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The Inflamed Mind: A Radical New Approach to Depression
Worldwide, depression will be the single biggest cause of disability in the next twenty years. But treatment for it has not changed much in the last three decades. In the world of psychiatry, time has apparently stood still...until now with Edward Bullmore's The Inflamed Mind: A Radical New Approach to Depression.
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我们会通过消息、邮箱等方式尽快将举报结果通知您。2018年长春市中考英语模拟试题　　一 . 2018年长春市中考英语模拟试题单项填空(共20小题;每小题1分，满分20分)　　( )1. Usually, it’s easier to make 　　　 decision than to take 　　　 action.　　A. an B./; an C./;/ D./　　( )2. In Western countries, women are always dressed 　　　 white 　　　 their wedding day, because white is the colour of purity.　　A. on B. in C. in D. on　　( )3. Wearing blue clothes can make _______ easier to feel less stressed. I will wear a blue T-shirt today. X k B 1 . c o m　　A. that B. me C. it D. myself　　( )4. — Do you think Andy can be a good policeman?　　— Yes, I think so. He has the ability to stay 　　　 when something dangerous happens.　　A. calm B. excited C. afraid D. nervous　　( )5. It’s believed that our moods are sometimes 　　　 by colours. Many scientists are doing some research (研究) on this subject.　　A. required B. chosen C. influenced D. explained　　( )6. — Shall we watch Japanese cartoons?　　— Japanese cartoons are not my cup of tea. I 　　　 watch talk shows.　　A. would like B. would better C. would rather D. should rather　　( )7. — Why not join them in their party?　　— Well, I am not invited. And I 　　　 to go to the cinema.　　A. prefer B. discover C. wish D. require　　( )8. I can’t stop 　　　 if Tom will show up at the party. We will be happy if he can come.　　A. hoping B. wishing C. believing D. wondering　　( )9. — What does the sentence “If you were the earth, I would rather 　　　 the moon than the sun” mean?　　— It means “I would like to move around you”. How sweet it sounds!　　A. be B. to be C. being D. to being　　( )10. — It seems that Jimmy is feeling bad about the exam.　　— He needs to 　　　. A “C” is not the end of the world. X|k |B| 1 . c |O |m　　A. cheer himself up B. calm himself downC. let himself down D. warm himself up　　( )11. You never know how much difficulty we had 　　　 the problem. Luckily, we managed to solve it with Mrs Wu’s help.　　A. working out B. work out C. worked out D. to work out　　( )12. — Do you think I should wear an orange shirt today?　　— Yes. 　　　 orange can bring you good luck, it is good for your interview.　　A. Though B. As C. But D. While　　( )13. — The match is so exciting. The opposite team is really strong.　　— You’re right. But I am sure 　　　 our team will win!　　A. if B. that C. whether D. why　　( )14. — Will you buy this tie for Dad?　　— I have no idea. I don’t know 　　　 or not the colour matches his new shirt.　　A. if B. that C. why D. whether　　( )15. — I prefer western food. It’s delicious and good for us.　　— 　　　? But western food is said to be high in sugar and fat.　　A. Is that right B. How do you know that　　C. Do you really think so D. Who told you that　　( )16. As I realized how bad the situations were, 　　　 terrible feeling of fear came over me. But when I heard Mum’s warm words, 　　　 feeling was gone at once.　　A. the B. a C. the D. a　　( )17. — You really had a long conversation with James.　　— I just listened to him singing the 　　　. He lost his job again.　　A. yellows B. whites C. blacks D. blues　　( )18. — Can you help me repair the computer? It doesn’t work properly.　　— I wish I could. But I am a 　　　.　　A. green hand B. white elephant C. yellow dog D. black sheep　　( )19. Tom is from Hong Kong. Sometimes I have some difficulty 　　　 what he says.　　A. understand B. to understand C. understanding D. to understanding　　( )20. — How would you like your coffee, sir?　　A. Very much B. Black, please C. No, thanks D. Yes, I do　　二. 2018年长春市中考英语模拟试题完形填空(共20小题，每小题1.5分;满分30分)http://ww w.xkb1.co m　　A　　Colours often have different meanings in different cultures. In the USA, people have found the following to be 　21　.　　Black is the colour of power. It is also 　22　 in fashion because it makes people appear 　23　.　　White is the 　24　 of purity. White is thought to be a 　25　 colour. However, white shows dirt and is more difficult to 　26　 clean than other colours.　　Blue is the colour of the sky and the 　27　.　　Peaceful blue is often used in bedrooms. Studies show that weightlifters (举重运动员) are able to 　28　 heavier weights in blue gyms.　　Green represents 　29　. It is good for our eyes. Hospitals often use green because it 　30　 patients and keep them peaceful.　　( )21. A. false B. wrong C. bad D. true　　( )22. A. unpopular B. popular C. inactive D. similar　　( )23. A. thinner B. fatter C. shorter D. heavier　　( )24. A. success B. system C. symbol D. survey　　( )25. A. spring B. summer C. autumn D. winter　　( )26. A. look B. seem C. feel D. keep　　( )27. A. ocean B. woods C. mountain D. grass　　( )28. A. lose B. watch C. lift D. control　　( )29. A. love B. sadness C. joy D. nature　　( )30. A. excites B. relaxes C. interests D. surprises　　B　　One day, some people set out to sea by ship. One of 31 took his pet monkey with him. 32 they were far out at sea, their ship was broken for some reasons and everyone fell into the sea, including the monkey. The monkey was sure that he would 33 his life because he couldn’t swim. Suddenly a dolphin came and put him on her back. They soon got to an island and then the monkey 34 down from the dolphin’s back.　　The dolphin asked the monkey, “Do you know this 35 ?”　　The monkey answered, “Yes, I do. The king of this island is my father. Do you know that I am a prince?”　　36 that no one lived on the island, the dolphin said, “Well, you 37 be a prince, but now you can be a king!”　　The monkey then asked, “ 38 can I be a king?”　　The 39 smiled and answered, “That’s 40 . As you are the only creature (生物) on this island, you will naturally be the king!” And then she swam away, leaving the monkey alone.　　The story tells us that those who lie (撒谎) may end up in trouble.　　( )31. A. you B. them C. us D. themselves　　( )32. A. Unless B. If C. Until D. When　　( )33. A. lose B. save C. change D. drop　　( )34. A. pushed B. turned C. jumped D. climbed　　( )35. A. accident B. place C. movie D. experience　　( )36. A. Forgetting B. Fearing C. Knowing D. Hearing　　( )37. A. wouldn’t B. needn’t C. may D. could　　( )38. A. How B. Which C. When D. Why　　( )39. A. monkey B. prince C. king D. dolphin　　( )40. A. difficult B. impossibleC. easy D. helpful　　三. 2018年长春市中考英语模拟试题补全对话(共5小题;每小题1分，满分5分)　　根据对话内容，从方框内的选项中选出能填入空白处的最佳选项，其中有两个为多余选项。　　A: Jenny, I am going to a birthday party tonight, but I don’t know what to wear.　　