Hey, it's Latif from Radio Lab. Our goal with each episode is to make you think, how did I live this long and not know that?

Radio Lab, adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Listen, wherever you get podcasts.

I'm Melissa Harris Perry, and this is The Takeaway.

America's practice of family separation did not end with the abolition of slavery.

Back in 2018, the Trump administration's zero-tolerance policy for unauthorized entry at our southern border

separated more than 2,000 minor children from their parents in the weeks immediately

before and following Mother's Day. And even though the policy of border separation has

ended, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that Biden administration policies of

detention and deportation still separate families. But perhaps no border runs more harshly through the lives

of migrant mothers than that of economic need. Gabrielle Olivaura is an associate professor of

education and Brazil studies at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She's also the author of Motherhood Across Borders,

immigrants and their children in Mexico and in New York City. For the women that I worked with,

it was really important for them to care for their children, even if they were not there in person,

right? And there is this aspect that is very U.S. centric and Western centric of being

present physically. And for these women, to migrate was to care, right? To migrate was to be able

to offer a better life for their children that stayed in Mexico. So that care never really

stopped. And that was enacted through investments in

education, making sure that the child was well taken care of, that had food on the table,

that had enough money. So all of these things meant that they were in their children's lives,

even if they were not there, bathing, feeding, right, kind of

doing the more physical aspects of mothering. As you're talking about these tangible, physical,

present aspects of motherhood, those do seem to take up an enormous part of our definition of what constitutes good mothering.

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