Migration and New Media

Transnational Families and Polymedia

Mirca Madianou, Daniel Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136577574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

How do parents and children care for each other when they are separated because of migration? The way in which transnational families maintain long-distance relationships has been revolutionised by the emergence of new media such as email, instant messaging, social networking sites, webcam and texting. A migrant mother can now call and text her left-behind children several times a day, peruse social networking sites and leave the webcam for 12 hours achieving a sense of co-presence.

Drawing on a long-term ethnographic study of prolonged separation between migrant mothers and their children who remain in the Philippines, this book develops groundbreaking theory for understanding both new media and the nature of mediated relationships. It brings together the perspectives of both the mothers and children and shows how the very nature of family relationships is changing. New media, understood as an emerging environment of polymedia, have become integral to the way family relationships are enacted and experienced. The theory of polymedia extends beyond the poignant case study and is developed as a major contribution for understanding the interconnections between digital media and interpersonal relationships.

1

INTRODUCTION

Within the past few years a revolution has been taking place, one with huge consequences, but so far subject to only limited systematic research. While there are many studies of globalisation and migrant transnationalism, few have addressed the consequence that probably matters most to those involved, which is the separation of families. Specifically, how do parents and children care and look after each other when they live in different countries for many years separated because of migration? Although transnational families are not new, they are becoming increasingly common. Furthermore this type of separation now often involves mothers and their children as a consequence of the feminisation of migration, partly fuelled by the insatiable demand for care and domestic workers in the developed world. The dramatic change which has revolutionised the way in which families maintain long-distance communication, is the emergence of a plethora of internet- and mobile phone-based platforms such as email, instant messaging (IM), social networking sites (SNS) and webcam via voice over internet protocol (VOIP). These new media have engendered the emergence of a new communicative environment, which we will call ‘polymedia’. This book is dedicated to the understanding of this new type of ‘connected transnational family’ which is the result of the convergence of these two phenomena: migrant transnationalism and the explosion of communicative opportunities afforded by new media.

This book makes both a substantive and theoretical contribution to the understanding of these profound, parallel developments of family separation and transnational communication that are shaping our contemporary worlds. We believe that to understand these transformations we cannot and should not separate them as, on the one hand, a study of the media, and on the other hand, an enquiry into what it means to be a migrant, or a mother. Our understanding will be much enhanced if we study media situated in the context of what it means to be a transnational mother in this environment of polymedia. As a result, this book contains not just a theory of polymedia, but also a theory of mediation in which we consider in general terms how relationships and media are mutually shaped. We do so by drawing on a long-term ethnographic study of prolonged separation between transnational Filipino migrant mothers based in London and Cambridge and their (now adult) left-behind children in the Philippines. No other country exemplifies the phenomenon of ‘distant mothering’ as clearly as the Philippines with over 10 per cent of its population working overseas, the majority of whom are women with children left behind. The Philippines is also at the forefront of globalisation in terms of its appropriation of new media platforms, notably mobile phones, the consequences of which have already been documented, especially with regard to the public sphere (Castells et al.,2006; Pertierra et al.,2002; Rafael, 2003). More than 10 million Filipino children are officially estimated to be left-behind, most of whom see their migrant parents only once every two years. Given that such visits are even less frequent for families of undocumented migrants, it is evident that such parent–child relationships have become increasingly dependent on the available communication media. We argue that focusing on this case of prolonged separation and intense mediation helps to bring to light and crystallise aspects of both parts of this equation: a better understanding of the consequences of new media, and an insight into the very nature of parent–child relationships. Starting from this case of accentuated separation and mediation, we then move on to develop a new theory of polymedia and of mediated relationships which, we argue, can have a wider applicability. The book is equally driven by the aim to make an original contribution to the migration literature as well as to develop a theoretical understanding of digital media, distant love and the nature of mediated relationships. It also follows Stafford (2000) in arguing that understanding separation is a route towards understanding the basis of human relatedness, autonomy and dependence and thereby the very nature of relationships.

