pile, whatever we don’t like anymore or don’t need,
then we go to the market and sell; it’s hard but we are sticking
together, we are together as a family.’’ After changing schools and
neighborhoods several times in Morelos, and dealing with teachers
who did not help her with her learning disability, Lulu told her par-
ents that she did not want to continue studying and would stay at
home with her mother. Lulu’s parents respected her decision. Ac-
cording to Lulu’s mother, ‘‘she was having a lot of trouble at school
and her teachers had no patience; she is sick, you know, we didn’t
want to stress her more. Here (at home), she helps with chores and
spends time drawing and we ask her to read for us, we give her
homework.’’
Despite the family’s economic troubles and her academic diffi-
culties, Lulu adapted quickly to her new environment, as if she had
always lived in Mexico. After several interviews and home visits it
became evident that Lulu was developing a Mexican identity; she
wore clothes and a hairstyle similar to her peers, and she incorpo-
rated slang in Mexican Spanish similar to her peers in the town where
she now lives. As Lulu stated, ‘‘I know I have that [U.S.] nationality
but to tell you the truth I feel more Mexican than anyone here.’’
Nonetheless, Lulu continues to think about the possibility of moving
back from Tlaltizapán to Los Angeles, knowing that she has the legal
 Román González, Carrillo Cantú and Hernández-León, ‘Homeland’ 267

option to live in either the United States or Mexico. As a result of the

family’s economic hardship, Lulu often thinks about the advantages
of being a U.S. citizen: ‘‘I want to go back to the United States when
I’m eighteen, then I can work and help my parents with their papers
or send them money; life is hard here in Mexico’’. Her migration to
her parents’ homeland and the dislocations she has experienced have
made Lulu keenly aware of the resources and opportunities available
in Los Angeles and Morelos and of the role the border plays in deter-
mining access to them.

Flor
Flor was born and raised in Oregon. Her parents separated when she
was very little. Unable to pay for a babysitter, her mother decided it
was time for Flor’s father to either help pay for childcare or take care
of Flor himself. He did not want to spend the extra money, so he
would pick her up at school and bring her with him to his business
every afternoon, while Juany (Flor’s mother) was working her second
shift. Flor became very close to her father because he would not be as
hard on her as her mother, and he would buy whatever food and toys
Flor wanted. He was always home because he had his own business.
When Flor told her mother that she wanted to spend more time with
her dad than with her, Juany realized she had neglected Flor too long
and she decided to win back her love and trust. Also, Flor’s older
sister had dropped out of high school in her senior year because of an
unwanted pregnancy, and she was getting involved in gangs through
her boyfriend. Juany was worried that she had spent too much time
working and not paying attention to her daughters’ needs. One day,
she decided to leave Oregon and return to Mexico even though she
knew that, given her lack of documentation, this could be the last
time she set foot in the United States.
Juany knew that coming back to Mexico was going to be a big
challenge. During the interviews, Flor recalled that she was happy to
spend time with her mother traveling back to Mexico. Instead of
flying, they decided to bring back a minivan packed with most of their
belongings. At first, Flor was very excited about the trip; her mom
told her that it would be fun to stop at different places before arriving
in Morelos, and she was eager to see Mexico for the first time. They
stopped at Disneyland in southern California and later visited rela-
tives in Baja California. Juany was feeling sad and sorry that she had to
take things away from her daughters and she tried to compensate
with the short stops they made along the way. She wanted to make
the trip enjoyable for her daughters and to stop thinking about the
268 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

