The Migrant Maternal: Birthing New Lives Abroad

Abroad

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

The migrant maternal : ‘birthing’ new lives abroad / edited by Anna Kuroczycka Schultes and Helen Vallianatos.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-77258-080-8 (hardback)

1. Motherhood--Social aspects. 2. Mothers--Social conditions. 3. Women refugees--Social conditions. 4. Women immigrants--Social conditions. 5. Mother and child. I. Vallianatos, Helen, author, editor II. Schultes, Anna Kuroczycka, 1984-, author, editor

HQ759.M52 2016 306.874’3089 C2016-905194-3

The Migrant Maternal

Birthing New Lives Abroad

EDITED BY

Anna Kuroczycka Schultes and Helen Vallianatos

DEMETER PRESS

Anna:

To my daughter Adriana, who has honoured me with the gift of motherhood, my husband Scott for sharing this amazing journey of parenting with me, and my parents for their unwavering love and support.

Helen:

To all of those from whom I learned what motherhood means, particularly my son Jacob, who brought me the joys of motherhood, and my husband Rob, without whose support mothering would be so much more challenging.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Migrant Maternal

Anna Kuroczycka Schultes and Helen Vallianatos

I. MOTHERING IN A FOREIGN LAND I—

BIRTHING NEW FAMILIES ABROAD

1.

Reproducing Punjabiyat: Family Rhetoric and Birth Control among Indian Migrant Women in Italy

Sara Bonfanti

2.

From Mama Africa to Papatūānuku: The Experiences of a Group of African Immigrant and Refugee-Background Mothers Living in Auckland, Aotearoa-New Zealand

Helene Connor, Irene Ayallo, and Sue Elliott

3.

Mother Tongue as the Language of Mothering and Homing Practice in Betty Quan’s Mother Tongue and Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms: Survival Strategies and Identity Construction of Migrant and Refugee Mothers

Eglė Kačkutė

4.

Perinatal Care for Immigrants in the Netherlands: A Personal Account

Theano Lianidou

5.

Motherhood and Unemployment: Immigrant Women’s Experiences in Toronto

Leslie Nichols

6.

Mothers at the Margins of Health: Syrian Mothers in Istanbul

Nurcan Ozgur Baklacioglu

7.

Changing Places, Changing Bodies: Reproducing Families through Food

Helen Vallianatos

II. MOTHERING IN A FOREIGN LAND II—

GENERATIONAL DYNAMICS IN SETTLEMENT AND MOTHERS’ RESPONSIBILITIES

8.

An Immigrant Mother’s Revolt against Silence in Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying

Justine Dymond

9.

Isolation and Negotiation: A Case Study of Chinese Working-Class Immigrant Women’s Mothering Experiences

Yu-Ling Hsiao

10.

Foreign Mothers, Native Children: The Impact of Language on Cultural Identity among Polish Americans in Chicago

Anna Kuroczycka Schultes

11.

Mothering Duties Come First: Professional Immigrant Filipinas’ Career Reconstitution Dilemmas

Cirila P. Limpangog

12.

The Extraordinariness of Ordinary Immigrant Mothers in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Writings

Rehnuma Sazzad

13.

Attaining a Balance between Showing Sensitivity to Local Norms and Upholding the Values of the Country of Origin: The Case of a Western Mother in Japan

Meredith Stephens

14.

Intercultural Upbringing: The Benefits of Maintaining Home Language and Culture when Raising Migrant Children

Agata Strzelecka-Misonne

Conclusion:

Mothering in Diverse Migratory Contexts

Helen Vallianatos and Anna Kuroczychultes

About the Contributors

Acknowledgements

We both wish to acknowledge the work of the contributors to this volume, the constructive advice by the anonymous reviewers that strengthened our collective work, and, most importantly, all the mothers who informed this work—both real and imagined.

Introduction

The Migrant Maternal

ANNA KUROCZYCKA SCHULTES AND HELEN VALLIANATOS

THE MANY CONFLICTS AROUND THE WORLD in the past two years, including the military conflicts in the Middle East, have caused a tremendous shift in migration patterns. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that in mid-2014 an average of thirteen million refugees were awaiting repatriation, local integration, or resettlement. In 2015, that number escalated dramatically, with various sources estimating it at circa fifteen million (Ruffer). In his book The Figure of the Migrant, Thomas Nail calls the twenty-first century the century of the migrant (1). Worldwide, one in seven people is considered to be a regional or international migrant (Nail 1), whereas one in 122 people is a refugee, an internally displaced person, or an asylum seeker (Vick 40).

