International labour migration creates new relational, emotional and social challenges for migrating parents and the children staying behind. In Ukraine, children who grow up in a transnational household are not only a concern for the individual family, however, but also a phenomenon that is thoroughly discussed in the public sphere. In this article the author analyses Ukrainian media, as well as popular and individual 'texts' on transnational childhood and child care at a distance, and argues that there are two diverging models of care that underlie personal narrative texts and public texts: care as fulfilment of a child's material needs, and care that necessitates physical closeness and constant face-toface interaction. He also identifies diverging perspectives in the various texts on what are considered adequate alternative carers, and on what the relational and social consequences are of the separation of migrating parents from their children.
In a globalized world where mobility and movement is at its essence, the movement of viruses paradoxically causes a preoccupation with boundaries, containment, and control over borders, and thus keeping the “dangerous” outside separated from the “safe” inside. Through a qualitative thematic and frame analysis of news articles published on 12 Ukrainian news sites, I found that Ukrainian labour migrants conceptually constitute a challenge to such a clear-cut spatial organization in a time of a pandemic. Labour migrants are part of the national “we,” but their presence in the dangerous outside excludes them from the “imagined immunity.” This ambiguity is evident in the way labour migrants were portrayed during the first months of the outbreak in Ukraine. Initially, Ukrainian labour migrants were depicted as a potential danger, and then blamed for bringing the virus back home. However, the framing of the labour migrants as a danger is only part of the story, and the image of a scapegoat was eventually replaced with images of an economic resource and a victim. Thus, Ukrainian labour migrants have been the object of vilification, heroization, as well as empathy during the various phases of the outbreak. I would argue that these shifting frames are connected to the ambiguous conceptualization of Ukrainian labour migrants in general.
Chapter five traces the experiences of Paco's friend Rogelio Martínez Sernaand that of his male peersacross the US-Mexico borderlands. Chávez-García argues that these men crossed into the United States not only to deter impoverishment and hardship but, more importantly, to achieve an economically, personally, and emotionally stable family life. This final chapter opposes Chávez-García's initial assessment that these letters simply provided a window into broader social, political, and economic circumstances beyond their control in shaping their choices. Instead, Chávez-García illustrates how Rogelio and his male acquaintances were neither victims nor passive agents in the process of gaining employment and other opportunities. Their use of humor, creativity, and resilience afforded them opportunities to cope with larger structural systems that they otherwise could not dictate. Moreover, Chávez-García notes that their oppression toward women, women's bodies, gender, and female sexuality illustrates another dimension of agency that these men possessed when negotiating their lives in the United States.This study is important because, as Chávez-García notes, few histories on twentieth-century Mexico have examined migrants' firsthand personal experiences in the United States. More than that, however, it creates new dominions of archival sources. The book demonstrates how new generations of historians, with access to personal family archives, can shed light on matters that dominant and traditional archival sources simply lack. Finally, Chávez-García's work provides a rudimentary outline for curating family archives within a larger historical framework.
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