While the United States is more traditionally considered as a destination for migrants from Latin America, beginning in the latter decades of the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first century various European countries have also become destinations. There are Peruvians and Ecuadorans living in Spain; Bolivians, Colombians, and Ecuadorans living in England. In these countries, as in the US, immigrant families are confronted with different gender ideologies and they experience transformations in domestic gender relations. Geographer Cathy McIlwaine (2008: 11–12) offers an analysis of these transformations from the perspective of the immigrants themselves. Catalina, a migrant from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, living in England, told her: “I think that here women have equality, they can do the same things as men without any problems. This is very different from where we are, from where women are for the home and there they must stay.” Another migrant, Elizabet, who arrived in London from Quito, Ecuador, stated: “Here, men and women are both in charge, both work, earn, spend, and go out equally.” Carla, from Ecuador, reported that “there’s hardly any machismo [here]; men have to do the same things as women, they have to help each other out.” And finally, Sebastian, from Palmira, Colombia observed that in his home country he would “burn water . . . first my mother did everything for me and then my wife and I just went along with it. But not now, when I went to work in the coffee shop I learnt a lot. Now I cook, I make some really good dishes, I look after the children, sometimes I wash the dirty clothes, I mow the lawn . . . and I like doing these things, I like to keep the house in good order. In Colombia, I did nothing.”
Across the Atlantic, within a community that has grown up in the city of Philadelphia, Vietnamese refugees have made similar observations about the impact of immigration on family life (Kibria 1993: 4–6). Binh, a man who left Vietnam in 1981 with his three sons, while his wife remained behind to look after their aged parents, found a job as a janitor soon after his arrival in the United States. But an injury kept him out of work and relying sometimes on public assistance. He also found himself doing the laundry and the cooking and fending off his sons’ complaints about the food he prepared. He felt sad and expressed the most regret about his sons and how they had changed. They had become Americanized and no longer respected him or listened to him. Lien, a young woman who left Vietnam under the guardianship of an aunt, first arrived in Hawaii, but eventually joined her brother who was living in Philadelphia. Her brother was living in a one-room apartment and working in a restaurant. Lien went to school. Her brother began to beat her every day when she came home from school and eventually she left him to live with some friends and their parents. After a few months, however, she dropped out of school to marry a Vietnamese-American man she had met and the young couple moved into an apartment shared with three of her husband’s brothers.
The Latin American migrants and Vietnamese refugees described above provide insight into how family and gender relations are impacted by geographical mobility and by living and working in a country culturally and socially distinct from one’s own. Immigrant women in particular, through their participation in the labor force, make important economic contributions to the household and this in turn may give them a greater sense of power and autonomy within the family, thereby altering traditional gendered domestic hierarchies. But the kinds of jobs that immigrant women do are often poorly paid and lack benefits and hence in some cases may in fact yield little in the way of equality and independence. In many immigrant families women bear a larger burden of childcare and housework and therefore juggle these responsibilities with waged work – experiencing what feminist scholars have long referred to as the “double-day.” But in other immigrant families, men begin to engage in household tasks that they would never have done in their home countries. Thus, it is important to explore how immigration transforms masculine identity and status, not only within the family but also in relation to gender ideologies and specific class, racial, and legal hierarchies in the country of immigration. This chapter focuses a gendered lens on the immigrant family. It is guided by broader theoretical questions such as: is migration disempowering or empowering to men and/or women within their families; are gender roles and gender ideologies (ideas about masculinity and femininity) changed in the immigrant context and, if so, how; what impact does migration have on social and intimate relationships within households, including relationships of conflict and violence?
The chapter also focuses on the immigrant family in a transnational context, and particularly on forms of transnational parenting that have often redefined ideas about the meanings of motherhood and fatherhood.1 Anthropologist Steven Vertovec (2010: 3) has argued that “transnationalism has become one of the fundamental theoretical ways of understanding contemporary migrant practices across the multi-disciplinary field of migration studies.”2 Transnationalism highlights the fundamental social, economic, political, and cultural connections between sending and receiving societies. It situates global population movements in relationship to the broader circulation of commodities, technology, and capital. And perhaps most importantly, it captures the social process whereby migrants and their families operate in interconnected social fields that transgress geographic, political, and cultural borders (Glick Schiller, Basch, and Szanton Blanc 1992: ix).
Recently, scholars have called for the “engendering of transnationalism” – that is, exploring how gender (and the hierarchies and inequalities associated with it) is constructed and reconstructed in transnational social space and analyzing similarities and differences in how men and women participate in transnational social fields. Men and women may, for example, experience different impacts on their social status as a result of migration, leading them to develop divergent attitudes toward their homeland and the country of immigration. To capture the complexity of an engendered transnationalism, Mahler and Pessar (2001) have developed a theoretical framework which they label “gendered geographies of power.” By this phrasing they intend to emphasize the nature of “gendered identities and relations when conducted and negotiated across international borders [according to] multiple axes of difference [and] across many sociospatial scales – from the body to the globe” (Mahler and Pessar 2006: 42). Important to their analysis is the question of agency – what kind of power and control do men and women, respectively, have over their own movements and activities in transnational space and what agency accrues to those who are left behind who are equally part of the families constructed by means of transnational practices, including the transmission of social and economic remittances.
For many immigrant women of the past, especially those who entered as wives and mothers, immigration was disempowering. Uprooted from their village communities and from extensive kinship networks that these afforded, these women found themselves living in small tenement apartments and often unable or forbidden to leave their households or the few local streets in their neighborhoods. They were confronted with American social reformers who contributed to the process of “institutionalizing social inequality between women, especially by nationality/race/ethnicity and class and between women and men in households and families” (Friedman-Kasaba 1996: 186). And yet as immigration historian Donna Gabaccia (1994: 68) has pointed out, immigrant children in turn-of-the-twentieth-century families viewed their mothers as powerful.
Children described immigrant mothers as collectors of wages, as organizers of expenditures and everyday life, as engagers of their help in domestic chores and industrial production, as dispensers of discipline and punishment, and as women who rewarded children with food, affection, small gifts and personal services. Immigrant mothers spent little “quality time” with their children, yet fostered emotionally close ties to them.
These immigrant mothers controlled domestic earnings, doling out an allowance to men rather than men providing a household allowance to their wives. Working daughters generally handed over weekly wages to mothers and retained little for themselves. By contrast, sons were accorded more freedom including the freedom to keep much of what they earned.
All of these contradictions reflect a deeper contrast between the private sphere and the public face of the family. Thus, writing about Chinese families in San Francisco in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historian Judy Yung has argued that immigrant women offered a submissive image in public but ruled at home. “As homemakers, wage earners, and culture bearers, [Chinese women were] indispensable partners of their husbands” (Yung 1995: 77). Most of these women, upon coming to America, were liberated from the traditional joint families of China where they were dominated by their parents-in-law. Any number of theoretical questions about the relationship between gender and power and between domestic space and public space can be informed by an examination of the gender relations within immigrant families who entered the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
During the third wave of immigration, as indicated in the previous chapter, more single than married women worked for wages outside the home and overall the rate of female waged work was low (20 percent in 1900) by comparison with the end of the twentieth century (60 percent) (Foner 1999: 96). Married women, particularly within the Italian and Jewish immigrant communities, took in piece work or boarders and hence were able to earn money and care for their children within a single social space. A report from 1911 indicates that more than half of Jewish households had boarders (cited in Foner 1999: 99). There is little evidence that husbands contributed much to the management of the household and childcare. This remained the woman’s sphere. But historian Donna Gabaccia also suggests that because immigrant men often earned so little, it is likely that few of them defined their masculinity exclusively in relation to their breadwinner role (p. 65) especially by comparison with the American middle-class men, many of whom experienced the shattering of self-esteem during the Great Depression.
Gender ideologies impacted immigrant family life in the US in myriad ways. Historian Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (1973) argues, based on research on Italian immigrant families in Buffalo, that women preferred occupations that did not strain traditional family relations so that Old World family values could continue to function.
The mother’s roles as arbiter of household organization and tasks and as disciplinarian and child-rearer were reinforced by her economic position as manager of the domestic undertaking, be it artificial flower-making, basting, or sewing. Because she still had not become, in the strict sense of the term, a wage-earner, she presented no clear threat to her husband’s authority and power.
(Yans-McLaughlin 1973: 143)
Further, the behavior of immigrant women, especially in Italian families but among some other immigrant groups as well, was closely scrutinized and the comings and goings of unmarried daughters was monitored. Parents in many immigrant communities kept close watch not only on their daughters’ places of employment but also on their courtships, in an effort to prevent premarital pregnancy. Even daughters who earned enough to be able to live independently generally remained at home until marriage (Gabaccia 1994: 69, 70).
Historian Robert Orsi (1985), writing about the Italians of Harlem during the early part of the twentieth century, describes a domus-centered society focused on home and family. Marriage was viewed as a union of two domuses. The father ritually presided over the domus and particularly at Sunday dinner when everyone gathered. And members of the domus surrounded it “with a dense screen of privacy, refusing to allow any public expression of its inner life” (Orsi 1985: 102). Oldest sons had a lot of authority, sometimes more so than fathers. This often stemmed from the close relationship they had with their mothers who were powerful figures in the household and responsible for upholding the traditional mores. “Mothers were the disciplinarians of the family, either meting out punishment themselves or instructing their husbands or older sons to administer it. They controlled the family finances, and the various members of the household were expected to hand their paychecks over to them” (Orsi 1985: 133).
