This edited volume contributes to the recent trend of recognizing children as social actors, rendering them more visible in migration studies. Children and youths feature only marginally in migration scholarship and when they do, the focus is mostly on second-generation migrants and their experiences of assimilation as well as children left behind. Contrary to this approach, children and youths are often part of their parents’ migratory enterprise and become mobile in the process.
The population at the centre of this volume are young Filipino migrants who resettled from the Philippines to various other parts of the world during their childhood or youth. The individual chapters cover migration to Australia, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States. These young migrants are referred to as the “1.5 generation”, meaning children and youths “who migrated to the destination country of their parents at an age below 18 and experienced at least two elementary or secondary school systems” (p. 8). This definition also includes children who were born during their parents’ stay overseas, were brought to the Philippines to be taken care of, and were reunited with their parents again a few years later by joining them again abroad (ibid.).
The book aims to answer the questions “How does family-related migration affect the life trajectories, sociality, and identity of children? How can we capture the lived experiences of young migrants who have undergone childhoods within two or more different social settings due to migration? In what way should we approach their childhoods thus characterized by individual and familial mobilities?” (pp. 1–2). The book is organized into three parts. The first part of the volume is dedicated to the introduction of the central conceptual lens employed throughout the book, “mobile childhoods.” Mobile childhoods are defined “as the socially constructed life stages of children aged below 18 who experience fluxes and movements in different contexts (familial, social, political, cultural, material, symbolic, and so on) and periods of life related to migration” (p. 30).
The next chapters take an empirical approach, and the various authors follow a similar pattern of enquiry and use the “mobile childhoods” lens to discuss their respondents’ narratives, which provides comparative reading across the many contexts studied. Moreover, the comparison highlights the importance of migration regimes in receiving societies, such as how systems have shaped the immigration of children joining their parents, as well as the parallels between their experiences that exist despite the variety of contexts encountered by different groups of respondents. This consistent organization is the chief strength of this volume.
The empirical chapters are divided into Parts II and III. Part II focuses on familial and social relationships in relation to geographic, social, cultural, and temporal mobility. Part III deals with processes of sense-making and self-(re)constructions upon migration. The richness of the ethnographic case studies renders this edited volume an interesting and engaging text that allows its readers to gain a glimpse of young Filipino migrants’ life-worlds.
It is remarkable that the experiences of generation 1.5 migrants depicted in this volume show striking parallels despite the different contexts in which they occur. Difficult family relations, language (as either a barrier to academic success or a marker of difference), and downward social mobility are central themes. As Fresnoza-Flot (chapter 4), Nagasaka (chapter 5) and Takahata and Hara (chapter 6) show, the language barriers encountered by their respondents pose a significant challenge to their academic success upon switching schools and school systems. All three chapters show how these barriers and the availability or absence of government support, such as language and integration classes, affect young migrants’ academic performance. Japan's school system is especially challenging as youths older than fifteen years of age are no longer eligible to join junior high-school, but instead “he or she must take a senior high school entrance exam while still in the process of acquiring proficiency in Japanese as an academic language. … This is disadvantageous for their entry into senior high school, because enrolment is based on entrance exam scores as well as academic achievement” (p. 119).
In the case of generation 1.5 Filipinos migrating to English-speaking countries, proficiency and accent become markers of distinction between different generations of migrants. As Seki (chapter 7) finds, generation 1.5 and second-generation Filipino youth demarcate their Filipino identities into Philippine-born versus American-born Filipinos. A similar differentiation has also been mentioned by some of Pertierra's (chapter 8) migrant respondents in Australia. These distinctions become part of a process of identity reconstruction as young migrants grapple with their sense of Filipinoness in migration.
In this process, the family also plays an important role. The family, as lived kinship ties and as an ideal, remains a crucial reference point in generation 1.5 migrants’ reaffirmation of their Filipino roots. Despite the centrality of the family, young migrants frequently feel emotionally distant from their biological parents after years of separation, leading to often fragile relationships that are prone to conflict. Ogaya (chapter 9) explores mother–child relationships, including the mothers’ perspectives, to discuss how both parties experience reunification in Canada after years of distance-mothering. Family reunification, Ogaya concludes, is not a static goal but a continuous process marked by the reconstruction of notions of “family” as well as by negotiations of sometimes diverging dreams and goals. Such divergences can be severe; Suzuki (chapter 10) observes how her respondents in Japan turn out to be pawns in their mothers’ survival strategies, impeding their academic careers and leading to emotional hardship. Here too, Catholic-influenced gender and family ideals remain central and make it difficult for migrant youth to come to terms with their family situations and the often very complicated, challenging relationships with their mothers, once reunited with them in Japan. Indeed, as all chapters show, “[T]he familial, social, and economic contexts prior to moving to a new country … act as reference points from which Filipino migrant children evaluate and see the quality of their immigrant lives” (p. 250).
Mobile Childhoods in Filipino Transnational Families is a good read for migration scholars and researchers interested in the study of children and youth. If there is a point to be critiqued about this successfully crafted collection of research articles, it is the lack of younger children's voices. Most authors have worked with respondents in their late teens or with adults who migrated during childhood and narrate from memory. The inclusion of younger voices would have given this book an even greater edge in its ambition to move away from adult-centric perspectives in migration studies.
