Transnational Families

The onset of a global pandemic has put contemporary social life on a stand still. People’s movements have been constrained due to border closures, travel restrictions, and lockdowns. As a result, many people have increasingly relied on digital communication technologies to forge and maintain ties. Notably, navigating an indefinite period of physical separation through digital media use is a familiar scenario among migrants and their left-behind family members. Even before the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, they were already heavily relying on communication technologies to sustain long-distance relationships. The expansive literature on the intersections of migration and digital media shows how digital practices facilitate a sense...

Migration is experienced not only by individuals who migrate, but also by their family members that remain at home. While previous research on origin communities has focused primarily on the economic impacts of remittances, this study emphasizes the emotional repercussions of family member migration. I use the Mexican Family Life Survey, a nationally representative data set, to empirically assess the effects of migration on the emotional well-being of migrants’ family members in Mexican communities of origin. Results indicate that migration of close family members to the United States, especially spouses and children, significantly increases depressive symptoms and feelings of loneliness reported by family members remaining in Mexico. Women, particularly mothers and wives, are more adversely affected by family member migration than men. On a practical level, findings from this study illustrate a need for support programmes in origin communities to help families cope with the migration of their family members. The results of the study also highlight the adverse and unintended consequences of border restriction policy that severely restrains migrants from visiting their families and origin communities. From a research perspective, the results indicate the importance of non-economic measures in analyses of migration. There are significant psychological and emotional repercussions of family member migration and these should not be downplayed or overlooked in migration research.

By their very nature, transnational family constitute an elusive phenomenon - spatially dispersed and seemingly capable of unending social mutation. Their ability to reconstitute and redefine themselves over time contingent on spatial practicality and emotional and material needs challenges even the most multi-disciplinary social scientist's analytical efforts. 'Transnational families' are defined here as families that live some or most of the time separated from each other, yet hold together and create something that can be seen as a feeling of collective welfare and unity, namely 'familyhood', even across national borders.
In this introduction, the manner in which transnational families constitute themselves and their identification with and linkages to nation sates and wider community and global networks are considered. The concepts of 'frontiering' and 'relativizing' are introduced to explore intra and inter-familial relations and their interface with the wider society.

This article proposes a conceptual framework for studying remittances as social transactions that can take a number of different forms. For the past three decades, the dominant framework for understanding remittance relationships has been the continuum of senders' motives from altruism to self-interest. This approach has its roots in economics and has shaped much of the quantitative research on remittances. In parallel, a growing body of ethnographic research has examined transnational money transfers with perspectives and data that differ from those of economists. The insights from these ethnographic studies are valuable, but remain fragmented and marginal in research on remittances. Two key points emerge from the ethnographic literature: Remittances are at the core of composite transactions with material, emotional, and relational elements, and there is great variation in the nature and logic of these transactions. The framework proposed here is designed to engage with both complexity and variation. It systematically draws upon a large body of ethnographic literature and introduces remittance scripts as an analytical tool.

The notion of ‘transnational families’ emerged at the beginning of the 21st century to designate in particular “families that live some or most of the time separated from each other, yet hold together and create something that can be seen as a feeling of collective welfare and unity, namely ‘familyhood’, even across national borders” (Bryceson and Vuorela, 2002: 18). Because of geographical distance, the maintenance of collective welfare and unity in transnational families largely relies on the ability of transnational family members to participate in the circulation of care across distance and national borders, an ability that represents a key feature of migrant wellbeing. The concept of care is indeed strongly related to issues surrounding welfare and wellbeing, both at an individual and collective level. As Daly (2011) points out, care relates not only to the servicing of the needs of those who cannot take care of themselves as well as those who are able-bodied, it also emphasises in a broader sense the relational foundations of all social life. In other words, ‘key elements of people’s welfare inhere in their relations with others and the reciprocity around responses to need and the receipt of recognition and value for who people are’ (Daly, 2011: 47-48). In this chapter, we define the circulation of care in transnational families as a ‘capability’ (Sen, 1987), and discuss how the ability to participate in care exchanges impacts on the well-being of transnational family members – in terms of the provision of their care needs, of reciprocal care obligations and practices, and of identity recognition. This also leads us to examine the ways in which new communication technologies transform the ways in which caring relationships are experienced and practiced, and to highlight how policy mediates families' capabilities to care across distance.