B: How about the orange T-shirt? 41.　　　 It can make you happy.　　A: That’s a good idea. 42.　　B: Perhaps you should wear your white jeans. White is a calm colour. 43.　　　 Everyone wants to relax in the party.　　A: You are right. 44.　　　 What colour should I choose?　　B: Why don’t you wear a blue hat? 45.　　A: Thank you. I believe I will have a good time at the party.　　A. It makes people feel calm and peaceful.　　B. Orange is the colour of joy.　　C. And I need a hat, too.　　D. What do you think about it?　　E. I’m not sure about it, either.　　F. I think you will look more beautiful.　　G. But what should I wear to match the orange T-shirt?　　四.2018年长春市中考英语模拟试题阅读理解(共20小题;每小题2分，满分40分)　　A　　Survey: What were you scared of when you were a kid?　　I was scared of spiders but I didn’t let my friends know because all of them liked catching these spiders. I was terrified but I just acted cool.　　— Buding, still afraid of spiders　　I was scared of the dark because I didn’t know if there was something scary inside the room. As a result, I always liked sleeping with my back facing the wall because it made me a little comfortable .　　— Gerard, not so afraid of the dark anymore, but still sleeps with his back facing the wall　　Strange as it probably sounds, I was scared of shadows (影子). Not the shadows themselves, but what they formed (形成). Because I was near-sighted (近视的), the shadows I saw formed into the scariest things I saw in my mind.　　— Jean, no longer afraid of shadows　　I was afraid of the old woman who lived alone right in front of us. Very large trees covered the front part of her small house. The few times I saw the old woman, it scared me because she looked like a witch　　(女巫). Once I was playing volleyball with my friends and the ball flew into her house. We all ran home quickly and decided that it was okay to lose the ball instead of seeing her come out of the house.　　— Mac, who has already moved to a different house　　( )46. Buding used to be afraid of 　　　.　　A. the dark B. spiders　　C. shadows D. an old woman　　( )47. Gerard sleeps 　　　.　　A. with the light on　　B. with his parents　　C. with the window open　　D. with his back facing the wall　　( )48. There is something wrong with Jean’s 　　　.　　A. legs B. back　　C. eyes D. feet　　( )49. The old woman lived in a small house 　　　.　　A. by herself B. with her daughter　　C. with her husband D. with her grandmother　　( )50. After the volleyball flew into the woman’s house, Mac and his friends 　　　.　　A. ran home quickly　　B. asked her for it　　C. broke into her house　　D. waited for her to come out　　B　　“Did you go skating a lot last year?” I asked. Jen shook her head and looked at me. Finally she said, “On Thanksgiving, Mom and I always went to visit some friends who lived on a farm. I especially loved seeing their big turkeys.”　　Until then, I didn’t think about how Jen felt. She had a new stepfather (继父) and stepbrother, and had a new town and home, too. Jen and her mom used to live near a lake where Dad and I went every summer, and she had to move up north with us. She had more changes than me.　　Jen seemed sad, so I was busy thinking of some ways to cheer her up on Thanksgiving. I told her my plan and she was excited. First we made a huge snowball, and then a small snowball. Then we built a wall behind the big snowball as a tail. Jen mixed some food coloring with water, saying, “We can spray (喷) colors on the tail.” Our snow turkey had a red, blue, green, and yellow tail. We were so busy that we didn’t notice our parents come outside. Dad found a hat for the　　snow turkey, and Mom wrapped her scarf around its neck.　　“Thanks for cheering Jen up,” Mom said. “You’re a good brother, and you always come up with great ideas.’’ A happy feeling spread through me. I began to understand how much she cared about everyone in our new family.　　( )51. What did Jen do on Thanksgiving in the past?　　A. She went skating with her friends.　　B. She went to the farm with her mother.　　C. She stayed at home with her mother.　　D. She made snow turkeys with her mother.　　( )52. What can we learn from the second paragraph?　　A. Jen lived near a lake in the past.　　B. The writer was Jen’s stepfather.　　C. Jen moved up north for studying.　　D. The writer just moved out of his old house.　　( )53. How many people are there in Jen’s new family?　　A. Two. B. Three. C. Four. D. Five.　　( )54. Which of the following is the right order?　　①made a small snowball ②found a hat　　③made a huge snowball ④sprayed colors on the tail　　⑤wrapped a scarf around the neck　　⑥built a wall behind the big snowball　　A. ①③⑥④②⑤ B. ①②③④⑤⑥　　C. ③①⑥④②⑤ D. ③①⑥②④⑤　　( )55. What can we infer (推断) from the underlined sentence?　　A. Jen’s stepmother was not friendly to the writer.　　B. Jen didn’t feel happy after moving here.　　C. Jen’s mother did a lot to make Jen happy.　　D. The writer felt happy because his stepmother liked him.　　C　　When I was very young, I wanted to become a veterinarian (兽医) one day, because I loved animals very much, especially dogs. However, there was no room in my adult life for a dog.　　Then, last year, I could not stand the fact that I developed cancer (癌症). I wanted to keep a dog, but I knew my illness made it impossible for me to keep one. In early September, to my surprise, my doctor told me that I could keep a pet as my friend, because my immune system (免疫系统) was strong to keep a pet.　　The same day I went to an animal market with my friends. When I saw a 9-week-old dog with big brown eyes, nice ears and white fur all over the body, I took it home.　　I’m happy these days since Oscar came into my life. My new favorite pastime is to watch him sleep, eat and run. And I have been spending more time caring about him, taking long walks with him in the park.　　Now I still have the physical examination once a week at the hospital. But my illness has taken a turn for the better with the company of a dog. My immune system is getting stronger, my doctor tells me. Thanks to Oscar, my life has changed a lot.　　( )56. The writer used to want to be a .　　A. doctor B. teacher　　C. trainer D. veterinarian　　( )57. Why did the writer’s doctor advise her to keep a pet?　　A. Because she developed cancer.　　B. Because a dog is friendly to her.　　C. Because she had a strong immune system to do that.　　D. Because she had enough room in her house to keep a pet.　　( )58. What does the underlined word “fur” mean in Chinese?　　A. 毛皮 B. 头发　　C. 爪子 D. 尾巴　　( )59. The writer does the following to pass time EXCEPT .　　A. see Oscar run　　B. watch Oscar sleep　　C. eat with Oscar together　　D. take Oscar for long walks　　( )60. From the passage, we can infer (推断) that 　　　.　　