The Italian immigrant domus was also a place of conflict, particularly across generations. Italian immigrant parents demanded respect and deference from their children and they were most concerned that their children were losing their culture. They worried about what their children were exposed to in the public schools, on the city streets, and even in the workplace (Ewen 1985). And they worried about how the state might intrude on domestic life. Broadly speaking, Americans of the time considered immigrant childrearing practices to be particularly strict; but they also were capable of charging immigrant mothers with neglect of their children who often played outside unattended (Gabaccia 1994: 66). Italians feared too much Americanization and the lax morality of American society and hence subjected their children to “relentless, demanding pressure” to maintain the traditions and values of the domus (Orsi 1985: 109). This pressure was particularly intense for daughters within a community that staked its reputation on the morality of its women (p. 135). “A woman who dated more than one man was considered frivolous and irresponsible, if not worse; likewise, if a couple dated four or five times and did not get engaged . . . both the man and the woman – but especially the woman – were in danger of doing permanent harm to their reputations” (Orsi 1985: 116).
Some of these gendered dimensions of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Italian immigrant family were equally present in other immigrant families of the time. For example, within French Canadian families that settled in Central Falls, Rhode Island, fathers, daughters and sons worked outside the home, largely in the textile mills, while widows, wives, and mothers worked at home. Daughters handed over their earnings to their mothers, who used it to help run the household. Rose Forcier, whose story was recorded as part of a University of Rhode Island Oral History project, explained that her mother never worked. “In them days very few mothers worked. They stayed home and did their cooking and laundry and all that stuff. We used to help at home too, when we’d come back and at night we used to help with the ironing but then we used to wear so many aprons and petticoats at that time” (Lamphere 1987: 141). This gendered division of labor was equally characteristic of English, Scottish, Irish, and Polish families in the area, although there was some variation from one group to another regarding the extent to which housewives also took in boarders to help supplement the household income. The presence of working daughters in these households did not appear to undermine male authority. “Daughters developed their own autonomous sphere at work and many participated in strikes and other types of workplace militancy as the twentieth century unfolded . . . Only with the advent of the wage-earning wife and mother have substantial domestic transformations emerged” (Lamphere 1987: 257). The wage-earning wife was more characteristic of the families that immigrated as part of the post-1965 so-called “fourth wave” of immigration initiated by the Immigration and Nationality Act.
The fourth wave of immigration is characterized by dramatic changes in the composition of the immigrant population entering the US. No longer are they predominantly from eastern and southern Europe; rather, they are economic migrants and refugees coming from Latin America, Asia, and most recently Africa. Negotiations and conflicts surrounding gender roles and relations within the immigrant family have been heightened for these fourth-wave immigrants, by comparison with their counterparts of the third wave, largely because married immigrant women have increasingly entered the labor force. Some immigrant women, as indicated in the previous chapter, were recruited for professional positions; others easily found work in the growing service economy. The need to work outside the home has often altered the scripts for who does what and when and how husbands and wives, and sons and daughters, interact within the family context.
Grasmuck and Pessar (1991), based on research among Dominicans in New York City, were among the first to draw attention to changing gender relations within the late twentieth-century immigrant family and what these changes might mean for the empowerment of immigrant women in particular. Families in the Dominican Republic are most commonly nuclear and formal authority rests with the senior male head of household. The male patriarch is the primary, if often the sole breadwinner in the family and represents the family to the outside world. By contrast, a woman’s place is in the home. Men have more freedom in appropriating household income for their own use and women are taught to accept these expenditures, and sometimes the extramarital affairs that accompany them, with resignation in order to avoid marital discord.
In the immigrant context, more equitable household arrangements – in relation to household authority, the allocation of housework tasks, and budgetary decisions – are often necessary. This is generally linked to the enhanced breadwinning roles of Dominican immigrant women. In the Collado household, for example, Tomás prepares dinner, claiming
that he would never be found in the kitchen, let alone cooking, in the Dominican Republic. But, he added, there his wife would not be working outside the house; he would be the breadwinner. Tomás explained that since he made his living in the United States as a chef, it seemed natural that his contribution to running the household should include cooking at home. He joked that if he wore out more pairs of socks running around in the kitchen it was all right because his wife worked in the garment trade and she could apply her skills at home by darning his socks. Tomás and his wife said that soon after they were both working they realized that “if both worked outside the home, both should work inside, as well. Now that we are in the United States we should adopt American’s ways.”
(Grasmuck and Pessar 1991: 152)
In Dominican immigrant households, income is pooled and decisions about how to spend household resources are shared. There appears to be a correlation between the amount of money a woman earns for the household and the extent to which a husband involves himself in household tasks. However, these changes may be more in the social practices within the domestic sphere than in actual gender ideology and norms. Dominicans talk about men “helping” at home and women “helping” to earn money outside the home. Ultimately, ideas about primary responsibilities may not have changed. As Pessar (1995: 53) has noted, none of her research participants “went so far as to suggest that men could or should act as women’s equals in the domestic sphere.” One woman in her study put it this way: “I know of cases where the man assumes the housekeeping and childcare responsibilities. But I don’t believe a man can be as good as a woman; she is made for the home and the man is made to work” (Pessar 1995: 53).
While gender parity exists in many of these Dominican immigrant households, and while many women enjoy the independence that earning their own wages yields, some of these families experience tensions and conflicts that in some cases have resulted in disbanded unions. Fourteen of the fifty-five women interviewed by Pessar (1995: 56) indicated that conflicts over domestic authority and social practices were major factors disrupting their marriages. In some cases, women find that men are using their salary for personal expenditures and yet expect their wives to contribute disproportionately to large household expenses. In other cases, Dominican women precede their husbands as migrants and the long separation leads to suspicions of marital infidelity. In still other cases, the challenges that men sometimes face in finding employment results in arguments. Pessar (1995: 59–60) concludes that immigrant life in the US may provide Dominican women with new economic, social, and cultural resources that are empowering, allowing them to place more demands on their spouses and giving them the freedom to walk out of a union when a husband refuses to be more supportive. However, this empowerment comes with a cost. “When household bonds are severed, the goal of the migration project – social advancement for the family – often falters, because the individual resources of single members, especially women, are insufficient to sustain it. The newfound autonomy of many immigrant women may, in the end, lead to poverty.”
In addition to the challenge to gender values and norms between husbands and wives, there are also conflicts that emerge inter-generationally as Dominican youth contest dimensions of parental authority and Dominican parents, just like Italian parents of a previous period of immigration, bemoan the excessive “Americanization” of their children. The male household head’s role as the voice of and representative for the family vis-à-vis the outside world is often undermined by migration. Children often assume this role because they have a better command of the English language. They interpret and sometimes even negotiate for their parents. They help them fill out forms or arrange for benefits. Parents also sometimes feel that American institutions – schools, the police, child welfare agencies – undermine their parental authority. Ideas about discipline vary from one country to another and hence what might be appropriate in one context is considered child abuse in another.3 One Dominican man expressed his frustration in the following way: “There is no respect for the father in this country. Back home, just let my son pick up the phone and call the police. Let them come. It wouldn’t matter. There they know it is the father who has the ultimate authority” (Pessar 1995: 65).
The issues that confront Dominican families also confront other post-1965 newcomers to the United States. In their research on Mexican families in the US and Mexico, sociologists Manuel Barajas and Elvia Ramirez (2007) critique a simplistic “home-host” dichotomy that constructs the sending society as a site of patriarchal oppression and the host society as the locus of greater equality. Their study reveals that while Mexican women in the US report more extensive familial authority and equality in decision making than do their counterparts in Michoacán, Mexico, they also report greater burdens associated with waged work and household chores. Thus, neither migration, nor employment, nor women’s greater authority within the home have altered the traditional division of labor for Mexican immigrant women in the US and in fact they experience a greater “double burden” than do their counterparts in Mexico for whom work and domestic spaces are integrated.
There are also significant differences between gender ideals and practices that vary by age and location, with older women in the US as well as women in Mexico tending to uphold ideas of male dominance to a greater extent than younger cohorts. In the immigrant context, young women, when talking about their parents, drew distinctions between the authority that a mother has over her children and the authority that a husband has over his wife. In the Michoacán context, young women talked about mothers training their children to defer to fathers. The following response illustrates this perspective:
When I want to go out, I ask my mom, and she says, “Ask your father for permission, and if he lets you go out, well go.” Both decide, but first we ask for permission from our dad, and if he lets us go, she also lets us. And if my dad doesn’t give us permission, then she won’t either.
(Barajas and Ramirez 2007: 377)
Mexican immigrant women in an age cohort between thirty and forty-nine describe more egalitarian and sharing relationships with their spouses. A similar response was characteristic of women in this cohort in Mexico as well. And yet it is here that the differences between ideology and practice are most apparent – people talk the talk of gender equality but in practice men still want to exercise authority. Thus, one woman reporting on those who return to the village for vacations made the following observation: “Even though the women want to order them . . . and the men support women’s liberation . . . But [men from the US] are as sexist as those here. When they come, the woman stays inside the home, while they are out in fiestas . . . It is the same machismo” (p. 377).
Barajas and Ramirez conclude that their research contradicts the assumption that Mexican immigrant women are more liberated from patriarchy than are their counterparts in the Mexico. Instead these changes are more nuanced and vary by age cohort in both places. That said in Michoacán ideals of male dominance are stronger, something that can be correlated with the possibility of men fulfilling their breadwinning roles – access to jobs may be better in the US and hence the articulated ideology may be less necessary to sustain masculinity. Ultimately, these authors suggest their findings “underscore the continuing significance of gender inequality for Mexican families across borders . . . the seeming empowerment of women in the United States is more illusory than substantive” (p. 385). Further, it is important to note that the unequal division of labor within the household is something that is also sustained by American cultural ideologies that accord less value to women’s productive and reproductive roles. Immigrant families operate within this context.
