In transnational families, grandmothers become caregivers to support their loved ones.
In a working class barrio of Managua, Nicaragua’s capital city, lives Angela, a mother to four adult children—two who live with their spouses and families in Managua, and two who have immigrated to the United States. One of Angela’s migrant children, Karla, emigrated in an attempt to rejoin her father, who had left for the United States about a decade prior. Upon Karla’s departure, she left behind her then one-year-old daughter, Laleska, for whom Angela assumed care, thus becoming responsible for her granddaughter’s physical and emotional wellbeing for more than a decade.
The story of Angela’s family is shared by many transnational families. Their experience illustrates the trials of transnational life.
While Angela, who is now in her 50s, finds a sense of purpose in caregiving, it has also been hard work: caring for her granddaughter has proven to be both physically demanding and emotionally trying. For Laleska, separation from her mother over more than a decade was not easy either, though Angela’s carework sustained the tie between Laleska and her mother, a tie made tenuous by absence, distance, and the uncertainty of family reunification, all of which are exacerbated by U.S. immigration policies.
During my time in Nicaragua conducting fieldwork with families like that of Angela and Laleska’s, I also volunteered with Servicio Jesuita para Migrantes (SJM, or Jesuit Migration Service), an NGO spearheading a nationwide campaign to protect and defend the rights of migrants. As part of the campaign, SJM produced a weekly radio program called La Mochila Viajera (The Traveling Backpack), which was designed to raise public awareness about immigration. La Mochila Viajera aired short public service vignettes, designed to raise awareness about the challenges facing Nicaraguan migrants and their families at home and abroad.
I reached out to families, like Angela’s, who were participating in my research study and invited them to share their stories on La Mochila Viajera if they were inclined to do so. Laleska decided this was something she wanted to do, and I escorted her to the radio studio one muggy Monday morning to record her vignette. Laleska was visibly nervous, but also committed to telling her story, as she told me, in order to let other children of migrant parents know they were not alone in the challenges they faced.
TRANSLATION: "Hi, I’m Laleska. I am twelve years old. I’ve lived with my grandmother since I was one year old because my mom left, for economic reasons, to the United States. Since then, I only see her in December. But for three years, I haven’t been able to see her. We just communicate by phone. Truthfully, I don’t like talking with her because I feel bad about not having her near."
Laleska was so enthusiastic, in fact, that when I took her home later that day, she told her grandmother Angela all about the recording studio and the radio program, and encouraged her grandmother to tell her story as part of the radio campaign. Angela agreed and, a week later, I accompanied her and another grandmother in my study, Marbeya, into the radio studio to record an interview about their experiences as grandmother caregivers in transnational families. An excerpt of that interview opens Care Across Generations, my ethnographic account of grandmother caregivers and transnational families in Nicaragua, and illustrates how these women experience the impacts of migration, both as mothers of daughters who emigrate and as caregivers for grandchildren.
TRANSLATION: "Well, in my case, like Marbeya said, emotionally this affects you a lot, right, because we know that distance, well, really affects us a lot, both the girl [Laleska] and me."
The story of Angela’s family is shared by many transnational families. Their experience illustrates the trials of transnational life—the anxiety, stress, and uncertainty commonly felt by families whose members straddle national borders and are unsure what the future might hold. Angela’s family story also underscores another common feature of transnational families, however: the importance of intergenerational care in sustaining families divided across borders and separated by time . Women of the grandmother generation often assume care for children after mothers emigrate in migrant-sending countries like Nicaragua. In the face of transnational migration and family separation, these women, las abuelas, become mothers again for another generation of children. As such, they provide care essential for children’s wellbeing and for family survival.
At a time when politicians are considering terminating family-based immigration and further restricting options for authorized entry into the United States, it is important to consider how U.S. immigration policy impacts families in migrant-sending regions such as Central America. Since World War II, U.S. immigration policy has favored facilitating the reunification of families. The visa process currently in place reflects the value that the United States has placed on the family as an integral unit of society, and policymakers across partisan lines have, in the past, supported the general idea that it is in society's best interest that families, especially parents and children, but also extended kin, reside together.
However, in practice, the failure to pass comprehensive, national immigration reform essentially since the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (which was controversial when it was signed into law) has left the U.S. immigration bureaucracy under-resourced, leading to a backlog of family visa petitions. In fact, wait times for family reunification visas range from several years to several decades, with longer waits for extended kin relations. These long waits have consequences for family members of migrants in home countries; among these are uncertainty, worry, and anxiety. Having so few options for authorized entry intersects with violent and unstable conditions in origin countries, which leads to increased numbers of unaccompanied minor children entering the United States. Surrogate caregivers in migrant-sending families face these challenges by using their caregiving as a resource to support family togetherness and uphold the wellbeing of children awaiting the possibility of rejoining their migrant parents abroad.
In the face of transnational migration and family separation, these women, las abuelas, become mothers again for another generation of children.
In 2009, Angela's daughter Karla had begun negotiating her way through this complex immigration bureaucracy in order to bring her daughter, Laleska, to the United States. Uncertainty and confusion surrounded this process. At one point, when Angela thought that the approval of Laleska’s residency petition was imminent, she began preparing herself and her granddaughter for Laleska’s departure. Yet time continued to pass, suspending Angela and her granddaughter in the ambivalent uncertainty of immigration proceedings. Nearly a year later, when Karla informed her mother that she had finally secured Laleska’s visa, Angela put her granddaughter on a plane to Miami. The decision to let her granddaughter rejoin her mother in the United States was fraught for Angela, who had previously watched her husband and two of her children emigrate. This time, Angela worried about her granddaughter's welfare as an immigrant child in the United States and she also feared she would lose the close bond she had formed with Laleska over more than a decade of close caregiving. Ultimately, however, sending her granddaughter away to live with her mother was a personal sacrifice that Angela made in order to support the reunification and solidarity of her family.
These particular cultural values, sacrifice and solidarity, motivate many grandmothers who provide care across generations and borders in Nicaraguan transnational families. Solidarity, a cultural ethos of togetherness in the face of external threat, has a strong connection to the Sandinista revolutionary period of the 1980s. Sacrifice is a related ethos, but is specifically gendered—women situate their carework as essential to sustain family unity and wellbeing, and making personal sacrifices for the good of the family is part and parcel of that work. Together, solidarity and sacrifice motivate grandmother care and sustain transnational families in the face of the long periods of separation and uncertainty provoked by immigration policies in destination countries like the United States. By focusing on these women’s experiences, we see how intergenerational care is a resource for the wellbeing of transnational families, especially in a period of restrictive immigration policy and the uncertainty that creates for members of transnational families across the globe.
having family that support and care about you is one of biggest blessings in one's life especially in difficult situations we need them to be behind us.
Posted by: family support | September 13, 2017 at 01:45 PM