At the start of this book, we, the editors, feel that it is important to delineate the differences between who ought to be referred to as a migrant versus a refugee, especially in the light of the barrage of media coverage and personal opinions expressed on social networks that frequently conflate the two terms. The 1951 Refugee Convention indicates that a refugee is someone who

As a result of events occurring before 1 January 1951 and owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it. (UNHCR 14)

This definition, however, is problematic in the context of the current refugee crisis. Whereas the 1951 definition focuses on a very specific group of people—those escaping Europe after World War II—today’s refugees are oftentimes stateless and have no government to turn to in order to seek protection or even apply for a passport, such as Haitians in the Dominican Republic, who have never been to Haiti but are not recognized by the Dominican state (Ruffer). The UNHCR has, thus, expanded this definition to include those who are fleeing generalized violence or have no national protection:

Migrants, especially economic migrants, choose to move in order to improve the future prospects of themselves and their families. Refugees have to move if they are to save their lives or preserve their freedom. They have no protection from their own state—indeed it is often their own government that is threatening to persecute them. If other countries do not let them in, and do not help them once they are in, then they may be condemning them to death—or to an intolerable life in the shadows, without sustenance and without rights. (Refugees)

Whereas many European countries, most notably Germany, have embraced the broader understanding of who may be considered a refugee in global political discourse, the United States has not and is resettling less than 1 percent of the world’s refugees. Therefore, in part as a result of the semantic discrepancies, 80 percent of global refugees live in the least developed nations of the Global South (Ruffer).

MOTHER MIGRANTS

Prior to the mass exodus of people escaping the ongoing conflict in Syria, which has resulted in the largest wave of refugees since World War II, it was estimated that women constituted 49.6 percent of the economic migrants worldwide (Pearce et al. 2). It is critical, therefore, for scholars to give adequate attention to the phenomenon that we discuss in this book, one which some have referred to as the feminization of migration (Chang; Parreñas; Yinger). The average migrating woman is twenty-nine years old and comes from a country where female identity centres on motherhood (Hochschild). These women usually take on pink collar positions—such as babysitters, cosmetologists, maids, domestic servants, receptionists, and waitresses—that typically bring in less income than the more respected blue or white collar jobs (see also Nichols, this volume).

Oftentimes, however, the children that these women leave behind or as we illustrate in this collection, the children they take with them or bear in the host country complicate the migration process. As Janet Salaff and Arent Greve point out, transnational migration affects women and men in gender specific ways, [as it assigns a much greater responsibility to women who] undertake the meshing of work and family systems (160). Being a migrant mother, therefore, demands a flexibility that extends beyond the everyday manual, physical, emotional, and psychological work of mothering [to] one that must take into account multiple time zones, competing schedules, and the uneven distribution of technology and resources (Bryan 35). Women who migrate with their children are perceived as good mothers but oftentimes face great challenges in trying to care and provide for their children. Transnational mothering, on the other hand, is problematic and women who migrate alone for the betterment of their children are labelled as bad mothers.

The act of mothering in contemporary society extends borders in both a physical and ideological way. Migrant mothers may be torn between performing motherhood in a way that resembles how they were raised or in the Western (European and American) ideal of intensive mothering, which assumes that children are social capital to be invested in (Vandenbeld Giles 9). As Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp state in the introduction to their volume Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, "questions of culture, politics, and biology are impossible to disentangle around the topic of reproduction, as they often involve transnational processes that link local and global interests (2). These global links have created care chains (Hochschild 186) and have produced multiple narratives of affective work, as documented by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Pei-Chia Lan, and Shellee Colen, among others, who, respectively, describe the situation of Filipina, Indonesian, and West Indian migrant women domestic workers. Time and again, women leave their own families behind to be taken care of by relatives, a phenomenon known as the care crisis," which has most famously been documented in the case of Filipino children, 30 percent of whom have one parent who works abroad (Hochschild). Some migrant women who leave their children in their homelands pursue employment as childcare workers in other countries, thereby transposing their sense of moral obligation to mother onto other people’s children.