A. the dog is hard to take care of　　B. the writer is thankful to her pet dog　　C. the writer’s illness gets worse than before　　D. now the writer doesn’t need any physical examination　　D　　One little miracle (奇迹) has been happening to me recently, and it gives me a special joy.　　A few months ago, I was telling my daughter, Sally, some stories about my mother. My daughter was so young when my mother died that she doesn’t remember her well. I told her all I could remember, like how wonderful my mother was and how much she meant to me.　　One day, Sally was sad because her grandmother was in heaven (天堂) and she couldn’t see her. I explained that though her grandmother was dead, now she was still watching over us and could send us something to let us know she was there. She could be anywhere, even riding invisibly (看不见地) on the back of a butterfly. Just after I said this, a butterfly flew down right by us, and we laughed happily.　　Now many people would say it was just luck that the butterfly flew down at that time. A funny thing, however, has happened since then. Every time I go out in any type of weather I see butterflies. Very often they fly right by my face to get my attention. I always say hi to Mum, send her my love, and thank God for little miracles.　　Everyone is always looking for some big miracles to come out and save them when they are in trouble, but they don’t notice the little miracles that happen every day right in front of their eyes. I know what they really are, however. For me little miracles are the best kind. So many little miracles happen around me all the time that I know they are not just luck.　　( )61. When her grandmother died, Sally was 　　　.　　A. at school B. quite young　　C. in trouble D. not at home　　( )62. One day Sally was sad because 　　　.　　A. her mother told her a sad story　　B. she argued with her grandmother　　C. she couldn’t see her grandmother　　D. her grandmother sent her nothing special　　( )63. What does the underlined word “they” refer to　　(指代)?　　A. Everyone. B. Butterflies.　　C. Grandparents. D. Little miracles.　　( )64. What is the little miracle that has been happening to Sally’s mum?　　A. She has a wonderful time with her daughter.　　B. She sees butterflies every time she goes out.　　C. She can make her daughter laugh happily every day.　　D. She often sees her mother ride on the back of a butterfly.　　( )65. Which can be the BEST title for this passage?　　A. Butterflies and miracles　　B. Sally’s grandmother　　C. Miracles are nowhere　　D. A funny thing happened to Sally　　五. 2018年长春市中考英语模拟试题单词拼写(共5小题;每小题1分，满分5分)　　根据首字母及汉语提示，完成下列单词的拼写，使句意明确，语言通顺。　　66. The bag was too heavy and the boy carried it upstairs with great d(困难).　　67. Listening to music sometimes can make you forget your s(悲伤).　　68. I cannot p(许诺) you anything at the moment, but I will try my best.　　69. People not only in China but also from many other countries are still i(受影响) by Confucius’ thoughts.　　70. — You look slimmer and healthier than before.　　— Yes, I p(更喜欢) sweet snacks to vegetable s before.　　六、2018年长春市中考英语模拟试题书面表达(满分15分)　　学校要为初三学生订制新的校服，下面是工厂送来的图片，请你结合所学的关于颜色的知识，选择一款校服加以评价。　　要求：1. 就校服的颜色以及款式加以评价;　　2. 内容充实，语言流畅，书写工整;　　3. 80词左右。　　提示：Style A: red and white spor blue and white sports clothes for boys　　Style B: white shirt, dark blue skirt a white shirt, dark blue trousers and red tie for boys　　2018年长春市中考英语模拟试题参考答案　　1-5 DDCAC 6-10 CADAA　　11-15 ABBDC 16-20 ADACB http://ww w.xkb1.co m　　21-25 DBACB 26-30 DACDB　　31-35 BDACB 36-40 CCADA　　41-45 BGACF 46-50 BDCAA　　51-55 BACCB 56-60 DCACB 61-65 BCDBA　　66. difficulty 67. sadness 68. promise 69. influenced 70. preferred　　One possible version:　　I like style A very much. I think wearing such school uniforms can make us look not only smart but also sporty. And we may feel energetic when we wear them. I like the colours as well. It’s good for boys to wear blue and white. They are a good match. They can make us feel less stressed. And red is also a good colour for girls. Red makes us feel full of energy and passion. It can make us take action easily.最新文章精品推荐Revista Env&o - María: Mother, Wife, Indigenous Woman,Emigrant and Voluntary Returnee
Revista Env&o
Edificio Nitlap&n,2do. piso
Universidad Centroamericana
Apartado A-194
Managua, Nicaragua
Telephone:(505)
Central American University - UCA&&
Number 327 | Octubre 2008
Central America
María: Mother, Wife, Indigenous Woman,Emigrant and Voluntary Returnee
Mass migration is changing Central America and its people.
To what extent has that important experience helped indigenous women
who emigrated to the United States and then returned voluntarily to Guatemala
free themselves from the millenarian oppression within Western and Mayan culture?
To what degree are migration and return factors of personal and social transformation?
The different identifies experienced by María provide pointers
to some of the answers.
Ricardo Falla
We visited María in Xicalcal, a rural, almost urban village near the city of Zacualpa, located on a plain at the foot of the Chuacús mountain chain.
It had been occupied by guerrilla fighters during the eighties.
María invited us into her well-plastered cinderblock house built with money earned in the United States.
Next to the house was a tank filled with crystal clear water brought down from the mountain, which is a marvel compared to the muddy water that comes out of the pipes in Zacualpa.
She showed us her henhouse, fruit trees and kitchen garden with herbs and medicinal plants.
Her husband has been living in the States for over five years, and she communicates with him on an almost daily basis.
She spent two years there herself, which is a very short time by local standards, as another five women who left before her have yet to return.
María came back a year ago.
A migrant from childhoodThirty-year-old María is mother to two girls, aged 10 and 12, and a boy aged 9.
Like many women from Zacualpa, she was a constant migrant at an early age due to the war, extreme poverty and desire to earn their own money.
When she was only 6 the massacres in Zacualpa (1982) forced the family to move to the coast, where she followed her father from coffee farm to coffee farm.
She only returned four years later, when the situation had calmed down.
While she still felt young, she decided not to follow her father any more.
She realized she had developed and was afraid of men, “who are very abusive, because sometimes when you’re a girl they get the urge to grab you.”
So she started to think about looking for work in Zacualpa so she could get her hair cut and buy her own clothes.
After that she left home to look for domestic work in the departmental capital and even in Guatemala City, although she never stayed long in each house.