Public discourse on Asian parenting tends to fixate on ethnic culture as a static value set, disguising the fluidity and diversity of Chinese parenting. Such stereotypes also fail to account for the challenges of raising children in a rapidly modernizing world, full of globalizing values. In Raising Global Families Pei-Chia Lan examines how ethnic Chinese parents in Taiwan and
the United States negotiate cultural differences and class inequality to raise children in the contexts of globalization and immigration. She draws on a uniquely comparative, multisited research model with four groups of parents: middle-class and working-class parents in Taiwan, and middle-class and working-class Chinese immigrants in the Boston area. Despite sharing a similar ethnic cultural background, these parents develop class-specific, context-sensitive strategies for arranging their children's education, care, and discipline, and for coping with uncertainties provoked by their changing surroundings. Lan's cross-Pacific comparison demonstrates that class inequality permeates the fabric of family life, even as it takes shape in different ways across national contexts.

As transnational social networks expand, people increasingly form intimate relationships with partners from a different sociocultural background. While intercultural intimate relationships are not a new phenomenon, they have attracted research only recently due to their global proliferation. Scholars are particularly interested in how such mixed relationships communicate and how their interculturality impacts on partners' (and their offspring's) identities. Some studies have been criticized for overemphasizing cultural differences and identification problems of intercultural partners. This depiction of intercultural coupledom as problematic in early research echoed initial societal perceptions of it. Contrastingly, recent works explore how intercultural partners can effectively communicate and negotiate their complex sociocultural repertoires. The hybrid cultural forms and meanings that intercultural couples create are shown as empowering rather than debilitating. This new approach is also reflected in society and the media, which increasingly represent intercultural families in a positive light, gradually normatizing or even endorsing them.

This article is concerned with the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on Filipina transnational mothers’ experience of motherhood, their practices of mothering and, ultimately, their identities as mothers. Drawing on ethnographic research with Filipina migrants in the UK as part of a wider study of Filipino transnational families, this article observes that, despite the digital divide and other structural inequalities, new communication technologies, such as the internet and mobile phones, allow for an empowered experience of distant mothering. Apart from a change in the practice and intensity of mothering at a distance, ICTs also have consequences for women's maternal identities and the ways in which they negotiate their ambivalence towards work and family life. In this sense, digital media can also be seen as solutions (even though difficult ones) to the cultural contradictions of migration and motherhood and the ‘accentuated ambivalence’ they engender. This, in turn, has consequences for the whole experience of migration, sometimes even affecting decisions about settlement and return.

À côté des études, en France, sur le plurilinguisme des familles de migrants et des travaux internationaux sur les politiques linguistiques familiales, cette thèse s’intéresse aux pratiques langagières intergénérationnelles de familles transnationales. Résidant en Ile de France, à Berlin ou à Antioche au Sud de la Turquie, où les membres les plus âgés sont nés, leur répertoire linguistique comprend l’arabe, le turc et le français ou l’allemand. À partir d’une ethnographie multi-sites auprès de 13 familles dont 100 membres ont été rencontrés, et d’analyses quantitative puis interactionnelle de quatre corpus recueillis dans deux familles à Paris et Berlin, les notions de language shift, de transmission ou d’agentivité sont notamment discutées. Dans un contexte où les participants présentent tous des profils différents et des ressources asymétriques dans les différentes langues, on observe l’utilisation de toutes les langues et en particulier de l’arabe dont la pratique est favorisée, pour les plus jeunes, par des phénomènes d’alignement aux choix linguistiques qu’ils initient dans l’interaction. Le turc se trouve pour sa part utilisé dans des prises de parole multilingues. Les reformulations, aides et traductions font ressortir le rôle prépondérant de la bienveillance entre les adultes et les plus jeunes pour favoriser la communication intergénérationnelle et, par là, l’utilisation des langues familiales.
Cette thèse constitue une contribution à la description de pratiques langagières familiales, à l’approche de politiques linguistiques de familles transnationales, à la documentation de la variété d’arabe antiochien en interaction et à l’étude de corpus hétérogènes trilingues.
Mots clés : pratiques langagières hétérogènes, familles transnationales, plurilinguisme, sociolinguistique interactionnelle, arabe, turc, français, allemand, variation linguistique