Sociologist Cecilia Menjívar (1999), based on her research among Central American immigrant families in California, also challenges the broad notion that waged employment generally empowers women and enhances their status in the family. She views the impacts as uneven and varied between families of indigenous Guatemalan background and those of Ladino Guatemalan or Salvadoran background. Women themselves report that they earn more here but in El Salvador or Guatemala they may have worked less. And even when women are the main providers, this does not necessarily translate to more authority in the household and in some cases it results in negative consequences. Menjívar (1999: 610) quotes one Salvadoran research participant:
The Salvadoran man continues to be macho here . . . The man becomes dependent on the woman. The woman goes to work, not the man. But men bring machismo with them and the woman takes on more responsibility . . . When men see themselves like that they drink and that brings a lot of problems home . . . The women end up suffering a lot because the men let their frustrations out by beating the women. I have not seen a family that is in good shape yet.
Menjívar notes that these tensions are not as common in indigenous Guatemalan households where the men view their wives’ employment as an opportunity for both of them to get ahead. She also emphasizes that Ladina Guatemalan women aspire to exit the work force once a more secure middle-class status is achieved. To Menjívar they expressed their confusion over why the women who employ them continue to work outside the home. By contrast, the indigenous women viewed work as part of life. They are not working because their husbands are economically vulnerable, but because it is an expectation, part of their understanding of gender relations and responsibilities. As a consequence, Ladina women perceive greater change in the allocation of tasks within the household than do indigenous women whose husbands already helped out at home in their home country.4
What is important about this particular study is that it attunes us to class variations in gender ideologies in the home countries; these variations challenge a simple dichotomy between “traditional” and “modern” or “domestic” and “public” – the former the sphere of women, the latter the sphere of men. While in many places men are culturally constructed as the breadwinner, this is not always the case, and certainly in many places the culturally meaningful distinction between household and street (casa and rua) as gendered spheres has itself undergone transformation prior to an experience of emigration. The “machismo” that has been associated with these gendered differences survives in many parts of Latin America and hence is challenged in the immigrant context, but in other places, machismo is no longer a significant dimension of gender relations, often having changed in association with the spread of evangelical Christianity (Santos 2012).
The issues that are raised in relation to Latino immigrant families in the US are equally characteristic of Asian immigrant families. Korean immigrant women, for example, are beginning to challenge the gender inequality and unequal division of labor within the family, although patriarchal ideologies are sometimes hard if not impossible to transform. In the US, married Korean women have much higher rates of labor force participation than do women in Korea (Min 1998). Many are employed in a family business and work long hours. This inevitably has an impact on domestic life. Sociologist In-Sook Lim (1997) offers four major conclusions regarding gender and family relations within Korean immigrant families. First, husbands feared the challenge to their authority at home, whether it came as a result of their wives being acculturated to American values with regard to gender relations in the home or from their contributions to the economic stability of the family through waged work. Several husbands referred to the greater assertiveness and self-expression of wives. Second, while wives report making some attempt to change male dominance in the home, they also report not wanting to totally subvert family hierarchy. This is best reflected in the following comment by one Korean immigrant wife: “I don’t think it is desirable for a woman to henpeck her husband even though she works outside the home. I want men to lead everything in his family. I think the authority of a family head needs to be secure” (Lim 1997: 40). Third, Korean immigrant women who engaged in waged work do ask more of husbands in sharing domestic responsibilities, something that differentiates them from their counterparts in Korea. Lim (1997: 42) refers to this, however, as a “politics of appeal” rather than outright demand. Doing anything to damage a man’s self-respect is not, in the view of these immigrant women, in the best interests of the family. Many, especially those of older cohorts, are in fact resigned to the fact that they will always do more work at home despite their major economic contributions outside the home. This resignation is shaped by patriarchal beliefs regarding sacrifice for the family as well as by a desire to avoid marital conflict.5 It is also often reinforced by the presence of mothers or mothers-in-law in the home who often support the more traditional division of labor within the household. Finally, the reluctance or resistance to domestic labor on the part of men is matched by Korean women who delay or cut corners. Thus one Korean woman said:
In Korea it might have been absurd for me to treat my husband to a humble dish when he came home from work. However, in the US, with the excuse that I am busy, it is natural for me to make my family a simple dinner. Under these circumstances I work as much as my husband does, there is no other way to do this.
(Lim 1997: 48)
Class can be an important factor shaping gender relations in Asian immigrant families. This is quite apparent in the research of sociologist Sheba George (2005) on Indian Christian families from the state of Kerala. Within these families, there are four different patterns for the household division of labor associated with whether the man or the woman is the primary migrant, what kinds of employment they pursue in the US, and what kind of access to alternative childcare is available (George 2005: 77ff.). One pattern involves traditional male-headed households, where men make financial decisions and women remain responsible for all other domestic tasks including childcare. In these families, the men are the primary migrants and have high status in the US labor market. Women have lower or equal status, often stay at home to take care of children, or the children are left in Kerala with relatives or at boarding school. These households have made the fewest changes in relation to lived experience and gender ideologies.
A second pattern is the “forced-participation household” which in many ways is similar to the traditional household but with exceptions. In these families women are the primary migrants and have high status in the US labor market (largely as nurses) and men have lower status relative to their jobs in India or to the jobs of their wives in the US. Couples in these cases often work alternate shifts, and while women continue to do much of the housework, men are forced to contribute to childcare, and some childcare help is available either in the US or in Kerala. Men retain control of financial decision-making. In these households, unlike traditional households, there is a dissonance between gender ideology and practice. Women in these households deal with this dissonance “by adopting the gender strategy of ignoring the reality of their relative economic success. By not knowing how much they made and by not signing their paychecks, these women consciously chose to play down what threatened their traditional ideology and their husbands” (p. 98). As George puts it, they “do gender” in the home to overcompensate for their breadwinner status (p. 115).
A third pattern is the partnership, and relatively egalitarian households. In these households women are the primary migrants and have high status in the US labor market while husbands have lower status relative to their jobs in India and to their wives’ jobs in the US. Men participate in housework and childcare, couples work alternate shifts, there is little outside help for childcare, and financial decisions are shared. Men do not claim headship of the household, despite being raised with this ideology in Kerala. George notes that in these households men and women are more dependent on one another, “seem to be better friends” (p. 99), and model their behavior on the US structural and cultural context. These household have made the most change in relation to the fit between lived experience and gender ideologies.
The final pattern, more anomalous, is the female-led household. Here women are the primary migrants and have high status in the US labor market. Men are absent, dependent, or unreliable. Women are mostly alone, perform all household labor, and relatives and the community provide some support for childcare. If a husband is present, relationships are strained and the women reject a gender ideology that does not correspond to their experience. They continue to live “with the contradictions of female-led households, where they were not socially supported and not rewarded for their headship, as were the men in traditional families” (p. 114).
As in many Latino families, the behavior of daughters in Asian immigrant families is more closely monitored – immigrant parenting, in other words, is highly gendered. This gendered parenting is perhaps best articulated in Yen Le Espiritu’s (2001) study of Filipino Americans. Espiritu argues that the “virtuous Filipina daughter is partially constructed on the conception of white woman as sexually immoral.” This emphasis on female morality (which includes not only sexual restraint but also dedication to family) is one way in which those groups that are dominated politically and economically can define themselves as superior in relation to the dominant group. However, this strategy, in this case promoting Filipina chastity, also serves to reinforce “masculinist and patriarchal power in the name of a greater ideal of national/ethnic self-respect” (p. 417). Young Filipina women experience restrictions in their mobility, independence, and personal decision-making. They are forbidden to date, to stay out late or spend the night with friends, or to go on out-of-town trips. Their behavior is closely monitored while that of their brothers is not. Sometimes this translates into allowing sons to apply to a distant college while daughters are encouraged to apply closer to home if not to also continue living at home rather than on campus. Young Filipina women express both frustration toward and understanding of the “policing” of their bodies. Sometimes they rebel, and sometimes they vow to develop more egalitarian relationships when they marry and have their own families. As one research participant put it:
I see myself as very traditional in upbringing but I don’t see myself as constricting on my children one day and I wouldn’t put the gender roles on them. I wouldn’t lock them into any particular way of behaving.
(Espiritu 2001: 435)
What is most intriguing about the research on immigrants in the US is the effort to link gendered and generational dynamics within the micro-structural context of the family to larger macrostructural factors of culture, race, and class as well as to the institutional contexts of American society. These connections are particularly important for one of the most recent immigrant populations, Somalis. Somalis have the highest poverty rate of any population living in the US (51% living in poverty compared with 13% for the total US population). Somalian families are patriarchal and the household is perceived to be headed by a male breadwinner. But, as sociologist Cawo Mohamed Abdi (2014) points out, based on research among Somalian families in Minnesota, this understanding comes up against welfare and government assistance programs which tend to undermine the economic position of men and generate conflict within the family.6 Welfare checks are issued to women and this upsets domestic life. As one Somali man put it:
The person with the highest share of the company is the CEO. If we say each has an equal share, no one will rule. What will that lead to? Chaos! People are depending on a third party. If there is some outside source of income, then there is no respect between the couple. If you are fed and provided for, then your attachment and respect to each other diminishes. The man is told “you don’t provide for this family, so don’t be arrogant.”
