Transborder families at the Mexico–US Border

The Mexico-US borderland is a complex and diverse region, encompassing multiple power structures and diverse populations. The rise of transborder literature reveals a more convoluted borderland where the lives of people and families are conducted simultaneously on both sides of the border. This paper examines transborder families and their strategies in the Baja California–California region. Transborder families have at least one nuclear member working or studying in the US while living in Mexico. In contrast to most recent transborder literature focusing only on individuals and individual border-crossing processes, I argue that the nuclear families with transborder members are part of the transborder fabric which includes work commuters, and transborder students. Transborder families, as a unit, collectively endure the implications of daily border crossings, profoundly impacting the family processes and dynamics unique to their condition. With empirical data collected between 2018 and 2019 in the border cities of Mexicali–Calexico and Tijuana–San Diego through in-depth interviews with thirty transborder people, the findings of this paper show that transborder families instrumentalise transborderism and employ it as a strategy for a better family future. In this sense, transborder families are vectors of analysis that expand transborderism as a theoretical, conceptual and empirical approach in the region.