Transnational families, while not new, are a rapidly increasing family form. Moreover, they challenge our traditional methodological and theoretical conceptualisations of family life. The dramatic increase in mobility and the revolution in modes of travel and communication across distance have made it imperative for family studies to examine the impact of processes of migration and, more specifically, distance and separation, on family relationships. In contrast to the past, migratory moves and other forms of family mobility today are more likely to be characterised by regular and frequent communication and linkages between sending and receiving areas, giving rise to conceptualisations of transnational family members and global households. Through the lens of transnational family caregiving, this chapter examines these issues, including the practical and policy implications of sustaining families across time and space.

Drawing on ethnographic field studies of youth on the transnational move, across Seoul, Toronto, and Vancouver, this book examines transnational flows of Korean youth and their digital media practices.

This book explores how digital media are integrated into various forms of transnational life and imagination, focusing on young Koreans and their digital media practices. By combining theoretical discussion and in depth empirical analysis, the book provides engaging narratives of transnational media fans, sojourners, and migrants. Each chapter illustrates a form of mediascape, in which transnational Korean youth culture and digital media are uniquely articulated. This perceptive research offers new insights into the transnationalization of youth cultural practices, from K-pop fandom to smartphone-driven storytelling.　

A transnational and ethnographic focus makes this book the first of its kind, with an interdisciplinary approach that goes beyond the scope of existing digital media studies, youth culture studies, and Asian studies. It will be essential reading for scholars and students in media studies, migration studies, popular culture studies, and Asian studies.

An entire generation of children, adolescents and young adults has been caught in the crucible of increasing criminalization of immigrants coupled with neoliberal globalization policies in Mexico and the United States. These are first- and second-generation immigrant
youth who are bicultural, often bilingual, but rarely recognized as binational citizens in either of their countries.

Bicultural immigrant youth are an integral part of mixed-status transnational families who increasingly have members on both sides of the militarized U.S.-Mexico border. They need public policies that are crafted in terms of the recognition, unification (temporary or
permanent) and integration of their families. Furthermore, their integration into the community of their choice must be predicated upon access to education (including higher education), employment, and international mobility as binational citizens. By re-framing the debate over immigration as a broader conversation about the constellation of public policy reforms needed to govern transnational movement and citizenship in the twenty-first century, we can better articulate just what is at stake in a major historical shift that has only begun.

In this article, we introduce the key themes of our Special Issue on "Transnational care: families confronting borders". Central to this collection is the question of how family relations and solidarities are impacted by the current scenario of closed borders and increasingly restrictive migration regimes. This question is examined more specifically through the lens of care dynamics within transnational families and their (re-) configurations across diverse contexts marked by "immobilizing regimes of migration". We begin by presenting a brief overview of key concepts in the transnational families and caregiving literature that provides a foundation for the diverse cases explored in the articles, including refugees and asylum seekers in Germany and Finland, Polish facing Brexit in the UK, Latin American migrants transiting through Mexico, and restrictionist drifts in migration policies in Australia, Belgium and the UK. Drawing on this rich work, we identify two policy tools; namely temporality and exclusion, which appear to be particularly salient features of immobilizing regimes of migration that significantly influence care-related mobilities. We conclude with a discussion of how immobilizing regimes are putting transnational family solidarities in crisis, including in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, gripping the globe at the time of writing.

"Smuggling far from constitutes a crime of the powerful: [to echo Scott], it is instead a tool of the weak. It is a practice primarily carried out by people from disenfranchised groups, who oftentimes lack not only ties to organized crime but criminal intentions, and whose primary if contradictory goal is to simultaneously collaborate with and profit from migrants for their own safety and survival. Furthermore, on the US-Mexico border, said precarity is often rooted on the lack, on the part of both migrants and those behind their journeys, of legal immigration status. Participation in the facilitation of irregular migration constitutes a form of protection from below emerging as a direct result of the increased militarization and enforcement of borders and migration controls worldwide."

In one of the first volumes to address social work practice with this emergent and often marginalized population, practitioners and scholars specializing in transnational issues develop a framework for transnational social work practice. They begin with the historical and environmental context of transnational practice and explore the psychosocial, economic, environmental, and political factors that affect at-risk and vulnerable transnational groups. They then detail practical strategies, supplemented with case examples, for working with transnational populations utilizing this population's existing strengths. They conclude with recommendations for incorporating transnational social work into the curriculum.

