ABSTRACT
It is important to explain the particular type of relationship that this chapter investigates. Transnational families are not new (Thomas and Znaniecki 1984), but the increase in, and feminization of, global migration have made family separation quite common (Parreñas 2001). The Philippines has pioneered the phenomenon with over nine million overseas workers and nine million children growing up without one or both their parents (Parreñas 2008, 68). Transnational mothering-and the children they leave behind-are usually referred to as the social cost of migration that developing countries have to pay in exchange for the remittances that keep their economies aoat (Hochschild 2000). While most research on transnational
mothering has foregrounded the political economy of global care and the power asymmetries of care provision in conditions of globalization, the experience of those most aected has received less attention. Putting the experience of transnational families at the heart of the analysis, as this chapter does, matters for a number of reasons. Ethnography is suitable for understanding migrant subjectivities within conditions of power. Ethnography can also reveal the complex and ambivalent emotions relating to separation, reunion, and family life more generally.