She always found jobs through networks of women doing the same work.
In one job she had to keep accounts in a store and realized the importance of a formal education, which she had missed out on while moving around as a girl in the coastal region.
That realization would stay with her even after she returned from the United States.
Her future husband was also from Xicalcal, and as she returned home every now and then he started wooing her by letter.
After thinking about it a lot, she decided to marry him because she was tired of working so much.
She’d have an easier life, particularly with someone like her fiancé who’d been in the United States.
They married when she was still 17, after all the normal steps of him asking for her hand and giving her gifts and then both a civil and church wedding.
They went to live in the house where she still lives, which was made out of adobe at the time.
Because her husband had worked up North and could afford to be independent, she didn’t have to follow the custom of going to live with her mother-in-law, but had her own house with her husband right from the start.
She had her first girl when she was 18, her second two years later and the boy not quite two years after that.
During that period she studied two years of literacy, the only formal education course she has ever taken.
Then her husband went off to the United States for the second time and three years later she decided to join him, leaving her mother to look after the children.
This is María.
A migrant since childhood.
An independent woman.
A woman who saw the different sides of Guatemala—rich and poor, rural and urban—before traveling north.
She liked being a housewife, but was also used to doing paid domestic work.
She had no formal education, but was aware of how necessary it was.
The decision and the deal with the coyoteWhy did María decide to emigrate?
The main reason she stresses is that she wanted to help her husband pay a debt they had both run up by building their house and installing two water pipes as part of a potable water and mini-irrigation project.
He returned to the USA to pay it off, but hadn’t managed to get the money together after three years.
That’s when, constantly in contact by telephone, María decided to make the journey.
He didn’t force she took the initiative.
Reading between the lines, it’s probable he couldn’t pay off the debt because he wasn’t saving, which was something she could guarantee by being at his side.
It was like a strategy to stabilize her husband by her presence.
María decided to leave her three small children with her mother, but rather than send them to live in their grandparents’ house, opted to ask her mother to move to the recently-built house and be their guardian.
Although such a journey was viewed in the village as an almost exclusively male enterprise, the fact that five other women from Xicalcal were already in the United States must have encouraged her, showing that women could also make it across the desert.
Once she had made the decision, a woman who acted as the coyotes’ representative in Zacualpa put her in touch with their network, taking her to Quetzaltenango to meet the main coyote, who accepted María’s payment and promised to take her all the way to her destination.
María reckons that the journey cost her 50,000 quetzals (roughly $6,300), including interest, while her husband’s trip three or four years earlier worked out at around 35,000.
A small part of that money was provided by her husband from the United States, but most was covered by a loan María took out with a ladino money lender from Zacualpa at 5% monthly interest.
Crossing the desert:
The only woman among men
There were 14 people in the group of migrants that María joined to travel north, and she was the only woman.
To protect herself from possible rape she planned her journey with two men from the same religious denomination and the same village, which made her feel safer.
Neither was a blood relative like a brother, uncle or cousin, but there was supposedly quite a sacred relationship involved.
“One was my godfather and the other a brother from my church,” she explained.
“When they went, I went too, trusting them because they were almost family.
That’s why I didn’t
I didn’t suffer in that group.”
The journey was relatively quick with no major setbacks.
María didn’t stop to explain that part of her story very much.
After 12 days, she was in Providence, Rhode Island, close to Boston, where she had met up with her husband, having passed through La Mesilla (the border between Guatemala and Mexico), Puebla and Altar Sonora (in Mexico), then through Phoenix and the Arizona desert to Los Angeles (by car) then Boston (by plane), then again by land to Providence.
To make the journey, she had to leave behind her traditional indigenous dress forever and put on trousers and a blouse.
This allowed her to move around more easily and conceal her identity as a Guatemalan indigenous woman.
When she had worked for families in their houses and on farms in the coastal region, she never had to take off her traditional clothes to hide who she was.
This was a new experience, something male migrants don’t have to go through.
María had to walk several segments of the journey.
She suffered most crossing the desert, walking for two nights and one day alone in a group of men, adjusting to their pace rather than them adjusting to hers.
But unlike the tales of what had happened to other migrants, they weren’t caught and didn’t come across any wild animals.
Nor did she experience the crisis of desperation or regret that others suffer.
For María, the “biggest disappointment” came when she was already in the United States.
Despite making a deal with the coyote from Quetzaltenango, who was supposed to be better and more honorable than one in Zacualpa, “they stole $2,000 from me over there in Los Angeles.”
Her husband wired the fare for her plane ticket from Boston, but the coyote said it was in the wrong name, warning that she wouldn’t go anywhere unless he sent it again.
“That’s what the coyotes do to the people they take...” she explained.
“On top of having to run up a debt here...
they stole that money from us over there.
I said to my husband, ‘Why didn’t you think a bit?’ ‘Well, it’s lost now,’ he said, ‘and at least you got here alive, without any major incident.’”
As a defenseless migrant aware of his helplessness, who was he going to complain to?
Was he going to pick up the phone in Boston and call the coyote in Los Angeles?
Or call the coyote from Xela or that woman who acted as a contact in Zacualpa?
A crisis of “repentence”: not being with himMaría didn’t stay in Boston, where her husband was working, but rather went to nearby Providence, home to many indigenous and ladino migrants from Zacualpa, some of them with their papers already in order.
Her husband found a place for her there with his brother, under the logic that “there were a lot of people where he was, which was just a small, very cramped house.”
He couldn’t keep her there among a bunch of men, with several people sleeping in the same room, and there wasn’t enough money to pay for somewhere else, “because an apartment costs $1,000 to $1,800.”
It was there that María experienced her crisis of regret, telling herself she shouldn’t have come, because on top of being tricked by the coyotes, she couldn’t be with her husband and her brother-in-law’s wife was aggressive, annoyed at having another woman in her house, even away from her home town.
“My sister-in-law was very angry.
‘Why had I come?’ ‘Why was I spending money?’ There’s discrimination among family members.
Sometimes you’re even embarrassed to be there, because you aren’t earning very much.
So I got desperate again.
What am I going to do?
I shouldn’ I shouldn’t have left my family.
And after two months there I already wanted to come back, but as my husband and I had a debt pending...
What were we to do?
‘Well, you’re here now, so be patient!’ he tells me.”
It wasn’t hard for her to find work in Providence, but the conditions were very different and hard for her, as she was shut up all day in a refrigerated room, and the $6-an-hour salary was very low, according to María.
Although she was accompanied by many women doing the same assembly line work she was, it was like working in a maquiladora sweat shop, and that did nothing to encourage her.
“I worked in squid,” she explains.
