ABSTRACT
Family histories are taken as a perspective, then the motives for migration, and questions of identity, become more complex, ambiguous, and culturally specific. Lola’s independence, of which the land remains a potent symbol, provides a clue to the sense of pride and family identity. The role of Lola was fundamental in the creation of family identity. The model of migration offered in the second family is more ambivalent. The theme which emerges is one of struggle and resistance, and a reshaping of the family migration model. The family employed servants in the house and hired labour to work the land. The extended family commonly incorporates step-parents and half-siblings. Thus social and family structures enabled and encouraged migration. The chapter identifies family models as an alternative, and primary, locus of migrant motivation, and transmitter of a migration culture, obscured in metropolitan based, and biased, studies of migration.