One of the book's arguments is that although information and communication technologies (ICTs) do not solve the problems of separation within families, they do contribute to the transformation of the whole experience of migration and parenting. For example, it is telling that the opportunities for cheap and instant communication feature strongly in migrant mothers’ justifications regarding their decisions to migrate and to settle. However, the fact that ICTs can potentially contribute, even if indirectly, to the shaping of migration patterns is not to say that the communication is necessarily successful. In fact, we will show how the perpetual contact they engender can often increase rupture and conflict between parents and children. The only way this becomes clear is through our transnational approach to research, which involved working with both the migrant mothers and subsequently the left-behind children of these same mothers whom we interviewed back in the Philippines. In the book we both demonstrate and interpret a discrepancy between the mothers’ and children's accounts. While for the mothers new communication technologies represent welcome opportunities to perform intensive mothering at a distance and to ‘feel like mothers again’, for their young adult children such frequent communication can be experienced as intrusive and unwanted, although this often depends on specific issues such as the age of the children at the time the mothers left and the nature of the media available to them.

In addition, this book aims to make a wider theoretical contribution by developing a theory of polymedia and a theory of mediated relationships. The theory of polymedia emerged through our need to develop a framework for understanding the rapidly developing and proliferating media environment and its appropriation by users. Although our analysis of communication technologies begins by investigating the affordances (Hutchby, 2001) and limitations of each particular medium, technology or platform, our discussion of the emergence of a new environment of proliferating communicative opportunities that is polymedia shifts the attention from the individual technical propensities of any particular medium to an acknowledgement that most people use a constellation of different media as an integrated environment in which each medium finds its niche in relation to the others. We will also argue that, as media become affordable and once media literacy¹ is established and continues to develop, the situation of polymedia amounts to a re-socialising of media itself, in which the responsibility for which medium is used is increasingly seen to depend on social and moral questions rather than technical or economic parameters.

If the term ‘polymedia’ recognises the importance of the human context for media use, this leads the way to our final chapter where we are able to bring this theory into alignment with the theorisation of relationships to create a theory of mediated relationships, which builds upon prior theories of mediation in media studies (Couldry, 2008; Livingstone, 2009b; Silverstone, 2005), but is here combined with debates about kinship, religion and mediation in anthropology (e.g. Eisenlohr, 2011; Engelke, 2010). In this final theoretical chapter we demonstrate that the key to understanding mediated relationships is not to envisage them as simply a case of how the media mediates relationships. Rather we start from our theory of relationships which demonstrates that all relationships are intrinsically mediated and that we can understand the impact of the media only if we first acknowledge this property of the relationship.

This book exemplifies the benefits of giving equal weight to relationships, media, ethnography and theory. But it is also sensitive to the context of its own case study, to the stories of suffering, separation, loss and also empowerment and love that make this more than just grounds for delineating such academic terrain. We have focused this volume just as much on the need to convey these stories and the background in the political economy of global labour and its impact especially on migrant women and their left-behind children.

The rest of this chapter will review the three key literatures which underpin this study, namely, global migration and transnational families; new media, consumption and transnational communication, and finally motherhood. We will end the chapter by providing an overview of the whole book.

Global migration and transnational families

Families whose members are temporally and spatially separated because of work are nothing new. Thomas and Znaniecki's classic The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1996) is a riveting account of the early twentieth-century migration to the US partly told through the letters that sustained these long-distance relationships between separated family members. The recent intensification of global migration and, crucially, the increasing feminisation of migration, have brought about a new type of transnational family where women seek employment in the global north, leaving their children behind. Transnational motherhood (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila, 1997), precisely because it challenges entrenched and often ideological views about the role of mothers and the value of children (see also Zelizer, 1994), has largely been seen as one of the hidden injuries of globalisation: the high social cost the developing world must pay for the increased income through remittances which keep the economies of the global south afloat.