(Abdi 2014: 467)
Somali men feel emasculated in the US, describing a situation where the economic and cultural foundations of their authority is undermined by their own precarious employment, by their wives’ employment, and/or by public assistance programs directed toward women and children. Welfare, claims Abdi (p. 469), is viewed as a symbolic menace by men but as a necessity by women although they recognize as well that it upsets family hierarchies. Somali men support the perpetuation of traditional and Islamic forms of conflict resolution, and are suspicious of 911 as a “non-Muslim” system that breaks up families and undermines their authority. Somali women often go along with this because they feel pressures from the broader Somali community to accede to patriarchal ideologies. Further, increasing hostilities toward Muslims in the host society turn them inward and result in gender bargains that limit the options Somali women have to resist their subordination in the US.
The challenges to culturally constructed ideas of masculinity and fatherhood that result from menial or under employment, is a topic that has been explored for other immigrant and refugee populations (Austin and Este 2001; Este and Tachble 2009). Deborah Boehm (2008b) describes the loss of autonomy and erosion of masculinity (if not feminization) that is associated with a transition for Mexican immigrant men from managing their own farm in Mexico to washing dishes and bussing tables in the US. And the masculinity of those who do not migrate is also called into question because migration is what is expected of men. Meanwhile the women who join their husbands in the US are often doing waged work for the first time in their lives and this results in altered family roles and in “many negotiations, controls, conflicts, alliances, strategies and maneuvers that coincide to construct gender subjectivities in a transnational space” (Boehm 2008b: 20).
In a somewhat more nuanced approach, Chad Broughton (2008) discusses the emergence of three different, but not necessarily mutually exclusive, masculine stances toward migration and the changes brought on Mexico by processes of neoliberalism: traditionalist, adventurer, and breadwinner. Broughton describes these as “negotiated, gendered approaches for meeting instrumental and identity goals related to work, family, and place, and they are often deployed strategically at different stages in the life course and in hybridized combinations” (pp. 573–574). The traditionalist view places a high moral priority on family protection and cohesion, commitment to village and nation, abiding by the law, and sustaining a stable identity. The traditionalist tends not to migrate and is concerned about depopulation, declining social mores, and the loss of talented young men. The adventurer view involves more risk taking and is guided by the desire “to elevate . . . social status, to test . . . courage and virility, and to escape the tedium and tighter moral codes of the rural [Mexican] south” (p. 578). The adventurer emphasizes social mobility and material possessions. Finally, the breadwinner is motivated to migrate in order to provide sustenance, to upgrade housing, to keep his children in school. His is a selfless choice impelled by desperate circumstances.
The masculinity of Iranian immigrant men in the US is also challenged. Iranian families have traditionally been “authoritarian and adult-centered” and in accordance with the values of the Islamic Republic, the husband is the head of the household (Mahdi 1999: 71). Most of the Iranians who have migrated to the US, and especially those who are wealthy and educated, have achieved an economic status equal to or higher than the status they had in Iran. However, women have achieved greater social gains (social and educational skills, a new sense of individuality, autonomy) than men who have lost the authority and many of the privileges they enjoyed in Iran. Many Iranian women have become more liberal in the US context, something that directly contradicts their Iranian male counterparts (Mobasher 2012: 145). Within the immigrant household, however, women still assume the primary responsibility for shopping, cooking, ironing, laundry, caring for children, and chauffeuring, while maintenance of the yard, house, and car are largely in the hands of men. The task that appeared to be shared was financial planning, although by comparison with husbands in Iran, Iranian immigrant men were contributing to more household tasks. The greatest conflicts regarding changes in roles and domestic authority were within the households of lower-class families. Sociologist Ali Mahdi reports that Iranian women often describe their households as a battleground and occasionally the tensions can erupt into violence. Social scientist Mohsen Mobasher (2012: 147) quotes the following observation made by an Iranian woman in Dallas: “Iranian women in the United States live in an inferno and are tormented, torn between individual freedom encouraged by the American culture and familial commitments and expectations cultivated by the Iranian culture.”
The “adult-centered” nature of the Iranian family has also been impacted by the immigrant context as children demand more freedom and parents are focused on their children’s success. Fathers are more involved in their daughters’ lives than in Iran and in general there is a more liberal approach to upbringing. However this is not applied in the same way to sons and daughters. “Girls, whose sexuality and lifestyle have a direct bearing on the family honor and dignity, are sometimes subject to closer supervision and stricter home regulations,” although they rarely let this interfere with a desire for their educational and social mobility (Mahdi 1999: 73). Summing up these households, Mahdi (1999: 70) writes:
Lack of family support and a larger kin network reduces the resources available to [Iranian] couples and increases the amount of time they spend with each other. In situations of conflict and crisis, increased interaction in a highly dense relationship multiplies the number of roles each spouse has to play in relation to the other. In the traditional family in Iran, a husband was “a husband” and a wife “a wife”. In the new setting each spouse not only has to play the role of intimate other but also, in many cases, the role of an absent father, mother, or brother at times of crises.
These more companionate marriages and the new forms of intimacy associated with them that are described for at least some Iranian families are key dimensions of the Mexican families in Atlanta studied by anthropologist Jennifer Hirsch (2003). Hirsch describes a generational shift from heterosexual relationships that are based on respect (respeto) to those based on trust (confianza) and explores how this shift impacts courtship, marriage, sexuality, and fertility. Older couples tend to have marriages based on respect while young couples have marriages based on trust. She views the companionate marriage (a marriage characterized by a high degree of sexual intimacy and intense psychological companionship) as something that has emerged not only in migrant families but also in families in Jalisco and Michoacán, Mexico where she also conducted research. Hence, like other researchers she rejects the facile assumption of there (i.e. Mexico) as traditional and here (i.e. the US) as modern. What she views as different between the two contexts is the greater ability among Mexican women in Atlanta to negotiate these changes within the family based on the economic opportunities that are available to them as well as the legal and institutional protections that characterize the US context. Further, while the companionate marriage may offer women more emotional satisfaction, they may also be more fragile. Hirsch argues, for example, that “equal access to intimate companionship is not the same as equal access to power” (p. 156).
Toward the end of her discussion of companionate marriages, Hirsch (2003: 202ff) tells us about being invited to visit a support group for Hispanic battered women in Atlanta. She observes that such a group is an odd context for arguing that Mexican women in the US have more social and economic leverage (are more empowered) than do their counterparts in Mexico. However, many of the women in this group had already left their husbands or were planning to do so and they argued that this option would not have been possible in the home country.
They spoke about how, with the support of social workers, they had learned to use the law to defend themselves through restraining orders, court-mandated child support, and mandatory batterers’ programs for their husbands.
(p. 203)
Not only were there mechanisms to support them in their actions, but they also had the economic wherewithal to stand on their own two feet. They described the domestic violence laws in their own countries as a lot of “blah, blah, blah” because without financial support they were meaningless. Further, they spoke about the anonymity of life in a big city like Atlanta (“nobody gets in your business”) making it possible to leave a spouse.
Hirsch’s reflections on the issue of domestic violence within immigrant families is representative of a new dimension of gendered immigration research. Sociologists Cecilia Menjíver and Olivia Salcido (2002) opened this discussion by beginning to identify specific factors that exacerbate the already gendered, race, and class vulnerability of immigrant women who confront verbal and physical violence in the home. Among these are limited host-language skills, domestic isolation and dependency, uncertain legal statuses, precarious employment, limited opportunities for alternative living situations, and hence a reluctance to leave an abuser. In many cultural contexts, the family culture discourages a woman from breaking up a marriage. Further, conflicts within the family are considered to be private matters – hence individuals are discouraged from going to the authorities for help. The limited language skills often make it difficult for immigrant women to understand their rights in the country of immigration and/or reach out for help. Host-language deficiencies also restrict access to decent jobs. However, sometimes it is a woman’s greater earning power that becomes a source of conflict that can erupt into abuse.
In a more ethnographic study that highlights how some of these issues play out specifically in relation to Hispanics in the United States, Salcido and Adelman (2004) adopt a two-pronged approach. They demonstrate not only how domestic violence (battering) leads to illegality, but also how immigration policies lead to men’s battering. In the first case, social scientists who have interviewed female migrants have often discovered that one of the motives for a woman’s departure is to escape from a batterer (Arguelles and Rivero 1993) or from gossip that challenges a woman’s reputation – a form of verbal abuse (Hart 1997; Brettell 2002; Brennan 2004). Contreras and Griffith (2012) highlight this dimension in their study of Mexican women who have been drawn to North Carolina to work in the Blue Crab industry. The employment opportunities are one draw and seeking them out in order to improve the quality of their children’s lives is a motivating factor, but so too is the chance to escape often abusive relationships. By migrating, such relationships can come to an end and women can take control of their own lives.
Domestic violence is also found within Asian immigrant families (Abraham 2000; Mehrotra 1999; Rudrappa 2004; Bhattacharjee 2006). Shamita Das Gupta (1999) has argued that the South Asian community in the United States, in conjunction with the “model minority” image assigned to them by broader American society, has promoted an image of intact and quiescent families where no abuse of women exists. “If any such episode surfaced, [it was] quickly blamed on renegade individuals, particularly pathological relationships, and the working class ‘others’” (p. 588). Thus, organizations to address violence against women were slow to emerge within this community and the challenges they have faced are formidable “On the one hand they are struggling against community policing that insistently tries to silence and deny women’s reality of abuse, and on the other hand they are striving to empower battered women in the face of a racialized society as well as restrictive immigration and welfare policies” (p. 589). South Asian domestic violence organizations and shelters try to provide a culturally sensitive context where counselors recognize the special concerns of abused women who might not want to reveal their problems to the “whole community” or who have no one and nowhere to turn. As Amita Preisser (1999: 692) observes, among South Asians domestic violence is “not just between a woman and her spouse, but between a woman, her spouse, in-laws, and the community at large.” For these women, “obedience to family elders, upholding family honor, fear of losing children, and dictates of religious practices may influence her to suffer in silence rather than to seek help” (p. 692).
