In spite of these shortcomings the referred model is a good departure point to develop a more suited understanding of the effects of migration on health. Nevertheless additional questions need to be addressed in the light of transnational migration and the creation of transnational social fields; particularly as social reproduction of migrant families takes place across national borders. A relevant question is for example; what are the effects on migrants’ health and general wellbeing of having their personal lives framed within transnational family relations? This section examines some of the dynamics of transnational migration as they shape migrants’ social relations and family lives, creating critical conditions for migrants’ health.11
One of the features of transnational migrational labour is the need for migrants to continue exercirsing parental roles from across borders. In particular migrant women, who engage in paid work in foreign countries often congregate in paid domestic work performing childrearing and domestic duties for others, find themselves temporally and
10
A dynamic perspective can be addressed by including factors such as the nature of the relationship between migrants and the host society. In this model that is expressed in the inclusion of discrimination as an intermediate variable. In effect, discrimination influences four other elements – material goods and housing, psychological stress, benefit from healthcare and working conditions. Social exclusion – although not identified as such in the model – can be linked to discrimination. The various dimensions included in discrimination are discussed in detail further on in this chapter.
11 The next chapter discusses the social and culturally shaped forms in which emotional distress resulting
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spatially separated from their own children. As Hoshschild (1983) points out migrant women from poor countries are hired to perform domestic as well as ‘emotional work’12 in households in the first world and increasingly in households in the developing world. This devalued unskilled, easy and ‘natural’ emotional work represents a fundamental part of the domestic labour process, for many women this work is however emotionally draining and problematic (Ibarra 2000).
The condition of this economic enrolment –including the demands to perform emotional work on a full time basis for others – leads these women to enter into transnational motherhood arrangements, not exempted from great emotional costs for them as well as for the children left behind (Pareñas 2005). As Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997) point out; “transnational mothering radically rearranges mother-child interactions and requires concomitant reshaping and redefining of the meanings and definitions of appropriate mothering” (ibid:557). Transnational motherhood arrangements and motherhood redefinitions often create family fissures which are signed by the constant concern of these women who, besides worrying about some of the negative effects on their children, experience the absence of family life as “a deeply personal loss” (ibid:562). The authors depict the transnational motherhood of Latino women in Los Angeles as “tempered with sadness with which these women related their experiences and by the problems they sometimes encounter with their children and caregivers. A primary worry among transnational mothers is that their children are being neglected or abused in their absence” (ibid:560).
The emotional experience often associated with the dynamics of a transnational family life can be better understood by examining the axis of simultaneity in which it occurs. The distinction between ‘ways of being’ and ‘ways of belonging’ provided by Levitt and Schiller (2004); helps to elucidate the double orientation of everyday life of individuals in transnational social fields and is explained as follows; “if individuals engage in social relations and practices that cross borders as a regular feature of everyday life, then they exhibit transnational ways of being. When people explicitly recognize this and highlight the transnational elements of who they are. Then they are also expressing a transnational way of belonging” (2004:1008). This distinction can be reformulated to examine migrants’s emotional struggles as they are part of transnational family relations, particularly for women in transnational motherhood situations for whom the notion of family in one place is painfully disrupted. Such distinction can be expressed as ‘the impossibility of being’ – part of a family as a localised unit of biological and social reproduction – and ‘the imperative of belonging’ – to the emotional ties that link family members together.
The emotional struggle of transnational migrants has been depicted through the notion of dislocation which describes the effects that leading a transnational life has on migrants’ subjectivity and emotional wellbeing. Attention has been paid to the structurally constrained sources of emotional dislocation for Philipino women who migrate to the North to perform care jobs (Parreñas 2001). Emotional dislocation in this
12
Emotional labour is defined by Hoshschild (1983:3 quoted by Ibarra 2002) as the “taken for granted effort of managing ‘feeling to create a public observable facial and bodily display’ that produces the proper state of mind in others” (ibid:554). This includes “spoken word, tone of voice and other efforts that are expressed through behaviour” (Ibarra 2002.)
23 context involves partial citizenship in both countries –sending and receiving– family separation, contradictory class mobility and feelings of social exclusion.
Emotional dislocation has also been depicted as resulting from conflictive notions of assimilation to the mainstream society, and has been examined by Menjivar among various generations of Salvadorean refugee women in diverse geographical locations (Menjivar 2000). Factors such as the pressure from parents to succeed; coping with racism and the dual nature of ‘home’ are identified as factors which predispose women to mental health risk.
Social networks have been understood as providing members with emotional support. Alicea found, among Puerto Rican in the U.S., the use of their ties to transnational homes to respond to the negative political and economic and social forces they have encountered, as she describes “their ties to Puerto Rican home communities enable them [transnational migrants] to resist inferior and demeaning definitions of their race and class position within the U.S. society” (1997:598). Alicea’s analysis focuses on women and their pivotal role in the construction of transnational families and households through kin work and caring work; the creation of transnational kinship ties offers them a critical support to face adversity
“…building extended family ties that transcend national boundaries and organizing family gatherings and traditional celebrations serve as an important way to resist race oppression. That is, gatherings, celebrations, and visits home serve to alleviate the feeling of alienation associated with the race oppression they experience within host societies (1997:621)
However, as the Alicea stresses, ties to home and homeland communities are contradictory and oppressive as women are “held accountable for doing and unshared fair of this [care and kin] work” (1997:621). Gender oppression is reproduced in the same social space and social relationships that nurture women’s needs for recognition, belonging and connectedness. As the author explains it: “because the women need a sense of stability in their own individual family to resist the race oppression and disadvantaged class condition that accompany migration, they have to put up with gender oppression” (ibid:621).
The social networks migrants in general –and women in particular– create, have been explored as the constitute means to access healthcare and health treatments, in context of restricted resources, rights, and medical choices. Mejivar (2002) examines the complex informal “social networks –both local and transnational– through which ladina and indigenous Guatemalan immigrant women obtain treatment for their own and their families’ illnesses” (ibid:437). The focus of this study is placed on immigrants’ use of informal social networks as a means to deal with inaccessibility to formal healthcare resources. As found by Menjivar, the exchange of help through these networks takes the form of a variety of treatments, including drugs and traditional medicines which constitute something akin to a ‘package’ of biomedical treatments and traditional medicine acquired both locally and from contacts back home. Aid is however obtained and given in negotiated processes not exempted of “disillusionment, tension and frustration as well as by cohesiveness and support” (idem).
Moving away from the intersubjective dimension of migrants’ experience, there are societal contexts which create the conditions for that experience to emerge that also
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needs to be attended to. Migrant’s experiences in the host society depend as much on the conditions of exit as on the context of reception. Structural constraints such as racism and discrimination are key aspects in the process and feeling of emotional embeddedness as they can also accentuate uprootednes and emotional dislocation. The next section looks at discrimination, a recurrent limitation migrants face in host societies and examines its effects on health.