El Paso – Although Mother’s Day in the United States is on the second Sunday in May, thousands of immigrants who live along the border celebrate it on May 10, the day Mexican mothers are traditionally honored.
First-generation immigrants continue remembering mother on May 10, whether they spend the day in the U.S. or cross the border to visit the moms they left behind.
“The first generation of immigrants continues to celebrate their mothers on May 10,” the director of the school of Chacano Studies at the University of Texas in El Paso, Dennis Bixlery, said.
According to the professor, recently arrived immigrants continue watching Mexican television channels’ coverage of the May 10 festivities.
But the second generation that watches TV in English and attends school in the United States celebrates mothers according to the U.S. calendar.
“My mother who is Mexican but lives in the United States keeps telling me that for her Mother’s Day is May 10,” the professor who came to the United States 50 years ago said.
Araceli Arroyo, who has lived in the United States for eight years, is traveling this week – as he does every year – to Parral in the Mexican state of Chihuahua to be with his mother.
“It doesn’t matter where we live, they are Mexicans,” Arroyo said.
According to Bixlery, the mother figure for Mexicans – and for Latin Americans in general – is so important that this is one of the most important dates on Mexico’s fiesta calendar.
“It is linked not only to our mothers, but also to the Virgin of Guadalupe, who is considered the ‘mother of Mexicans,'” he said.
For that reason the date prevails even for immigrants crossing the border into the United States where the festivities take place on another day.
The disparity is a windfall for stores along the border that exploit both dates, one for U.S. shoppers looking for a gift for mom and another for immigrants who have not lost the custom of commemorating holidays according to the Mexican calendar.
“We’ve been in the United States for more than 15 years, and we go on celebrating my mother on May 10,” said Leticia Salas, a first-generation immigrant.
But there are other cases such as that of Paulina Medrano, whose mother is Mexican but who was herself born in the United States and celebrates the day according to the U.S. calendar.
“I don’t like it, but I know we have to start living like Americans,” Josefina Medrano, Paulina’s mother and a resident of Tucson, Arizona, confessed.
Nonetheless, she travels to El Paso to honor her own mother on May 10.
Bixlery said that some families celebrate both days, to satisfy both the mothers born in the United States and the Mexicans in the same family.
“It’s a situation that reveals the nature of immigrant families, especially along the border,” he said.
So much tradition surrounds Mother’s Day in Mexico, Bixlery added, that the date of the holiday is one of the hardest to change for recent arrivals from Latin America.
