Sent home: mapping the absent child into migration through polymedia

Migrants and their transnational families document their children and child‐rearing practices on social networking sites (SNS) to enhance their social mobility. In this article, I identify a new group of migrant children, namely those sent home to their parents’ countries of origin for an imagined ‘good childhood‘. I demonstrate that polymedia – SNS and other platforms – sustain these children and create new norms of publicness and visibility in transnational parenting. Exploring how families document child‐raising across international boundaries, I show how the trajectories of parenting relationships remain open ended. I counter the predominant focus on transnational parenting as a kind of abandonment attached to left‐behind children. Instead, I refocus the research on the opportunities polymedia give families to create and sustain intimacies, thus making the trajectories of migrant families and children increasingly dynamic. Polymedia create important shifts in global migration – a transformation that requires changes in the way scholars approach transnational families and long‐distance parenting.     

Reconceptualizing Motherhood,Reconceptualizing Resistance

Female labour migrants face contradictory expectations. On the one hand, they are expected to be their families' and communities' economic saviours. On the other hand, they are expected to meet their maternal responsibilities even while they are abroad; otherwise, they face charges of maternal neglect. My goal in this article is to highlight how female migrant workers handle these conflicting demands. I discuss how migrant women simultaneously adapt to and challenge imposed family separation through the case study of Filipina live-in caregivers in Canada. They do this in two ways. First, they exhibit transnational hyper-maternalism which allows them to overcome accusations of neglect. They ‘mother across borders’ by providing for their families and by using technology to supervise, monitor and communicate with their children. In doing so, they reify and contest established gender roles. Second, they are active in civil society. In doing so, they highlight the negative consequences migrant women and their families face. Reconceptualized notions of motherhood characterize migrant women's transnational parenting, while the desire to ameliorate the negative consequences of family separation and reunification explain their activism.     

Rethinking Migrant Families from a Transnational Perspective: Experiences of Parents and Their Children

This article provides an overview of existing studies which take a transnational approach to examining the experiences of migrant parents and their children. In this article, I examine (1) how migrant parents who settle in host societies seek to raise the next generation transnationally, (2) how the children of migrants respond to being raised in a transnational social field, (3) how migrant parents manage relationships with their children who remain in their homeland, and (4) how children left behind think and feel about growing up without the company of one or both of their parent(s). By analyzing how various cross‐border connections are sustained and negotiated in these different types of migrant families, this article highlights the various transnational forces that operate in different types of migrant households.     

Economic Well‐Being in Salvadoran Transnational Families: How Gender Affects Remittance Practices

This article examines how migrant parents' gender affects transnational families' economic well‐being. Drawing on 130 in‐depth interviews with Salvadoran immigrants in the United States and adolescent and young adult children of migrants in El Salvador, I demonstrate that the gender of migrant parents centrally affects how well their families are faring. Gender structurally differentiates immigrant parents' experiences through labor market opportunities in the United States. Simultaneously, gendered social expectations inform immigrants' approaches to parental responsibilities and remitting behaviors. Remittances—the monies parents send—directly shape children's economic well‐being in El Salvador. I find that even though immigrant mothers are structurally more disadvantaged than immigrant fathers, mother‐away families are often thriving economically because of mothers' extreme sacrifices.     

Migration status and transnational mothering: the case of Filipino migrants in France

Recent studies on transnational mothering have explored the various strategies migrant women use to negotiate their absence from home; however, there is limited knowledge on how migration status diversifies transnational mothering practices. To fill this gap, I conducted in‐depth interviews and observations of Filipino migrant mothers working in the domestic service sector in and around Paris. The consequences of migration include the prolongation of a planned stay in France, emotional difficulties due to family separation, and distant mother–child relationships. Transnational family life appears more complicated and difficult to manage for undocumented migrant mothers since they cannot easily visit their family back home, which they try to compensate by resorting to more intense transnational communication and gift‐giving practices. Hence, migration status plays an important role in shaping transnational motherhood.     

Children and Power in Mexican Transnational Families

Today, many families find that they are unable to fulfill the goal of maintaining a household by living together under the same roof. Some members migrate internationally. This article addresses the consequences of a transnational lifestyle for children who are left behind by migrant parents. Using ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with a total of 141 members of Mexican transnational families, I explore how children who are left behind react to parents’ migrations. I focus on how Mexican children manifest the competing pressures they feel surrounding parents’ migrations and consequently shape family migration patterns. The article shows that children may experience power, albeit in different ways at different ages, while simultaneously being disadvantaged as dependents and in terms of their families’ socioeconomic status.     

