To be at Home

House, Work, and Self in the Modern World

James Williams, Felicitas Hentschke, James Williams, Felicitas Hentschke

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110580136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Houses and homes are dynamic spaces within which people work to organize and secure their lives, livelihoods and relationships. Written by a team of renowned historians and anthropologists, and and accompanied by original photography by Maurice Weiss, To Be at Home: House, Work, and Self in the Modern World compares the ways people in different societies and historical periods strive to make and keep houses and homes under conditions of change, upheaval, displacement, impoverishment and violence. These conditions speak to the challenges of life in our modern world. The contributors of this volume position the home as a new nodal point between work, the self and the world to explore people's creativity, agency and labour. Houses and homes prove complex and powerful concepts – if also often elusive – invoking places, persons, objects, emotions, values, attachments and fantasies. This book demonstrates how the relations between houses, work and the self have transformed dramatically and unpredictably under conditions of capitalism and modernity – and continue to change today.

Section 1
Homes and Mobility: Borders, Boundaries, Thresholds

Heike Drotbohm

Shoes Painfully Small: Material and Maternal (Dis)comfort in Cape Verdean Remittance Houses

Emilia (17), Luisa (14), and Edilson (9) live with their grandparents in one of the best houses in São Filipe. I met the three children while carrying out anthropological fieldwork on the island of Fogo, Cape Verde, in 2007 and 2008. Their house had been built by their mother, Susana, who has been living in Dorchester, close to Boston, in the United States since 2001. The extravagant two-story building looked exactly how most Cape Verdean transmigrants – migrants who live their social lives between their country of origin and country of destination – would describe uma casa bonita, a beautiful house. It was painted in pastel colors and metal fences surrounded the front lawns, with a gate allowing entry only for certain neighbors. There was a garage and a satellite dish on the roof. It was equipped with air conditioning, large leather suites, and a flat-screen TV. The kitchen had a modern stove and various cooking utensils. And despite Cape Verde’s chronic water shortage, the house had three bathrooms, all with several sinks and bathtubs. “Just like she has it in Dorchester,” Luisa commented when she showed me around, hinting proudly at her mother’s achievements abroad.

In the anthropological literature on transnational migration, ‘remittance houses,’ i.e. houses built with money remitted by migrants living abroad, are considered important for understanding how family members dispersed across several countries or continents create a sense of togetherness, belonging, and intimacy despite physical separation. A kasa d’emigrant, as such houses are called in the Cape Verdean creole language, is understood as a tangible link that connects migrants’ lives in their country of destination to their country of origin and thus as markers of identity and stability. By investing materially in their countries or communities of origin, migrants manage to affirm their responsibility and co-presence.10

During my fieldwork, which began on the Cape Verdean islands and extended to family members living in various locations as part of the Cape Verdean diaspora, I read this acceptance of obligations – through the building of remittance houses – as an act of care to complement other modes of transnational support, such as remittances, gifts, phone calls, or visits. As Leah Schmalzbauer has shown regarding transnational Honduran families, parents living abroad often try to improve the socioeconomic status of their children remaining behind by concentrating on status-relevant investments, in addition to covering their basic needs such as health and education.11 At the same time, however, the material comfort flowing from the diaspora back to the country of origin is accompanied by differences and divisions that are likewise part of cross-border family lives. This essay concentrates on the ‘(dis)comforts’ of remittance houses. I refer here to a term introduced by Daniel Miller, who used the objects assembled in households to reflect on the ‘comfort of things’ – the expectations, accomplishments, and frustrations of the inhabitants of a single street in London.12 Complementing these theoretical premises, I argue that things not only comfort, but also discomfort, when they gloss over the misunderstandings and misrepresentations that are part and parcel of lives extending across national borders.