The migration process always involves a sense of loss: the removal of territorial ownership or access, the loss of the political right to vote or to receive social welfare, the loss of legal status to work or drive, or the financial loss associated with transportation or change in residence (Nail 2). Migrant mothers who reproduce their families in a foreign context face additional challenges; they often have to negotiate their sense of belonging in their host country, especially their ability to adapt familiar mothering practices to new cultural and physical contexts (Kačkutė, this volume). Shellee Colen has deemed the act of performing mothering duties differentially, based on one’s upbringing, as stratified reproduction. In ‘Like a Mother to Them’: Stratified Reproduction and West Indian Childcare Workers and Employers in New York, Colen describes this phenomenon as one where physical and social reproductive tasks are accomplished differentially according to inequalities that are based on hierarchies of class, race, ethnicity, gender, place in a global economy, and migration status and that are structured by social, economic, and political forces (380). Sociologist Annette Lareau further distinguishes between parenting styles based on class. Concerted cultivation, the parenting style most commonly practised by the middle class, is based on engaging with children by reading or playing with them or by taking them to sports, music, or drama activities; it is an ideology that Lareau found manifests itself in parents who want to nurture their children’s growth. Middle-class parents are increasingly determined to make sure that their children are not excluded from any opportunity that might eventually contribute to their advancement (Lareau 5) and strive to instill in their children the necessity of questioning adults and addressing them as relative equals. On the contrary, working-class parents are not concerned with soliciting the opinions of children, as they see a clear boundary between adults and children [and] … tell their children what to do rather than persuading them with reasoning (Lareau 3). This parenting style, referred to as the accomplishment of natural growth, allows working-class and poor children greater control of their free time. It presumes that children essentially need someone only to watch over them and not be actively involved in their upbringing. They are free to engage with friends and relatives in the neighbourhood, instead of with extracurricular activities organized by their parents.

As the chapters in this volume show, for migrant mothers, these distinctions become highly problematic as a result of the struggles caused by the migration and translocation process. Migration—a process frequently associated with a drop in class status (Gans)—may force some mothers who believe in concerted cultivation practices to raise their children more in accordance with the accomplishment of natural growth, as financial, social, and cultural barriers, among others, may prevent them from enrolling their children in extracurricular activities, for example. As a result, immigrant mothers may also become increasingly isolated and feel that they do not fit in with the mainstream culture of the host country.

In this edited collection, we explore how and why immigrant and refugee mothers’ experiences differ because of the challenges posed by the migration process, but also what commonalities underline immigrant and refugee mothers’ lived experiences.The contributors use diverse theoretical lenses, which are at times informed by their own migrant trajectories as well (see Figure 1). This book adds to the field of women’s studies the much needed discussion of how immigrant and refugee mothers’ lives are dependent on cultural, environmental, and socioeconomic circumstances, and investigates how refugee mothers’ issues differ from those of immigrant mothers. The collection offers multiple perspectives on migrant mothering by including ethnographic and theoretical submissions along with mothers’ personal narratives and literary analysis. We felt that it was important to include feminist ethnography, which privileges the importance of individual experience, in order to interrogate and challenge the wide-reaching effects of neoliberal policies and practices (Vandenbeld Giles x), which are often the causes of migration.¹

We have chosen to divide the volume into two sections: 1.) Mothering in a Foreign Land I: Birthing New Families Abroad and 2.) Mothering in a Foreign Land II: Generational Dynamics in Settlement and Mothers’ Responsibilities. The main difference between these two parts is the focus of the authors’ exploration. In the first section, the focus is on mothers’ roles in the family institution and the pressures and responsibilities that they face in creating and reproducing families physically and socially. The second section, however, shifts its attention to children and highlights mothers’ continued roles in the development of their children abroad, along with the gendered and generational dynamics in settlement and mothers’ responsibilities.

Both sections focus on mothering rather than motherhood. Although these two terms are often used interchangeably in public discourse, our aim is to distinguish between motherhood as an identity and mothering, which by centring on beliefs, practices, and engagement, is constantly in flux (Walks 19). It is mothering, therefore, that is key to the experiences of immigrant women, who need to continuously adapt their ways to the situation of migration.

MOTHERING IN A FOREIGN LAND I: BIRTHING NEW FAMILIES ABROAD

The chapters in this section focus on three main issues: the birthing experience abroad, mothers’ refugee experiences, and migration as a site of intense negotiations (Kačkutė, this volume), which pertains to such things as how to style your child’s hair, what to feed your family for dinner, or how to manage financial challenges and situations of unemployment.