Negotiating transnational ambivalence: how ageing parents grapple with family separation across time

ABSTRACT

This article uses older parents of parachute kids as an example to explore the ways in which the heads of transnational households assess intergenerational intimacy at a later stage of their life trajectories. I argue that transitioning to a later life stage motivates or even demands older parents reorient their perspectives on the separation from their children overseas. Specifically, I offer the concept of transnational ambivalence to analyse the processes whereby older parents grapple with the meaning of being physically separated from their children. This study demonstrates how the interplay between extended family separation and human ageing provokes complex feelings and emotions among parents. In addition, this research chronicles the factors that explain the variation in parental ambivalence. In so doing, this article contributes to the literature on transnational families by illuminating the temporal reflexivity of parents ‘left behind’.     

Consuming the transnational family: Indonesian migrant domestic workers to Saudi Arabia

Abstract There is heated debate in contemporary Indonesia about the rights and regulation of transnational women migrants, specifically about the ‘costs to families’ of women working overseas, but little attention has been given to women migrants' own views of family or women's own motivations for migration. In this article, which is based on field work in a migrant‐sending community in West Java, I focus on migrant women's narratives of transnational migration and employment as domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. I contribute to the literature on gender and transnational migration by exploring migrants' consumption desires and practices as reflective not only of commoditized exchange but also of affect and sentiment. In addition, I show in detail how religion and class inflect low‐income women's narrations of morally appropriate mothering practices. In conclusion, I suggest that interpreting these debates from the ground up can contribute towards understanding the larger struggles animating the Indonesian state's contemporary relationships with women and Islam.     

Family divided: the class formation of Honduran transnational families

Although there is a growing literature on transnational families, we know little about the class formation of such families and even less about how transnational migration and generation interact in this process. In this article I draw from ethnographic research with Honduran immigrant parents in the USA and transnational youths in Honduras to theorize the class formation of transnational families. Based on Bryceson and Vuorela's concepts of frontiering and relativizing, I show how economic remittances bolster the expectations and improve the lifestyles of transnational youths to the detriment of their parents' welfare in the USA. That parents often relativize their communication, choosing not to tell children about their struggles, can contribute to increased inequalities within families. Finally, my data suggest that it will be difficult for transnational youths to meet their newfound expectations and maintain their lifestyles without a permanent flow of remittances and thus the ongoing separation of family.     

‘Virtual’ intimacies? Families communicating across transnational contexts

Abstract Many analyses of the uses of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) focus on factors such as gender, class and communication infrastructures in explaining how and whether people communicate across distance. In this article, I argue that such analyses fail to capture the full complexity of ICT use. I use the results of a large qualitative study of transnational families, conducted in Australia, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Iran, Singapore and New Zealand, to examine how and whether kin maintain contact across time and space. The research demonstrates that ICTs are more available for some people than for others. However, also and possibly more important in the decisions people make about using particular communication technologies are the social and cultural contexts of family life, which render some ICTs more desirable than others at specific points in time. Acknowledging this provides an important corrective to economic analyses of transnationalism, and contributes to theorizing and documenting the role of ICTs in the maintenance of transnational social networks.     

Mapping the role of ‘transnational family habitus’ in the lives of young people and children

In this article, we develop the concept of ‘transnational family habitus’ as a theoretical tool for making sense of the ways in which children and young people from a migrant background are ‘doing families’ transnationally. Drawing on over a decade of cumulative research on Caribbean and Italian families in the UK, as well as on a new joint research project, we first investigate the opportunities and consequences of a transnational family habitus on family arrangements, kinship relationships and identity within a transnational context. Second, we analyse the role of these young people's structural location in Britain in shaping the boundaries of their transnational family habitus. We argue that one should see a transnational family habitus as an asset that can potentially disrupt conventional understandings of belonging and processes of inclusion and exclusion. However, we also detail how social divisions of class, race, and increasingly migration status, shape such a habitus.     

Culturally tailored workers for specialised destinations: producing Filipino migrant subjects for export

This multi-sited, mixed-methods study in Canada and the Philippines examines how migrant workers are manufactured and deployed to a range of global destinations by the Filipino migration apparatus. Building on scholarship examining how the Filipino state markets, selects and prepares Filipino (labour) migrants from and to the Philippines, I show that beyond seeking to produce a temporary migrant workforce with a ‘comparative advantage’ (including traits like ‘docile’, ‘hardworking’, ‘English-speaking’ and ‘loyal’), the state alongside recruiters and other actors in the migration industry also seek to produce workers with cultural knowledge of norms in receiving destinations. This is another dimension through which the Philippines aims to establish its ‘superiority’ in the international market for temporary labour. This study has implications for how we think about transnational labour brokering under highly saturated conditions, and the role of culture and other mediating factors in configuring ‘ideal’ worker constructions and flows.     