“All the women are there in lines, working with their hands, making trays of squid.
But you’re standing up all day, in a freezer house that’s really freezing.
You’re there covered up in your sweater, wearing sneakers with two pairs of stockings.”
She was there no longer than a month.
Her desperation about where she was living infected her enthusiasm at work, so her husband made an effort to find her somewhere to live in Boston and they moved in together two months after she had arrived in the United States.
This cheered her up and dampened her desire to return to Guatemala and her children as soon as possible.
Women for the homeland
and men for the North?
This woman’s gender perspective is illuminating, not because she migrated to the United States to see if a woman could cross the desert as well or show that international migration isn’t just for men.
Her motivation was the payment of a family debt, but it led her to confront the difficulties of “a masculinized effort” like migration and prove that a woman is also capable of that feat.
International migration is a “masculinized effort” because the groups taken across by the coyotes are mainly made up of men.
The women who go with them not only face the danger of being raped, but also have to adapt to circumstances designed with men in mind: the pace, the sleeping places, the rests and where they defecate on route…
While proving that migration is not an exclusively male effort was not María’s motivation, there was an element of female struggle in the desire to be with her husband, stabilize him and not lose him, all under the guise of paying off the debt.
That struggle led María to leave her children behind and break the stereotype that women are for the house and men for work, which in this case translates into women for the homeland and men for the North.
Moreover, it wasn’t her husband who took the initiative for her to undertake this journey, although she always consulted with him.
She decided, continually proving herself the quickest acting, most creative person in the couple.
A female sense of self-esteem is constantly present in María’s story.
She had to break through many prejudices regarding what it is to be a woman, an indigenous woman, a woman-mother, a woman-wife to achieve the goal of paying off the family debt.
María is not the only woman who has done this, and she could be criticized as a bad mother (for leaving her children), an indigenous woman who renounced her culture (for shedding her traditional clothes), a non-submissive wife (for going to find him), and a women whose excessive liberation led her to risk the journey among men.
However, when she returned to Zacualpa and was asked in her village church to tell them how things had gone, she didn’t stress this aspect of female self-esteem, but rather focused on what everyone tells, men and women migrants alike: the suffering on the journey and the suffering in the work they do to earn a living.
She agreed with other men, stressing that they’re telling the truth, rather than making up boastful stories about all the “great jobs” she had in the United States: “What I told them was how I arrived, how I got on in the desert, how I suffered from hunger, what area we walked in, how many hours, if it was hard and the work I did there.”
A particularly female crisis Male migrants tell of moments after the coyote abandons the group and they ask themselves why they ever left home: “Was I right to migrate?
Did I make a mistake?”
They describe that feeling as one of “regret.”
Regretting implies that the decision to migrate was incorrect, crazy, bad.
María also experienced such a moment, telling herself “I shouldn’t have come, I shouldn’t have left my family…” but it didn’ it happened at the beginning of her stay in the United States.
Questioning the sense of her decision to migrate wasn’t triggered by suffering in the desert, the coyotes’ deception and robbery, or external circumstances to do with Americans and their way of life, as she found herself alongside women who were Hispanic, Guatemalan and even from Zacualpa both at work and at home.
So what lay behind her crisis?
The first reason was that she had to live away from her husband when she arrived, living with her brother-in-law and his wife in a different city, as though she was living off them.
The second source of her “regret” was her children.
Although young, María is a woman with responsibilities, unlike other male migrants, who tend to be adolescent and have no children.
María has three and left them for their sake, but then couldn’t bear to be away from them, loving them from a distance.
While she broke the stereotype of the mother who must always be at home at her children’s side, we discovered she hadn’t broken it completely.
These two factors—the desire to be with her husband and the distance from her children—churned away inside her, making her crisis of regret a female one that was very different from that of most male migrants.
She overcame it by changing where she was living and her work, but didn’t get over it completely.
While it was practically impossible for her to think about returning when she arrived, she never completely adapted to life in the United States.
For this reason she returned to Zacualpa sooner than the other women in her village.
Hers was a different experience than that of other young migrants: the two poles of her identity clash strongly because both are deeply rooted.
How the coyote networks have evolved
Certain information extracted from the interview with María shows the evolution of international migration in Zacualpa, which is slowly transforming the role of women.
In 1993, migration was just taking off in the municipality.
María left ten years later, when it was already in full swing, probably making female participation in this transnational effort more frequent in both absolute and relative terms.
By the time she left, the charlatan coyotes of 1993 had turned into a well-oiled coyote network.
There was even a woman contact to respond to requests from other women, indicating a growing complexity in intermediation, which was by then taking women into account as migrants.
Nonetheless, both in 1993 and still in 2003, the coyote system was unfavorable and deceitful for the migrants, whether men or women.
Many have been abandoned at the US border and robbed, although María was robbed “cleanly,” without anyone even touching her purse.
But there’s a double difference in the scheme the coyotes used in her case.
The first one was the amount stolen.
María was swindled out of $2,000, which is a lot more than other migrants pay for the journey.
This shows that every year more money is being moved around in the coyote business and that both male and female migrants are being tricked into greater losses.
The second difference is in the way María was robbed, which is easier to do to a woman than a man.
If a male migrant had been told to cough up $2,000 more in Los Angeles, he would probably have gone to look for another guy to bail him out of the jam.
But for a woman like María, that was hardier and riskier.
So her husband felt forced to find more money to bail her out of the trap in which the coyotes had her.
In ten years, increasing sums of money have been circulating
in the business of travelling north.
The money paid to coyotes for the trip has increased 4.5 times in dollars.
With the growing demand and the increasing difficulties along the way, the price has risen from $1,400 to $6,300 (8,000 to 50,000 quetzals) from 1993 to 2003.
There’s more money available to cover this due to the increase in migrants to the United States, who can pay for a relative, and the increase in wealth in Zacualpa, again due to migration.
So María’s case is paradigmatic, because the more husbands there are in the United States, the more wives can be taken up north.
How the village has evolved
As international migration has been changing its forms, so has Zacualpa’s reality been undergoing a transformation.
When María emigrated, the town had already emerged from the dark days of the war and terror.
Her story didn’t contain that background fear of strangers that appears in the tales told by migrants who left in 1993.
The gradual opening up of Zacualpa to outside influences, which was unthinkable during the war, has also changed agriculture, in the form of mini-irrigation.
Ten years ago agriculture was limited to the traditional maize and bean crops.
Those changes were also influenced by the remittances sent home by migrants in the United States, and they too involved the women.
Another change in Zacualpa’s reality has been in education.
There was no complete primary school when the migrants who left the village in 1993 were children, but there was by the time María’s children were growing up.
