Educación y salud

Flor, 24, is the eldest daughter in a family with a history of domestic violence and where the mother migrated to support her children. I am looking at this case more closely because her account perfectly illustrates the role of gender norms and family responsibility in the decision to migrate, as well as the trajectory of female beneficiaries who migrated internally to work and who, once in the migration destination, formed or reinforced educational aspirations.

Flor was an Oportunidades beneficiary from primary school to the completion of senior-high school. She had two younger brothers. During her school years, her father had an alcohol addiction and her mother migrated to Mexico City to work as a housemaid and Flor was left in the care of her grandmother. She remembered that

Oportunidades had a positive impact on the household’s income but also caused her

father to be careless with money:

Sometimes we had economic problems … but we could always get ahead … with Oportunidades we received my share and my brother’s and my mother also received something, so it was a great support. However, … my dad felt we had a secure extra income ... sometimes, if he finished a job, all his time was spent drinking or sleeping. Even when he was working and getting an income, he preferred to spend it buying beers and my mother didn’t say anything because she was scared of him… I think the programme made men lazy, as they know women nowadays work and also have Oportunidades.

Flor described her father’s constant abuse of her mother. The large sums of money that Flor said that her mother was receiving might have challenged her father’s view of traditional gender roles and emphasised his loss of status. This confirms the results of Bobonis et al. (2015), who observed an initial increase in male violence in

Oportunidades beneficiary households, probably caused by the men’s lesser control

over household resources and decision-making. Similarly, Angelucci (2008) found that violence increased, in particular, in beneficiary households where the husband was an alcoholic and poorly educated, and where the wives received considerable benefits. Flor also narrated how her father began to reduce his working hours and spent part (or most) of his money on alcohol. According to Flor, her mother managed to escape this situation when she abandoned her husband and migrated to Mexico City. Oportunidades, said Flor, became the main source of income for her household, together with the money that her mother made from jobs in Tama or as a housemaid in the capital city.

The first time Flor migrated was to study at senior school in a neighbouring town. However, she then moved to the senior-high school in Tlahui, where her younger brother wanted to study. When she completed her school education she returned to Tama, unsure about what to do next. She recalls that, in that period, she became like a mother to her youngest sibling:

At that time, I was very confused, I did not know what to do, where to go, and then we had economic problems… I did not have much hope of continuing my studies, I got stuck without knowing where to go, what to do, who to talk to… I wanted to become independent and have my own money but I didn’t

know how…my parents didn’t tell me anything about why I was there, they never told me ‘Look for a school or something’ … then I thought that I could probably work and study at the same time, but how? In Oaxaca, the salaries are very low, I saw that things were very difficult.

For Flor, the decision to continue studying or not was influenced by different factors. First, despite the efforts of her mother and the cash that she received from

Oportuniades, the lack of income was the main barrier to her continuing to study.

Second, higher education was unfamiliar to her as well as to other students from poor socio-economic backgrounds because universities are usually located in other cities and the students lacked the information necessary to qualify. Finally, families’ lesser experience of higher education can be detrimental to the educational aspirations of their children (Ball and Vincent, 1998; Bok, 2010).

In addition, although her mother encouraged her to continue study, Flor always felt her younger brother was given more preference:

My mother used to motivate me a lot but … she paid more attention to my brother … and sometimes my dad used to say to me ‘You are a woman and you are only useful to have children’ and that in part … I think it was good that he told me that … his words had a great impact on me… because they motivated me to do better.