Gender and Transnational Gossip

Transnational social networks powerfully shape Mexican migration and enable families to stretch internationally. In an atmosphere of such high dependence on social networks, it would be rare for families not to be affected by the opinions of others. This article analyzes this often-overlooked aspect of social networks, gossip. I analyze gossip stories prevalent for one type of migrant family, those in which parents and children live apart. Drawing on over 150 ethnographic interviews and observation with members of Mexican transnational families and their neighbors in multiple sites, I describe both parents’ and children’s experiences with transnational gossip. I show that in a transnational context, gossip is a highly gendered activity with different consequences for men and women. Although targeting both women and men, transnational gossip reinforces the expectations that mothers be family caregivers and fathers be family providers even when physical separation makes these activities difficult to accomplish.

What is Love? The Materiality of Care in Ghanaian Transnational Families

In the West, economics and intimacy are assumed to occupy separate – even antithetical – domains. In Ghanaian family life, however, affection is understood to be expressed through the distribution of material resources across generations and a person’s life cycle. Such an understanding of love means that migrant parents who leave their children behind in Ghana can continue to be good parents by sending remittances, and, in fact, may be considered better parents than caregivers who stay and are poorer. This construction of love also means that children tend to attach themselves to more financially secure caregivers over those with fewer economic opportunities — to men in favour of women, to those abroad over those in Ghana. It is precisely because love is signalled through material exchanges that children long to be with parental migrants far away who support them and feel abandoned by those parents who do not. The intertwining of economic and emotional ties in Ghanaian transnational families has significant implications for policy, as discussed in the conclusion.     

Affects of unease: mother–infant separation among professional Indonesian women working in Singapore

The extent of systemic forms of mother–child separation has received insufficient attention in research on migrant families. In this article, I explore the little‐studied phenomenon of mother–infant separation among professional women migrants. I draw from in‐depth interviews with Indonesian professional women working in Singapore who have lived apart from their infant children to pursue work and education. Narratives of separation illustrate a complex transnational network of care built around an availability of support offered by spouses or extended kin. Women experience unease about separation, which emerges in how they talk about their absent infants. Mothers articulate ambivalence about the potential cost of their decisions, positing infants as able to pass judgement on them, with potential rejection and disengagement causing them potent concerns. The unease of these mothers moderates claims that transnational separation is readily managed and highlights the ambiguity embedded in an increasingly common form of transnational mother–child separation.     

The transnational work of kinship and caring: Bengali–British marriages in historical perspective

Abstract In this article, based on ongoing research carried out in Bangladesh since the mid‐1980s and field‐work in London in the late 1990s, I take a historical approach to the analysis of transnational Sylheti marriages. By showing how the form of these marriages has changed since the mid‐twentieth century, I argue that transnational migration is itself highly fluid. The role of wives in maintaining transnational links is central to the account. I focus in particular on the wives of ‘first‐generation’ migrant men who came to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and whose families were generally reunited in Britain by the 1980s. By describing the household and caring work of these wives both in Sylhet and London, I demonstrate that rather than being ‘dependants’ of their migrant husbands, women have been central to the success of migrant households. The rewards of transnational connectedness have, however, come at a cost — long‐term separation from loved ones. Isolation and loneliness have been hallmarks of the experiences of these earlier generations of women.     

Not Always ‘Left-Behind’: Indonesian Adolescent Women Negotiating Transnational Mobility,Filial Piety and Care

In contrast to current research focusing on how migrant parents provide care for their ‘left-behind’ children, this article highlights how Indonesian adolescent women also migrate (or stay) in order to provide care for their families. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted mainly between 2014 and 2015 in Central Javanese migrant-origin villages, this article discusses how opportunities for transnational labour migration affect young unmarried women’s roles as ‘dutiful daughters’ in diverse ways. By analysing how the (im)mobilities of three young women are mutually shaped by diverse expectations to care for their families, I highlight that care is always relational, showing that the distinction between care-givers and care-receivers is less evident than currently assumed in migration studies. Closer examination of how young persons mutually negotiate mobility and parent–child care expectations brings into focus the new forms of agency, power and vulnerability that they encounter in migration and migrant-origin contexts.     

Transnationalizing the ‘Asian’ family: imaginaries,intimacies and strategic intents

Abstract In this introductory article, we emphasize the significance of considering the politics and practices of transnationalism as they impinge on the social morphology of transnational ‘Asian’ families. Three strands of work in this arena are discussed. First, transnational families draw on ideologically laden imaginaries to give coherence to notions of belonging despite the physical dispersal of their members; these imaginaries may in turn act as a conservative force exerting control over particular female members, an increasing salient issue given the feminization of various streams of labour migration. Second, transnational families are also realized through lived experiences, where variants and degrees of intimacy are negotiated across transnational spaces with both ‘regular’ members and ‘irregular’ others. In the process, social identities may be reinforced or reconfigured. Third, families may assume transnational morphologies with the strategic intent of ensuring economic survival or maximizing social mobility. In this context, children's education has emerged as a particularly important project which provides strong impetus for families to go transnational.