The Challenges of Leaving and Remaining Close

Susana had left her children and parents, like so many other Cape Verdean women before her, at a moment when she did not have much of a choice. Since the 1970s, which marked a new phase in the history of Cape Verdean migration, Cape Verdean women have increasingly begun to find employment abroad as nannies, housekeepers, and cleaners, but also in the health and elderly care sectors. Comparable to many other societies in the Global South, the so-called feminization of migration saw thousands of women travel to the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and wealthy Asian countries to find gainful employment in order to support family members left behind in their countries of origin. According to Arlie Hochschild, who introduced the critical notion of ‘global care chains,’ the exodus of women from the Global South is accompanied by a shortage of women to perform the same duties for their own families back in their countries of origin.13 In Cape Verde, the absence of women in the middle generation follows the same migration pattern of their male compatriots, who have been migrating from Cape Verde to the United States since the nineteenth century to work as whalers, cranberry pickers, or in the garment industry. Cape Verdean women are likewise considered reliable, diligent, and sociable workers, who make a valued contribution to closing the care gaps generated by the increasing withdrawal of the state from North American or European welfare programs.14

When an opportunity arose at the end of 2000, Susana had to react. The father of her first two children had died in a car accident, the second had left her immediately after Edilson’s birth, and she had to move back into her parents’ house. When a cousin, who had been living in Boston for some years, found her a job, the pressure was unbearable. Everybody in their crammed little stone house knew that they would all profit from Susana’s emigration and she could not ignore their expectations and excitement. She decided to apply for a tourist visa and leave her three children with her parents, where they would, she was sure, be taken good care of.

The very first weeks after Susana’s departure were very difficult, her children and their grandparents told me. She called every day on the phone to talk to each of them. She checked whether everything was alright, asked about school, their friends, and health, and tried not to cry too much. She told them it wouldn’t be for long. For the children, though they remained in their familiar environment, it was also a big change. The two girls in particular had to take over many household duties in addition to their schoolwork. However, merely weeks after her departure, Susana began to organize their material improvement, which started with the house.

In a social setting shaped by constant mobility, departure, absence, and the hope for someone’s return, a house built by those who managed to leave the islands, live successful lives abroad, and reinvest into their country and community of origin has always received attention and appreciation. The caring aspect of houses goes far beyond the mere act of providing a living space. Since most migrants live abroad during the building phase, they have to collaborate and communicate with the others who are present. They need to cooperate with construction contractors and middlemen, negotiating costs and supervizing their working hours, and possibly also bribing local officials for the necessary permissions.

Within months of her departure, Susana and her father had identified an ideal plot of land close to the village center. She contacted the owners, organized the acquisition through a local notary, and contracted the construction workers. She saved the respective sum over the summer, and then they started to lay the foundations. The ground floor was finished within a few months. In their weekly phone calls, Susana discussed every decision with her parents, including the materials to be purchased and the conflicts to be solved. By early 2002, immediately after the basic interior works were finished, her family was able to move from the little stone house up in the hills into this modern, fancy house close to the main road.

Coping with Unforeseen Contingencies

When I met them in 2008, Susana’s children appeared to be doing very well. Their mother’s financial and material investment in their education had enabled them to continue at secondary school during the years of her absence. Emilia, the eldest, attended the only private high school in town, where she took classes in business administration. The younger two were ambitious high school students; Luisa was part of a theater group and Edilson played for the school soccer team. Thanks to a steady stream of money from the United States, they had been able to adopt a lifestyle that differentiated them from their poorer peers, many of whom had no family connections to the diaspora.

Often the two girls talked about their future plans, which were fixated entirely on emigration. Emilia wanted to continue her studies and work in a bank, and Luisa planned to study medicine at a top American university. Although they had never left their home island, the transnational flow of money, information, and ideas had stimulated a precise imagination of a life abroad. Contrary to his two older sisters, however, Edilson did not yet harbor any professional ambitions, which can be considered typical of a boy of his age. In one of our talks, he told me that he liked his life on Fogo island and that he would rather stay where he was. Edilson felt particularly close to his grandmother, Maria, with whom he had developed a relationship akin to mother and son, as often happens in constellations of transnational child fosterage.15 Unlike his sisters, he hardly remembered his mother and did not feel particularly attracted by promises of an unknown life abroad.

During their mother’s absence, each child had developed their own ideas and visions. They also had doubts and fears, which they did not discuss openly. A longer interview with their grandmother, Maria, revealed the bumpier side of their transnational family life, which the children seemed to find harder to expose:

We all thought this would go faster. I am not young anymore. I have already raised my kids, now I am a mother again. Susana said she would take them to the US as fast as she could, but this is so complicated! She already has a nice house in America, and she earns well, everything is well prepared. But apparently doing the papers is still very complicated … She never managed to come for a visit. This was very hard, especially for the little one. And in the meantime, the kids fear that their mother could forget about them. She has a new child now; did they tell you? This [she points at a picture of a little baby] is Junior, the last one, he was born a bit more than a year ago. So, she was not able to work for a certain while, I guess she even lost her job. This complicated everything.