life they had left behind. After a week-long trip, they finally arrived in
Morelos.
Flor and her older sister Ruth were used to having a nice apart-
ment in Oregon but their new house in Jiutepec was very different.
According to Flor, ‘‘when we arrived, there were bugs everywhere
and dust on the ground, because there was no floor, and we had to
carry water in a bucket to use the bathroom or to take a shower, it was
nothing like our home over there.’’ Flor quickly became disappointed
with her new home because it did not have the same comforts she
enjoyed in the United States. Her mother made it clear that she could
not afford to buy Flor and Ruth every little thing they asked for. Flor
started longing for her old home and thinking about the possibility of
moving back to the United States with her father. Her mother did not
have a problem with the new house; for her, getting used to this place
was part of a lesson her daughters needed to learn. Juany told them
that in Mexico they would need to work harder to get what they
wanted and would have to learn to share and appreciate what they
had. She also reminded them how much she had worked in the
United States to give them what they needed and that now it was the
children’s turn to help her.
For the first weeks, Flor enjoyed her time in Mexico because she
was with her mother, with Ruth, and with Ruth’s baby; they even
adopted a dog. After a month in Morelos, she traveled by herself to
visit an aunt in Mexico City. She compared her home in Morelos to
her aunt’s luxurious house, where she had her own room and a bath-
room with a nice shower. However, she constantly missed her mom.
When Flor went back to Morelos, she told Juany: ‘‘Mom, I like being
with you here, even if I have to use a bucket to shower.’’ Needless to
say, this made Juany very happy. It was evident that Flor could dis-
pense with certain material comforts at home because the family
bonds were strong and the relationship with her mother was begin-
ning to heal.
The circumstances in Morelos complicated Flor’s adaptation to
her new home. She was not allowed to go out to play because the
family lived in a dangerous neighborhood. As a result, Flor spent
most of her time indoors doing homework, watching television and
playing with her nephew. But she missed her dad and friends from
school in the United States. At her new school in Morelos she was
bullied. Children teased her about her ‘‘weird accent’’ and called her
gorda (fatso). Contrary to the kind of girl that Flor was at home -
happy, talkative and playful - she appeared very shy and quiet at
school. According to Juany, Flor could not get used to the school and
the neighborhood in Morelos.
 Román González, Carrillo Cantú and Hernández-León, ‘Homeland’ 269

A few months after arriving in Mexico, Flor decided to return to

the United States to reunite with her father. Juany explained: ‘‘It was
her decision, I couldn’t take that away from her, she came here with
me and tried staying for a while; it didn’t work for her. Going back to
her dad [to Oregon] was her choice and now she has to live with the
consequences.’’ Juany added, ‘‘[Flor] calls me every day and seems
very happy, but whenever she fights with her dad she tells me she
wants to come back to Mexico . . . Of course, I miss her and want her
back, but she has to take responsibility for her choices. I tell her that
she cannot be moving whenever she wants, and that if she chose to
leave she has to be mature and be patient with her dad.’’
Flor’s fleeting immigration to Mexico made her aware that her
U.S. citizenship offered the opportunity to move between the two
countries. Her return to the United States was uneventful; her par-
ents paid for the plane ticket and had an acquaintance accompany her
on the trip. Her father was still living in Oregon and had his own
business. Flor was able to enroll in school immediately. Since her
return, Flor uses smart phone applications and social media to com-
municate with her mother, sister and nephew in Mexico, the same
means she used to keep in touch with her father. She is involved as an
intermediary in the constant negotiations between her divorced par-
ents, who do not get along very well, and recognizes the significance
of her role in family dynamics. Flor continues to nurture her family
bonds by staying in constant communication with her mother and
sister in Mexico, by planning visits to Morelos and by asking them for
consejos (advice). Flor currently resides in Oregon with her father but
the moral and affective ties that form her nuclear family are now
dispersed between Mexico and the United States.

Discussion and Conclusions

The cases of Beto, Lulu and Flor are emblematic of the trajectories
and experiences children encounter as they move from the United
States to the state of Morelos. All three cases support the central
argument of this article: that children play a critical and varied role
in social processes of family return migration and that, as they adapt to
their new environment, they face challenges that are unique and dif-
ferent from the issues adults encounter. Based on the evidence pre-
sented here, we also contend that children often experience return as
a break between the social world they leave behind in the United States
and the new environment to which they need to adapt. The reasons
motivating return, the conditions and resources available for adapta-
tion to a new home and a viable path for re-emigration to the United
270 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

