This book focuses on global mobility and the worldwide articulation of family life, understood as dimensions of social change that come off from the private sphere of individuals and reverberate to the point of transforming the composition of national populations. Delving into the interrelation of migration and life courses, the volume investigates how individual mobility paths are intertwined with family matters and the way population movements are embedded in a myriad of intimate and household affairs. The inquiry is based on qualitative data and specifically focused on the migratory flow between Morocco and Italy through an exploration that encompasses a range of interrelated issues such as: transnational marriages, intimacy, love, daily domestic life, the formation of second generations and citizenship. Providing an exhaustive analysis of such phenomena, the book portrays cultural diversity in a nuanced manner and, in so doing, contributes to de-politicize widely stigmatized traits of migrant families.
Francesca Decimo is professor at the Department of Sociology and social research, University of Trento
From Introduction: Migration, Reproduction, and the Place of Families (pag. 2-3)
How do people in motion make family? What are the times and places of intimacy and generation when individual existences are shaped by migration and uncertainty? How do affective bonds find sufficient ground to engender domestic realms in times of increasing movement, separation, and forced mobility or immobility?
This book stems from questions about how personal life and household formation take place in our age of controversial globalization and contested mobility. Anyone who has crossed paths with someone from elsewhere knows how relevant these issues are, and the answers are equally complex. Indeed, staying close to their own family is a difficult accomplishment for large numbers of mobile subjects whose only means for maintaining contact with their relatives is remote channels. This condition is further exacerbated by economic and legal constraints that may prolong the state of living apart indefinitely, as demonstrated by the many dramatic chronicles of migrants separated from their children by restrictive immigration and border enforcement policies.
It was exactly with this scenario in mind that, as my research questions took shape, I was all the more struck by stories of families in motion that developed in the completely opposite direction. Keenly aware of the multitude of migrants for whom love and family life are widely transmuted into relationships at a distance, I was interested in retracing affective articulations aimed instead at embedding and embracing familial presence within movement. I refer particularly to migratory trajectories that, instead of exposing single individuals to the experience of mobility and displacement, are based on household movement and settlement abroad, showcasing stories of family and generation that evolve by intersecting with mobility. By charting the trajectories of household formation unfolding across migration, I realised that these trajectories were woven by individuals who have been able to dislocate, away from home, the chance of setting up a home, founding spheres of personal care, reproduction, and generation elsewhere. And there is more: I also recognised that, precisely through this multitude of personal choices regarding family relationships in motion, not only have these migrants been able to domesticate mobility, as it were, but also to set in play a wider, full-fledged population dynamic across the spaces and boundaries of transnationalism. Indeed, it is through a myriad of choices aimed at entangling affective relations with movement that the demography of nations undergoes significant social and cultural transformations.
Marriages and fertility events lie at the core of this interrelation of family trajectories and national composition, particularly when they imply the birthing and raising of offspring across migration. Viewed in this perspective, bringing children into the world represents a radical event and quite a challenge for mobile subjects who move on uncertain terrain par excellence: indeed, births in a foreign land give rise to crucial issues of intimacy, reproduction, and belonging spreading out from the couple formation, family settlement, and household security to views about the future, identity, and kinship, up to issues of parent and children’s legal status, nationhood, and citizenship.
This book examines the intimate family lives of migrants and the population dynamics that spring from their personal choices. To do so, it reconstructs life stories and processes of family formation from the standpoint of Moroccan immigrants in Italy, the protagonists of my research. By delving into their lives in motion, the following analysis maps how transnational relationships across the Mediterranean have developed over time to support a transformation of this migratory flow from largely single males, migrating alone, into the settlement of households with children. In this vein, my line of reasoning aims to offer a new view onto the transnationalism and reproduction nexus: it considers how migration is intertwined with the evolution of the family cycle, shaping households and their demography well beyond the sending countries. As I show, not only does care circulate – through material and moral exchanges – amidst transnational families, but vital events such as marriages, family formation, household settlement, and births are interrelated with and triggered by migration.
Courtesy by Springer