Other scholars have taken on issues of sexual abuse, including marital rape, the manipulation of reproductive rights (Abraham 1999), and bride burning (Singh and Unnithan 1999). In South Asia there is no concept of marital rape because a woman is a man’s property and marriage is for procreation and hence sexual intercourse is expected to occur with the woman having little right to refuse. In the immigrant context the interplay between these culturally sanctioned sexual rights to a woman’s body, combined with discrimination based on ethnic, class, cultural, and structural location of immigrant families (and often the downward mobility experienced by men in particular) may in fact exacerbate sexual abuse (Abraham 1999: 604–605). It is further exacerbated by a perception of American society as sexually permissive and the desire of South Asian men to have as much control as they can over the sexuality of their wives.7
So-called “crimes of honor” constitute another dimension of domestic violence within the families of immigrants. In January of 2008, two Dallas area teenage girls, Amina (age eighteen) and Sarah (age seventeen) Said, were killed by their Egyptian Muslim father. He was reported to be a strict father who rarely allowed his daughters to spend time with their friends. Friends of Sarah were reported to have said that when Sarah met a boy at her job she told them that her father would kill her if he found out. The father did not approve of non-Muslim boyfriends, or of boyfriends in general. A cab driver, he drove to a motel in Irving, shot his daughters, left them to die (one called 911 to say she was dying), and disappeared. There were reports of previous abuse; the girls’ great aunt was quoted in the newspaper claiming that the mother had previously fled with her two daughters and that “this was an honor killing” (Eiserer 2008). Services were held in a Christian chapel as well as at the Richardson Mosque – the largest and oldest mosque in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metropolitan area.
The incident in DFW is not unique. In July of 2008, a Pakistani pizza shop owner in the Atlanta area supposedly killed his daughter to protect family honor. His daughter, whose marriage had been arranged, was seeking a divorce from a husband much older than she and often absent. Her father, it was reported, thought that divorce would bring shame upon the family. He was quoted as saying that his daughter “wasn’t being true to her religion or to her husband” (Tarabay 2009). In this case the father admitted to his crime and turned himself in. And in Chicago, Subash Chander, killed his pregnant daughter, son-in-law and 3-year-old grandson “because he disapproved of his daughter’s marriage to a lower caste man” (CBS News 2008). And more than a decade earlier an Iranian immigrant in California killed his wife and six children by burning his house down. The reason he gave to law enforcement was that his wife was having “illegitimate relationships with male strangers” (Mahdi 1999: 69). Examples of so-called honor killings in the US extend beyond the Muslim community. Alison Renteln (2004) cites cases among Chinese and Hmong immigrants – men who killed their wives when confronted by adultery or some other indication of wayward female sexuality.
Some scholars have attempted to analyze why this occurs within immigrant communities. Most often, it is linked with a broader literature on domestic violence that we have been discussing here (Narayan 1995; Ayyob 2000; Sheehan et al. 2000). Indeed, sometimes those within Muslim immigrant communities attempt to draw on this discourse in order to turn attention away from Islam itself and from cultural explanations rooted in codes of honor and honor killings, and by extension away from the stigma and racism that may accordingly be directed toward them (Werbner 2005: 32). Turkish sociologist Akpinar (2003) suggests that the immigrant context enhances the role of women as bearers of group identity and that abuse emerges when women violate ideas of acceptable femininity. This happens, because in the immigrant context women may gain more freedom as well as economic responsibility as potential wage earners; correspondingly, men may experience downward social mobility, greater marginalization, and a loss of self-esteem. Immigrant men who feel that they are discriminated against may turn inward and exert patriarchal control over women (wives and daughters) because this is something they still can control. Powerlessness in the public sphere generates a desire to exercise more power in the domestic sphere (Akpinar 2003: 428, 435). Drawing on the work of Baker et al. (1999), Akpinar writes:
women’s increased autonomy and threatened traditional male privilege due to increased acceptance of women’s human rights puts men into a potential shameful position . . . These individual men may resort to violence, especially in times of economic and/or social stress, towards women – to protect their honour, or in other words not to experience shame.
(p. 427)
The ethnic community becomes an important reference group against which one’s own worth is measured. Akpinar (2003: 436) describes how gossip and stigma among Turks living in a Swedish suburb become mechanisms “for the control of women by men as a group, but also among women themselves as a punishment for those who deviate from the norms.”8
A final observation is worth making, and here I take my inspiration from sociologist Yen Le Espiritu’s (2001) work on Filipino immigrants in the United States. Immigrant women, and by extension their daughters, are the ones charged with preserving culture. Thus their bodies are policed, Espiritu suggests, and this is the main means by which immigrant groups who are otherwise defined as economically, socially, politically, and legally inferior can assert their moral superiority. “This rhetoric of moral superiority often leads to patriarchal calls for cultural ‘authenticity’ that locates family honor and national integrity in the group’s female members” (Espiritu 2001: 435).
The family life of migrants has been significantly impacted by transnational practices (Abrego 2014). One dimension of this impact is the growing significance of long-distance parenting (Carling, Menjívar, and Schmalzbauer 2012), and particularly of transnational motherhood that has developed as increasing numbers of women have migrated in response to the growth of the global gendered labor force discussed in Chapter 3. Transnational motherhood refers to the “circuits of affection, caring, and financial support [on the part of mothers] that transcend national borders” (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997: 550). As anthropologist Heather Millman (2013:73) has emphasized, the daily lives of transnational mothers “involves the constant negotiation of geographies, economics, and social and familial roles.” How can one continue to be both physically absent and a “good” mother or parent?
There are myriad examples of this transnational mothering among immigrant women across the globe who have decided to leave their children with surrogate caregivers or “other mothers,” usually a relative and often their own mothers, while they migrate to distant places in search of waged-work (Schmalzbauer 2004).9 Thus, their own mobility brings grandparents as non-migrants into the activities of the transnational social field. It also serves to reframe conceptualizations of motherhood. As sociologist Umut Erel (2002: 132) has observed, “the separation of mothers and children runs counter to hegemonic discourses on the mother as the primary caretaker of her children, and the emotional, physical and thus geographical closeness that is claimed and naturalized by such discourses.” How do transnational mothers react to this situation?
Often, they adjust their ideas about what it means to be a good mother in order to accommodate the decision they have made to live and work apart from their children. Many Latina domestic workers, and particularly those who are serving as live-in nannies in the United States (and hence cannot bring their own children with them), forthrightly reject the notion that they have abandoned their children and concertedly work to minimize estrangement between themselves and their offspring. According to sociologists Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila (1997), they convince themselves that their children are better off at home than with them and that their own physical absence does not mean emotional absence. They redefine “motherhood” to encompass their role as breadwinners and they expand their understanding of caregiving to include the wages they earn as domestic workers. Thus, transnational mothers often “juxtapose traditional ideas of physical and emotional nurturing with realities of nurturing from outside of their own domestic sphere, providing physical support that comes from remittances and emotional help through technological mediums such as the internet or over the phone” (Millman 2013: 77). This redefinition of the meaning of motherhood has been documented for a range of societies around the world. For example, Peruvian migrant women in Chile view the abandonment of their children “as part of an exercise of responsible motherhood in that [it] . . . is motivated by the need to secure family welfare. It is because of an almost heroic sense of responsibility and love for her children that a mother undertakes the journey to an unknown country, even if it means separation from her loved ones” (Illanes 2010: 211). Similar ideas about self-sacrifice and responsibility are expressed by Ecuadorian immigrant women in Italy who also articulate a form of “double living” – their bodies are in Italy but their hearts and souls are in Ecuador (Boccagni 2012).
What of the emotional needs, or “embodied distress” (Horton 2009), of mothers themselves who often allude to the pain of separation and to feelings of sadness, regret, guilt, and incompleteness (Illanes 2010: 211)? Anthropologist Sarah Horton explores the compartmentalized lives of mostly undocumented Salvadoran women who are workers in the US and mothers in El Salvador, placing particular emphasis on how separations are negotiated intersubjectively between these women and their children. She observes that the conversations that occur between mothers and children prior to departure result in a sense of “profound moral failure” among mothers who are unable to continue as physical caretakers for their children in order to secure the financial and physical wellbeing of their children by working abroad. “As children challenge their mothers’ absence, mothers attempt to situate their migration in a context of continuing love” (Horton 2009: 30).
These transformations in the meaning of mother love are also considered by sociologist Rhacel Parreñas in her work on “mothering from a distance” among Filipina domestic workers in Italy and the United States. Parreñas (2001a: 381) makes reference to a form of “commodified love” based on purchasing things to send to children who have been left behind in the sending country. The mediation of physical absence through commodities which act as “communicative devices expressing social bonds and belonging” has also been identified among Ukranian and Ecuadorian transnational parents in Spain (Leifsen and Tymczuk 2012: 220). And anthropologist Sarah Horton (2009) has found a similar emphasis among the Salvadoran families she studied. Drawing on her interviews with one research participant, Gloria, Horton (2009: 33) writes:
Gloria and her husband sent their children toys and luxuries they had never before enjoyed – a color TV, a VCR, a freezer, brand-name clothing, jewelry, comforters, and toy cars. As Gloria thinks back on the comforts she provided her children, her face lights up in a smile. She rattles the objects off in a long list, each item punctuated by the phrase ‘‘which we never had over there.’’ ‘‘Casi todo’’ (‘‘Almost everything’’), she says. Her children wear the bracelets and new clothes to school; they are popular and receive invitations for playdates from friends who wish to share in their good fortune. “Their friends tell them that they have the best mother in the world,” she says, laughing with pride.
