ABSTRACT
In the wake of a renewed interest for kinship in migration studies, this work recovers the salience of family narratives arguing how kindred and movement are mutually constitutive and transformative. Based on long-term fieldwork with Panjabi migrant households in Italy, the chapter discusses the institute of transnational marriage and kin reunification among Indian diasporas, interlacing the drive for upward mobility, the normative frame of family migration and the affective economy in building affinity relations. One domestic group is considered, recounting the lag between a mother’s and her daughter’s experience, an Indian pioneer migrant and a second-generation Italian, who differently resorted to their affective circuits counteracting political persecution, economic uncertainty, law-enforced immobility. The binding relations that mother and daughter keep threading in their everyday sheds light on gender and age intersections in transnational migrations, revealing the performative character of kinship and its interplay with unequal mobility dynamics. Last, the ethnographer reflects on the methodology that buoyed her analysis, based on the biographical accounts that her informants exchanged with one another over time and partly shared with her, thus empowering their voices as agents and authors of their own family migration stories.