In peacetime, the state has extended its services to rural areas.
But this reality also involves a demand for remittances to pay for the education of one’s children.
A good part of the education of María’s daughters was financed by the savings from her time away and the monthly remittances sent home.
A generation of children is thus being raised with more education than the previous one, when children couldn’t study because they were going from farm to farm i or because there was no school providing full primary educa or because of parental contempt for education as something that just trained people to be lazy.
That’s something María said several times to her brother, perhaps to get back at him for the privileges families afforded to the boys.
The opening up of educational opportunities is breaking the idea María experienced as a girl that only boys can study.
The need to study, which she vividly felt later, has influenced her promotion of education for all three of her children.
Finally, the whole opening up caused by migration during peacetime has been accompanied by the multiplication of means of communication.
The telephone is one example.
Ten years ago there was a public telephone from which people called their relatives, responding to their calls from the North.
Today, practically every household with relatives in the United States has a cell phone.
Cleaning up other people’s filthHow was María’s stay in the United States?
Can her process be differentiated from those of young male migrants?
The crisis caused by culture shock in the United States calmed down when María went to live in the same room as her husband, although the cohabitation that soothed her heart didn’t work out at all cheap, as her husband started paying $800 a month in rent.
Once in Boston with him, she looked for any work that might come her way, as migrants can’t be choosers.
“I went to ask for work at a cleaning company,” she recalls, “because that’s all there is in Boston… a filth you’ve never had in your own house gets into the houses of Americans, who haven’t cleaned in I don’t know how long.”
During that search, María gradually came to understand that she had the new identity of a migrant, a social identity applied to those who did the work most looked down upon and who lacked the papers for working legally.
“We migrated there without so much as a piece of paper to defend ourselves,” María explains.
“Not just me, but all the people who are working buy false papers, because if you don’t have them you can’t get any work.
I had to buy that piece of paper and it cost me $125.”
María immediately noticed that the women did heavier work there than in Guatemala, because they have to do the same heavy work as the men.
Her husband also worked for a cleaning business: “Over there, women do the same work as men.
If the men do cleaning work and carry things like vacuum cleaners—that’s what they call machines that suck up trash off the floor—the women carry them as well.
And if the men clean up the rubbish, make an effort with those things or clean the stove—those stoves that are really splattered so the dirt doesn’t come off because they haven’t been cleaned for years—so do the women.”
So in the apparent equality between men and women, the women come out worse off.
Neglect, tiredness, worries... The work María did eroded her female identity in some way, because it affected her appearance and beauty.
She compared it to her work in Guatemala: “Maybe here I can still manage to paint my nails, but not over there.
Over there your nails are to scrape things, to scrape grease off dirty ovens…
Over there you earn some money, I’d say, but you suffer, you get ill.”
She was also affected by the lack of rest, working more hours because she wanted to earn more money.
The result was more neglect of her appearance and a lack of interest in developing social relations.
Her concern was her family back in Zacualpa, not integrating into the migrant society.
“You have to work for hours there,” she said.
“If you have the ability to work for 12 or 16 hours, then you can do it, but you get so tired.
Every day!
There in Boston, cleaning those buildings that sometimes don’t have elevators, you have to climb five floors by foot.
Oh my god!
My feet were killing me I was so tired, every day.”
She fooled herself at the beginning when she accepted cleaning work, viewing it as a housewife’s work.
But the difference made an impact, because at home she did it for her children, didn’t have so many appliances to clean and didn’t use the toxic chemicals the company forced her to use to clean the grease off the cookers.
It wasn’t a housewife’s work over there, and it was ruining her health.
“You see quality there,” she explains, “but there’s filth… What most affected me were the chemicals we used, what’s it called?
Those grease-stripping sprays you breathe in… you feel bad, your head really hurts.”
The company didn’t give her any medicines.
She had to go to the hospital where they asked for residency papers, which she didn’t have, so she was only given a check-up.
There were translators from Spanish to English, but not from her Mayan Quiché language.
She didn’t have any problems because she could speak Spanish, but there were monolingual indigenous women who couldn’t.
“I went to ‘apply’ to a hospital—that’s what they say… They examined me and took a blood sample.
I didn’ it was just tiredness.
What I needed were vitamins.
And I was also worried about things.”
The Guatemalans discriminate thereThere was multiple discrimination in the work relations.
María mentions discrimination by both male and female migrants who could speak English and therefore found themselves inside the command structure of the company where she was working.
Their discriminatory treatment was felt through orders and threats of dismissal.
That this could happen when there were so many people from Zacualpa there was something that disconcerted María: “It’s sometimes the Latinos, people from our own families who set out from here, who discriminate against you just because they’ve already learned English.
They’re supervisors now, they can check the work and say, ‘She can’t work, she’d better leave.’”
The male supervisors from Zacualpa exercised another kind of discrimination, offering preferential treatment in return for sexual favors.
“That didn’t happen to me,” she stated, “but it did happen to one girl who couldn’t clean a window or a table….
They said, ‘She’s pretty, she can sleep with me.
Then I’ll give her work.’”
María uses the word “discrimination” both for patriarchal work situations and for working relations among women whenever power is used to legitimize the maltreatment of another, even when both are Guatemalan.
María is amazed how such profound changes can occur in people with the same needs and from the same homeland.
Everyone, men and women alike, experience this identity transformation.
“They discriminate against you,” she explains.
“I imagine they went through the same thing when they arrived, but they don’t want to remember that and treat you like you don’t know anything.
Like they’re not Guatemalans anymore.”
The discrimination is more drastic in the relations with private homeowners.
There’s no discussion and no you just get fired.
And not just for not carrying out an order.
No matter how docile and hard-working the migrant domestic worker is, not understanding what she’s being told is tantamount to refusing to carry out orders.
“I had to leave about three jobs,” recalls María, “because the language there is English.
You have to speak English to understand what they’re saying, and if you don’t understand, you’re out.”
The husband-wife relationship How did the work affect her relationship with her husband?
On the one hand, there was strict coordination and equality in payment of both the costs involved in staying in the United States and the remittances sent home, which they each paid every other month.
They paid the family debt off together.
This doesn’t mean that there wasn’t any friction.
“I was earning $9 an hour there, but they only gave me three hours.
I started at 6 and returned home late at 9.
Sometimes I had some minor problems with him because I’d leave and he’d still be there...
Also I had another job from 7 to 4, then I’d rest for an hour and leave at 5 for that job, and sometimes I’d get home and he wasn’ he was out in the street.
Sometimes he’d come find me… And I could see he was a bit upset because I was working all the time… I earned a little more than him, but we always shared to cover our needs.
