“Something happens when we cross borders. You become someone else.”

Dr. Lilia Soto reflects on girlhood, identity, and migration.

Discussing the changes to come for many of the girls she interviewed for her book Girlhood in the Borderlands: Mexican Teens Caught in the Crossroads of Migration, Dr. Lilia Soto offered a three word synopsis: “It was … painful.”

Currently an associate professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at San Diego State University, Dr. Soto’s scholarly focus on Mexican girlhood (with a focus on communities in Napa, CA, and Michoacán) illuminates the often invisible costs of migration on girls. When we conducted this conversation – in the fall of 2023 – Dr. Soto began by sharing her restlessness with the state of immigration-related perspectives in this country. In this first half of our conversation, she shares the personal connections that drive her pursuit of the untold stories of transnational girls today.

ANTERO GARCIA: I want to start with a nerdy confession: one of my favorite parts of books is the acknowledgements. You conclude your acknowledgment section writing, "I hope that this book contributes, even if only a little, to changing the conversation of how we view peoples movement across international borders." As we are talking today [in 2023], what should we be changing about this conversation?

LILIA SOTO: Right now, I'm interested in thinking about migration not as a movement from a bad place to a better place, but movement in terms of survival. What does it mean to think about people moving to survive? My dad was a bracero worker and I'm thinking about that aspect of migration as an immediate form of survival. Of course, with that idea, climate change comes around. So what does it mean to migrate because of climate change? How do we understand how border patrol agents handle people that are coming to seek asylum, for example? This is informed by Todd Miller’s book. So in 2023, that's where I'm at, looking at other factors that are pushing people to move, and what does it mean to switch the conversation from the old dated trope of the American Dream to survival? How can we center humanity? I'm really frustrated with the lack of understanding and the stuckness that I feel in terms of people's movement.

AG: You mention your father. I’m curious about the personal drive for your work.

LS: I was born in Napa. When I turned one, we went back to Michoacán. So I grew up in a transnational family. The book is super personal to me from that perspective.

When I went to UC San Diego as an undergrad, I was looking for myself. I was majoring in ethnic studies, and I was also majoring in Latin American studies. This was in the mid to late '90s. And I couldn't find my experiences anywhere. And at that point, whenever we spoke about immigration and ethnic studies, it was usually the second or third generation. It wasn't children immigrating. It was sons and daughters of immigrants or parents immigrating. And it wasn't until I read Gendered Transitions by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, and there's a particular line in her book where she mentions that we don't know the experiences of children. I felt connected to that and I was like, "Oh my gosh, she's talking about my mom."

So this was ethnic studies, and I also couldn't find myself in Latin American studies. It was interesting, but I just kept thinking, "Where am I? Where am I?" And then I told myself when  applying to graduate school, "If nobody's writing about this, I'm going to write about this." That was the push, and then of course, a lot of books started coming out.

That made it easier for me to think about how I wanted to tell these stories. I think the book that I was like, "Whoa, this is really good," was, Rhacel Parreñas' Children of Global Migration. That one came out in I think 2005. I was really happy when I started seeing scholars writing about children, Marcelo and Carola Suarez-Orozco, they also published this book, Children of Immigration. Then, slowly but surely other books started coming up. By the time my book came out, I was like, "Oh my gosh!" I remember having conversations with friends and colleagues and my mentors that it felt like my work was dated.

AG: I think your book is injecting girlhood into the conversation. That's been overdue.

LS: The way that I understood it in my head, academia, it moves so quickly and topics become sexy and topics become dated. At some point, I felt like no one was interested in Mexican immigrant girls who were raised in a totally heteronormative, patriarchal family. It felt like that ship had sailed. My mentor, George Lipsitz, told me that I have a habit of not following trends, that I do my own thing.

AG: That's good!

LS: Something that I realized in terms of all this literature that was coming out focusing on children is that, in some ways, it felt to me that it assumed similar experiences between boys and girls, or it talked about boys and girls in a similar way.

When I started doing the interviews, one of the things that was really frustrating to me was when the young women told me that their fathers didn't want to legalize their status because they were girls and they were going to become their responsibility. I was like, "Whoa, we need to separate these." I didn't go into this work wanting to interview boys. I went into this work specifically wanting to tell the stories of girls. The girls that I interviewed in Napa, a lot of them were crying, and they would say that it was hard growing up without their father. I also wondered, are they crying because something happened? I don't mean physically, but something happened in the process of migration. They lost something.

