Fryda grew up in a Cuban-American family, and easily sees how her mother's life in Cuba influenced how she raised her. As a result, sometimes their relationship feels strained. And, Juleyka speaks with an immigration and acculturation scholar who helps us uphold boundaries with parents.
Fryda is the cohost of the Teikirisi podcast.
Featured Expert:
Rose Perez is Associate Professor, Graduate School of Social Service, Fordham University. Her research focuses on the adaptation of immigrants and refugees to US society. In particular, she is concerned with adverse psychosocial effects of dissonant acculturation in families. Her research and teaching are informed by her interdisciplinary education and experience in the social sciences and in business administration. In addition to two master’s degrees and a doctorate from the University Of Chicago, and an MBA from the University of Michigan, she has clinical experience working with acculturating adults, children, and couples around issues of subjective well-being, psychological distress, and familial violence. You can learn more about her work here.
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Juleyka Lantigua-Williams:
Hi, everybody. Today, I’m speaking with Fryda. She was born in Cuba and she and her parents moved to the U.S. when she was a young child. As an adult, she’s learning to navigate her relationship with her mom and to assert her individuality. She’s also becoming more and more aware of how her mother’s experience in her home country plays out in their relationship. Let’s get into it.
Fryda: My name is Fryda. I was born in Cuba and raised in Miami. I’m one of the cohosts of the podcast, Teikirisi, and I call my parents mamí y papí. Well, I came to the U.S. when I was around four years old and I grew up an only child with two parents, and those two parents had just finished going through el periodo especial in Cuba, and so it was a period of time of scarcity, very little food, access to food, blackouts all of the time, and so coming to the U.S. was very much a big experience for my parents, where they… I don’t know. They saw abundance for the first time.
They would see me eating cereal and milk for breakfast and they’d be like, “You know, we used to have to pick leaves from the backyard and stew it and that would be our breakfast and then it would also be our dinner with some sugar.” They told stories of lots of different ridiculous situations, including situations growing up and being like sent away from their parents, and taken to escuela del campo, and I think that specifically was particularly traumatizing for my mom, who after age 11 she was not at home anymore. She was in a camp school.
And I guess being raised around them is being raised around two people who saw a lot of scarcity growing up and who also were raised in an environment where they were scared to speak up. Both my parents were teachers. Well, they became teachers in the U.S. And they were both very, very dedicated to me, paid a lot of attention to me, but I think also were very strict and protective of me, as well. Especially for my mom, I couldn’t be… If she didn’t see me for like a minute or two, she would think that I got kidnapped, or that I disappeared, and would be scared of that. To this day, it’s been really hard to even establish any form of boundaries. I live far away from them and just being able to exercise not talking multiple times a day is a difficult thing.
My mother specifically is very, very attached, and over the years has demanded a lot from me, I think, and a lot of… I think I’ve had to… I’m responsible for meeting a lot of her needs, being her best friend, and the best daughter, and there’s just some expectations there. And I think that she always told me she didn’t have that growing up. She didn’t have her parents around to really parent her after she was 11, and so I just started to imagine that that’s affected the way that she kind of has strongly attached to me.
I think that especially being the only child, the kind of light of someone’s life, and the reason they’re alive, the way that she tells me, I think it’s a lot of pressure. I think there’s a lot of times where I feel guilty about making decisions where I might be spending some time away from them. Then again, one of the healthiest things I’ve done is I think not live in Miami and live away from them, actually. I think it’s helped me to be able to just do… to live the life that I want to live.
I’ve had to assert my boundaries a couple of times, including not wanting to share my location at all times using find my friends. Just saying something as simple as, “I would like to be trusted,” or, “It’s a boundary that I have. I’d like to be able to just go about the world without being tracked.” And at first, deciding to not share my location really devastated my mom and she asked for me to change my mind for several weeks. She has dropped the subject since.
I think that doing something like getting married or having children is a role that she might respect more. I don’t know if it’s in Latino parents. When you get married, that’s sometimes when they believe you’ve become a woman. Sometimes when you become a mother, that’s when they believe you’ve become a woman, or, mujer. And so, the fact that I actually haven’t done any of those things sometimes I think might make it harder for… I don’t know. It might make it harder for me to assert myself at first.
