Mobile Childhoods in Filipino Transnational Families

Migrant Children with Similar Roots in Different Routes

Itaru Nagasaka, Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot, Itaru Nagasaka, Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137515148
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Mobile Childhoods in Filipino Transnational Families focuses on the lived experiences of '1.5-generation' migrants with similar 'roots' (the Philippines), traversing different 'routes' (receiving countries). By shedding light on the diversified paths of their migratory lives, it revisits the relationships between mobility, sociality and identity.

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Introduction

Itaru Nagasaka and Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot

[I]f contemporary migrant populations are not to appear as mute, passive straws in the political-economic winds, we need to listen to a wide range of ‘travel stories’ (not ‘travel literature’ in the bourgeois sense).

(Clifford, 1997, p. 38)

Family-related migration has been the main channel of legal entry to many major immigrant-receiving countries since the 1970s (Kofman, 2004). In 2005, around 40–60 per cent of long-term migrants in these countries (except Japan and the UK) were actually family-related migrants (International Organization for Migration [IOM], 2008, p. 157). The number of children among them is difficult to determine (White, Loire, Tyrrell, & Carpena-Méndez, 2011, p. 1160), but the prevalence of family-related migration in many countries today strongly suggests the presence of child migrants (accompanied or non-accompanied). These young people originate from various countries, mostly in the global South. They move not only to classical immigration countries, such as the US and Canada, but also to newly emerging ones, like Italy and Japan. In their destination country, they are compelled to deal with a variety of ‘contexts of reception’ (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001): the immigration policy, the school system, the immigration history of their ethnic group and its position in the existing social order, and so on. The plurality of places of origin and destination of these young migrants underscores their diversified and differentiated ‘routes’ (Clifford, 1997), which raises significant empirical, theoretical, and methodological questions. How does family-related migration affect the life trajectories, sociality, and identity of children? How can we capture the lived experiences of young migrants who have undergone childhoods within two or more different social settings due to migration? In what way should we approach their childhoods thus characterized by individual and familial mobilities?

This volume attempts to tackle these issues by exploring the lived experiences of ‘1.5-generation’ migrants of similar ‘roots’ following different ‘routes’—those of the same national origin (the Philippines) but living in different countries (Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, and the US) after migrating during their school years. These children spent parts of their lives in both their ‘origin’ and ‘destination’ societies, but their experiences of immobility and mobility varied to a significant degree. Some migrated with their parents after spending their childhood years in the Philippines, whereas others experienced prolonged periods of family separation before rejoining their parents abroad. Their life experiences after their migration also varied considerably due to differences in the ‘context of reception’. By comparing their diverse experiences in the society of their origin and destination, we aim to shed light on the relations between the migration trajectories of children and their parents, as well as to provide insights into how young migrants (re)build their lives after moving to a new country.

Studies on this generation currently remain scarce compared to those considering other groups of children of migrants. For instance, much has been written about the diverse trajectories of assimilation or integration of immigrant second generations into their receiving societies (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Portes & Zhou, 1993; Rumbaut & Portes, 2001; Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco, 2001; Waters & Jiménez, 2005; Zhou, 1997). A growing body of literature on transnational families, especially on transnational motherhood, has also brought to the fore the emotional difficulties of migrant parents as well as their ‘children left behind’ in their homelands (Carling, Menjívar, & Schmalzbauer, 2012; Dreby, 2010; Parreñas, 2005; Zentgraf & Chinchilla, 2012). By focusing mainly on assimilation and separation issues, these works overlook the migratory experiences of children of migrants as a result. The present volume addresses this lacuna by examining the way in which 1.5-generation migrants experience migration, reorganize their social ties, and (re)make their sense of self across time and space.

To attain this objective, we draw from the existing literature on migration, transnational family, and childhood studies. We particularly build upon the insights offered in ‘the new social studies of childhood’ that emphasize the social and cultural construction of childhoods and children’s agency within structural constraints (for example, James & James, 2004; James & Prout, 1997; Jenks, 1996). This scholarship allows us to regard migrant children and youth as active agents and as ‘interpreting subjects’ (Silvey & Lawson, 1999, p. 126), which highlights the ways in which they construct their own migratory lives and their subjective migratory experiences (Coe, Reynolds, Boehm, Hess, & Rae-Espinoza, 2011; Dreby, 2007; Gardner, 2012; Knörr, 2005; Ní Laoire, Carpena-Méndez, Tyrrell, & White, 2011). This diverges from the predominant adult-centric perspective that views migrant children as ‘things’ (Dobson, 2009, p. 356) transported or left behind by adult migrants.

