The interdependence of migration and family formation has been studied extensively, but studies that consider the embeddedness of this interdependence within gender and class relations are less common. Most existing research on family and migration treats gender and social class as separate determinants of family events or transitions, instead of analyzing how the intersections of both shape full family formation trajectories, defined as all partnership and childbearing statuses throughout an individual life course. We overcome this gap by using an intersectionality framework to analyze trajectories of family formation and migration collected by the Mexican and Latin American Migration projects (1982–2016). Using retrospective information, we reconstruct full family formation and dissolution trajectories (i.e., individuals’ marital statuses and number of children born from ages 15 to 39) for 16,000 individuals and apply sequence and cluster analysis to define a six-category typology of ideal family formation trajectories. Next, we associate this typology with individuals’ sex, age at migration (domestic, international), and educational attainment as a way to measure individuals’ social class position. Our results suggest that the relationship between migration and typical family trajectories depends on the intersection of individuals’ social class and gender. Previous studies have neglected this intersection by overly focusing on the “average” migrant's experience. Migration research must acknowledge and account for migrants’ heterogenous experiences and pay more attention to how intersecting social categories mediate the relationship between migration and other demographic processes.
Scholarly work on international chains of care have highlighted the stratified nature of reproductive work along the lines of gender, social class, race/ethnicity, and cross-national economic inequalities, particularly with regard to childbearing and childrearing tasks. Immigrant women from the global South are taking rising shares of domestic and care workloads in global North countries. Less attention has been devoted to national contexts, particularly from a quantitative perspective. Using large-scale nationally representative data for Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, this work presents a quantitative assessment of fertility and offspring mortality patterns among live-in domestic workers and their employers ( patronas) during the second half of the 20th century. Our results indicate that the historically low and delayed fertility of live-in domestic workers stems from the confluence of socioeconomic disadvantages throughout their life courses, the everyday mobility constraints they face, the physical control exerted over them by their employers, and the expropriation of their daily and life course time by middle- and upper-class families. These results underline the stratified nature of reproduction in the Latin American context and urge scholars, particularly those working with quantitative data, to re-center research questions around the social mechanisms, including power relations, underpinning unequal living conditions and their consequences for the stratification of reproductive tasks. We use this evidence to argue that the increasingly feminized nature of domestic work and the rising trends of socioeconomic inequalities within and between countries render the examination of intersectionality-defined minorities central for a deeper understanding of family change beyond the Latin American context.
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