Grandmothers play a significant role in the organisation of care brought by the global care-work economy and feminised international migration. What is striking, however, is that despite the crucial role they play in care arrangements, grandmothers are conspicuously neglected in the literature on migration and care (Bastia Reference Bastia2009). In Care Across Generations, Kristin Yarris addresses this gap by examining the role played by grandmothers in caring for their grandchildren in the context of parental migration. Yarris explores the social and material contributions of grandmothers and the reconfigurations of care and caring duties in families spurred by women's migration. Yarris draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with grandmothers in Nicaragua with daughters who have migrated to the United States of America, Mexico, Spain, Costa Rica, Panama and Guatemala. The book is divided into four chapters.
Chapter 1 examines how grandmothers assume the primary role of caring for their grandchildren when parents, especially mothers, migrate. It explores the gendered and culturally ingrained expectations of care as sacrifice and obligation in Nicaraguan family life. The influence of gender and culture in care-giving for left-behind children emerges from narratives of grandmothers who viewed assuming caring duties for their grandchildren as just adhering to notions of cultural expectations that see caring as the responsibility of women. Fathers are discussed as absent, with little or no contribution in their children's care. They cause tensions in families by demanding guardianship of their children which is only motivated by wanting access to remittances sent by migrant mothers. Whilst motivations to care emanated from culturally ingrained notions of care-giving, grandmothers in the book framed their care-giving role as an expression of sacrifice and solidarity with their migrant daughters. Care in these transnational families is seen as a shared sacrifice or responsibility and a resource for wellbeing in transnational families. Moreover, Yarris shows how grandmothers’ involvement in their grandchildren's care strengthens intergenerational bonding in transnational families.
Chapter 2 explores grandmothers’ experience of managing remittances sent by migrant mothers abroad. Remittances serve as a personal sacrifice and fulfilment of migrant mothers’ obligation to care for their children left behind. In this chapter, Yarris presents a clear-cut and coherent gendered analysis of the way women and children exert agency over remittances. She challenges the stereotypical discourses that tend to assume that grandmothers are motivated to care for their grandchildren by greed for remittances. Yarris shows that although migrant mothers sent economic remittances for their children's expenses, the money was not enough as none of her participants showed signs of economic prosperity or social mobility from remittances. Instead, grandmothers used remittances for four primary needs: grandchildren's education, food, medical care and repayments of debts incurred during the migration period.
Chapter 3 sheds light on some of the lesser-studied consequences of transnational migration – the emotional and psychological wellbeing of those left behind with prolonged burden to care. In this chapter, Yarris details the experiences of emotional distress and embodied suffering of grandmothers as they deal with the lived realities of transnational family life. The grandmothers use the expression pensando mucho or thinking too much, to express their feelings of distress and anxiety about the effects of migration. The main reasons that led grandmothers to think too much is the emotional separation and detachment from their daughters and the distance in-between. This is further exacerbated by uncertainties of how long they will continue taking care of their grandchildren before they are reunited with their parents abroad. This ambivalence in transnational families, made complex by uncertainties of reunifications, leads grandmothers to worry about their future. What is evident from their worry and fears is that taking care of their grandchildren constitutes a meaningful part of grandmothers’ lives by providing a sense of purpose, personal value in cultural as well as family life.
Chapter 4, the final chapter, looks at how past experiences of family migration influence intergenerational care trajectories in Nicaraguan transnational families. The chapter follows the historical migration experience of grandmother Angela from when her husband migrated and never returned and the migration of her two children to join her long-lost husband. Yarris shows how grandmother Angela fears that her two children might abandon her and their children the same way her husband abandoned her. For grandmother Angela and all the other grandmothers interviewed by Yarris, caring for their grandchildren is an embodiment of sacrifice and solidarity for the sake of family unity, togetherness and wellbeing in the present and the future.
Care Across Generations is solid work, it is clearly a result of an extensive and carefully conducted ethnographic research that allows Yarris to make compelling arguments. Her intergenerational analysis is family-centred, providing much-needed and arguably more accurate analysis of the socio-cultural subtleties of care work that are inherent in transnational families. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in migration theory, transnational families, and transnational care and gender dynamics.