You have to pay the telephone, electricity, gas and apartment bills.
He’d pay one month, I’d pay the next.
Sometimes he’d send back to the family, sometimes I’d send back…”
One aspect of their relationship doesn’t appear in the interview.
If she went there to work, then she couldn’t have children as long as she was in the United States.
When they lived together in Guatemala they had three children in quick succession.
The journey north implied planning, and thus a change in her image of what it meant to be a woman, which now didn’t necessarily involve being a mother.
This almost certainly generated tensions and worries for her.
The decision to returnSometimes it’s said that a woman gets trapped again in the patriarchal system when she returns from the United States.
Is this true?
Why did María decide to return?
“I could see that I’d managed to pay off those debts, and the debt of my journey out there,” she explained.
“So I thought I don’t want to be here anymore, because I felt I was getting sick, my body was starting to hurt.
I was getting headaches and thinking more about my family…
Also, because we were a couple and shouldn’t be living with other people, we had to live in a room that cost us $800.
Well, it sometimes took my husband two weeks to earn that $800.
So he pays the rent and sometimes I send money back to the family, or I pay the rent and he sends home to our family and his mom as well.
We always divided the money.
When we look at it, we’re in the same position.
It’s going to be about three years and we haven’t saved anything…
And I didn’t want to be there anymore.
I couldn’t sleep at night worrying so much about my family.
And I felt almost sick with being there.
It was better to come home, because I’m happier being with my family even if I don’t have so much money.”
Although María went to work in the United States without assuming the identity of a permanent migrant, she wasn’t originally thinking about returning immediately.
However, her doubts undermined her decision to stay longer, which was also something that came from her, not him, although she consulted him about everything.
Economics didn’t weigh heavily in that decision.
On the one hand, she’d already paid off the debt with the coyote, so she was free from those chains, but the cost of living in the United States meant they were hardly saving anything.
On the other hand, illness is an objective element with economic effects, because when there’s pain, the body and head work less…
In addition to these material aspects, there was the element of identity related to seeing happiness where others don’t see it.
Guatemala is a poor country, but that’s where her children were and she’s a mothe it’s her main identity as a woman.
She couldn’t stand being in the North any more and would get even sicker if she stayed.
So the element of identity mixed with economics and consolidated the decision.
María’s case leaves us with a question that is also a general hypothesis: Is it more difficult for a woman who is a mother to integrate into migrant society over there if she has children here and a husband there?
In this case the answer is affirmative.
Back in the village—has she changed? How did María reassume her local identity when she returned to Zacualpa?
How does she view herself?
How do others see her?
Has she changed?
María returned by plane, traveling alone.
Her father, brother and eldest daughter were waiting for her at the airport and took her back to her village.
In twelve hours she had traveled from Boston to Zacualpa.
“I said hello to my family and went to bed with my conscience more or less clear, because I was with my family again.
Well, my husband stayed behind, but that’s not as sad as being without your children.
It’s not such a worry, because he’s an adult now, he knows how to look after himself.
If he doesn’t do it, that’s his problem now.”
Three very similar feelings—worry, guilt and sadness—that reinforced each other when she was in the United States could be distinguished once she was back in her village.
The guilt disappeared and the other two diminished.
She’s a returnee in peace, although she finds it hard being separated from her partner.
The village learned of her arrival and the Catholic community invited María to welcome her back.
But she was embarrassed about presenting herself in public because she’d gone north without telling them and she now looked different from the other people there.
Back in the village, she started worrying about her appearance again, but it wasn’t about dolling herself up.
Quite the opposite: she wanted to ruralize herself.
It took her a month before she was able to present herself at the oratory.
“I was embarrassed, you know!” she laughs.
“Because when I went, I didn’t leave any message for my brothers and sisters, and coming back here my whole face and body had changed.
I was different when I looked at myself in the mirror, because my cheeks looked like those of a 15-year- all filled out.
Everything was a bit lighter, my eyes and hands as well… as I’d turned a little paler over there…
It made me feel embarrassed…
What was I going to do?
I started working at home, cleaning up the house and going to feed the chickens.
And as I ran my errands here in the village, I let the sun burn me a bit.
I carried on like that for a month.
By then my ‘over there’ appearance had disappeared a little.
They didn’t welcome me until then, because it was only then that I went there.”
There was some kind of fracture in María’s identity with the community when she left without telling them: she didn’t trust them enough to confide in them about a resolution that could lead her to no longer be from “here,” like other women who stayed away.
Her external appearance could also confirm a change of identity, as she no longer looked like a Zacualpa villager, but rather a well-fed Americanized migrant with a fairer complexion.
Her shame was the emotional expression of recognition that the community saw something improper in that fracturing of identity.
Like a girl who knows she’s done something wrong to people she esteems and is ashamed to stand among them and have the eyes of the community fixed on her.
Such shame is greater among women than men, because they aren’t used to standing up in public in any event.
It was a feeling of transition.
She felt as though the community’s eyes would undress her and she would feel very ashamed to be naked.
Then the community would dress her back up in the community identity and the fractured identity would be reestablished.
“I’m not thinking about going back” After being presented and well looked upon, the questions started.
María followed five other women from her village, none of whom had returned yet.
“They always asked me why I came back,” she recalls.
“And I told them the truth: I couldn’t stay there any more because that place is very hard.
And just as she isn’t embarrassed about saying she was weak in the face of suffering, she also has no feelings of inferiority or failure in relation to other people in the community.
Her words are based on her experiences, which they can’t refute, because she knows all about migration, the journey, the stay and the return.
The other kinds of questions have to do with her identity as a returnee: is she going to return to the United States?
The people want to know more about her identity with respect to the community.
Has she returned for good or is she just visiting?
She replies that she isn’t thinking about going back and defines herself as a voluntary, permanent returnee.
But do people believe her?
Might she not suddenly take off again without saying anything?
“When they ask me if I’m going to go back again, I saw who knows… maybe some day out of the blue.
I don’t know, but I’m not thinking about it.”
Nobody complained that she’d left without warning.
She leaves the future open and compares what she tells people to what people said ten years ago, before her husband left for the first time.
It isn’t possible to invent the same kind of “lies” any more.
“Oh my God!” she remembers.
“Many p they said a lot of things before. They said people left dolla that if you searched old cars you’d find dollars there.
And if you wanted a car you just went to the place they left the old cars, asked for permission and got yourself an old car.
People made a lot of things up.
My husband had already been once, and when he returned he said, ‘What a lie, it’s real hard work!’
And when I went, I was only working with fish, just with fish…”
“I’m hardly ever worried now” How does María see herself now?
