The Pillar & The Light

In Children of Global Migration, Parreñas exhaustively describes the intricacies of the familial gendered relationships in Filipino families with at least one parent working as a global migrant. I wish that the book had done more work in terms of historical and global context. Parreñas very writes thoroughly and convincingly about her case study, but she leaves many implications of her study unsaid. What I mean here is that I was waiting for Parreñas to more broadly challenge capitalism, to take a minute and say "isn't it crazy that we live in this world where people will separate from their families for twenty years to ensure that their children can live in a house, have medical care, and receive an educaiton?" But I felt, however, that Parreñas leaves those larger contextual fundamental problems for the reader to think about alone. 

One of the most interesting assertions in the book that I had never thought about in a clear way before was the "migration of care" idea. Parreñas writes that "women from the global south migrate to the global north in order to alleviate the care burdens of privileged women in the global north; at the same time, they leave the care of their children to women with less privilege in the global south. The international division of caring work, meaning the three-tier transfer of care among women in poor and rich nations, is caused by gender inequities that keep the care of the family the responsibility of women, neo-liberal prescriptions that designate care as a private responsibility, and finally economic inequities between the global north and global south." (23) Of course I have always had a funny feeling about this, and it is a very visible phenomenon. My mother and her thirteen sibilings were raised in California primarily by a nanny from Tijuana who had left her own children behind there so that she could make more money. I, too, spent several years in my childhood in Utah under the care of nannies from Mexico and Honduras. My parents put my brother and I in the care of a nanny when she went back to work. I had never thought about these generations of nannies in a more contextualized way, as fitting into a global pattern of the migration of care. Also, my father is a pilot and was gone about two weeks of every month, and he also had training across the country for six weeks once a year. I could definitely relate to the kids of migrant parents that Parreñas interviews because of this setup. 

It really didn't surprise me that global migration has done little to challenge gender norms in the Philippines, and I was very surprised at the end when Parreñas said that she expected to see greater gender fluidity in families of global migrants, especially since she has acknowledged a US study from the 1980's that shows the "stalled revolution." As Pratt & Yeoh write, "'Going transnational' has done little to trouble the gendered division of household labour, or destabilize the gendered inequalities of the patriarchal state." (162)

This has been my favorite book that we have read so far, probably because it is very transnational in nature and because we get to hear the voices of many of the people in the studies that Parreñas has done. I also think that she does a very thorough job of examining the issue of care of children in transnational families from multiple angles.