¿Cómo podemos pensar las interfaces entre las migraciones internacionales y la protección social en un mundo marcado por una división internacional de riesgos y protecciones y por una combinación entre la transnacionalización de la vida social y la perennidad de un anclaje nacional de los recursos de protección social? En esta tesis se discute esa cuestión amplia desde una perspectiva transnacional y por medio de la etnografía multisituada con las familias transnacionales bolivianas en São Paulo y Barcelona. En esta investigación, se propone el estudio de los desencajes y bricolajes de la protección social manifestados en las narrativas biográficas de los migrantes bolivianos y sus familias. Los desencajes de la protección social pueden ser entendidos como los contextos constituidos por mecanismos que distribuyen desigualmente factores de riesgo y recursos para la protección social. Los bricolajes, a su vez, aluden a los esfuerzos multisituados de combinación de recursos de protección, tanto de tipo formal como informal.

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How can we think about the interfaces between international migration and social protection in a world marked by an international division of risks and protections and a combination of the transnationalization of social life and the continuity of a national anchoring of social protection resources? This thesis approaches this broad question from a transnational perspective and through the multi-sited ethnography with Bolivian transnational families in São Paulo and Barcelona. In this research, it is proposed the study of the disembeddings and handicrafts of social protection manifested in the biographical narratives of Bolivian migrants and their families. Disembeddings of social protection can be understood as contexts constituted by mechanisms that unequally distribute risk factors and resources for social protection. The social protection handicrafts, in turn, refer to the efforts of combining multisited resources of protection, both formal and informal.

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Como podemos pensar as interfaces entre as migrações internacionais e a proteção social em um mundo marcado por uma divisão internacional de riscos e proteções e por uma combinação entre a transnacionalização da vida social e a perenidade de uma ancoragem nacional dos recursos de proteção social?  Esta tese é dedicada a essa ampla questão a partir de uma perspectiva transnacional e por meio da etnografia multisituada com as famílias transnacionais bolivianas em São Paulo e Barcelona. Nesta pesquisa, é proposto o estudo dos desencaixes e bricolagens da proteção social manifestos nas narrativas biográficas dos migrantes bolivianos e suas famílias. Os desencaixes da proteção social podem ser entendidos como os contextos constituídos por mecanismos que distribuem desigualmente fatores de risco e recursos para a proteção social. As bricolagens, por sua vez, aludem aos esforços multisituados de combinação de recursos de proteção, tanto de tipo formal como informal.

Seamen’s wives know absence very well. Their lives are striated by it. Based on interviews with seamen’s wives conducted in Ilocos Norte, this article investigates the communicative practices obtaining amid absence and separation, and the wives’ activities that bring their husbands home and bring “home” to their husbands. It examines how new communication technologies, particularly the cellphone, have engendered new ways of becoming present and intimate. For seamen’s families, cellphone-mediated intimacy creates a space of imagined communion, which becomes the locus of the reproduction of family and affective ties and is itself the result of these emotional and material activities.

A moving ethnographic account of the transnational caregiving experiences and practices of migrants and refugees who live in Australia, with their parents in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and New Zealand. This timely work contributes rich detailed knowledge of how people respond to a world characterised by unprecedented mobility (both voluntary and forced), globalised job markets and an ageing population, as increasing numbers of families find themselves spread across the globe and caring for their elderly parents from a distance.

Current Dutch family migration policies are among the most restrictive in the European Union. (Groenendijk et al 2007b) From the 1990s onwards, the conditions for admission and stay of foreign family members in the Netherlands have gradually been tightened. Most recently, the centre-right government under Premier Balkenende which was in office from 2002 to 2006 implemented a number of significant restrictive reforms. The Law on Integration Abroad (2005) in particular attracted a great deal of attention both within the Netherlands and internationally. This law makes the granting of entry visa to family migrants conditional upon their demonstrating a sufficient level of knowledge of Dutch language and society. The Netherlands were the first country in the world to introduce such integration requirements at entry for foreign family  members. (Groenendijk 2005: 12)
This paper provides an overview of the main developments in Dutch family migration policies, with a focus on recent years. By way of introduction, it sketches the main trends of immigration to the Netherlands since the Second World War and presents statistical data on migration flows, migrant population and family migration in the Netherlands. The second section traces the history of Dutch family migration policies from the 1950s until the end of the 1990s. Finally, the third section provides an overview of the current policy framework, as well as a  discussion of the political debate about family migration in the Netherlands since 2002.

