Children’s voices about ‘return’ migration from the United States to Mexico: the 0.5 generation

ABSTRACT

Since 2004, our research has focused precisely in those minors who ‘returned’ from the United States to Mexico. Our interest has been to know the social, geographical, educational, and symbolic trajectories of those migrant children and adolescents who are part of the contemporary move of returnees. Based on the children’s narratives (all collected before US November 2016 federal election), we now have a multifaceted response to the question: How and why are young Mexican migrants returning from the United States to Mexico? Some of these returnees were born in Mexico and arrived to the United States when they were young. International migration literature describes them as members of the 1.5 generation. But others were born in the United States and often started school there. They did not ‘return’ to Mexico, they arrived to their parents’ home country for the first time in their lives. We call them the 0.5 generation.

KEYWORDS:

• Mexican migrants
• migrant children
• return migration
• Mexico and the United States
• children’s narratives

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This article differs from earlier depictions of the 0.5 generation that we have offered because we analyze here children’s voices about ‘return’ migration as keys for chronicling U.S./Mexico migration through the children’s eyes. The only coincidence is that we argue in these three works in favour of the relevance of using the category ‘0.5 generation’.

2 We made comparative analysis between data collected at different times (2004, 2005, 2009, 2010, and 2013). We did not find any relevant differences in terms of children’s visions about moving from the United States to Mexico. We also made analysis comparing boys and girls. The conclusion was: there are no significant differences between these two groups as we are going to show below.

3 In many rural towns in Mexico, people celebrate ‘las fiestas del Santo Patrono’ which always coincides with the date on the Catholic calendar of a particular saint. In some regions of Mexico, every town has a Christian saint identified as the protector of that community.

4 While there is not space here to consider whether the Generation 0.5 frame applies to other child-including migration dynamics in other parts of the world, Vandeyar and Vandeyar’s (2015) portrayal of African and South Asian notes children’s awareness of tensions about whether to imagine ‘sending’ versus ‘receiving’ countries as ‘home’. A first, second, third generation etc. framework also does not appear to fit very well there. Coe et al.’s (2011) book Everyday Ruptures: Children and Migration in Global Perspectives offers still other examples of children’s meaning making from around the world. While we cannot assure that this is so (doing so would require a more systematic literature review and would be another paper), we anticipate that a 0.5 generation framework is not unique to the US/Mexico dynamic.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología [grant number PDCPN 2016-1972].