I’d like to still be respected as an adult regardless and I think we’re working on that. While I do not plan to have children or plan to get married, I do have some aspirations of possibly moving cross country or moving to another country someday, and definitely at the forefront I think about just how much it would hurt my mom for me to be even further away. And my relationship with her affects some life decisions that I think I’d like to make in the future.
Lantigua-Williams:
For first gens, sometimes it’s too easy to overlook that our parents are also going through a first experience. They might be the first ones in the family to have immigrated. They’re certainly having a lot of new experiences living in their new country. And they’re often the very last ones in their families to call their home country home. And of course, all of this shows up in the way they parent us, and of course all of it also influences the way we relate to each other. To help us make sense of it all, I did what I always do. I called in an expert.
Rose Marie Perez:
My name is Rose Perez or Rose Marie Perez. I’m an Associate Professor at Fordham University School of Social Work. My area is on immigration, acculturation, and ambiguous loss.
Lantigua-Williams:
So, you listened to Fryda’s story. What did you hear?
Perez: I heard a story that’s so typical of my own life, my research, and also, I heard something that comes through a lot when I teach human behavior in the social environment to social work students. It’s about the effect of context on human beings and the intergenerational transmission of experiences the parents have onto their parenting of their children.
Lantigua-Williams:
So, this intergenerational transmission, is this something that is necessary, that is accidental? How does it happen?
Perez: Absolutely. It’s normal. You raise your kids based on your own story, meaning how you were parented, as well as the context around that parenting when you were parented, as well as the present moment, and so if you think about it, the context matters on the individual. The macro environment, meaning the whole world for example is experiencing COVID. The world is driven by globalization. Global-wide economy. And that filters into individual countries all the way down to the mezzo systems, which would be your institutions. What institutions would this four-year-old coming from Cuba have? Well, basically the family.
So, whatever institutions this young adult is facing right now, maybe she is in the workplace, out of college, and depending where she’s living. We often talk about the number of coethnics where you live. So, if she was raised in Miami with a lot of Cuban coethnics, but she’s now living where there’s different population groups, she’s going to be impacted. She’s gonna be among non-coethnics, and she’s gonna look at her own life story very differently based on the current context.
Lantigua-Williams:
I’m listening to this and I’m visualizing a cultural compartmentalizing that crosses generations. So, the parents come in with a notion of self and then they try to transfer that notion of self to their children, but they’re doing it in a completely different environment. There’s gotta be a lot of friction there.
Perez: Absolutely. There’s often acculturation differences in families. If you’re a person migrating at age 80, you’re gonna have a very different experience than somebody migrating at age four or age 30. And so, acculturation differences in families, acculturation refers to how you become, say American, right? In this country, we often forget the old country and we move to a new country. Unless you’re living in Miami, and then you get to retain everything.
Lantigua-Williams:
In Fryda’s case, she did know a little bit about the context in which her parents grew up, but to her it just seemed so foreign. So, from your research, how does that widening gap in understanding impact the relationships and the formation of the self for the American-born child?
Perez: Every child has parents that grew up in a different era. On top of this, she has parents who grew up in a very different environment than the U.S. So, it’s a bit of a double whammy for immigrant children. She’s making sense of things and she’s drawing heavily on her parents’ unique experiences. Castro’s Cuba, the Special Period, and escuela del campo. And so, in the United States we have a very different way of bringing up our children, and she’s looking at her family as really different because of their experiences. But I think that the mother also has issues from her own family, right? She has fears that may have had to do with the communist system or the way kids and adults and everybody was treated there, or maybe has to do with her daughter being an only child, and she’s scared to be in the U.S.
Whatever other individual factors are happening, there’s something that happens within the mom. There might be some cultural aspects, like filial duty, right? Latino parents are known to have familism, familismo, they’re known to have respect, and how dare you question me, right? So, the mom is raised in the cultural milieu, and she also had her unique experiences.
Lantigua-Williams:
So, one of the things that Fryda recounted for us was her desire to not be married, to not have children, to live a very different, very independent life when compared to her mom’s choices. So, how does this self-formation in this first-generation Cuban American impact the dynamics long term of her relationship with her mother?
