Transnational Care in Multigenerational Households

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 2 provides an ethnographic account of transnational care-at-a-distance. Against the simplistic model of cross-border care advanced by the state, transnational families themselves envision and enact care as a multidirectional process in which all relatives participate. These engagements are understood as fundamentally differentiated, both by gendered and generational hierarchies as well as by pervasive distinctions between migrants and nonmigrants. This chapter highlights the role of communication in transnational care, suggesting that language is a powerful resource that often reproduces hierarchy even as it can be used to renegotiate the multiple inequalities that shape family care. As communicative care generates social life, it also introduces incremental change. Through communication, families implicitly push back against dominant imaginaries in ways that at least partially recover family care from neoliberal state co-optation.