As an analytical lens, we adopt here a perspective of ‘mobile childhoods’ that views the (re)construction of migrant children’s social lives as part-and-parcel of a continuing and long-lasting process during which they move from one social, cultural, political, and economic context to another (for details, see Fresnoza-Flot & Nagasaka in Chapter 2). By doing so, we shall be able to highlight the temporality and contextuality of their social relationships and sense of self in the midst of their movement in different contexts (familial, social, political, cultural, material, symbolic, and so on). In addition, throughout this volume, we demonstrate the importance and efficiency of incorporating a comparative method into ethnographic studies of migration (see Mahler & Pessar, 2006, p. 32). We believe that such comparison allows us to highlight the relational nature of the sociality and identification of the 1.5 generation.

In this introductory chapter, we outline the significance of our focus on the perspectives of the ‘migrant children’ and explain the way in which we use the concept of 1.5 generation. We then go on to describe our research methodology and, finally, we provide a summary of the different chapters comprising this volume.

Migration and childhood: An overview

As mentioned earlier, the adult-centric perspective has made children invisible in migration studies. This reminds us of the invisibility of women in this field of study ‘under the male bias’, pointed at by Morokvaśic 30 years ago. Since it was assumed that women migrated only as dependents of men, women’s migration did not attract much scholarly attention and, as a result, had little impact on migration studies and policy making (Morokvaśic, 1984). The present-day invisibility of children is comparable to that of women in the past; hence, the growing interest in migrant children should not be regarded merely as the addition of a new research topic to migration studies. Considering the subsequent developments in the research field of ‘gender and migration’ and its theoretical impacts on the main body of transnational migration literature (for example, Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994; Mahler & Pessar, 2006; Parreñas, 2001; Pessar & Malher, 2003), it is important to consider children’s experiences through their own eyes to widen our understanding and conceptualization of transnational family or transnational social field.

Migrant children are rarely regarded in migration studies as social actors who construct their own social world but instead are usually considered as passive dependents (Dobson, 2009). Ní Laoire and associates (2011) pointed out that, when migrant children are the subject of studies in Europe, there is a tendency to view them as vulnerable victims. Under this trend, studies on certain categories of migrant children, such as refugees, asylum seekers, and victims of trafficking, have been predominant (Ní Laoire et al., 2011, p. 2). Although some recent studies attempt to offer more complex pictures of these migrant children (for example, Heindbrink, 2014), from this perspective, insufficient attention has been paid so far to children’s voices and their active responses to structural constraints (Crawley, 2009, 2010). In addition, the relevant literature emphasizes the ‘success or failure of “integration” or “incorporation” of children of migrants to the host society’, rather than their own view of their migratory lives and their sense of belonging at various levels (Ní Laoire et al., 2011, pp. 1–5). While we do not seek to undervalue previous works on the vulnerability of migrant children and on their ways of integrating or assimilating, we feel that insufficient attention has been given to migrant children’s own views on their mobility as well as to their agency during the migratory process until recently.

For instance, Olwig (1999) indicated that the nature of Caribbean transnational family networks has been described from the vantage point of adult migrants or caregivers, and then examined it from the viewpoint of children who had been left behind in the homeland and subsequently experienced their own migration. Orellana and associates (2001) pointed out the invisibility of children in the transnational migration literature owing to the assumption that adults are the only important social actors. Drawing on the case of children with roots in Mexico, Central America, Korea, and Yemen, they argued how ‘the presence and actions of children may help families stay connected across the borders’ (p. 573). In a similar vein, pointing out the scarcity of research on children’s own understandings of migratory life in migration literature and emphasizing the need to recognize children’s agency and potential for change, Knörr and Nunes (2005) explored forms of social relationships and identities that migrant children have (re)built in the course of migration (see also Gardner, 2012; Ní Laoire et al., 2011). This work stresses the importance of examining the agency of young migrants to uncover the logic of their actions.

Agency has been a key concept in childhood studies during the last decades. Over the years, the conventional conceptualization of childhood in social sciences as ‘a way station on the path to the “complete, recognizable, and … most significantly, desirable” state of adulthood’ (Jenks, 1996, p. 9 cited in Hirschfeld, 2002, p. 614) has been seriously questioned across disciplines. For instance, in anthropology, Hardman (2001) criticized classic anthropological studies on childhood by stating that they saw the child ‘as continually assimilating, learning and responding to the adult, having little autonomy, contributing nothing to social values or behaviour except the latent outpourings of earlier acquired experiences’ (p. 504). Criticizing such dominant conceptualizations of children as ‘receptacles of adult teaching’ (ibid.) or as ‘adults in the making’ (Holloway & Valentine, 2000, p. 763), the ‘new social studies of childhood’ began to regard children as social actors and to emphasize their agency from the late 1980s (Oswell, 2013). In their essay outlining an ‘emergent paradigm’ of childhood, Prout and James (1997) highlighted children’s creative construction of social life by stating that ‘children must be seen as involved in the construction of their own social lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they live’ (p. 8).