And yet these mothers also acknowledge the frustrations that their children express regarding their absence. Money and goods are not a total substitute. Thus Horton quotes one child’s query to her mother: “You only send me things; you don’t visit and you barely call. How can I know you love me?’’ (p. 34). As Horton observes, this unease regarding the strength of maternal love is aggravated when a mother has other children while abroad, children who can enjoy the daily physical presence of a mother while those left behind cannot.10
Sociologist Rhacel Parreñas (2001b) suggests that while the Filipina women she studied work hard at their transnational motherhood, such households are considered “broken” because they diverge from what is considered a normative, cohabiting family with the woman performing the primary childcare responsibilities. This image emerges despite the more egalitarian gender structure in the Philippines (bilateral kinship, women with comparable levels of education to men and a high rate of participation in the labor force). A similar negative image also seems to emerge in Sri Lanka in relation to the families of women who have migrated to the Middle East to work as housemaids on two-year labor contracts, leaving their husbands and children behind. Sri Lankan villagers, as well as local politicians and the national media, have expressed concern about the long-term effects of maternal absence on children. While children do not experience abuse and neglect, they do receive reduce education, and paternal alcohol consumption has increased (Gamburd 2000, 2008). According to anthropologist Michele Gamburd (2000), when women breadwinners return from abroad they face backlash and are subjected to accusations of prostitution and marital infidelity. In short, their reputation and image as wives and mothers is subverted and once back home, they tend to abandon their cosmopolitan identity in order to minimize these accusations and the sometimes violent behavior that accompanies them. But the image of men is also undermined.
Men, bereft of the “breadwinner” role, suffered a challenge to their masculinity. In both villages, migrants reported hearing Arabs speculate that “Sri Lankan men must be donkeys because they send their women abroad to work.” Images of uneducated, slothful husbands suggested that men wasted the money their wives earned abroad. Sinhala stereotypes portrayed men turning to alcohol (an exclusively masculine beverage) to drown their troubles: in Muslim stereotypes, men did not drink, but smoked, gambled and womanized like their Sinhala counterparts. Representations of the delinquent, emasculated men appeared in tandem with the images of promiscuous, selfish, pleasure-seeking women who neglected their husbands and children.
(Gamburd 1999: 5)
In the state of Kerala, in southwest India, as in Sri Lanka, Malayali men who are left behind while their wives work in domestic service in Italy also have to contend with emasculating public identities (Gallo 2006). They are known as “waiting men”, biding their time until a visa is approved for them or dependent on their wife’s remittances. Further, they are made fun of because they have no control of the sexuality of their absent wives who reside within the intimacy of Italian domestic space. They are equally emasculated when they travel to join wives working abroad. Often they are given positions in the same household in work that is perceived as feminizing. And yet Italians often view them as “good south Asians” by contrast with South Asian men from the Punjab who are often in Italy without families. Anthropologist Ester Gallo (2006: 368) sums up the complexities of these transnational gender identities as follows:
Through the rhetoric of Italy as a “feminizing” place, Malayali men in transnational marriages make meaningful and contest their difficult and conflicting experiences of downward mobility and being “dependent husbands” or “displaced householders and fathers.” Indeed, men’s conjugal ties with women working in Italy and their relationships within the employers’ households in turn impact on how Malayali society perceives men with wives in Italy or who migrate following marriage . . . Men’s transnational marital experiences, through their dependence on women’s remittances and sponsorship, are socially constructed as a symbol of lower status. On the other hand . . . this rhetoric may assume different meanings across places. Thus, in the highly constrained labour market of central Italy, the feminization of Malayali migrants is used ambiguously to construct respectable male identity in the eyes of Italian society. Men’s conjugal status emerges as crucially important in shaping not only their working relations and everyday life, but also their public respectability and legal status.
While transnational motherhood, including its impact on husbands and children left behind, has received a good deal of scholarly attention, the significance of transnational fatherhood and its association with the construction of masculine identities should not be overlooked. Indeed, the long-distance parenting of male migrants is, in some sense, implicit. By this I mean that in many contexts, for example Mexico or Portugal, there is an historically rooted culture of migration that includes the expectation that men will migrate and support their families from afar (Brettell 1986; Cohen 2004). For some time in such places, the father as breadwinner has been equivalent to the father as migrant and both are part of what it means in these contexts to be a good father.
One out of every twenty-five Mexican children has a migrant father in the US (Nobles 2011). Those who are married are more likely to be in involved in the lives of children who remain in Mexico. They visit as much as they can and invest in their education, something that sociologist Jenna Nobles argues is in fact a long-term investment in the development of Mexico. In another study of Mexican families in New Jersey, sociologist Joanna Dreby (2006) has identified three types of transnational families, types that parallel those that I found when working with Portuguese immigrant families in France in the 1970s (Brettell 1995). These types are: fathers who leave their wives and children behind, migrating alone; couples who migrate together leaving minor children in Mexico; and mothers who are unwed mothers or separated or divorced who leave children and migrate alone. Dreby finds that the emotional responses of men and women to being separated from their children differ and she links this to gender ideology in Mexico where a woman’s role as mother is “sacralized” while the father’s role is tied to financial provisioning. She observes that while a mother’s relationship to her children in Mexico is very dependent on being able to show emotional intimacy from a distance, the fathers’ relationships are rooted in their success as migrant workers. If a father cannot fulfill his role as a provider, he grows more distant from his children. A father, even one who has had relationships with other women while abroad, maintains his image as a “good” father if he is sending money back to his family. Conversely, if Mexican women do not show dimensions of stress and suffering related to being physically absent from their children, they can be subjected to accusations of being a “bad” mother and abandoning their children. Dreby (2006: 56) concludes as follows:
Migration does not appear to significantly transform notions of Mexican motherhood and fatherhood even though it does change parenting activities. Fathers’ relationships with their children are directly related to their ability to honorably fulfill the role of economic provider for the family. When fathers are successful economically as migrants, they tend to maintain stable and regular relationships with children in Mexico regardless of marital status. In contrast, even though Mexican mothers migrate to work like fathers, their relationships with children once abroad depend on their ability to demonstrate emotional intimacy from a distance.
Thus, a critical question is how fatherhood and masculinity are redefined or reaffirmed in connection with migration. Anthropologist Jason Pribilsky (2012) examines this issue in relation to undocumented Ecuadorian men living in New York City. He describes men who balance their desires for the good things of life in New York with their responsibility to send money back home to their families (“remittance discipline”) and hence act as responsible fathers. This requires a mental shift, Pribilsky observes, from a subsistence orientation (“making a living”) to a surplus generating orientation (“working for money”) so that there is money to remit. The latter means learning how to save and learning how not to spend or consume. Men are drawn into the world of money management, a world dominated by their wives back in Ecuador. One of the most serious consumption dilemmas is what to do about alcohol, something they are routinely used to consuming in Ecuador. Ecuadorian migrant men, as primary breadwinners, tend to forego alcohol in order to save money to support their families. Alcohol no longer defines masculinity; saving money does make these Ecuadorians “more modern” men by comparison with their fathers and with those men who remain behind in Ecuador. Like the Filipina transnational mothers described by Parreñas, these Ecuadorian fathers construct the meaning of good fatherhood in the gifts that they send back to recognize the birthdays and other important events in the lives of their children.
The act of remitting gifts and the accompanying tasks of shopping, packaging gifts up with letters and receiving family members’ reactions to the purchase allowed men to look towards their home communities and produce a coherent identity of themselves as successful migrants, committed husbands and attentive fathers.
(Pribilsky 2012: 336)
Migration not only changes “traditional” gender roles including the division of labor but also alters the meanings of gender categories. Men, especially those who have left their families behind, assume responsibility for their own domestic lives, adopting female roles, and women sometimes are doing what their husbands normally did.
Beyond “degendering” male and female tasks . . . namely removing the assignation of specific behavior to one gender or another, couples must also work in tandem to “learn to exist side by side” (aprender a convivir) in order to meet their goals of success in migration. Indeed, what counts as “success” for many migrant households – minimally defined as a couple’s ability to “get ahead” (salir adelante) with remittances – depends as much or more on wives’ ability to work with husbands to orchestrate household affairs and handle remittances as it does on the hard labor of husbands abroad.
(Pribilsky 2004: 316)
As part of an effort to emphasize the more emotional and personal dimensions of the transnational family and transnational fatherhood in particular, sociologist Veronica Montes (2013) explores how men move away from the expected hegemonic masculine identity (being unemotional, non-nurturing, dispassionate, and aggressive) and toward emotional expressions of love and caring. Migrant men express the emotional cost of being separated from family differently from migrant women, often through drug and alcohol use. But some have used the situation of separation to reflect in more demonstrative ways about why they are abroad, how they feel about living apart from their wives and children, and about what their families mean to them. They articulate these feelings in relation to ideas about sacrifice, nostalgia, love, sadness, and anxiety – all fully contrary to the ideas about what it means to be masculine with which they were raised. For example, Montes (2013: 483) offers the following comment from one of her research participants, a man named Daniel:
One takes the risk to migrate for the love of the offspring, in order to give them a better life. I don’t care if I don’t get my papers, if I die without papers; what matters is that my children have better opportunities, a better life [crying]. I don’t care if I have to go through the same again, risking everything again, as long as my son has the opportunity to achieve what we [my wife and I] did not achieve. My job has not finished yet; my job will finish when I see my son going to college and becoming a good man. That’s why I do not go out so much because of the fear of getting deported.