States determine whether this break is lived as a rupture (as in the case
of Beto) or as a temporary disruption (as in the case of Flor).
Clearly, children are at the center of the adults’ decision to return
to the homeland. Parents seek to protect their children’s safety and
wellbeing, keep the family together8 (endangered by the looming
threat of deportation) and rebuild relations eroded by poverty, long
workdays and intra-family conflict. At times, children play an active
role in the decision to move across borders, as illustrated by the case
of Lulu, who, together with her sisters and parents, agreed to return
to Mexico. And the case of Flor, who decided to re-emigrate to the
United States and return to her father, friends and school in Oregon.
Beto’s case stands on the opposite side of the spectrum. Not only was
he not consulted, he was also deceived to ease a hurried exodus. His
parents felt justified because they feared for his physical safety.
These cases also show that while deportation is not always the
main cause of return, legal status is omnipresent in the decision to go
back to Mexico. Beto and his parents were undocumented, a condi-
tion that made them vulnerable and fearful to report to the author-
ities that they were victims of blackmail. Threatened by a local gang
member, the adults felt that they had no recourse but a speedy flight
to the homeland. Lulu and Flor were part of mixed-status house-
holds, where U.S.-born children were citizens and the adults were
undocumented or in the midst of protracted efforts to regularize
their status. This situation meant that the children could contemplate
re-emigrating to the United States, as Flor eventually did, but leaving
one or both parents behind in Mexico.
Children’s experiences of return migration are distinct and dif-
ferent from those of adults. The feelings, incidents, and interactions
described by Beto, Lulu and Flor, suggest that children face a unique
set of challenges in their return migration to Mexico. While adults
have to worry about reintegrating into the labor market in order to
provide for the family, children have to integrate into schools, with
teachers who are ill-prepared to receive them (as some of the articles
in this special issue demonstrate), and to learn academic Spanish.
While adults have to reactivate support networks and adjust to
a diminished social status (as they no longer have access to dollars
and the U.S. labor market), children have to establish relations with
relatives they never met and negotiate new friendships with peers who
often see them as different because of accent, dress and demeanor.
Children also have to get used to changes in standard of living,

8. From the point of view of Flor’s mother, it was about keeping the family (she
and her daughters) together.
 Román González, Carrillo Cantú and Hernández-León, ‘Homeland’ 271

especially if the family encounters economic hardship trying to make

a living in Mexico. In Beto’s case, once it became clear that he was not
going back to the United States, he felt sad and alienated from the new
environment. Lulu struggled with teachers who did little to help with
her learning disability and ended up dropping out of school. Flor had
a hard time with schoolmates who bullied her and called her names.
The process of family return migration also offers an opportunity
for children to renegotiate their relationships with parents and influ-
ence decisions that directly affect their lives. As Dreby has noted in
her studies of family separation in the context of international migra-
tion, children’s negative experiences give them ‘‘some ability to bar-
gain in their families’’ (2010: 143). While this is partly the result of
children’s processes of maturation, migrant parents tend to be more
lenient with their children out of feelings of guilt, especially if a child
is experiencing difficult situations in the neighborhood, at school, or
with relatives (Dreby 2010). Beto asserted this newfound power by
refusing to continue his education at the same institution where he
completed his elementary education, opting instead for a private
school, even though his parents would have a hard time paying the
tuition. Lulu negotiated a de facto homeschooling arrangement with
her parents and Flor managed to convince her divorced parents to let
her return to Oregon because she missed her old friends and school
and felt constrained in Morelos.
While adults are willing to compromise, they strategically use the
experience of return to teach children a series of moral lessons.
These teachings include ‘‘the expectations of the roles that they [chil-
dren] would play in life and the rules of conduct that had to be
followed . . . ’’ (Valdés 1996, 125). Needless to say, conveying moral
messages to one’s offspring is at the heart of parenting. But the
powerful disruptions return migration introduces create a unique
opportunity for parents to build the moral character of their children.
The accounts of return provided by Beto, Lulu and Flor show that
these moral lessons are not lost on them. During the interviews, all
three children talked about how parents repeatedly told them about
the value of hard work, of not taking things for granted, of the impor-
tance of keeping the family together, and of assuming responsibility
for personal decisions and actions. For children, as well as for par-
ents, return migration is a moral experience.
Finally, children also demonstrate a remarkable ability to adapt
to their new social environment. Beto, Lulu and Flor9 have adjusted

