Mixed Families in a Transnational World

Josiane Le Gall, Catherine Therrien, Karine Geoffrion, Josiane Le Gall, Catherine Therrien, Karine Geoffrion

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000484779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Offering a transnational perspective on the processes of identity transmission and identity construction of mixed families in various parts of the world, this book provides an overview of how local, national, global contexts and inter-group relations structure the development of specific forms of belonging and identification.

Featuring nine rich ethnographic studies situated in geographic areas less covered by scholarship on mixed families such as Québec, Morocco, Italy, France, Switzerland, Belgium, the Philippines, Thailand and Israel, the book's contributions reveal how families' everyday lives are shaped by historical and sociopolitical contexts, as well as by transnational dynamics and mobility trajectories. The studies illustrate the context-specific realities that shape social definitions of mixedness—whether religious, national, cultural, ethnic or racial—at local and transnational levels.

The articulation of local and transnational perspectives on mixed families will be of interest to students and scholars of migration, transnationalism, families, ethnicity, race and racism in the social sciences (anthropology, sociology, history, social work, international relations and global studies). The book will also be of interest to policymakers, as well as activists and practitioners working in organizations offering services to mixed individuals, migrants, and their families.

Part I

Transnational relatedness: Socialization and belonging through and beyond borders

DOI: 10.4324/9781003126263-2

Chapter 1

Relational transnationalism of Filipino/Thai-Belgian youths in Belgium

Mothers, memories, emotions and social entities

Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot

DOI: 10.4324/9781003126263-3

Children of migrants, such as the so-called ‘1.5’ and ‘second’ generations, are one of the principal objects of scientific investigations within the literature on migrant families. A large number of studies pay specific attention to these children’s experiences of assimilation, intergenerational relationships and identity construction (e.g. Attias-Donfut & Wolff, 2009; Boyd & Grieco, 1998; Crul, Schneider & Lelie, 2012; Foner & Dreby, 2011; Haller & Landolt, 2005; Nagasaka & Fresnoza-Flot, 2015; Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Rumbaut & Portes, 2001). In recent years, migration scholars have started to examine the transnational links and practices of these generations, notably their connections with the country of origin of their migrant parents (e.g. Bartley & Spoonley, 2008; Lee, 2009; Levitt & Waters, 2002; Wessendorf, 2016). Despite this rising interest in young people’s transnational lives, the case of children of ‘mixed couples’ in which partners possess different nationalities (at least initially) and/or ethnicities remains mostly unexplored. Given that these young people grow up in ethnically diverse family settings (see Unterreiner, 2015a; 2015b), the way they build and maintain transnational connections may differ from that of 1.5 and second generations whose parents are both migrants. How do these young people establish, sustain and reinforce their links with their migrant parent’s country of origin? What factors and structural forces influence or facilitate their transnational practices?

Understanding the transnationalism of young people requires a phenomenological analytical approach that pays attention to the agency of these individuals as well as to the relational and larger social dimensions of their experiences. Such an approach requires an exploration of the way the ‘self’, the ‘others’ and the ‘world’ are interrelated (Zahavi, 2001). To find out how the ‘self’ is connected to the ‘others’, it is indispensable to investigate the intersubjective aspect of experience at the micro level (Ritzer & Goodman, 2004). Within the context of the family as a social institution, it is therefore heuristic to analyse the way parents influence their children’s transnational ties and activities. As Horton argues, ‘the self emerges within social relationships, and thus the family […] may instead be conceived of as a space in which notions of “self” and “other,” or of “child” and “mother,” are coproduced’ (2009, 22). At the macro level, in the vein of the phenomenological approach, it is crucial to understand the relations between the social world and human actions. That is why I scrutinise how the social context in which the young people in the present study are enmeshed shapes their transnational practices. In short, I concentrate here on these individuals’ ‘lifeworld’, that is, the ‘domain of the everyday, immediate social existence and practical activity’ (Jackson, 1996, 7).

As a case study, I examine in this chapter the experiences of children of Filipino-Belgian and Thai-Belgian couples in Belgium. I focus on these mixed families because since the 1980s, a dynamic marriage migration of Filipino and Thai women has been taking place in many European countries, including Belgium. This migration is part and parcel of the rising phenomenon of mixed-family formation in this region of the world: for instance, 17.4 per cent of the marriages celebrated in 2017 in Belgium were ‘mixed’, that is, one partner in the couple is a Belgian citizen and the other has ‘foreign nationality’ (Statbel, 2018). In this country, marriage migration can partly explain the numerical dominance of women in both the Filipino and Thai migrant populations. In fact, from 2005 to 2017, women were constantly more numerous than their male counterparts in the aforementioned migrant populations (Statbel, 2019). This was also the case in 2018: 76.4 per cent of 4,415 Filipinos and 85 per cent of the 3,769 Thais in Belgium were women (ibid.). The mixed families of these women can be mainly found in the Flanders and Brussels regions. The case of Filipino and Thai women has recently become an object of studies (Fresnoza-Flot, 2017; 2018b; Heyse et al., 2007; Pauwels, 2015), but that of their children remains a scholarly terrain to be explored.

The present chapter, therefore, aims to make the lifeworld of these mixed-parentage individuals socially visible and contribute fresh insights to migration and (mixed-)family studies regarding their transnationalism. Given that the qualifier ‘mixed parentage’ has been widely used in these research fields to describe mixed couples’ children, I employ it here to refer to my informants. The case of mixed-parentage individuals can unveil the nuances of transnationalism among children of migrants, as well as put into reflection the encompassing category of ‘second generation’ that most often eclipses the experiences of less numerous groups of young people.