Conceiving children as social actors and emphasizing their agency is, of course, not unproblematic. As the wealth of arguments on ‘structure and agency’ repeatedly reminds us, we should recognize the need for a ‘careful analysis of the cultural meanings and structural arrangements that construct and constrain their “agency” ’ (Ortner, 1996, p. 2). The call for recognizing both children’s agency and vulnerability (Bluebond-Langner & Korbin, 2007, p. 242), and the criticism against the tendency towards hypostatization of the agency and structure dichotomy (Oswell, 2013, p. 49), should also be taken seriously. Nevertheless, we can say that the introduction of the concept of agency into childhood studies has laid the foundations for considering children as not merely acted on by the social worlds in which they live, but also that they act on and negotiate these worlds.

Together with the new scholarship on migrant children (for example, Gardner, 2012; Ní Laoire et al., 2011; White et al., 2011), the present volume adopts this logic in exploring the agency of migrant children and (re)constructing their migratory lives. However, it sets itself apart from existing studies in two main respects: by focusing on the intertwined contextual factors that constrain the migratory lives of children in both their sending and receiving societies, and by introducing comparative methods in the ethnographic study of migrant children. We shall explain these two features of our book in the next two sections.

The 1.5 generation under focus

The term ‘1.5 generation’ has its scholarly roots in the US, notably in the field of migration studies. One of the earliest categorizations of 1.5-generation immigrants was made by Rumbaut (1991), who proposed this term to refer to migrants born outside the US but having received their education in the country. Since these migrants were expected to manage the transition from childhood to adulthood and transition from one sociocultural environment to another at the same time, he insisted that they should be distinguished from the first- and the second-generation immigrants who only had to deal with either one of these two transitions (Rumbaut, 1991, p. 61).

In the immigration literature on assimilation of the new second generation or the descendants of post-1965 immigrants to the US, members of the 1.5 generation are usually treated as ‘de facto second generation’ (Rumbaut, 2004, p. 1165) or, in general, as part of the category ‘second generation’ (Levitt & Waters, 2002, p. 12; Myers, Xin, & Emeka, 2009, pp. 208–209). Other works have made distinctions based on the age of immigrants at the time of immigration (Zhou, 1997, p. 65).

After the 1990s, those who do not fall under the categories ‘first-generation migrants’ or ‘second-generation migrants’ have been increasingly categorized as part of the 1.5 generation, taking into account their age at the time of their arrival. However, the age specified in the definition of the term changes from one study to another.¹ Some studies also introduced concepts such as ‘1.25-generation immigrants’ and ‘1.75-generation immigrants’, and emphasized the difference in migratory experiences depending on the different ages at the time of immigration² (Rumbaut, 2004; see Alitolppa-Niitamo, 2002). Furthermore, 1.5-generation immigrants can also be divided into two groups according to whether they migrated together with their parents (‘1.5-generation children of family migration’, Fresnoza-Flot, 2015) or after them (‘1.5-generation children of parental migration’, ibid.).

This diversity in the definition of the term ‘1.5 generation’ underscores the widespread interest in the influence of age on the migratory experiences of individuals. However, it should be noted that the use of the term ‘generation’ in immigration and transnational migration studies has received some criticism. For example, Waters and Jiménez (2005) stated that ‘at any point in time each generation is a mix of cohorts and each cohort has a mix of generations’ (p. 121), given the continuous replenishment of new immigrants to the US since the 1960s. They thus recommended a combined usage of the concept of generation and cohort. Other critical comments on the use of the term ‘generation’ have also been voiced by scholars of transnational migration to Europe. Mand (2010), for instance, in her article on the sense of belonging among migrant children with their roots in Bangladesh and living in Britain, mentioned:

While it may be feasible to speak of a generation of migrants who were part of a ‘mass’ migration, such as those of the 1950s from the sub-continent to Britain, such distinctions are difficult to maintain given the fluidity of movement in the context of transnational mobility. (p. 278)

In a similar vein, others argue that the number of children raised in a transnational social field is increasing, which implies that the socializations of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Understanding Childhoods and Mobilities
• Part II: Family and Social Relationships in Their Temporality
• Part III: Sense-Making and Self-(Re)Constructions
• Index