Indeed, the three children had not mentioned their little brother, whose picture on the living-room shelf had always gone without comment. As migrants can only sponsor remaining family members once their economic and legal situation in the host state is properly established, postponed visits and unintended delays in the bureaucracy of family reunification are routine occurrences that transnational families have to bear. Interestingly, children left behind are usually well aware of the risks and contingencies associated with their desire to be reunited with their parents or other family members living abroad. While they may be confident and optimistic just after their parent’s departure, many develop fears and frustrations over the course of a prolonged separation. Edilson, who always, and sometimes even stubbornly, refers to the island of Fogo when discussing his own future, provides an exemplary case. Teenagers in particular tend to hide their vulnerability and their disappointment behind layers of distance and protest. There are several cases of such children referring to their foster mother as ‘mother’ and calling their migrant mother by her given name as a way of expressing their psychological wounds.

Evidently, the birth of a new sibling – in this case the child of their mother’s still-unknown new partner – complicated the trust felt by the three siblings in their transnational family arrangements.

Concealing Inconsistencies

In late 2008, I decided to travel to Boston to include the perspective of the family members who had been physically absent in Cape Verde during my research and whom I had not yet met in person. When I called Susana’s number in São Filipe and asked her about potential addresses for accommodation in the Cape Verdean neighborhoods in the Boston area, she immediately invited me to stay at her place. When we sat at her kitchen table and talked about a vida nas ilhas, life on the islands, it became clear that Susana’s reality in the United States differed considerably from the success story that her loved-ones imagined back on the islands.

Just like her partner, also a Cape Verdean migrant, Susana was working double shifts in two food factories in Dorchester United States. It was difficult for her to talk about the years that had passed since she left Fogo. At the beginning, she said, she had been optimistic, but then all types of problems arose. She had taken out a loan to finance not only her life in the US, but also the construction of her family’s house in Cape Verde. With the housing and banking crisis that began in 2007, it became nearly impossible to cover the mortgage repayments. After losing her previous job in the elderly care sector, she had to move into a smaller apartment in Dorchester. Of course she missed her three children a lot, but she also considered them to be in a good, safe, ‘traditional’ environment where they would be protected. Many of the Cape Verdean diaspora struggle with precarious living conditions in neighborhoods shaped by gang and police violence, and tend to romanticize their lives back on the Cape Verdean islands, where children can grow up within a larger, caring island community. For Susana, it turned out to be a much more complicated and lengthier process than she expected to legalize her stay. It was only through her recently born child that she was able to obtain full US citizenship and file a petition for family reunification with her other three children.

Susana’s trajectory, including the complications she faced in legalizing her stay and the unintended family reunification delay, is typical of migrants who are neither fully undocumented nor documented, but often straddle both statuses by means of a series of temporary permits spanning more than a decade. Evidently, these legal constraints and bureaucratic complications have severe consequences for their parenting capacity.16 Those left behind have to cope with unclear decisions, unforeseen, long-term, and sometimes even indefinite separation, and a general lack of information, which obviously also has an effect on their emotional attachment.17

During the months and years of separation, Susana had filled her small apartment with memories, such as family pictures, traditionally embroidered tablecloths and bedspreads, and paintings of the Cape Verdean islands, its little villages, and the Atlantic ocean. She cooked with Cape Verdean spices and took her coffee with typical bulaxas biscuits, bathing in the memories of home. Besides this, she focused her material investments entirely on her family life in Cape Verde. At least three times a week she went shopping and looked out for ‘something special,’ as she put it, to send back to Cape Verde.

One day, she was sitting in her kitchen trying to organize the several pai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Section 1 Homes and Mobility: Borders, Boundaries, Thresholds
• Section 2 Houses, Work, and Everyday Life: Rhythms, Ruptures, Cycles
• Section 3 Construction, Demolition, Relocation
• Section 4 The Power of Place: Space, Exclusions, Vulnerability
• Section 5 Houses and Selves: Nostalgia, Imagination, Memory
• Section 6 Networks, Neighborhoods, Communities
• Section 7 Being at Home in the World: Thinking with Houses and Homes
• Reflections I
• Reflections II
• Reflections III
• Contributor Biographies
• Picture Credits
• Index