Elisabetta Zontini

Immigrant women in Barcelona: Coping with the consequences of transnational lives

One of the obvious effects of transnationalism is the geographical dispersal and fragmentation of families. Few scholars have looked at this aspect in depth, beyond a mere recognition of the existence of so-called transnational kinship groups. Fewer studies still have considered the implications of transnationalism for women, even though they represent a growing percentage of the migrant population world-wide. The aims of this article are threefold. First, to show the key role that women play in the maintenance of their families and transnational groups; attention is paid to their contribution to the interlocking spheres of productive work, kin work and caring work. Second, to draw attention to the differentiation of transnational practices among two different migrant groups. Third, to spell out some of the consequences that the transnationalisation of social life has for migrant women and their families. These considerations are based on an analysis of the everyday experiences of Moroccan and Filipino women residing in the Southern European city of Barcelona.

Continuity and Change in Transnational Italian Families: The Caring Practices of Second-Generation Women

This article deals with continuity and change in immigrant families, focusing on the caring practices of the adult children of Italian migrants in the UK. Looking at motherhood, care for the elderly and the management of kin relations at a distance, the paper explores how values and norms get transmitted and transformed across the generations. The article shows both continuity and change in norms and values about care, and argues that change occurring in immigrant families is not necessarily a move from ‘tradition’ to ‘modernity’ or from ‘ethnic’ to ‘mainstream’. Motherhood is changing and acquiring a renewed value for second-generation women who are now putting it before paid work, contrary to first-generation women who tended to combine it with full-time work. In terms of intergenerational relations, the analysis shows that, despite the tensions sometimes occurring between parents and children, reciprocal bonds across the generations remain very strong, with children providing care for their ageing parents while at the same time receiving various forms of support from them. Finally, the paper shows how, as a result of their upbringing and their personal choices, second-generation women continue to be involved, as were their parents, in having to manage kin relationships at a distance.

Enabling and constraining aspects of social capital in migrant families: ethnicity, gender and generation

Abstract This article sets out to examine the use, production and maintenance of social capital in the context of migration through an in-depth analysis of the everyday experiences of young people in Italian families in the UK and Italy. Social capital is usually described in the literature as membership in networks that either helps individuals to get ahead or to preserve positions of power. In this article, I move beyond these one-sided understandings of social capital by exploring both the positive and negative traits of family and ethnic solidarity, as specific forms of social capital for Italian young people By focusing on the experiences of Italian young people, the analysis also demonstrates that gender and generation are crucial axes for interpreting different experiences in participating in strong family and ethnic networks.

Ethnicity, Families and Social Capital: Caring Relationships across Italian and Caribbean Transnational Families

Social capital theorists acknowledge that caring networks operating within and above all across households lie at the heart of families and communities. They also see these networks and family bonds as generally declining in contemporary society due to individualisation. However, there seems to be little empirical evidence documenting these processes in detail, particularly with regards to minority ethnic and transnational families. This article explicitly addresses reciprocal relationships in ethnic minority families, focusing on different forms of care circulating within transcultural and intergenerational family and kin networks. By doing so, this discussion reveals many nuances of family life and the processes by which cultural norms, values, attitudes and behaviour are transmitted, transformed and maintained across generations and geographical distance.

Transnational mothering and forced migration: Understanding the experiences of Zimbabwean mothers in the UK

A growing body of scholarship has documented the experiences of different groups of migrants involved in the maintenance and development of transnational families worldwide showing that proximity is not a prerequisite of family life and that families can successfully be done from a distance. While most work deals with the experiences of labour migrants less attention has been paid to forced migrants. Still little is known about families that fail to operate transnationally and are broken by the migration experience. For instance, when can we say that this type of family cannot be sustained? This article, drawing on the transnational motherhood literature and on Zontini (2010) previous study on Filipino labour migrants in Southern Europe, highlights the factors that shape transnational parenting. The authors then use this framework to explore the experiences of a group of Zimbabwean asylum seeking mothers in the UK. In doing so, the authors point out some of the specificities of this particular group; highlighting the differentiated impact of transnationalism and contributing to refining the literature on transnational parenthood.

Transnational and diasporic youth identities: exploring conceptual themes and future research agendas

This special issue brings together multidisciplinary and international perspectives on the importance of diasporic and transnational networks for the formation of ethnic identity by migrant youths. Within the context of this issue migrant youths refer to young people (aged 16–35 years) who are themselves migrants or are children and grandchildren of migrants. Our attention to the transnational and diasporic identities of migrant youths is in direct response to policy debates and migration scholarship in this area, which in recent times have focused on the supposed crisis of minority ethnic youths and their perceived marginalisation and social exclusion from a wider society. The special issue broadens the parameters of this debate by exploring not how transnational migrant youths are but more interestingly, we believe, what it means for them to have grown up in a transnational social field. In the special issue rather than simply addressing identity outcomes, we want to emphasise identity processes. This is because we are more interested in understanding the ways the migrant youths are ‘doing transnationalism’ and also through this process ‘doing identity’ (including intersected racial, ethnic, gender, class and sexual identities).

‘Non-Normative’ Family Lives? Mapping Migrant Youth’s Family and Intimate Relationships across National Divides and Spatial Distance

In this chapter, questions of ‘non-normative’ lives are addressed globally by mapping the intimate and family lives of migrant youths engaged in relationships across distance and transnational spaces. Whilst there has been much pioneering research in the academic field of family studies reframing debates by problematising and critically interrogating normative understandings of intimacy in family relationships, we argue that what lies at the heart of much analysis is the implicit assumption that ‘doing families’ and intimate relationships is primarily practiced within a structure of co-presence and within the boundaries of the nation-state. For migrants with family members geographically dispersed across the globe, however, doing families and intimacy usually involves them transcending these nation-state boundaries, and crossing cultural divides and spatial distances. Yes, this aspect of family, intimacy and relational life is often overlooked and marginalised in family studies debates including among those commentators that critique heteronormative family models (for example, Weeks et al., 2001; Folger, 2008; Taylor, 2009).