seeking for job. She comes to the U.S. with her husband, Alvaro. She left Guatemala because life is hard there and that there is no work. She has no choices left other than to go to the north. “I had to leave them because life back home is hard. Now that they (her children) are small, we need to come here so we can offer them a better future. We come here to work so they can have an education. To give them new life, so they can have a future” (Maid in America). Survival is a common reason why people come to the U.S. seeking a better life. She briefly asserts that she is not coming to the U.S. to achieve the “American Dream.” Women seeking works and becoming breadwinner, to some extent, underlies the phenomenon of the feminization of poverty, which is then, leads to the feminization of migration and lastly, it embodies in the feminization of labor (Maid in America, Made in L.A., Bread and Roses, Dirt). The maquiladoras labors in the borderlands which are mostly women are a perfect example to illustrate the feminization of poverty that slowly moves to realize the feminization of labors and as the women try to struggle keeping the ends meet, they embody the feminization of survival. The maquiladoras prefer to hire young single woman rather than the unemployed braceros labor because “women supposedly were better at …show more content…
People living in sister cities, for instance, tend to cross border back and forth. Romero notes, “It is very common for Mexicans to live in Tijuana and commute to San Ysidro or San Diego every day” (99). However, for the undocumented migrant, such activity might not be possible, unless they want to risk their lives coming back to their home country. In Maid in America, Judith is willing to risk her life and her son’s life to come back home to Guatemala because her mother is sick and that the girls need her. They give her no choice. The possibilities offered is to send the girls to the U.S. or that Judith has to come home. Judith could not take the risk sending her daughters coming to the U.S. First, it will cost her and her husband a lot of money to pay for the journey (including paying the coyote). Second, she has heard many bad stories about the danger of border crossing. Most importantly that her daughters are technically teenagers. It is even riskier for teenagers cross the border not to mention the possibility of being robbed or