Cultural context is equally important for understanding the impact of transnational families on ideas of masculinity, particularly in situations where women are the migrant breadwinners and their husbands are left behind to assume caregiving and other domestic tasks that were carried out by women prior to their departure. In some contexts men do not openly admit how much housework they are doing for fear that it will undermine their masculinity (Gamburd 2000). In other contexts men call on the assistance of extended family members or older children to avoid becoming primary caregivers for their children. In Vietnam, a context where women are seen as making important economic contributions to the family and where men have always contributed to childcare (Hoang and Yeoh 2011), men with migrant breadwinner wives, and the wives themselves, maintain the idea that the new domestic responsibilities that fall on men left behind is a temporary situation and does not undermine either their masculinity or their role as the head of household and the decision maker. Vietnamese men insist that their wives would not have migrated without their consent. Others acknowledge that their wives do not always remit money back, but appear to deny that this has an impact on their sense of themselves as men – although beneath the surface it clearly does aggravate some that their wives maintain so much control of the money they earn.
Fathering is an important dimension of masculine identity in Vietnam and hence men step into the role of primary caregiver while their wives are working abroad. However, it is exhausting because at the same time they are working to bring some resources in to the household. The paid work is important to them so that they do not look like “spongers.”
Some men were torn between fathering responsibilities and the sense of masculinity attached to their breadwinner role when their wives decided not to remit her income. Instead of applying pressure on the woman to remit, they worked longer hours (and thus spent less time with and for the children) or borrowed money from other people to pay for daily expenses (if possible). Clearly, one identity contradicts the other in these instances and the men’s ability to keep their sense of masculinity intact compromises their efforts to be good fathers. Conversely, other men readjusted their livelihood strategies to accommodate family duties at the expense of their breadwinner status and economic autonomy . . . Women’s labor migration has indeed given new meanings to the notion of masculinity, and gender boundaries are shifting along with ongoing global economic restructuring.
(Hoang and Yeoh 2011: 734)
Hoang and Yeoh (2011: 734) argue that the Vietnamese case challenges a universal crisis of masculinities resulting from the migration of women and supports an approach that views gender roles as malleable and flexible in the face of population mobility.
A different transnational family form, described by the term “astronauting,” is found in close association with emigrants from some parts of Asia. For example, it is discussed by Pe-Pua, et al. (1996) for Hong Kong immigrants in Sydney, Australia; by Wong (1998) for recent Chinese immigrants in the San Francisco area; by Min (1998) for Korean families in the US, and by Chee (2005) and Chiang (2008) for Taiwanese immigrants in Canada and the United States. Astronauts are “people who travel, live, and work in different parts of the world as they explore opportunities in the global village (Wong 1998: 87). Some “astronauting” began as an adaptive strategy in relation to the corporate downsizing in the US during the 1990s; in other cases it was simply the inability to find sustained employment abroad. The difference between these families and other transnational families is that the children are left in the country of immigration while one or more parent works in the country of origin. Most commonly it is the father/husband who returns to the home country and commutes back to see his wife and children. The decision is often taken so that children can pursue the advantages of the host country educational system. In these families, the father lives where he can best fulfill his role as breadwinner; the mother often remains in her role as primary caretaker and hence with the children.
Scholars who explore the impact of astronaut and other “split household”11 transnational family arrangements on women as workers, wives and mothers, and on marital relations, observe that husbands and wives maintain contact in transnational space through fax, telephone, email and travel, all of which reflects their class background and access to economic resources (Chee 2005). Also of interest is the impact on the children and in the context of this research, some researchers have described a variant transnational family form that involves what have come to be termed “parachute kids.” Parachute kids are children sent to or left behind with a friend or relative or other caregiver while both parents remain in or return to the home country (Orellana et al. 2001; Tsong and Liu 2009). One study conducted in 1990 estimated a total of 40,000 Taiwanese unaccompanied minors between the ages of eight and eighteen living in the United States with smaller numbers from South Korea and Hong Kong. Another study identified 7,000 unaccompanied Korean minors in elementary and secondary schools in southern California in 1997 (both studies cited in Tsong and Liu 2009: 367). Chiang-Hom (2004), based on research with unaccompanied Chinese adolescents born abroad but living in the US, found that 36 percent were living with a relative (6 percent with a grandparent), 30 percent were with paid caretakers, 5 percent were with siblings only, 5 percent with friends of the family, 4 percent with a cousin, and 3 percent entirely alone.
While the primary motive for this transnational migration strategy is, as mentioned above, to take advantage of primary and secondary education in the host country, and eventually university education, some of the other motivations are highly gendered. Tsong and Liu (2009: 368) point, for example, to the desire of parents in South Korea and Taiwan to avoid compulsory military service for their sons; alternatively they may send their daughters to act as caregivers for younger brothers in the US. Educating children in the US is also a symbol of higher status. Needless to say, much of the research explores the psychological impact of these familial situations on children, identifying feelings of loneliness, homesickness, and depression but also a rapid maturity and sense of responsibility and role reversal – the latter particularly in the case of astronaut families where sons become the “man of the household” (Zhou 1998; Alaggia et al. 2001; Chiang-Hom 2004).
In summary, transnational parents, no matter what their strategy, are operating in both productive and reproductive roles across space. As some researchers have emphasized, “the essence of migrant transnationalism is that physical absence is compatible with social presence and participation” and hence the subject of transnational parenthood places emphasis on “how the parent–child relationship is practiced and experienced within the constraints of physical separation” (Carling et al. 2012: 192).
One of the important transnational mechanisms linking migrants abroad and those who remain in the country of origin is economic remittances. Economic remittances are transfers of money from a foreign worker to the home country. The World Bank has estimated that the flow of remittance funds to the developing countries totaled a little more than 400 billion in 2012 and the expectation for 2014 was that this would rise to 436 billion.
In 2013 the countries receiving the highest volume of officially recorded remittances were India ($71 billion), China ($60 billion), the Philippines ($26 billion), Mexico ($22 billion), Nigeria ($21 billion), and Egypt ($20 billion).12
Remittances have played and continue to play a very important role in the economies of developing as well as some developed countries and they certainly impact the lives of individual families.13 In Portugal in the 1960s and 1970s it was the remittances of male and sometimes female workers abroad that provided the resources to build new houses, what came to be known as “casas franceses” – the homes of Portuguese migrant workers who lived in France (Brettell 1986). Today one sees such houses in China (Chu 2010), in the state of Kerala in India (Kurien 2002), and in many of the small villages of Mexico and other parts of Central and South America. Early studies of the impact of remittances noted that much of the money was spent on conspicuous consumer items (deemed a negative) rather than for economic investment (deemed a positive) that would spur economic development (Rhoades 1978; Gmelch 1980; Gardner 1995). While recent research in places such as Thailand and Mexico (Gullette 2009, 2012, 2013; Cohen 2011) has offered a more positive view of the impact of remittances on local development, anthropologists Sarah Mahler and Patricia Pessar (2006: 45) critique the entire debate about the productive or unproductive (positive versus negative) use of economic remittances as gender-biased. They note that the bulk of remittances goes to women who are demeaned and disciplined by a discourse that undervalues expenditures on family sustenance (food, shelter, clothing, education) by labeling them unproductive. Clearly, there are significant gendered dimensions to remittances but they are rarely considered (Kunz 2008). “Remittances reflect and transmit power” (Mahler and Pessar 2006: 45) and hence knowing who earns the funds, to whom are they sent, on what are they spent, who has control of such expenditures, and whom they ultimately benefit is exceedingly important.
Emphasizing that remittances should be conceptualized as a social process, sociologists Mizanur Rahman and Lian Kwen Fee (2009) have explored the gendered dimensions of funds remitted by Indonesian domestic workers who have migrated to Singapore, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. They find that female domestic workers in general remit a much larger portion of their earnings than do their male counterparts and these funds are most commonly directed to mothers and sisters rather than to brothers, fathers, and husbands.14 Gender differences are also found in the use of such remittances, with female recipients directing them toward investments in human capital and male recipients investing in physical capital. Through remittances many young women enhance not only their own social status in the sending community but also that of their families.
In the North American context the bulk of remittances is sent by Hispanic (Mexican and Central American) men to their wives left behind in the countries of origin. What do these remittances mean to these women? Sean McKenzie and Cecilia Menjívar (2011) explore the more emotional dimension of remittances for Honduran women who continue to live in their home villages while their husbands and sons are abroad. Many accept the hardship of separation if it results in their ability to build a new home with the money their spouses send home. These resources also open up educational opportunities for their children and provide them with better clothing and nourishment. However, the meaning of remittances, these authors observe, goes well beyond the economic. They describe a seventy-year-old woman whose three sons were working in the US who views remittances as more than increased money for the household to spend: “those home repairs and extra finances meant love, commitment and sacrifice, meanings intimately linked to the social milieu in which they are formed” (McKenzie and Menjívar 2011: 69).
Are remittances a source of empowerment for the women left behind? There is certainly evidence that supports a positive answer to this question. For example, in my own work on Portuguese wives who remained in home villages while their husbands migrated to France in the 1960s and 1970s, I identified any number of cases where these wives assumed the role as heads of household. They managed the continued cultivation of family plots of land and they often oversaw the construction of a new house. They represented the household at village meetings. However, in the Portuguese case, these patterns have deep historical roots that resonate with other dimensions of life in northern rural Portugal including naming and social identity practices, inheritance patterns, patterns of rural employment (particularly day laboring), and high rates of out-of-wedlock births (Brettell 1986).
