I'm back in the States now, having had an extremely productive research trip. My research assistant, Jalal, served as a type of "pace car" and kept me moving throughout the three and a half weeks. Together we completed 127 oral history interviews, which is truly amazing.
Every research trip (for me, at least) tends to focus on a particular topic. Last year I interviewed mainly longer term expats. Those interviewees were able to give me a longer-term vision of the SMA expat community, but also revealed aspects of the population that I would not have expected: younger working expats, some married and raising kids, others who were making a go at living in Mexico.
For the next few days, I'm going to be blogging about expat work in SMA. Most of the people I interviewed had businesses, and therefore are willing to be identified (or their businesses identified) on this blog.
I"m still decompressing from my return trip: I was overjoyed to to see my family, but I was not happy to have to take the wheel of my minivan again (alas, this is the suburbs). I will be processing much of the materials Jalal and I collected, and reporting some of those findings here. I was amazed and impressed with what I discovered this summer. I think you will be as well.
Showing posts with label families and research abroad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label families and research abroad. Show all posts
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Expat Family Values
I've been thinking a lot about families, well, really only my own family. When I was about 10 days into this project, I started to get really homesick. Like cry myself to sleep at night homesick. Somehow when I planned this field trip, I failed to calculate how long I would be away versus how long I had been away during past research trips to Mexico. When I sat down and thought about it, it has been years since I was away for longer than 2 weeks by myself. Last year, I came with my husband and kids, and it was great. I was more stressed and tired than they were, but after all, I was working the entire time we were here.
The funny thing about working here in SMA is that most of the expats here have left their extended families behind. The couples who have grown children often tell me that they felt free to come here because their kids were grown and on their own. The young marrieds have told me that they never saw their extended families more than two to three times a year anyway, so Mexico hasn't changed much in that regard. When I asked one gentleman who has been here for over 50 years what it was like raising his daughter in Mexico and far away from his parents and siblings simply said, "you know, it was wonderful."
Last year one of my first informants, a woman I identified as "Julia," told me that in general, expats of her generation either had no extended families or were not on good terms with their extended families. This morning as I was eating breakfast in the Bagel Cafe, the local expat haunt, one gentleman explained, "Normally, as you get older, your friends become less important and your family more so. But for expats, it's the opposite. Our friends become like our family, and family relationships often become more distant."
The irony (for me) is that many of the expats that I interview say that they really admire Mexican family values, and the ways that multi-generation households stay together and maintain close ties, sometimes knowing third or fourth cousins, great uncles and aunts, and so on. I find this ironic in that expats admire what they themselves do not have (or perhaps do not want). At the same time, what anthropologists would call "fictive kinship," strong relationships and obligations between non-blood relatives which are often formalized through ritual practice, seem to take on greater significance in the expat community.
My first response to this is "to each his/her own." Family dynamics can be tricky at best, and downright destructive at worst. And there is a certain joy that I experience when I know I have a really good, reliable friend. I can only imagine that having an entire community of such friends would be extremely satisfying. Still, I cannot imagine living so far from my mother, sister, or someday, my kids. I know the globalizing world seems to dictate that people move farther and farther from their hometowns or homelands. Maybe tonight I'm exceptionally sentimental because, alas, I would like nothing better than to kiss my kids goodnight and sleep next to my husband, or maybe I'm feeling some of the emotion that accompanies living abroad.
If there is any aspect of the expat life that I think should (and could) be emulated in the U.S., it would be the ways that this group has mastered the art of friendship, and made a lifework of making friends and supporting one another. You should not have to leave your homeland to find this, but it seems being an expat and being a good friend go hand in hand.
The funny thing about working here in SMA is that most of the expats here have left their extended families behind. The couples who have grown children often tell me that they felt free to come here because their kids were grown and on their own. The young marrieds have told me that they never saw their extended families more than two to three times a year anyway, so Mexico hasn't changed much in that regard. When I asked one gentleman who has been here for over 50 years what it was like raising his daughter in Mexico and far away from his parents and siblings simply said, "you know, it was wonderful."
Last year one of my first informants, a woman I identified as "Julia," told me that in general, expats of her generation either had no extended families or were not on good terms with their extended families. This morning as I was eating breakfast in the Bagel Cafe, the local expat haunt, one gentleman explained, "Normally, as you get older, your friends become less important and your family more so. But for expats, it's the opposite. Our friends become like our family, and family relationships often become more distant."
The irony (for me) is that many of the expats that I interview say that they really admire Mexican family values, and the ways that multi-generation households stay together and maintain close ties, sometimes knowing third or fourth cousins, great uncles and aunts, and so on. I find this ironic in that expats admire what they themselves do not have (or perhaps do not want). At the same time, what anthropologists would call "fictive kinship," strong relationships and obligations between non-blood relatives which are often formalized through ritual practice, seem to take on greater significance in the expat community.
My first response to this is "to each his/her own." Family dynamics can be tricky at best, and downright destructive at worst. And there is a certain joy that I experience when I know I have a really good, reliable friend. I can only imagine that having an entire community of such friends would be extremely satisfying. Still, I cannot imagine living so far from my mother, sister, or someday, my kids. I know the globalizing world seems to dictate that people move farther and farther from their hometowns or homelands. Maybe tonight I'm exceptionally sentimental because, alas, I would like nothing better than to kiss my kids goodnight and sleep next to my husband, or maybe I'm feeling some of the emotion that accompanies living abroad.
If there is any aspect of the expat life that I think should (and could) be emulated in the U.S., it would be the ways that this group has mastered the art of friendship, and made a lifework of making friends and supporting one another. You should not have to leave your homeland to find this, but it seems being an expat and being a good friend go hand in hand.
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