Having spent a large part of my adulthood (15 years) in Rhode Island and Upstate New York, and coming from New Mexico, and living now mostly in central Illinois, I’ve reached the conclusion that people miss the friends, family, and businesses that move away and notice the newcomers a lot more than they pay attention to the local kids who grow up and stay. When Leda and I first moved to Providence, locals would often ask where we came from. When we told them California, more than once, they said, uncomprehendingly, “Why?” Why, that is, move to a state where many people dream of moving away, maybe not to California but definitely to the Southeast. In the DC area, where I live part of the time and Leda lives all the time, people come from all over the world. When people ask why we moved here, the tone is completely different: Of all the abundant reasons for you to relocate to our thriving and growing region, which one brought you?
Since 1995, the answer to the question, “Why did you move here?,” has for us been, For work (and to be transparent here, it’s always been for jobs I’ve been offered). Before then, it had always been for education: mine at Kenyon College and UT-Austin; Leda’s at Reed College and Mills College; ours, together, when I finished my master’s degrees in community & regional planning and Latin American studies at UT-Austin while Leda took a year off her master’s degree program and we moved back to the Bay Area so she could finish her MA in book arts. The Bay Area offered us both amazing opportunities to develop. Leda bought her first printing presses and type from a hobby printer in Carmel, moving them up to a space in Oakland where she started Physical Language: A Cooperative Enterprise (PLACE) as a coop with book-arts friends. I got a job that set my path ever since, analyzing housing and land use policies for a San Francisco-based business sponsored good government organization, the Bay Area Council. Three amazing professors from the Department of City & Regional Planning at Berkeley served on various task forces and steering committee for the Bay Area Council, and they confidently said, if you get a Ph.D. in planning, you don’t have to abandon your efforts to change policy. I applied, was accepted, did a dissertation about land-use regulations in the biggest U.S. metro areas, and finished it less than a week before getting on the plane to Providence.
Employment also drove my family’s migrations until we reached Albuquerque: from Baltimore to St. Croix, where he and his sister tried unsuccessfully to start a nursing home (rich neighbors whose fancy houses looked over the proposed site organized to kill the project), and then to Albuquerque, where he found a job that lasted six years before getting cut from the state budget. By that time, he was 61, and my mother had gotten a stable job with good career advancement at Sandia Labs, so we stayed.
There’s a family secret buried here that I’ve never figured out. For my mother, the move from St. Croix to Albuquerque (with my sister Elise and me) in 1970 was a homecoming to her own mother, whose migration from Wisconsin to Albuquerque in 1942 was precipitated by her husband’s death at 42 from a cerebral hemorrhage. She and my then-11-year-old mother and her 14-year-old brother moved to Albuquerque because her only brother (a prosperous lawyer and banker) lived there and had a house where they could live. My father stayed behind in St. Croix when we left, because (this is guesswork) my mother—who had been working for dad’s sister Magda, a doctor—finally got fed up with Magda, and maybe with my dad, so she moved back to her own mother’s home. She and her mother had a challenging relationship, and her mother seems to have been as suspicious of my dad as Magda was of my mom. So things must have been pretty dire in St. Croix. Elise and I speculate now that mom gave dad an ultimatum: get a new job, somewhere, maybe we’ll move to be with you and maybe not. How convenient that even with a national search, including prospects in South Carolina and St. Cloud, Minnesota, he would land the job at the now-defunct Mid-Rio Grande Health Planning Council on Mesa Verde Ave. in Albuquerque.
This is all prep for spending some time in the next few weeks (or longer) on migration. I’m a migrant. My parents were both migrants (my dad was an immigrant). Leda’s a migrant, and so were her parents (her dad eventually emigrated to Europe). Does migration run in families? Do migrants have kids with other migrants and raise migratory kids? Living as a migrant seems normal to me, but it’s the exception in the U.S. According to a 2008 poll, an estimated 37% of U.S. adults still live in the same town where they were born and another 20% live in a different place within the same state. Only 15% have lived in four or more states. And relatedly, the New York Times reported in 2015 that “the typical American lives only 18 miles from Mom.” While some people move back to their mother’s community or vice versa, the norm seems to be that they’ve always lived close to their mothers. My mom stayed on in Albuquerque in 2008, when she moved to Santa Fe, and she died there in 2013, when my family was living in Takoma Park. What about you? How far do you live from your mother if she’s still alive? If not, how far away did you live from her when she died?
So interesting! My three brothers all live within an hour or so of our mother in MD, whereas I have moved all over the place: Ohio, Oregon (if college counts — my brothers all stayed in-state), Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia. I believe that my mother would probably have stayed in her home area at least, except that her more-migratory husband moved her to Maryland for a job. Gives new meaning to the idea of a “mixed” family.
Thanks for these thoughts. You’re still within a couple hours of your mother, but this seems to be as much by accident as by design. Did your mother’s and brothers’ location in MD play a part in your move to Philly for grad school?
I’ve been researching the family tree. My husband’s family has at least three people since the 1800s who formally migrated to the US and then decided to move back to the U.K.
Living in the U.K. I am struck by how little people move for work. They pick a place and stay put. They might move after university or in or out of the city as they start a family. But once they buy a place they generally stay put. This was also true in the Netherlands. I think that could be driven by the cost of stamp duty and that you can’t borrow off a mortgage to pay it. Also, I don’t see as many ghost towns in Western Europe (I don’t think there are any). Policy decisions prioritise preserving the rural life.
Yes there are migrants who arrive in the U.K. from (often) the old British Empire. It would be interesting to compare the patterns and prevalence of internal migration in different countries. I wonder if there are any patterns depending on the colonial history of the country or the economic development status or due to environmental impacts. Some rambling thoughts on the topic.
Thanks for these thoughts!
It took me a long time to learn about “reverse migration,” but it was also really common for Italian immigrants to the US. I think maybe a quarter or a third of those who came here in the early 1900s eventually went back. These folks must have had a lot of interesting stories to tell about the pushes and pulls that led them to return to their native lands. My colleague Faranak Miraftab wrote a wonderful book, Global Heartland, about a small city in Illinois (Beardstown) whose meatpacking industry was reborn with immigrant labor from Mexico in the 1990s. A later wave of immigrants arrived from the east coast of the U.S., having entered the country from Togo (West Africa) on diversity visas. She visited the home communities of both of these groups, observing towns whose able working-age people had left (especially the one in Mexico). The remaining residents, many of them disabled and elderly, had found punishing physical work in the U.S., only to return to Mexico when they needed health care and support denied them by the U.S. because of their status. They also returned or remained to take care of the young children of parents whose only economic prospects were in the U.S. I highly recommend this book.
There is a book, Albion’s Seed (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32081.Albion_s_Seed), which frames U.S. colonial history and regional variation as a story of immigration from different parts of the British Isles. Like the majority of reviewers on Goodreads from the link above, a good friend of mine likes it a lot; but it has been subject to a fairly high level of criticism; see for example https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/8q6krp/albions_seed_the_hillbilly_myth_and_slate_star/.
I live about 95 miles from my mother in the same state. My daughter moved to the town in which I grew up, which is where my own mother resides. My son lives about 15 miles from me. On the other hand, my husband, who is an immigrant, moved 9000 miles from his mother, and broke her heart.
Interesting post– thank you. What’s the farthest away from your mother you’ve ever lived? Where did your husband arrive from? Do you feel comfortable sharing anything about why his mother was not able to join him here? Does he have other siblings who also migrated?