Sara Bonfanti and Theano Lianidou discuss the reproductive challenges that women face in circumstances of migration. Bonfanti’s study analyzes how procreation and infertility is thought of and practised within Punjabi communities in northern Italy. She discerns that Punjabiyat influences, shapes, and constrains local reproductive experiences through intersecting forms of power and resistance, despite the distance between Italy and South Asia. Bonfanti also introduces the idea of gift babies among Punjabi women as a culturally acceptable means of dealing with their infertile bodies. Although reproductive technologies are perceived as farfetched and classed in India, fostering a family member’s child, or in essence receiving that child as a gift, places emphasis on familial piety and selfless giving.

In her compelling narrative centred on her own traumatic child delivery in Amsterdam, Theano Lianidou explores the notion that potential ethnic biases are a contributing factor to substandard perinatal care for immigrants in the Netherlands. After synthesizing the literature, Lianidou identifies language barriers, mothers’ lack of health literacy, impaired general health, single motherhood, and delayed or irregular prenatal care visits as documented factors that lead to substandard care among the immigrant population. In the absence of these causes in her own personal experience, however, Lianidou calls for further exploration of ethnic biases as they pertain to perinatal care.

Both authors in their chapters tackle the issues of discrimination and ethnic bias being present in their respective locales, and report that gynecologists and obstetricians lament a lack of sound family planning among migrant women in general. More specifically, as these chapters show, this bias is encountered by the Indian community in Italy (Bonfanti) and among Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese, and Indonesian women in the Netherlands (Lianidou).

Helene Connor, Irene Ayallo, and Sue Elliott introduce a group of African immigrant and refugee mothers living in Auckland, New Zealand, whereas Nurcan Ozgur Baklacioglu provides a glimpse into the distressing lives of Syrian mothers in Istanbul. Both chapters underscore the main challenges caused by the mothers’ stateless status: lack of health care, social isolation, and the way in which single and divorced or widowed mothers are stigmatized in their respective communities. These chapters highlight the immediacy of these women’s situations and how migrant mothers are placed in the most precarious of positions through illegalization, criminalization, marginalization, and victimization during their transits and stays in the destination country.

The final set of chapters in this section focuses on the challenging negotiations that women engage in with themselves and their children when living in situations of migration. Leslie Nichols examines the experiences of unemployed immigrant mothers in Toronto. She has found that situations of employment precarity place mothers at greater risk of negative health outcomes, especially anxiety and depression, as they try to figure out how to provide their children with a nutrient-rich diet on a resource-poor budget. Financial insecurity, a biproduct of the immigrant settlement period, is further exacerbated by the necessity to provide care and nurturance to growing children.

Egle Kačkutės chapter explores immigrant and refugee mothers who mother primarily in their own native language rather than in English by focusing on two multilingual pieces: the play Mother Tongue (1996) by Chinese Canadian playwright Betty Quan and the novel Chorus of Mushrooms (1994) by Japanese Canadian author Hiromi Goto. Kačkutė uses migration theorist Irene Gedalof’s ideas to explain how migrant women’s subject position as mothers helps them negotiate and create a sense of belonging for themselves in their host country. She identifies these homing practices as the embodied work of mothering, such as childbirth and childcare, and the work of reproducing cultures and structures of belonging, such as the passing on of culturally specific histories and traditions regarding food, dress, family and other inter-personal relationships (Gedalof 82).

The reproductive sphere in the context of migration is, thus, far from reiterative of the home culture women left behind. Helen Vallianatos’s chapter explains how food beliefs and practices shifted after migration among a group of South Asian migrants to an urban area in Western Canada. By discussing habitual acts that are performed in new, nonhabitual environments, Vallianatos elaborates on Gedalof’s notion of repetition, which undoes, or that recollects forward (96). Vallianatos makes clear how food is a way for mothers to transmit their love and values to the next generation, which becomes especially important when it comes to being a member of a particular ethnocultural community. The act of children requesting the food of the host country while simultaneously rejecting traditional food may be perceived as a rejection of the family’s cultural values.

MOTHERING IN A FOREIGN LAND II: GENERATIONAL DYNAMICS IN SETTLEMENT AND MOTHERS’ RESPONSIBILITIES

The second part of the collection sheds light on the demands that accompany raising children in foreign contexts—namely, maintaining home language and culture among the next generation and mothers’ attitudes towards local norms. Cirila Limpangog surveys the childcare expectations of professional Filipina women in Melbourne. She calls for the care deficit—the need for care which has outgrown the available amount of caregivers (Hochschild)—to finally be addressed, as women in circumstances of migration are likely to endure more guilt for not accomplishing their mothering duties well. With careers often delayed or reconfigured in the new setting, men’s lack of care participation—what Limpangog deems the care-share deficit—needs to be remediated, especially since Filipino cultural norms demand that childcare may only be relegated to trusted kin.