9. Flor’s path differed from Beto’s and Lulu’s, given that her father remained in
the U.S. However, Flor did make an effort to adapt to her new home.
272 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

to different economic conditions and developed new social identi-

ties. We were able to observe this process of adaptation first hand
thanks to our longitudinal methodology. After several interviews and
home visits, we noticed how Beto and Lulu became more proficient
in Spanish. At some point, they stopped communicating with us in
English and began to use Spanish instead. Over time, conversations
about going back to the United States were less common. We learned
through repeated interviews that Beto and Lulu were slowly broad-
ening their social circle with new friends as they embraced Mexican
slang, local dress codes and other cultural practices. At the same time,
Beto and Lulu managed to maintain a binational and bilingual iden-
tity by keeping connected to friends and relatives in Los Angeles and
Santa Ana, California, using social media. Flor took a very different
path when she decided to return to Oregon. She now literally and
figuratively moves between two social worlds of Portland and Jiute-
pec, Morelos, as she mediates relations between her estranged par-
ents. Needless to say, this is not the last chapter in the migratory
and subjective itineraries of these children. Dual citizenship (in the
cases of Lulu and Flor), bilingualism and biculturalism (for all three)
are resources that these children will continue using to make sense of
their present, and to imagine their future as adults, whether in Mex-
ico, in the United States, or in continued transnational migrations.

Works Cited

Abrego, Leisy. 2014. Sacrificing Families: Navigating Laws, Labor, and Love
Across Borders. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Arzubiaga, Angela E., Silvia C. Noguerón and Amanda L. Sullivan. 2009. ‘‘The
Education of Children in Im/migrant Families.’’ Review of Research in
Education 33 (1): 246–271.
CONAPO. 2011. I´ndices de intensidad migratoria México-Estados Unidos
2010. http://www.conapo.gob.mx/swb/conapo/Indices_de_intensidad_
migratoria_Mexico-Estados_Unidos_2010
Dı́az Gómez, Leticia. 2002. ‘‘Siguiendo los pasos hacia Estados Unidos:
Interacción infantil con videos, cartas y fotografı́as.’’ In Migración in-
ternacional e identidades cambiantes, edited by Ma. Eugenia Anguiano
Téllez y Miguel Hernández Madrid, 229–250. Zamora: El Colegio de
Michoacán.
Dobson, Madeleine E. 2009. ‘‘Unpacking children in migration research.’’
Children’s Geographies 7 (3): 355–360.
Dreby, Joanna. 2010. Divided by Borders: Mexican Migrants and their
Children. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Escobar, Agustı́n, Lindsey Lowell and Susan Martin. 2013. Binational dia-
logue on Mexican migrants in the US and in Mexico. Mexico: CIESAS/
Georgetown University.
 Román González, Carrillo Cantú and Hernández-León, ‘Homeland’ 273