Something happens when we cross borders. You become someone else. I often wondered if the tears were not in relation to their father or growing up without their father, but in relation to everything that they lost during the process of migration. In terms of their girlhood or their girl-ness, they were forced to become someone else when they crossed the border.

In terms of their girlhood … they were forced to become someone else when they crossed the border.

Now, how has girlhood shifted? Today, I think some of the numbers of Mexican immigrants coming into the United States has decreased. I think that there's something to think about in terms of Central American children, Central American youth who are taking on this journey by themselves. What does that do to their being? What does that do to their self? I think today the youth who take on this route on their own are forced to become adults and to handle responsibilities that my five year-old great niece doesn't ever need to deal with, my 14 year-old nephew would never have to deal with.

AG: Looking at the interviews with the girls in Mexico … I don't want to call them naive, but there was this joyful sense from them, like I can't wait to be on the other side. There's an anticipation. Do you think that turned into regret once they got here?

LS: I just feel like they have no idea. There was one girl in particular that I write about. She's realized she was a US citizen when she overheard her parents having a conversation. At some point when I was interviewing her, I just wanted to hold her face and tell her I felt like I understood what was going to happen to her, that --

AG: Did you see yourself in her?

LS: I was younger than she was. My experience was also a little different. Well, she's a US citizen, and I was a US citizen too, but we were never told we were going to stay in the United States. We used to come visit my dad every summer for 10 years. The town where I grew up is about 45 minutes on a bus from Morelia. Somebody would take us to Morelia on a Thursday, and then on a Thursday at around 7:00 PM we would take a bus to Tijuana. We would get to Tijuana on Saturday morning at around 9 or 10. My dad would already waiting for us. We would cross the border illegally, six girls, my mom and my dad. You can imagine it was my dad, my mom, and then the two little ones in the front, and then four in the back, and the luggage in the trunk. My dad had a red Vega car. In 1986, for some strange reason, the border patrol started asking questions. And in hindsight, I feel like the backdrop of the Immigration Reform and Control Act had something to do with the ways that we were questioned.

Marion S. Trikosko, photographer Aliens, immigration & naturalization [raids, Illinois] 1977. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The way that I understand it is, all my sisters were legal residents, and I was the only US citizen, you can't go outside of the United States for more than six months if you're a legal resident. And the assumption is that because you're a legal resident, you speak English, right?

AG: Yeah.

LS: But we were little, so none of us spoke English because we were all going to school in Mexico. They detained us for what felt like hours. I just remember in my mind there was this really skinny white lady with short hair who talking to my dad and telling him things that I didn't even understand, so it was weird. And then this other lady with brown hair came out, because they took the green cards away, gave my dad the green cards and said something like, "Here are your green cards. Take your daughters, put them in school, stay here." And we were going to go back to Mexico anyway, because my mom, I've had conversations with her and she wanted to live in Mexico. Her soul is down there. Her soul is not in the United States.

At the end of the summer, I was 10 and my 18-year-old sister told my dad, "Why don't we just stay for a year and learn English?" That's when we decided to stay.

So, going back to the girl in my interviews, my experience is different. I couldn't bring any toys with me. Nothing. When I went back to Michoacán three years later, all my toys were gone. I was already 13, but everything that reminded me of my childhood was gone. So when I interviewed this young woman, I wanted to hold her face. I thought about when I was 10. I didn't know I was going to leave Michoacán. I wanted to hold her face and tell her it's not going to be easy. It's going to be so hard… And I didn't keep in touch with her. I've asked my mom because she goes down there often if she's seen her. I was rooting for her and--oh my God--I'm going to get really cheesy! I was hoping that her dreams would come true.

AG: No! That doesn't sound cheesy at all.

LS: But I knew that that wasn't going to happen, that she was going to go through a period of transition in that who she was in Mexico was going to cease to be. I'm thinking about a line that Stuart Hall writes: "There's no home to go back to. There never was." It was…painful.

Propina

In addition to recommending for readers to check out her book, Dr. Lilia Soto has been writing about the Napa Valley for over a decade, including “The ‘Essential Worker’ in the Time of Corona:  Ethnic Studies and a Legacy Cancelled in the Napa Valley,” and “When César Chávez and Dolores Huerta Came to Napa.” 

We’ll be back next week with the second half of our conversation.