The impact on left-behind families and the relationship people maintain to their countries of origin have been a relatively recent focus of attention, perhaps because for so long the migration literature focused on questions of assimilation and integration in the host societies (Vertovec, 2009: 13). An influential approach for understanding transnational families has been the ‘care chains’ approach (Hochschild, 2000; Parreñas, 2001) and the related notion of ‘care drain’ affecting developing countries which experience a ‘care deficit’ by exporting their mothers and care workers (Hochschild, 2000; Widding Isaksen et al., 2008). The work of Parreñas (2001) on Philippine migration has acquired paradigmatic status in exemplifying the connections between different people across the world based on paid or unpaid relationships of care. The concept of a global care chain has particular poignancy because of the way this is refracted in the impact upon left-behind children. The paradigmatic case is where a Filipina woman from Manila spends much of her life looking after a child in London, using part of her wages to employ a Filipina from a village to look after her children in Manila. This woman in turn uses part of her urban wages to pay someone else in her village to look after her own children. These images of a global care chain are powerful representations of the larger inequalities of contemporary political economy.

There exists a corresponding debate at a popular level within the Philippines itself with regard to the impact of migration upon parent–child relationships. Critical to our fieldwork was a film called Anak (the word in Tagalog for ‘child’) which portrays the extreme example of a mother who feels she has sacrificed herself for her children by taking on domestic work in Hong Kong. But during her absence, her son drops school grades and loses his scholarship, and her daughter falls into a life of assorted vices including smoking, drinking, drugs and abusive boyfriends leading to an abortion. The film is dominated by the relationship between the mother and the sullen and resentful daughter who blames all her woes on being abandoned by her mother. This was a hugely popular film in the Philippines. It was directed by R. Quintos and starred Vilma Santos, a well-known actress and politician, now the mayor of a major town. We often started our discussion with the children by asking for their reaction to the film, which was easier to broach than immediately discussing their own childhood. So in addition to any academic debates, we also have to be aware of the way these issues are constantly appraised within the Philippines itself.

In the academic literature, gender has been understood as being key to understanding dynamics in transnational families. Parreñas (2005a) in her study of Filipino left-behind children noted that when mothers migrate they are expected to perform the caring and emotional work typically associated with their maternal role, but also to take on the traditional male breadwinning role. Globalisation and female migration have not reversed, nor even challenged traditional gender roles and hierarchies. This finding is also shared by Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997) in their study of Latina transnational mothers in California as well as Fresnoza-Flot (2009) in her research with Filipina migrants in Paris. Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997: 562) argue that female migration has not replaced caregiving with breadwinning definitions of motherhood, but rather has expanded ‘definitions of motherhood to encompass caregiving from a distance and through separation’. For Pessar (1999), any advances by women's breadwinning capacity are cancelled by the fact that female migrants are overwhelmingly employed in the care and domestic sector, thus preserving patriarchal ideologies. However, McKay (2007) and Pingol (2001) observed a different gendered division of domestic work in the Philippine region of Northern Luzon.

The political economy of care and the feminist critique on which the care chains approach is based have made significant contributions to the literature on migration, with their emphasis upon the economic motivations for emigration. However, the focus of the care chains approach on structural factors does not acknowledge the empowering potential of migration for women and does not grant much agency to migrants themselves in determining their own trajectory (McKay, 2007; Silvey, 2006; Yeates, 2004). The care chains approach also assumes a normative and universal perspective of biological motherhood which should be performed in a situation of co-presence (actually living together in the same household). What the more ethnographically based studies such as McKay (2007) and Aguilar et al. (2009) demonstrate is that both the global feminist discourse employed by Parreñas (2001), and also globalised ideas about women's responsibilities (which are found in the Hollywood-style melodrama that clearly influenced the film Anak) have to be complemented by grounded study within the Philippines, which may reveal very different and more nuanced expectations about mother–child relationships.

Mothers themselves are subject to competing discourses about the moralities of their own actions. In such circumstances it seemed vital to recognise the migrant women's own perspective, particularly when the research agenda concerns sensitive and emotive issues such as family separation. In our research we have adopted an ethnographic approach which recognises migrants as reflexive subjects, albeit ones positioned in structures of power. For example, crucial for understanding the relationships and communication between mothers and left-behind children is the analysis of the context of migration, including the reasons why women migrate in the first place. The bottom-up ethnographic perspective followed here can uncover the contradictory and perhaps less socially acceptable motivations for migration and cast light on the processes through which women negotiate their various roles, identities and relationships. This is an approach followed by Constable (1999) in her work with Filipina migrant workers in Hong Kong, where she focused on the ambivalent narratives of return amongst her participants. Such accounts of the motivations for migration and settlement often highlight personal reasons which are not captured by more top-down perspectives such as that of the care chains with its emphasis on the role of the state and the political economy of care.