Gaitán, Lourdes. 2006. ‘‘La nueva sociologı́a de la infancia. Aportaciones de

una mirada distinta.’’ Polı́tica y Sociedad 43 (1): 9–26.
Gaitán, Lourdes, Mónica Dı́az, Ricardo Sandoval, René Unda, Sebastián
Granda and Daniel Llanos. 2011. Los niños como actores en los procesos
migratorios. Implicaciones para los proyectos de cooperación. Madrid:
Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Giorguli, Silvia and Edith Gutiérrez. 2011. ‘‘Niños y jóvenes en el contexto de
la migración internacional entre México y Estados Unidos.’’ Coyuntura
Demográfica, SOMEDE (1): 21–25.
Giorguli, Silvia, Bryant Jensen, Frank Bean, Susan Brown, Adam Sawyer,
Vı́ctor Zúñiga, and Felipe Martı́nez Rizo. 2013. ‘‘Education.’’ In
Binational Dialogue on Mexican Migrants in the U. S. and Mexico,
Final Report, edited by Agustı́n Escobar Latapı́, Lindsay Lowel and Susan
Martin, 23–31. Washington D. C.: CIESAS/Georgetown University.
Hamann, Edmund T. and Vı́ctor Zúñiga. 2011. ‘‘Schooling and The Everyday
Ruptures Transnational Children Encounter in the United States and
Mexico.’’ In Everyday Ruptures. Children, Youth, and Migration in
Global Perspective, edited by Cati Coe, Rachel Reynolds, Deborah
Boehm, Julia Hess and Heather Rae, 141–160. Nashville: Vanderbilt
University Press.
Hamann, Edmund T., Vı́ctor Zúñiga and Juan Sánchez. 2006. ‘‘Pensando en
Cynthia y su Hermana: Educational Implications of U.S./Mexico
Transnationalism for Children.’’ Journal of Latinos and Education 5
(4): 253–274.
Hatfield, Madeleine E. 2010. ‘‘Children Moving ‘Home’? Everyday
Experiences of Return Migration in Highly Skilled Households.’’
Childhood 17 (2): 243–257.
Hernández León, Rubén. 1999. ‘‘¡A la Aventura!: Jóvenes, Pandillas y Migración
en la Conexión Monterrey-Houston.’’ In Fronteras Fragmentadas, edited
by G. Mummert, 115–143. Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán.
Instituto Nacional de Estadı́stica y Geografı́a (INEGI). 2010. Censo de
Población y Vivienda 2010. http://www.censo2010.org.mx.
Katz, Vikki S. 2014. Kids in the Middle: How Children of Immigrants
Negotiate Community Interactions for Their Families. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press.
Kirova, Anna. 2007. ‘‘Jacqueline Knörr (Ed.): Childhood and Migration: From
Experience to Agency.’’ Journal of Internacional Migration and
Integration 8 (1): 127–133.
López Castro, Gustavo. 2007. ‘‘Niños, socialización y migración a Estados
Unidos.’’ In El paı́s transnacional: migración mexicana y cambio
social a través de la frontera, edited by Marina Ariza y Alejandro Portes,
545–570. México. UNAM/Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales.
Nı́ Laoire, Caitrı́ona, Allen White, Naomi Tyrrell and Fina Carpena-Méndez.
2012. ‘‘Children and Young People on the Move: Geographies of Child
and Youth Migration.’’ Geography 97 (3): 129–134.
Orellana, Marjorie. 2009. Translating Childhoods: Immigrant Youth,
Language, and Culture. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
274 Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos

Orellana, Marjorie, Barrie Thorne, Anna Chee and Eva Lam. 2001.
‘‘Transnational Childhoods; The Participation of Children in Processes
of Family Migration.’’ Social Problems 48 (4): 572–591.
Panait, Catalina. 2011. Cuentos de mis escuelitas: la princesa y el hombre de
hojalata. Transiciones, rupturas e identidades lingüı́sticas en alumnos
con escolaridad circular. M.A. Thesis in Education, Monterrey:
Universidad de Monterrey.
Passel, Jeffrey, D’vera Cohn and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera. 2012. Net Migration
from Mexico Falls to Zero-and Perhaps Less. Washington, DC: Pew
Hispanic Center.
Prout, Alan. 2011. ‘‘Taking a Step Away from Modernity: Reconsidering the
New Sociology of Childhood.’’ Global Studies of Childhood 1 (1): 4–14.
Punch, Samantha. 2007. ‘‘Negotiating migrant identities: Young people in
Bolivia and Argentina.’’ Children’s Geographies 5 (1): 95–112.
Ramı́rez, Telésforo and Liliana Meza. 2011. ‘‘Emigración México-Estados
Unidos: Balance antes y después de la recesión económica estadouni-
dense.’’ In La situación demográfica de México, edited by CONAPO,
241–259. México: CONAPO.
Ruiz, José. 2012. Metodologı́a de la investigación cualitativa. España:
Universidad de Deusto.
Rumbaut, Rubén and Alejandro Portes, eds. 2001. Ethnicities: Children of
Immigrants in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sánchez, Juan and Vı́ctor Zúñiga. 2010. ‘‘Trayectorias de los alumnos trans-
nacionales en México. Propuesta intercultural de atención educativa.’’
Trayectorias 12 (30): 5–23.
Sánchez, Juan, Edmund T. Hamann and Vı́ctor Zúñiga. 2012. ‘‘What the
Youngest Transnational Students Have to Say About Their Transition
from U.S. Schools to Mexican Ones’’. Diaspora, Indigenous, and
Minority Education: Studies of Migration, Integration, Equity, and
Cultural Survival 6 (3): 157–171.
Tuirán, Rodolfo, Carlos Fuentes and José Luis Ávila. 2002. I´ndices de
Intensidad Migratoria México-Estados Unidos 2000. México: CONAPO.
Vadean, Florin P. and Matloob Piracha. 2009. ‘‘Circular Migration or
Permanent Return: What Determines Different Forms of Migration.’’ IZA
Discussion Paper (4287). http://anon-ftp.iza.org/dp4287.pdf.
Valdés, Guadalupe. 1996. Con Respeto, Bridging the Distances Between
Culturally Diverse Families and Schools, An Ethnographic Portrait.
New York: Teacher College Press/Columbia University.
White, Allen, Caitrı́ona Nı́ Laoire, Naomi Tyrrell and Fina Carpena-Mendez.
2011. ‘‘Children’s Roles in Transnational Migration.’’ Journal of Ethnic
and Migration Studies 38 (8): 1159–1170.
Willis, Katie and Saw Ai Brenda Yeoh. 2000. ‘‘Gender and Transnational
Household Strategies: Singaporean Migration to China.’’ Regional
Studies 34 (3): 253–264.
Zúñiga, Vı́ctor. 1992. ‘‘Tradiciones migratorias internacionales y socialización
familiar: expectativas migratorias de los alumnos de secundaria de cuatro
municipios del norte de Nuevo León.’’ Frontera Norte 4 (7): 45–74.
 Román González, Carrillo Cantú and Hernández-León, ‘Homeland’ 275

———. 2013. ‘‘Migrantes internacionales en las escuelas mexicanas: desafı́os

actuales y futuros de polı́tica educativa’’. Sinéctica (40): 1–12.
———. 2015. ‘‘Niños y adolescentes separados de sus familias por la
migración internacional: el caso de cuatro estados de México’’. Estudios
Sociológicos 33 (97): 145–168.
Zúñiga, Vı́ctor and Edmund T. Hamann. 2011. ‘‘Volviendo a visitar la noción
de transnacionalidad: Comunicación transfronteriza y redes diaspóricas
en alumnos migrantes internacionales en las escuelas de México. In
Procesos comunicativos en la migración. De la escuela a la feria
popular, coordinated by José Juan Olvera and Blanca Delia Vázquez,
29–59. México; COLEF/UDEM/UR/ITESM.
———. 2014. ‘‘Going To a Home You Have Never Been To: The Return
Migration of Mexican and American-Mexican Children’’. Children’s
Geographies 12 (4): 1–13.
Zúñiga, Vı́ctor and Marı́a Vivas. 2014. ‘‘Divided Families, Fractured
Schooling, in Mexico: Educational Consequences of Children
Exposition to International Migration.’’ Cahiers, CEMCA (6): 3–18.
Zúñiga, Vı́ctor, Edmund T. Hamann and Juan Sánchez Garcı́a. 2008. Alumnos
transnacionales, escuelas mexicanas frente a la globalización. Distrito
Federal, México: Secretarı́a de Educación Pública.