Love, Money, and a Secret Divorce

Every anthropologist has a compelling story that doesn’t fit into the book. This is one of those. Published in Ethnographic Insights on Latin America, this essays tells the story of men’s migration from the perspective of their mothers. In my book, Marriage after Migration, older women who watch their sons emigrate can sometimes seem like unsympathetic actors. They try very hard to enforce the family rules as they understand them in the midst of intense migratory pressures to create family change. Their daughters-in-laws, that is the wives of emigrant men, bear the brunt of these pressures. In this essay, I show how mothers-in-law are not entirely in the wrong. Sometimes daughters-in-law do act in unconscionable ways. How does a wife pull off a secret divorce, and why would she want to? This essays explains.