Doesn’t she clash with the community’s customs and mentality?
How does she feel the change upon returning?
Has she deconstructed what she learned in the North?
“I’m living like a housewife now,” she explains.
“A housewife does her chores quickly, cleans the house, looks after the children, feeds her animals, eats calmly, without any worries at all.
It’s not like being there.
And although you’re not getting paid by the hour, the way I see it you’re having a good time.
That’s what I’ve picked up from my experiences, being in your own little house, feeding your hens, eating well.
Over there, on the other hand—oh my God!—eating on the run… because if you get there after work starts, they say you must not need to work, that it’d be better if you left, that they’ll look for someone else who does need work…
Here you’ve got your animals, you go to the square to sell them, and you’ve got a little money.
And if you’ve got some crops, vegetables, and look after them, you can go to the square and make a little more money…
And so we get by.
I’ve got two lime trees that give a lot of fruit.
I planted them.
And I’ve got that furrow of sugar cane I planted with my husband.
And I sowed that over there myself…
And I’ve planted my guava bush… We’ve also eaten guavas during the past season.
And my avocado tree there also produced avocados this year.
So I’m always happy.
I’m hardly ever worried.”
From wage earner
to independent womanMaría no longer has a supervisor standing over her.
Now she’s independent and her own boss.
There’s nobody giving orders or on her back to eat up, nobody correcting her and threatening to fire her.
However, some features of her work in the North are still present in her independent work.
The first feature is the awareness that the work she does has the same value and can be measured in terms of hours and minutes, even though in Zacualpa it’s not paid and not valued as work.
Another is relating the speed with which the work is done with the measurement of its value.
And the third, related to the other two, is the limited appreciation of household “chores” compared to other work more related to agricultural production.
María feels proud of what she has sowed and harvested and it shows.
She has built her agricultural identity here, not directly through the work in itself, but by presenting her own worth to the others through that work.
Trees or their fruit bear that feeling of identity, as if María were present in them in a way that could never be possible with money.
Any wound inflicted on those trees or any violation of the fruit through theft would feel like an attack on María herself.
María uses the remittances her husband sends back to pay the laborers who help her when the water pipes have to be fixed.
She has two kinds of money: remittances and the “little money” she earns selling “the little hens” (everything is diminutive).
Money is always money, but for her the “little money” corresponds to a system of life that while more modest, slower and more monotonous, is also calm and enough to live on.
When she returned, María went from being a wage earner who was paid in dollars, but suffered pressure from her supervisors, into an independent woman who is recovering her own agricultural work and paying others to do the work she considers inappropriate for a woman in her village.
Her love of trees and fruit indicates the recovery of a female agricultural identity in a woman who is responsible for her house.
Will this identity change when her husband returns?
“How far I’ve come!” How does María feel in relation to her two daughters and son?
They were her big concern in the United States, but how does she view them on her return?
How does she view herself as a mother?
María has an image of what a woman should be that doesn’t correspond to what she has been.
Realizing that time can’t be turned back, she projects that image into her daughters’ future, particularly that of the oldest one, who’s a pre-adolescent.
She thinks her daughter can now decide between the two models of being a woman: the one she and her mother followed and the one she’s proposing.
María is 30 and her daughter 12.
María married at 17 and wants to avoid such an early marriage for her daughters.
How does she view her past and what future does she dream of for her daughters?
“Sometimes I sit here looking at the mountains and say: ‘How far I’ve come!
Going to the United States and back.
And before that going to the capital alone, to the coast alone, to Quiché alone.’
And I was still a girl, about my daughter’s age.
I sometimes tell her that when I was her age, I was working because I already knew about money.
She says to me now, ‘Give me a quetzal, give me this, give me that.’
I couldn’t say that to my parents.
I had to earn it, because they didn’t earn very much.”
María is laconic and not very poetic, but there’s a certain poetry in these words.
She gazes off into the mountains that watch over the Xicalcal valley where she was born and now lives.
What do those mountains have that awakens the memory of her past?
For the people of Zacualpa they are signs of a very ancient, pure and authentic past.
They are a symbol of Zacualpa’s identity and tradition, although they are also signs of poverty and, in a certain way, backwardness.
At their peaks are some of the Mayan altars that even today att the clean water that irrigates the valleys flows from their folds and the firewood comes from their forests.
But the poorest peasants also come down from those mountains to sell their produce in the markets.
For María they are also a symbol of the here and now from which she contemplates them.
After so much travelling, she’s again before the mountains that witnessed her birth.
She has returned!
And she’s amazed that she never got lost, despite always wandering alone.
The tone of that story is appropriate for someone who tells of great feats.
The bravery that has accompanied her is almost the guiding thread.
She considers that she was brave enough to travel to the United States alone, and while there have been limitations she wouldn’t like to see repeated in her daughter’s life, she doesn’t assume them with guilt and defeatism.
The big difference between her life and her daughter’s is poverty.
María had to start working when she was still a girl, while her daughter is freed from her tasks to concentrate on studying.
María was constantly moving around looking for a better paid job, while her daughter has never left Xicalcal.
And the biggest difference of all is that María never studied and married early, while her daughter is studying, and will hopefully continue, so she won’t be like her mother.
Two models of being a womanMaría turns her story into advice for both daughters in the future.
“They’re both big now and I tell them, ‘Why did I go risk myself?
Because I went to earn a little money and I’ve got it saved up so you can study more later...’
Money is the most important thing for studying.
If there isn’t any money, you can’t study.
So I tell my daughters that I hope they won’t get stuck half way, because if they’re thinking of getting married, then it’d be better if they didn’t study,
because if you’re studying and then get married, you’ll end up like me: staying at home and looking after the children...
I’ve seen that studying is necessary.
But I’ve seen girls who’ve studied then gone to the United States.
And what do they do there?
They wash toilets...
If I had studied, I’d be thinking about getting a job in the capital or right here…”
For María there are two models of woman for her daughter to choose from: marrying early and studying.
She sees studies as an investment.
You have to be consistent and finish them, otherwise you lose that investment.
That investment involves the savings María made through her journey north.
She keeps them in an account in the Banrural bank in Zacualpa.
But she doesn’t think they’ll be enough to cover the education of her three children.
In time, they’ll have to help pay for their own education.
María, who hasn’t studied, sees education almost exclusively as an economic good.
She doesn’t invest it with any sense of vocation or enjoyment and it causes her uncertainty and insecurity.
Will she end up losing the capital she’s invested in them?
Another way of losing the investment is migration.
What if she spends all that money on studies and her daughter graduates then goes off to clean toilets…?
As a returnee migrant, María feel}