Perez: Cuban parents for some reason, maybe it’s an artifact of their experiences with the government intervening for so long, maybe they kept their kids close to them. Some kids will respond with a type of identity formation where they don’t question life and they just do what their parents say, okay? Viewed as an outsider, we say, “Boy, that’s just a wrong decision,” right? But to Cubans, that’s the right decision.
So, I actually applaud Fryda because she is her own individual. It might come across as a reaction against what the mom is trying to do, but I think she’s just trying to assert herself and I think the long-term effects of that is that she will negotiate a better, healthier relationship with her parents because her mother and father will learn to see her as an individual. She’s setting boundaries. And hopefully she’s doing it because that’s really what she wants and not just a reactive approach to this sort of control, perhaps. Whatever the experience is for her.
What a parent wants is for the children to internalize their values and obviously not lose the kids, and so sometimes when the mother is perhaps a little bit too forthcoming in what she wants, or too needy without realizing it, the children can… There can be a backlash. Now, if Fryda’s parents accept her with whatever differences she decides to take on, and you know we can have a lot of differences in our society, things that some parents might find terribly problematic, and then it’s up to the parents to accept that child or not. So, it does tax the dynamic at least in the short term. But it’s a time where she can decide, and I think it’s healthy for any child to decide for themselves.
Lantigua-Williams:
In the work that you’ve done, have you come across any suggestions, or any actions, or any approaches that work for someone like Fryda who is aware of this dynamic which has some tension in it, which has some distance, and some aspects of control? How can someone like her even begin to broach the subject with a parent?
Perez: The tension is very typical of families who are immigrant families because many times parents and children acculturate at different rates. So, when she came as a four-year-old, she learned English right away. The mother probably lagged, and the father probably lagged for a long time. And there have been some intervention approaches used. In 1986, José Szapocznik, who teaches out of Miami, came up with interventions for troubled adolescents where he helped the adolescents to retro acculturate and helped the parents to acculturate, so that there was a meeting of the minds. Retro-acculturate is… It’s when you go back and appreciate aspects of your culture. Appreciate maybe your parents’ experience, or Cuba, appreciate the songs, and the food, and the culture of your homeland.
It takes time, and planning, and maybe arguments between mom and others who are traditional, but if… I think it’s all part of it. I think Fryda knows what she wants and again, if it’s healthy for her to assert herself, to refuse to do gender choices, if she’s doing it out of her own true wish and not just as a reaction, that is the healthiest way. And in time, with some softness, right? So, my kids are driving now, and they say, “I want to go on the drive on the highway.” Well, they just have their permit, so I say things to them like, “I’m not ready for that.” And they’re like, “What do you mean you’re not ready?” I’m like, “You were just a baby in my hands yesterday. How could you ask this of me? I’m not ready for you.” And I say it with love, and I say it from the heart, right?
So, a lot of this has to have love involved. Mamí, I love you. I respect you. I know I’m the only child and perhaps you wanted me to turn out a different way. Please respect me the way I am.
Lantigua-Williams:
All right. Thank you so much. This was invaluable. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us.
Perez: Thank you for having me.
Lantigua-Williams:
All right, let’s recap what we learned from Rose. Remember context. Understanding the environment in which our parents grew up can help us not only understand their experience, but it can help us understand how they see themselves, how they see themselves as parents, especially. Go at your own pace and let them do the same. Developing a sense of belonging in a new country happens at different rhythms. Keep that in mind as you notice and negotiate the differences between how your parents acclimate and how you acclimate. And remember, be firm and loving. You certainly can and should assert your boundaries but try to remember that getting used to them might take some time and effort from your loved ones, so keep that in mind as you build into this relationship with your parents.
Thank you for listening and sharing us. How to Talk to [Mamí and Papí] About Anything is an original production of Lantigua Williams & Co. Virginia Lora is the show’s producer. Kojin Tashiro is our mixer. Manuela Bedoya is our social media editor. Cedric Wilson is our lead producer. Jen Chien is our executive editor. I’m the creator, Juleyka Lantigua-Williams. On Twitter and Instagram, we’re @TalktoMamiPapi. Please follow us and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Bye, everybody. Same place next week.
CITATION:
Lantigua-Williams, Juleyka, host. “When Mamí Wants You Close, But You Need Space.”
How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] About Anything,
Lantigua Williams & Co., May 3, 2021. TalkToMamiPapi.com.