More recent research on more contemporary migrations has begun to challenge or at least nuance the discussion of whether remittances truly empower women or change gender norms about formal sector work. Economists Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Susan Pozo (2006), for example, find that in Mexico remittances do not reduce the male labor supply, but do reduce the female labor supply by ten percent, particularly in rural areas. They suggest that this substantiates the conclusion that women engage in waged-work only when male income is insufficient. Remittances allow a portion of wives left behind to remain in the household. Research in Morocco has found that although the wives of male migrants live more comfortably and securely and assume responsibility for decision-making, many of them view this as a burden (De Haas and van Rooij 2010). This is equally true of Honduran women who claim that male migration has created more work for them and that the additional responsibilities generate stress and anxiety (McKenzie and Menjívar 2011: 76–77). Some of the stress comes from an increased work load and some of it from having to manage the debt created by their husband’s migration. Very often remittances first go to pay off these debts and hence the family cannot enjoy the more tangible benefits that remittances might ultimately bring.
In the Moroccan context mentioned above, it is the in-laws with whom the wife lives who most often take responsibility for how remittances are spent. Thus, while changes have occurred recently in the lives and social position of women in rural Morocco, this may be only partially explained by male migration and remittances. The same is true in rural Armenia and Guatemala (Menjívar and Agadjanian 2007). In these locations, women have little control over how money is spent and see little increase in their independence and autonomy, primarily because they are watched by their husband’s relatives and by an absent husband who remains in touch via telephone to monitor behavior. Women reported that it was their husbands who decided whether they could work outside the home and who largely remained in control of the money they remitted. In these contexts, a woman working outside the home reflected poorly on the husband, indicating that he was not successful abroad. This observation suggests that the impact of remittances on masculinity is also important to consider.
It is precisely this question that sociologist Hung Cam Thai (2006) addresses. Among transnational Vietnamese families he identifies three types of male economic remitters: status remitters, altruistic remitters, and contract remitters. Here, Thai is building on the work of sociologist Leah Vanwey (2004) who, based on research among rural urban migrants in Thailand, demonstrates that female migrants and poorer migrants are more altruistic in their remittance behavior (that is, sending money to increase the welfare of family members), while male migrants and migrants from wealthier households are more contractual in their remittance behavior (that is, sending money to non-family members to repay a debt, pay for education, or purchase a piece of land, etc.). Thai argues that status remitters “send money for claiming and valorizing social worth in the community of origin” (p. 255). Often the recipients of their remittances are not family members but other individuals with whom they want to retain social ties. Status remitters engage in small-scale conspicuous consumption, and gain deference, recognition, and respect when they return to Vietnam. They gain “importance”. Thai (2006: 264) argues that these low wage men are “more likely than women, and more likely than economically privileged Vietnamese immigrants to feel compelled to claim social positions at “home” [because] social positions [are] often denied to them in the country of migration as a result of being low wage racialized men.”15
The altruistic remitters, usually adult children or siblings of recipients of remittances, direct their money to improving the welfare of their family. These remitters constituted about half the participants in his study. They express the most stress about the burden of sending money home, observing that to cease sending money would mean the termination of ties with family members. They rarely share with these family members the sacrifices they make in the country of immigration in order to send money home. Further, what they can afford to send and what those in the homeland expect them to send are often not the same and their failure to match expectations poses challenges to their masculine identity. To sustain this identity, some send more than they can afford, thus not only going without in the country of immigration but also sometimes into debt.
The contractual remitters, often older men who are the most likely to return to Vietnam, are engaging in reimbursement for past or future expenses associated with their departure. Often, Thai points out, these individuals “enter a remittance relationship because it allows them leverage for taking partial ownership of properties and land that they could take residence upon their visits” (Thai 2006: 255; see also Thai 2005). This is a strategy used in response to laws that make it difficult for Vietnamese abroad to own properties in Vietnam and is an insurance policy in relation to potential return. These remitters experience the least stress and can achieve personal goals that enhance both their social status and their self-worth.
While scholars generally focus on economic remittances, several years ago sociologist Peggy Levitt (1996: 926) formulated the concept of social remittances to refer to “the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving- to sendingcountry communities” (see also Levitt and Lamba-Nieves 2011). Clearly, social remittances have numerous implications for gender relations and gender ideologies. The critical question is: have these changed as a result of outmigration, transnational connections, and return migration? Some of these changes have already been alluded to but they require further elaboration.
Levitt herself (2001) has discussed the young women from the Dominican village of Miraflores who changed their ideas about the kinds of men they wanted to marry based on ideas they had learned while working abroad. Further, young women who had remained behind in the village noticed that when couples returned to visit they appeared to make more decisions together and the husband was more respectful of his wife. They began to seek the same equality for themselves. Anthropologists working in other regions of Latin America have documented similar changes in ideas and practices. Kimberly Grimes (1998) describes the increasing consumerism that has emerged in Mexican sending communities as well as the impact of mass media and other new technologies on the lives of those who have remained behind. More important to the discussion here is her analysis of the impact of migration on gender relations – the liberal attitudes that are brought back, the attack on the macho image, and the general loosening of gender norms such that returned migrant men often help with household chores and child rearing. Deborah Boehm (2008a) describes Mexican women who increasingly assume the roles previously performed by men – they manage household finances, supervise farm labor, oversee home construction and renovation, and attend community meetings. As a result, new ideas about womanhood as less passive and more independent are emerging. And finally, anthropologist Julia Pauli (2008) describes a traumatic relationship between Mexican wives and their mothers-in-law with whom they live when their husbands depart for the United States. These Mexican wives use the remittances sent by husbands to construct a home of their own so that they can achieve some independence. Pauli suggests that the changes associated with these new patterns of residence are likely to erode the status and security of the elderly population living in these sending villages
The impact of social remittances on gender roles and ideologies is increasingly being documented in international migration flows to other receiving societies around the world. Yemeni migrants who have returned from East Africa bring back an experience of a different gender order – of places where women do not wear a veil, where there is less gender segregation such that men and women socialize more easily, and where there are more educational opportunities for women (Christiansen 2012). Some of these return migrants attempt to position themselves according to these new gendered guides for action and living a life. Similarly, Romanian migrants who return from working in Italy, often as a result of a decision made by a husband, nevertheless begin to challenge gender relations (Vlase 2013). And social analyst Sule Akkoyunlu (2013) argues that Turkish migration to European Union and OECD countries has an impact on people’s attitudes and preferences and by extension on the participation of women in politics, measured in this case in relation to their participation in the Turkish Parliament. This author cautions, however, that the nature of social remittances and their impact on gender ideologies may vary depending on the destination country. But what is important about this study in particular is that it reveals the potential of social remittances for changing gender roles and relations not only in the domestic sphere but also in the public sphere – whether in the realm of politics, in the realm of religion, or in the realm of entrepreneurial enterprises. Thus sociologist Peggy Levitt (nd) has observed that Pakistani women become involved in the management of Islamic Centers in the United States and then take these ideas back to their home countries, calling for more collective spaces of prayer for women. And Brazilian women have taken back to Brazil the idea of organization leadership, whether in churches or in other neighborhood groups.
Anthropologist Jennifer Hirsch (2003: 266) astutely points out that a good deal of the theoretical literature on gender and migration is framed in relation to resource theory and hence argues that women’s participation in waged work provides the basis for challenges to traditional gender relations within the family. Gender theory, she suggests, emphasizes that even when women have greater access to economic resources through waged work, gender ideologies may in fact limit processes of empowerment. More nuanced research on what is meant by empowerment and how it is differentially constructed and experienced is therefore essential to a full understanding of how migration impacts gender relations within the family. Certainly in some cases greater gender-egalitarianism emerges as a result of women’s full-time employment. In other cases men’s lives are also changed as a result of chronic or periodic unemployment and the need to assume more domestic responsibilities. Men, in particular, may experience lower self-esteem and challenges to their sense of masculinity as a result of a loss in their traditional breadwinner role within the family. Gender relations within the family may, in all these cases, be renegotiated. But equally, traditional gender hierarchies can be reinforced. Or gender relations may be renegotiated in some contexts but not in others, hence challenging a simple continuum from disempowerment to empowerment.
How migration impacts gender relations in the family (including patriarchal relations) thus varies not only in relation to issues of male and female employment but also in association with factors such as the culture of origin, social class status (and the human capital associated with it), legal status, auspices of migration (male first, female first, as a couple together), and access to resources (extended family, neighbors and compatriots, institutional support) in the country of immigration. Gender relations may also be affected by how a family copes with the inequalities, including racism and discrimination, which it may confront in the broader host society. Further, just as relations between husbands and wives can change, so too do intergenerational relations, resulting often in role reversals where parents come to rely on their children to help them interface with the language and social institutions of the society of immigration. Parental relations with sons may be more lenient than those with daughters, resulting in tensions and conflicts over issues such as choice of friends, dating, college, marriage, and career choices. Commonly, adolescent girls raised in immigrant families have fewer freedoms and less autonomy in making decisions than do their brothers. The gendered and intergenerational tensions that emerge sometimes erupt into domestic violence.
If anything, gender relations for migrant families are fluid and contingent and constantly in a process of formation and reformation, contestation and re-contestation. This is as true in the space of the sending society as it is in the space of the host society. It is equally true of the transnational spaces between. How migrants, men and women, operate within transnational social fields has become fundamental to our understanding of twenty-first-century mobility. Migrant women, in particular, have redefined dimensions of motherhood to accommodate their physical absence; but so too do migrant men, who equally act as fathers from a distance. And for those families that are operating transnationally, with one parent in the society of immigration and another in the sending society, the economic and social remittances that ‘travel’ can have varying impacts. For some women left behind remittances can enhance their status and autonomy as household decision-makers. In other contexts gender roles and gender ideologies remain unchanged or women become less autonomous and more dependent on resources that flow from outside.