As global social networks expand, couples are increasingly comprised of partners from divergent sociocultural backgrounds (e.g. Piller, 2007; Dervin, 2013). This unfolding trend inspires research into complex identification processes in such transnational relationships. To explore these processes, I conduct a qualitative discourse analysis of interactions in five UK-based Polish-British families. The data include the families’ interactions during celebratory meals, which they video-recorded, and my semi-structured interviews with the participants, which were audio-recorded. The study focuses on how the participants’ food-related interactions project ‘stance’ (Du Bois, 2007), that is, how talk about food and food practices can discursively and semiotically index the speakers’ positioning towards their own and others’ sociocultural fields. 

The analysis reveals that as the speakers negotiate their foodscapes, they constantly engage with various sociocultural repertoires and appeal to multiple ‘centres’ of normativity (Blommaert et al., 2005). This negotiation at times occasions contrasting positioning acts, highlighting the dynamism of the speakers’ stancetaking, and thus of their identities. On one hand, the participants reproduce and exoticise what they imagine as their ‘traditions’, ‘cultures’ and ‘nations’, on the other, they echo postmodern discourses of ‘choice’ (Giddens, 1991), individualism and post-national cosmopolitanism. Following the theories of ‘reflexivity’ (Giddens, 1991; Urban, 2001), I demonstrate how in postmodernity even food interactions surface as reflexive spaces. Through culinary performances and meta-talk, the speakers reinterpret cultural signs, creating ‘third spaces’ (Bhabha, 2004 [1994]) – discursive zones with ever-evolving cultural meanings. 

These reflexively co-constructed ‘third spaces’ display the participants’ identity as hybrid and cosmopolitan families. The family members successfully negotiate the perceived differences between them, which challenges the ideologies of problematic intermarriage (see also Piller, 2002; Gonçalves, 2013). Their complex sociocultural repertoires do not ignite a ‘cultural clash’. They rather offer the speakers versatile vistas for identification and constitute ‘symbolic capital’ (Bourdieu, 1977), thus reflecting the increasing commodification of hybrid forms and pursuit of transcultural identities.

Este artículo tiene tres partes, en la primera pasamos revista a las migraciones entre Europa y América Latina desde una perspectiva de larga duración destacando las incidencias de la globalización en el aumento de las desigualdades entre países y en los procesos de movilidad social ascendente y descendente de las familias migrantes. En la segunda, abordamos los escenarios posibles y estrategias múltiples de  la presencia latinoamericana en la Unión Europea en el contexto de crisis global. Finalmente, nos interrogamos sobre la incidencia que las actuales políticas migratorias, de gestión de la crisis y del mercado de trabajo, tienen sobre la vida familiar de los diferentes colectivos latinoamericanos.

This chapter investigates the cumulative consequences of new communication technologies for the phenomenon of migration. Drawing on a seven year long comparative and multi-sited ethnography of long-distance communication within Filipino transnational families I demonstrate that the recent convergence in new communication technologies has profound consequences not just for the migrants and their left-behind families but for the phenomenon of migration as a whole. Although new media cannot solve the fundamentally social problems of family separation, they are increasingly used as justifications for key decisions relating to migration or settlement in the host country. The chapter brings together research with migrants and institutional actors and shows that transnational communication through new media has become implicated in making female migration more socially acceptable while ultimately influencing patterns of migration. Technologically mediated communication remains a relatively unexplored aspect of transnational family life. Although new research has recently emerged, that it took so long for this issue to be placed on the agenda of migration research is surprising given the dependency of transnational families on communication technologies, especially in conditions of prolonged separation. This chapter extends

This article examines the practices of ‘flexible kinship’ used by Chinese migrants in colonial Tahiti. ‘Flexible kinship’ draws attention to the strategic uses that are made of kinship in the context of migration and diaspora: the adjustments to cultural, political and legal borders that lead to changes in family forms and in the relations between kin. Using a multigenerational perspective, I examine how families were shaped by successive changes and reversals in legal-political and economic events and conjunctures over the long 20th century. I argue for the importance of addressing transnational border-crossing practices that involve not just a spatial extension of networks but also legal strategies within the host locality. I further show that if it is true that the Confucian hierarchical order has conditioned transnational practices of flexible kinship, then this hierarchy has not only bent to the circumstances, it has to a great extent been weakened. Finally, I argue that the history of familial adjustments has shaped a habitus that maximizes economic and legal security, especially among women.