Rehnuma Sazzad examines the pressure of isolation for newly immigrant women in her discussion of Jhumpa Lahiri’s writings. For Sazzad, Lahiri’s texts highlight the question of whether diasporas provide enabling contexts in which previous gender norms can be challenged or whether they reproduce and possibly even harden existing gender ideologies and relations (Al-Ali 119). In examining the Bengali mothers present in Lahiri’s short stories, Sazzad underscores how diasporas can either harden or challenge gender ideologies.

In her chapter, Yu-Ling Hsiao focuses her attention on working-class Chinese women in the United States and how their limited understanding of the host culture’s norms and practices affects their ability to educate their children, ultimately leading to a sense of guilt, isolation, and powerlessness. Mothers come up with parental strategies based on their (mis)interpretations of local community and school cultures, which can then result in more harm than good when it comes to their children’s educational experiences.

Children’s educational choices are further explored in Anna Kuroczycka Schultes’s and Agata Strzelecka-Misonne’s chapters. Both pieces examine Polish immigrant women raising children in the two largest centres of Polish migration in the United States: Chicago and New York City. Schultes’s study examines the choices that mothers make in an attempt to raise bilingual and bicultural children. Her research reveals that mothers believe their native language to be inextricably intertwined with teaching children about Polish culture; it is also a means of passing cultural capital onto their children. She introduces the concept of heritage language in this chapter to refer to the language that is acquired first by children born to immigrant mothers but that may not end up being completely acquired because of a switch to another dominant language (in the case of Schultes’s research participants, English) in the future (Kozminska 2).

Strzelecka-Misonne, on the other hand, produces a personal reflection on the importance of intercultural awareness when raising children abroad, which is grounded in her background as a cultural studies scholar. She claims that it is crucial for migrant mothers to kindle their children’s interest and broaden their knowledge of the language and culture of the country of origin. Strzelecka-Misonne argues that an intercultural identity provides both children and adults a sense of safety in that they are able to interpret cultural codes and messages present in multiple environments.

The final two chapters deal with the way in which the migration experience may often cause women to be disobedient towards local norms and customs in order to do what they think is best for their families. Meredith Stephens recounts her cross-cultural experiences as an immigrant mother from Australia raising her two daughters on a sparsely populated island in Japan. She discusses her own internal conflict on whether to respect local assumptions about motherhood or to act in accordance with her own values, which reflect alternative expectations of motherhood and women’s roles. Stephens admits that although at times, she conformed to what was expected of Japanese mothers, she also exploited stereotypes of the role of Western mothers in order to avoid fulfilling those expectations if they made her uncomfortable or interrupted with work duties.

Lastly, Justine Dymond conducts a literary analysis of the memoir Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American writer who struggles with the significance of giving birth as a naturalized citizen while her uncle and many other migrants are being deported from the United States. Dymond argues that Danticat’s experience of motherhood is inextricably bound up with her identity as an immigrant and simultaneously strengthens and fractures her sense of national belonging, which is further problematized by post-9/11 anti-immigrant rhetoric and stricter border control policies.

Although we have chosen to divide this collection into these two sections, we recognize multiple connections that can be drawn between chapters across sections as well. Bonfanti, Vallianatos and Sazzad consider the challenges that mothers in the Indian diaspora face in Italy, Canada, and the United States. Through their reproductive choices, and childrearing practices, the mothers in these chapters strive to maintain their connection to India. Kačkutė’s and Dymond’s chapters both provide examples of how women can better adapt to the otherland by projecting homely features of the motherland onto it (Draga Alexandru 125). The personal narratives of Lianidou, Strzelecka-Misonne, and Stephens raise awareness of the many decisions that mothers struggle with when raising children in a different sociocultural context and the challenges that they face, despite possessing the cultural and social capital that our authors did. When this capital is lacking, as the chapters by Hsiao and Nichols most notably underscore, mothers are left feeling isolated and powerless in their adopted communities.

In bringing to light the (her)stories of immigrant and refugee women, we hope to highlight how mothering practices are constantly in flux in foreign environments and get modified further depending on the situation of migration. As our contributors’ chapters show, although these changes may be positive when they provide a platform for intercultural awareness and intercultural identity