Everyday Ruptures: Children, Youth, and Migration in Global Perspective

6. The Children of

115 Chapter 6 The Children of Émigrés in Ecuador Narratives of Cultural Reproduction and Emotion in Transnational Social Fields Heather Rae-Espinoza In the study of migration journeys, we must look not only to the experiences of the migrants themselves but also at how the effects of these journeys weave through the cultural values and experiences of the people who stay. In the literature, much of the concern for those who stay has focused on the children, whom researchers perceive as “left behind.” Images of children without adult figures raising younger siblings without social, economic, or psychological support shape perspectives on parental emigration. However, generalizing from worst-case scenarios and across cultural boundaries is not warranted. Even when émigrés’ macro­ economic and sociopolitical motivations for migration are similar, the experiences of those who stay may not be. Culturally shaped concepts of the child and parenting practices greatly affect how children adapt and adjust to parental emigration. For this reason, the children who stay do not necessarily experience psychological difficulties or aberrant developmental pathways. An established base of research on alternative or non-normative families—with acknowledged difficulties over the referential framework to a norm—details the role culture plays in emic ideas of children’s needs, natural abilities, and desires. In these families, siblings (Weisner and Gallimore 1977), fathers (Hewlett 2001), or larger kin networks (Stack 1997) fill the role of child caretaker. These alternative family structures can be strategic and adaptive in the face of both economic limitations (Coontz 1992) and technological innovations (Shanley 2001). 116 Everyday Ruptures However, the alternatives are often merely variations with a similar set of internal processes for meeting children’s needs, based on a Western notion of a dependent, vulnerable child.1 Across cultures, families are thought to universally fulfill procreation, orientation, status-giving, and economic functions (Queen, Habenstein, and Adams 1961). In other words, the kinds of care that children receive are not altered in these socalled alternative families; instead, the sources of care differ from those in an idealized nuclear family. With transnational families, we can see not just changes in the sources of care, but drastic alterations in the forms of care. Children may or may not come to accept new methods of receiving affection, responding to discipline, and expecting rewards with globalized, transnational ties. Yet, migrants demonstrate that family ties can cross borders. Roles can be sustained without physical contact, testing accepted concepts of family not only in how the family unit is constituted to provide care, but also in regard to what being a member of a family entails. As children learn, innovate, or reject cultural norms in the process of cultural reproduction, the children of émigrés experience not just novel sources of care, but also novel forms of care. The concern over traumatized children’s emotional experience arises from insistence on a natural human reaction to ruptures that are implicit in migration trajectories. However, this focus overlooks children’s individual perspectives on the everyday. Because of cultural variation in the concept of the child, we cannot infer any inevitable emotional experiences for the children of migrants, especially without employing a more nuanced theory of affect. With transnational families, the pervasive nature of developmental research’s equation of physical affection with love can spur assumptions in regard to children’s emotional state without the necessary, contextualized, in-depth observations of children’s feelings. The omission of taxonomic, ecological, semantic, and regulative values surrounding an emotional expression indicates an omission of understanding emotion in context (Shweder 1985, 182). For instance, we should not assume that the children of émigrés will experience anxious attachment based on a single emotional manifestation, or, even worse, on the reports of parents at distant locations with their own projections as fodder for interpreting children’s internal emotional states. Even attachment theorists who brought to light this emotional state as the result of parental separation warned against ignoring the covert deprivations and resiliencies that are apparent only in accord with the child’s internal working model of a parent (Ehrenreich and English 2005). More general contentions of “emotional trouble,” as if a ubiquitous set of unproblematic emo- The Children of Émigrés in Ecuador 117 tions exists for others throughout development, are even more dubious. Looking merely at the eliciting situation and the succeeding expression of a particular emotion does not tell us a child’s emotional experience. A...