Cet article examine les pratiques de “parenté flexible” déployées par les migrants Chinois dans le Tahiti colonial. “Parenté flexible” souligne les emplois stratégiques de la parenté dans un contexte de migration et de diaspora : les ajustements à des frontières culturelles, politiques et juridiques qui mènent à des changements dans les formes familiales et les relations entre parents. Recourant à une perspective multi-générationnelle, l’article examine comment les familles ont été modelées par des changements et retournements de conjonctures politico-légales et économiques sur le long XXe siècle. L’auteure souligne l’importance des pratiques transnationales de traversée des frontières qui n’impliquent pas simplement une extension spatiale des réseaux mais aussi des stratégies juridiques dans le pays d’accueil. Elle montre également que si l’ordre hiérarchique confucéen a conditionné les pratiques transnationales de parenté flexible, cette hiérarchie a été adaptée aux circonstances, voire a été largement altérée. Enfin, l’auteure avance que l’histoire des ajustements familiaux a forgé un habitus qui tend vers la maximisation de la sécurité économique et juridique, en particulier parmi les femmes.

The existing scholarship on middle and upper-class East Asian transnational families accompanying their children to English-speaking countries has mainly focused on long-term transnational migration pattern. However, we know less about the short-term pattern, and how it affects the subjectivities of migrants. By conducting a case study of Japanese women participating in oyako-ryūgaku (a short-term parent-child study abroad trip) with their chil- dren in Hawaii, we demonstrate how they constructed their transnational gendered subjectivities. We argue that not only motherhood and selfhood, but also wifehood is actively negotiated among the short-term transnational mothers through oyako-ryūgaku.

In this essay, Joanna Dreby, Sarah Gallo, Florencia Silveira, and Melissa Adams-Corral use a transnational frame to explore the meanings of US citizenship for binational children and its importance to experiences of belonging. Drawing on interviews with children ages six to fourteen living with their Mexican-born parents in rural Puebla, their analysis shows that children view US citizenship as signaling their social location in a historically based migratory system and that the meaning of this social location on children’s daily lives differs given their transnational experiences, specifically the extent of US schooling they received. Migration thus engenders understanding of power and privilege among young children and influences how they negotiate among their peers. The authors argue that young children may exhibit “critical postures”
arising from their migratory experiences. They conclude that schools on both sides of the border can view migrant children’s experiences and critical perspectives as assets that may provide more flexible spaces for learning and belonging.

Family history can be seen to be comprised of both told and untold stories and sentiments related to them, all of which affect family members. Drawing on interviews conducted with immigrants from the former Soviet Union living in Finland and their family members living in the country of origin (in Russian Karelia and Estonia), this article1 explores the silenced aspects of family storytelling and analyses how the absence of narration can serve as a protector and maintainer of family as a set of relationships, or an enabler of “normal” family life. The focus of the article is on family past, and the continuum from tellable to silenced experiences will be analysed. However, the methodological side of studying unsaid or unsayable things is also touched upon.