Her accounts illustrate how parental aspirations are often higher for boys than for girls (Dercon and Singh, 2013; Serneels and Dercon, 2014). Evidence from Oportunidades also shows that parents would give preference to the education of their sons instead of that of their daughters if they had to choose (Adato et al., 2000). This is because parents believe that their daughters will get married and become housewives, while their sons will need to provide for their own households (Adato et al., 2000; Lopez, 2005). However, this did not lead Flor to lower her own aspirations; it inspired her to try to achieve a better life. Tired of the situation at home, she moved, with the help of her cousin, to Guanajuato to work in a taqueria. Her parents (and especially her mother, who had previous migration experience) agreed to finance her trip. After a couple of months, Flor and her cousin moved to Guadalajara to work in another taqueria where her cousin had networks. In Guadalajara, Flor felt more stable and was able to start sending money to her parents, which made her feel proud. However, the manager of the

taqueria tried to abuse her and she ran away that same night. She called a woman she

met one day in the taqueria who offered her work as a housemaid.

Throughout her account, Flor highlighted a feeling of family responsibility, as she was sending most of her income back to her household in Tama:

When I started to work there (in Guadalajara) I realised I was making more money than in Guanajuato and I thought ‘Now I am going to send them money’ while, in Guanajuato, I was feeling bad because I was, like, ‘How is it possible that I am working and I have no savings, that I am not even sending money?’. In Guadalajara I could start sending money. Then, when I was working as a housemaid I also sent money … it was less, but better than nothing.

Flor’s narrative shows that young women’s decisions to migrate can be driven by a desire to achieve independence as well as by feelings of family responsibility (Mills, 1997). Likewise, her case suggests that she was also influenced by the migration context of the taquerias and her social networks, as suggested by the theoretical framework in Chapter 2. Although Oportunidades had made it possible for her to pursue an education, she migrated for other reasons.

Flor worked as a housemaid for eight months. In her neighbourhood, she took an interest in beauty treatments – something that she had never heard of until she saw the salons advertising them. She decided to return to Tama when a friend, who was about to migrate to the USA, recommended that Flor replace her as a secretary in a construction business. She worked there until she found a job as a supply teacher in another Mixe town. She did not like teaching and struggled to pay her expenses, so she decided to move to Mexico City, where she was living with her younger brother who was studying for a degree. She found a school where she could study to be a beautician and worked at a taqueria at the weekend to fund her studies. In contrast to Miguel, her experiences working in taquerias were an influential factor in her decision to continue studying because she did not want to end up like her female co-workers, with their low salaries, long working hours and no means of improving their situation.

After a year, she found a job at a beauty salon where she could make money and gain experience. All the jobs that she had performed had been in accordance with the employment stereotypes for women in Mexico (Garcia, 2007; Milicevic, 2010).

However, her migration experience in Mexico City made her feel more empowered because she was responsible for both her own and her brother’s expenses as well as for funding her own technical education. Flor also felt that her hopes and dreams had changed since she had moved:

I realised that there are many options that I could not see in Tama. I was more close-minded as I had not been out of the town. When I left I realised that there are many options for continuing to study and to be independent – I became more open.

Like Miguel, Flor’s perceptions illustrate that the migration experience in itself can impact on an increase in economic well-being and greater aspirations (Czaika and Vothknecht, 2014). Her networks formed at the taquerias increased her ability to migrate, and the migration experience itself increased both her awareness and her hopes for personal development, in turn reinforcing her decision to continue studying. Therefore, this shows aspirations are not static but continuously evolve over time (Tafere, 2014). By the time of the interview, she wanted to study English at a public university so that she could combine it with her Cosmetology degree. Although she spoke of her desire to return to work in Tama, she was also hesitating as she felt she had greater opportunities in Mexico City:

I feel I have more opportunities here. I can practice what I’m studying a bit more and I’m not, like, … bogged down… I don’t know what to do there (in Tama), where to go; I feel trapped, whereas here I feel like I’m more free, with more opportunities.

Her case illustrates the likelihood that increasing hopes and dreams are part of the reason why migration persists because aspirations become more achievable abroad (Carling, 2014). I continue my examination of the decision-making of beneficiaries regarding their aspirations to extend their stays abroad in the following case study.

5.2.3 Mariel: ‘I stopped thinking about studying or playing, I only started to think