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Mai-Ling Garcia (Sociology Major)
“The Managed Family: An Examination of the Role of the Military Family in the Institution”
Sponsor: Professor Martin Sanchez-Jankowski, Sociology
Project Description
The family is often considered a primary source of emotional support and an institutional constant amidst every day challenges. For military personnel, the circumstances of every day life are more unpredictable, more dangerous, and further complicated by the intensive debate surrounding military duties and functions. Military families are intimately intertwined with the institution, but are not bound to the military in the same fashion as its personnel. What is the role of families in the military? This summer, Mai-Ling will conduct ethnographic research at the Marine Corps Base in Twentynine Palms, California, to investigate how military families manage themselves and how the military manages families within the institution. By interviewing Marine Corps wives and personnel she will investigate both the perceived and expected roles of families, and attempt to discover the actual nature of their relationship with the military.
Scholar's Photo
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Mai-Ling at Joshua Tree National Monument, near Twentynine Palms Marine Base.
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Scholar's Journal
It had been almost two years since I left the desert for the cooler breezes of the bay. The green bayonet shaped leaves stood erect on the arms of Joshua trees. I had come to the desert to explore my deepest feelings about the ‘military life’ I had left behind. As a wife to a Marine, I knew that I had somehow been an intimate part of the institutional fabric, but I couldn’t quite articulate how my involvement played a role in the larger infrastructure of the Marine Corps. Thus, on a searing day in late June, I began a journey down the highway 79 to converse with other women--- other military wives.
For the first few weeks of my project, I spent most of my days tucked away from the 117 degree heat in a small café off the highway. Smoothies and iced chai comforted me as I tried to plan the next steps of my project without knowing if I could reconnect with this tightly knit community. I had been in Twentynine Palms, California for three weeks trying to reintroduce myself into an environment that had once been so familiar and a culture that had been such a large part of my life. However, I began to intensively question if could I begin to reconnect to this population. In a community which is constantly mobile, most of my neighbors had moved, my friends dispersed, and I now felt very alone. Who could share their triumphs and challenges with me? Naturally, because these families and the very actions of the Marine Corps are highly politicized, many people in this small community were very cautious of my interests. Was I now an outsider? Could I overcome the stigma of being a researcher?
However, on a day when the weather was conflicted between dry heat and thunderstorms, I was invited to a small pot luck gathering of a dozen or so military wives. I carpooled with another woman I had recently met, and arrived at a small community center where women slowly arrived with their very own culinary specialties--- recipes that originated from across the nation. Each homemade entrée or appetizer was carefully placed on a long table and surrounded by the chatter of women----- discussions of sick children, work and school, but most of all—the talk of a pending homecoming of their husbands from months of deployment overseas. There is an unsaid excitement that is only expressed in anxious questions, procedural descriptions, and mild humor about the long time that has passed since they last laid eyes on their Marine.
Three weeks into my project, this is the day where I begin to speak with women and personnel about their sadness when a family member must travel a distance to perform their duty, their triumphs of learning to single-handedly repair car and home, and the heartache when the community suffers an irreplaceable loss--- when a Marine does not return home. So for the next few weeks, I am eating, laughing, crying, with women and some personnel who share their intimate tales of triumph and tribulation as supporters of U.S. Marines. Their stories are as poignant as the weather; fluctuating between hot, cold, wind and rain--- a dynamic that uniquely belongs to the California desert.
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