In Chapter 3 we build upon Parreñas (2001: 27) who developed an intermediate level analysis combining a bottom-up perspective with the macrostructural approach of political economy of labour migration (Sassen, 1988). This allowed Parreñas to identify a range of ‘hidden motivations for migration’ which extend beyond the well-rehearsed and socially accepted reasons, which are usually economic. For example, Parreñas observed that personal reasons including the breakdown of a relationship, domestic abuse and extramarital affairs, constitute a significant motivation for women's migration (2001: 62–69), often in conjunction with other well-documented economic and political reasons. However, our work suggests that migrants do not always articulate the contradictions (what Parreñas calls the ‘dislocations of migration’ [2001: 23]) in their narratives. Rather, often the discrepancy between their own accounts (which often draw on well-rehearsed public discourses about what constitutes good mothering and a good reason to go abroad) and their actual practices, points to the contradictions and ambivalence that is part of the project of migration. To unearth such discrepancies one needs the long-term and in-depth involvement of ethnography. Migrant women occupy simultaneously different and often contradictory subject positions: breadwinners and caregivers; devoted mothers and national heroines; global consumers and exploited workers. Our ethnographic perspective documents how they negotiate these conflicting identities both discursively and through practices.

Although, as we noted earlier in this section, research on transnational families is part of the transnational turn within migration studies, it is perhaps ironic that one still encounters a degree of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller, 2002) within such scholarship. It is as if researchers cannot escape the ‘assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world’ (Wimmer and Glick-Schiller, 2002: 301). Although it would be foolish to entirely repudiate the relevance of the nation-state in the analysis of migrant transnationalism, it seems that one way of overcoming the straightjacket of methodological nationalism is to actually conduct research transnationally. Our research has benefited from this comparative, multi-sited perspective. By focusing on the relationships between migrant mothers based in the UK and their left-behind children in the Philippines we have ‘followed the thing’ through a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995). The comparisons – and contradictions – between the mothers and the children's perspectives lie at the heart of this book. We came to recognise that we would have written an entirely different book if we had concentrated on migrant mothers only, or on their children. Transnationalism is all about relationships, and following them (rather than assuming them) is one way of dealing with the perils of methodological nationalism.

Transnational communication and new media

For transnational families who are reunited on average every two years,² new media are essential for keeping in touch. Dependence on new media is exacerbated in the case of irregular migrants who often do not see their families for longer periods (in our sample the longest period without a visit was 13 years; for similar observations see also Fresnoza-Flot, 2009). In such cases new communication technologies become the only means through which migrant mothers can maintain a relationship with their children. Given this almost extreme dependency, it is perhaps surprising that new media have not received much attention in the literature of migrant transnationalism, although studies have highlighted the more general importance of the mobile phone as a social resource in the lives of migrants (see Thompson, 2009). Most academic writing on new media and migration has looked at the important questions of identity and integration (Gillespie et al., 2010) and the political implications for diasporic and national populations (Brinkerhoff, 2009; for a review see Siapera, 2010). Although this literature has been very useful and influential, it does not address the urgent question of sociality and intimacy in a transnational context (although see Horst, 2006; Miller and Slater, 2000; and Wilding, 2006), while the focus on the rather bounded concept of identity does not always capture the dynamic nature of transnational processes (Glick-Schiller et al., 1992; Madianou, 2011).

In the context of Philippine migration, Parreñas observed that among separated Filipino families mobile phones actually tie migrant women to their traditional gender roles (Parreñas, 2005b), echoing North American studies about mobile phone use and the spillover of the domestic into the professional sphere (Chesley, 2005; Rakow and Navarro, 1993). Apart from gender inequalities, Parreñas also argues that the political economic conditions of communication determine the quality of transnational intimacy and family life (Parreñas, 2005b), as families without access to the internet or even a landline are deprived of care and emotional support. In the next chapter we shall acknowledge these stark asymmetries both between the communications infrastructure of the Philippines and the UK and within the Philippines. But...