In the following sections, I review the literature on transnationalism of migrants’ children to highlight the scholarly contributions of the present study. I also explain in detail the methodology I adopted to access the target group of my research and present some demographic characteristics of the young people interviewed. The core of the chapter delves into the transnational practices of Filipino-Belgian and Thai-Belgian informants, notably highlighting the relational and larger social dimensions of their cross-border connections and activities. I mainly argue here that parents, notably the migrant mothers, chiefly influence their children’s construction of transnational linkages, which develop as these young people grow up alongside their created cross-border ties. Drawing from my empirical data analysis, I revisit in the concluding section of my chapter the central questions and the aims of my research while emphasising its contributions to the study of the transnationalism phenomenon in the context of migration and mixed-family lives.

Children of migrants and their diverse transnational practices

The emergence of the transnational perspective in the 1990s in migration studies has inspired many scholars to examine the cross-national border ties and practices of migrants and more recently those of their children (Lee, 2011; Levitt & Waters, 2002; Sun, 2013). These studies indicate the varying forms of transnational activities that migrants’ offspring engage in and identify new themes to explore in this research domain. Several works demonstrate that young people’s transnational connections with their migrant parents’ country of origin are less intense than those of their parents (Alba & Nee, 2003). However, scholars point out that children of migrants may appear to have weaker ties with the ancestral homeland but build connections with it in different ways. For instance, in her study of Filipino youth of the second generation in California, Wolf found out that, unlike their immigrant parents who had strong transnational connections with the Philippines, these youth experienced an ‘emotional transnationalism’: they ‘maintain ties’ with the Philippines ‘at the level of emotions, ideologies and conflicting cultural codes, at the very least’ (1997, 459). Some young people of Algerian origin in France maintain their transnational links with Algeria through entrepreneurial activities, which do not necessarily require them to reside in that country (Santelli, 1999). Contrastingly, some second-generation Indian Americans move to India from where they keep ‘affective and civic ties’ with their natal country, the United States (Jain, 2019). In Australia, many of the second-generation Tongans do not have direct contact with their parents’ country of origin but engage in ‘indirect’ transnationalism (Lee, 2011). They do so by ‘helping to organise fundraising events, providing food, performing Tongan and other Polynesian dances, and otherwise participating in ways that facilitate the overseas community’s support of the homeland’ (ibid., 308). Other forms of the second generation’s transnational activities include making phone calls, sending emails and visiting their homeland with their parents (Orellana et al., 2001). These are what Itzigsohn and Saucedo call ‘linear transnationalism’, that is, the practices that allow people to maintain ‘the ties that link’ them ‘to their families and place of origin’ (2002, 771).

In addition, transnational practices among migrants’ children appear non-uniform in terms of intensity. In his study of contemporary migrants’ children in the United States, Rumbaut found out that members of the 1.5 generation who spent part of their childhood in their parents’ country of origin were more likely to engage in transnational practices than members of the ‘second generation’, who had ‘no “tingling” sensation, no phantom pain, over a homeland that was never lost to them in the first place’ (2002, 91). This case of the 1.5 generation highlights the nuances present in the transnationalism of migrants’ children: the category ‘second generation’ is not a homogeneous group, as some children of migrants may also have diverse migration or spatial mobility experience. Hence, in the present chapter, I pay attention to these possible nuances in the transnational practices of the children of mixed couples given that some of them are also part of the 1.5 generation, that is, they partly grew up in one country and later moved to a new society to permanently settle there (for example, children adopted by the foreign partner of one of their separated biological parents).

Furthermore, studies on children of mixed couples in which one parent is a migrant rarely focus on these young people’s transnationalism. This empirical gap may be due to the general tendency in the literature to treat them as part of the ‘second generation’, thereby overlooking their particular experience of growing up in a mixed family setting. The fact that one of their parents is an insider citizen and the other a migrant may have an impact on the way they build, maintain and reinforce their social ties with the country of origin of their migrant parent. What is little known about these children is that their transnational practices are mostly shaped by their parents and by the quality of the parental relationship. For example, some lone mothers of mixed-parentage children who are an object of negative social stereotypes and discourses engage themselves in the minority group’s ‘value system’ by cooking their foods, wearing their clothes and learning their language (McKenzie, 2013), which allows them to ‘creatively’ claim ‘value for themselves’ (Harman, 2010, 1355) and also to socialise children in their father’s culture. This suggests how the social image of mixed family members can push mothers to embrace indirect transnationalism—consuming the culture of their partner’s country—and transmit this practice to their children. Moreover, when parents are separated or divorced, mixed-parentage children mostly experience limited contact with their fathers and their paternal kin living in other countries (Harman, 2013). ‘Contact’ with kin is ‘often viewed as a central link to the children’s heritage’ (ibid., 1335; see also Britton, 2013), and the absence of it may affect children’s construction of social ties with a transnational dimension. These ties can shape their identity formation: for instance, Unterreiner (2015b) observes among mixed-parentage individuals in France, Germany and the United Kingdom (UK) that those who were socialised in the two countries of their parents, who have strong affective links with the extended family in the country of origin of the migrant parent and who possess significant social ties in their country of residence, display an ‘heir identity’ (identité d’héritier), that is, one with equal identity imprints of both parents. On the contrary, mixed-parentage individuals with strong affective ties with the migrant parent’s country of origin, but with fewer social links with their country of residence for various reasons such as being discriminated against there, tend to display a ‘foreigner identity’ (identité d’étranger), that is, one oriented to a country other than the country of residence (ibid.).

Overall, studies on the transnationalism of migrants’ children underline the agency of these young people and the way they construct their ‘transnational social field’ (Levitt & Schiller, 2004), wherein multiple ties are sustained even ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Beyond borders: The everyday life of transnational mixed families
• PART I Transnational relatedness: Socialization and belonging through and beyond borders
• PART II (In)visible affiliations and racialization processes in tense (trans)national group relations
• Index