A pesar del creciente interés que ha suscitado el estudio de los procesos de migración internacional desde una perspectiva de género, la mayoría de los estudios solamente describe la migración de hombres y mujeres por separado sin tener en cuenta sus interacciones, o reflexiona sobre la cuestión del empoderamiento de la mujer a través de la migración. Sin embargo, la transformación de familias, hogares y comunidades derivada de la migración es mucho más compleja y requiere de un enfoque relacional más detallado y profundo. En este artículo intento contribuir al estudio de este tema a través del análisis de un componente fundamental de la migración internacional, que es la organización de hogares transnacionales. Con objeto de poder aplicar una perspectiva de género en el análisis de la organización de hogares transnacionales, aplicaré el marco teórico gendered geographies of power desarrollado por Sarah Mahler y Patricia Pessar. El presente estudio está basado en un trabajo de campo sobre las diferentes estrategias que utilizan las mujeres (y hombres) centroamericanos que emigran a Belice City para ‘salir adelante'. Sus historias muestran cómo las mujeres migrantes intentan utilizar su condición de mujer transnacional a su favor. A partir de sus experiencias y perspectivas, argumento que el discurso mundial de la migración internacional necesita de un replanteamiento que tome en cuenta la interacción de hombres y mujeres y las geometrías de poder en que se encuentran los migrantes.

Transnational connections, social capital and networks, and family considerations which are found to be central in migrants’ lives and decisions in relation to migration and settlement may not be sufficient for migrant retention when some key expectations are not met. Our qualitative research investigated the migration trajectories and histories of Middle Eastern migrants in Atlantic Canada and Ontario. Our findings revealed that transnational family and ethnic networks provided support to migrants in their initial move to Atlantic Canada. On the other hand, the same connections proved equally instrumental and important when migrants, disappointed with Atlantic Canadian political economy of labour, decided to move to Ontario.

This article centres on the interaction between transnational families, the global labour market and migration policies of receiving nation-states. Transnational families act as hubs of migration decision-making, directed towards individual or collective economic development and social welfare, structured by the family life cycle. This cycle influences family members' global migration patterns, material and emotional exchanges, and care circulation across generations within the transnational family. During the past two decades, globalization has propelled millions of economic migrants from poor sending-nations to seek employment in affluent receiving-nations, notwithstanding national migration policies trending towards tightening border controls. Tracing the interface between transnational families' decentralized migration decision-making and centralized state efforts to deter migration reveals intra-familial material sacrifices and emotional tensions arising between migrant parents and their stay-behind spouses and children. This introduction models temporal and spatial aspects of transnational family decision-making, indicating when and how affluent receiving nation-state's policies on border crossing entry and circular migration may influence the development aspirations, welfare-creation strategies and the ways and means of provisioning family life cycle care needs within transnational families.

In southern China, small-scale factory owners have forged cross-cultural collaborations with transnational brokers, suitcase traders and subcontracted agents, to create the cross-border partnerships that comprise the transnational supply chains on a global scale. In turn, the forging of these cultural and economic links has generated a platform upon which small-scale subcontractors, as well as other agents across the supply chains, call themselves “boss” by taking on the risks and rewards of entrepreneurial self-enterprise, while they embed their economic activities within the global economy.

In the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region, gendered enactments of “bosshood” and other figures of capitalist accumulation are expressed through divergent performances of male mobility, as articulated and expressed through entrepreneurial and masculine “freedom” across various class groups. These enactments, in turn, are linked to specific labour practices, organisation of kin relations, and manipulation of transnational citizenship. The story of Mr. Cai, a forty-something successful real estate investor and owner of several garment factories based in Guangzhou, offers a glimpse into the cultural significance of the “boss” as an aspirational figure in contemporary China. More specifically, the accumulative strategies of Mr. Cai and his family highlight how the scaling of capitalist networks across provincial and national boundaries entails spatial and subjective transformations through which patriarchal figures emerge within transnational families.

Scholarship on transnational families has regularly examined remittances that adults abroad send to children in their country of origin. This paper illuminates another permutation of these processes: family members in Senegal who establish relations with and through children in France through gifts and money. Focusing on relationships between children in Paris and their family members in Dakar, it provides insight into the everyday exchanges through which transnational families attempt to assure the material reproduction of households in Africa. I trace the ways children use Facebook to maintain relationships with relatives in Senegal and examine how adults shape these relations. Focusing specifically on innovative forms of “cross cousin” relationships in the Senegalese diaspora, this paper illustrates how adults create cultural scaffolding around children who may be unaware of the kinship terms for the relationships in which they are implicated. I demonstrate how practices that have permitted Africans to weather economic volatility for centuries are now carried out, in part, through social media. Approaching material circulation and the transmission of cultural values as mutually imbricated processes, I demonstrate how Senegalese selectively reinforce links with certain family members, in efforts to favorably position themselves in socio-economic networks of transnational kin.