The Spatially Ruptured Practices of Migrant Families: A Comparison of Immigrants from El Salvador and the People’s Republic of China

Abstract

This study draws insights from scholarship on immigrant families and transnational migration to examine the multi-local transnational family practices of Salvadoran refugee-migrants in the US and middle-class emigrants from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to Australia. We compare the contexts of exit and reception and state-migrant relations that characterize the two migration flows; explore the elite and popular narratives in which family migration experiences are embedded; and provide a range of family biographies that capture some of the more emblematic long-distance practices and livelihood strategies of transnational families. The article examines three types of border-crossing family practices including long-distance conjugal relations, spatial ruptures in mother-child relationships, and caregiving arrangements that involve shuttling non-working-age members of the family across locations. PRC and Salvadoran migrant families navigate dramatically different institutional and discursive landscapes, which impacts the character and quality of the resources they bring to bear on their long-distance family arrangements. The findings challenge existing conceptualizations of the immigrant family, gender role performances and gender ideologies, and highlight the gendered aspects of the institutional landscapes and discursive narratives in which the livelihood and mobility strategies and long-distance practices of immigrant families are embedded.

The China Challenge : Sino-Canadian Relations in the 21st Century

“…Over the past twenty years we have observed the burgeoning of the literature on Chinese "astronaut" families and "parachute" children, demonstrating how this transnational family form aff ects family relationships and individual members in both positive and negative ways (see Alaggia, Chau, and Tsang 2001, Aye and Guerin 2001, Gardner 2006, Ho 1999, Irving, Benjamin, and Tsang 2000, Lam 1994, Landolt and Da 2005, Man 1995a, McKeown 2000, Ong 1992, Preston, Kobayashi, and Man 2006, Preston, Kobayashi, and Siemiatycki 2006, Pribilsky 2004, Salaff , Shik, and Greve 2008, Siemiatycki and Preston 2007, Skeldon 1994 Tsang et al 2003, Waters 2002, Wong and Ho 2006, and Zhou 1998. However, more recently, the Chinese transnational family has shifted to a pattern in which working-age immigrants leave aging parents in China and also leave, or send back, their young children (see Da 2003, Liu 2008, and Man 2002.…”

Gender, Generations and the Family in International Migration

“…Altogether the very notion of transnational family still seems in itself little more than a heuristic device, given the huge diversity of underlying family structures and, even more so, migration systems (Landolt & Wei Da 2005). Through our exploratory field-work in three cases, we never theless wonder if any relevant commonality may be detected concerning ways of living family life at a distance.…”

Crossing Boundaries to Education: Haitian Transnational Families and the Quest to Raise the Family Up

“…Modern communications technologies, such as cell phones and internet, are not available in many poor, rural areas or may be too costly (Mahler 1998, Pribilsky 2004, Sassen 2000. The ability to travel is limited by economics and geography and in addition may be curtailed by a migrant's legal status or a family's ability to secure necessary visas (Landolt and Da 2005, Parreñas 2005, Pribilsky 2001). …”

“…A transnational perspective is necessary to understand the lives of contemporary immigrants whose lives in the US do not stand apart from the connections to family and community in their homelands, nor from the associated financial obligations, social reciprocities, or political alliances they engender (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc 1995, Glick Schiller and Fouron 2001, Landolt and Da 2005, Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004, Mahler and Pessar 2006. Transnational immigrants live complex and multifaceted lives that weave together aspects of economics, culture, kinship and identity across the two, or perhaps more, countries in which their families reside.…”

“…Coleman (1990) and Putnam (2000) each have argued that migration and its disruption of family and community relationships have a deleterious effect on the social capital of the migrants and their social networks. Others argue that spatial unity is not necessarily a requisite for family support and that a static view of the family limits an understanding of the potential for developing social capital in diverse family forms (Landolt and Da 2005;Parreñas 2005, Evergeti andZontini 2006).…”