Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Studies on integration policies for the children of immigrants have tended to explore whether this group retains the national identities of their parents or not, based on the assumption that retaining this sense of identity would durably reproduce in their offspring their parents’ foreignness and lead to deficient social inclusion in their respective environments. In practice, however, there has been much discussion regarding the effects of the children holding onto the national identity of their parents and the indicators that enable us to measure this effectively. This article first considers this issue and then explains how viewing identity as social capital in the context of negotiation processes could help to overcome the difficulties raised by data on the national identity of the children of immigrants. In support of that opinion, the approach adopted in a qualitative study on the subject – conducted in Madrid – and the findings thereof are summarized.

To understand the social fields with which the children of immigrants actually identify, we interrogate the multiple sites and sources which Gujarati-origin Indian American Hindus and Muslims draw upon to construct their religious identities. We find that our respondents create religious selves by combining their imaginings of their parents’ religious upbringing with their own real and imagined experiences of religious life in the US, India, and other salient places around the world. They also incorporate real and perceived understandings of US religious traditions in four broad patterns which we call American-centric, Indian-centric, global-secular and global-religious. But while they adopt these various stances, they do so from their positions in the US. The circulation of religious ideas, practices and objects is filtered through uniquely American cultural structures and traverses uniquely American organizational channels.

Although the second generation inherits the transnational networks and practices from its parents, this is seldom analyzed from a transnational point of view. The article explores, therefore, how the second-generation’s transnational networks and practices can be apprehended in empirical terms. We present a research design that was developed and used in a study on the Spanish second generation living in Switzerland. The mixed-methods approach evolves in four phases: (1) biographical interviews about the relationship of the second generation with family and friends in Spain; (2) ego-centric network maps and geographical maps for a structured account of relationships with people and places in Spain and abroad; (3) visits to people and places in Spain, including semi-structured interviews, photographs, and field notes; (4) a third interview with the interviewees of the second generation in Switzerland to comment and interpret together the material collected in Spain using methods such as drawing. We present the research strategy, its methodological implications, and illustrate it with data from the study. We conclude with an overview of the most important results.

Increases in migration from developing countries to industrialized nations results in family members living in different countries, having to arrange care for young and elderly at a distance. A common form that these transnational families take is when a parent migrates, leaving his or her children in the care of someone in the home country. This results in transnational child raising arrangements (TCRAs) composed of migrant parents and their children and caregivers in the countries of origin. Transnational migration studies have begun to study this phenomenon, yet they tend to give prevalence to relationships between migrant parents, especially mothers, and children. Caregivers are not a focus. This is a consequence of researchers being guided by Western conceptualizations of the family where prevalence is given to the nuclear family living in geographical proximity. This paper focuses on a recent study in which all members in a transnational child raising arrangement are the focus: the migrant overseas, the caregiver or multiple caregivers at home and the child him or herself. The study uses a mixed methods approach, which incorporates surveys of children and parents, the mapping of child raising networks with the different actors of a TCRA (parents, caregivers and children), and an in-depth, multi-sited ethnographic study of a select number of child raising networks, giving equal attention to all members of a TCRA. This paper focuses on the second method and highlights three contributions that such a method makes to our understanding of TCRAs. First, the mapping of child raising networks helps to identify the perceptions of care held by different members of a TCRA. Secondly, discrepancies and similarities between different actors’ perspectives help to understand how TCRAs function. Finally, mapping child raising networks with all actors involved, gives children a voice which is an element often missing in research about children.