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Aquí la mayoría ha pasado así: de que somos las abuelas que quedamos al final. (Here the majority have experienced it like this: that we grandmothers are the ones who are left in the end.)

—Aurora

Assuming and Relinquishing Care

Aurora is an animated, busy, active woman of sixty-three who lives in a small

house in a planned residential development near a major interstate transit ter-

minal in Managua. While the terminal is loud, busy, and dusty with the con-

stant traffic of passengers, taxis, and buses, the housing development has a

slower pace, with children walking to school in their blue and white uniforms

on dirt roads only occasionally crossed by private cars or delivery trucks car-

rying Bimbo bread or Coca-Cola soft drinks to one of several ventas, or neigh-

borhood stores, in the community. Aurora runs a venta out of the converted

front room of her cement house, painted lime green. When I first met Aurora,

she was awaiting a delivery of ice, and I watched her conduct inventory before

she was able to sit down and talk with me. I knew from one of Aurora’s neigh-

bors that her daughter, Elizabeth, had left for Spain about two years prior. Au-

rora talked to me about Elizabeth and about her two granddaughters, Salensca

and Daniela, ages seven and five, whom she had raised in this home in their

mother’s absence. For Aurora, assuming the role of intergenerational caregiver

had been a sacrifice, as she had to adjust her schedule at the venta and hire

additional help in order to have time for her granddaughters. She also missed

the help that Elizabeth used to provide her, at the venta and in her everyday

life. Aurora was not receiving either economic or social support from the girls’

father, thus her sentiment that “no ha[bía] nadie más” (there [was] no one else)

to assume care for the children after their mother’s migration. Despite these

disruptions to her family life, Aurora enjoyed caring for her granddaughters

Tenemos Que Hacerlo Responsibility and Sacrifice in Grandmother Care1

Yarris, Kristin E.. Care Across Generations : Solidarity and Sacrifice in Transnational Families, Stanford University Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utsa/detail.action?docID=5013691. Created from utsa on 2021-03-23 13:32:57.

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32 Care Across Generations

and viewed her sacrifice as part of the shared sacrifice that her daughter’s mi-

gration required. Aurora recalled,

It’s what I had to do. She [Elizabeth] had to migrate, and I had to take care of my

granddaughters. But I had their affection, and during the time that I had them,

I had a routine of getting up in the morning to send them off to school every

day. I felt good. In the morning one of the girls went to school, and I got up at

four thirty to make her breakfast, her lunchbox. She took her lunch, and I got

her ready, bathed her, dressed her, and took her to the bus stop. Then I woke her

sister up at nine or ten to give her a bath. . . . They had gotten used to me and

wanted me to do all this.

In describing her assumption of caregiving, it is clear how Aurora obtained

a sense of purpose, identity, and meaning from her role as a caregiver across

generations. Her daily routines for her granddaughters’ care “felt good” and

helped Aurora adjust to the absence of her daughter. She also grew close to her

granddaughters, sharing their “affection” through everyday care. Despite these

positive aspects, intergenerational caregiving was a precarious prospect for Au-

rora, as shown by the reunification of her granddaughters with their mother

that terminated her role as a surrogate mother. Just nine days before our first

interview, Elizabeth had returned to Managua to reclaim custody of her daugh-

ters and take them with her back to Spain. This reunification filled Aurora with

ambivalence. On the one hand, she supported her daughter’s desire to have

her children with her in Spain; on the other, reunification meant that she—

Aurora—would no longer enjoy the affection or daily routines of intergenera-

tional care she had grown so fond of. Because of this change in circumstances,

Aurora’s reflections about grandmothering are framed in the recent past tense.

As a mother, Aurora supported her migrant daughter by caring for her chil-

dren; as a grandmother, she assumed the responsibility of everyday care for her

granddaughters. This reconfiguration of care across generations is a sacrifice

structured in part by gendered inequalities, which left Elizabeth’s children with-

out the support of their father and Aurora feeling as if there was “no one else” to

provide them care. And yet because Aurora found pleasure in her daily routines

of care and built strong ties with her granddaughters, their subsequent depar-

ture through reunification with their mother abroad is emotionally difficult for

her. Despite her personal distress, Aurora makes another sacrifice, overcoming

her sense of personal loss of both her daughter and her granddaughters for the

sake of mother-child reunification. Aurora’s story illustrates how solidarity and

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Tenemos Que Hacerlo 33

sacrifice are central in shaping and giving meaning to intergenerational care in

transnational families, both in motivating the assumption of intergenerational

care and in aiding grandmothers to confront the challenges of transnational

family life, including relinquishing care in order to support mother-child re-

unification.

How do grandmothers like Aurora come to assume care of grandchildren after

mother migration? What is the role of gendered inequalities in shaping grand-

mother care? How do grandmothers make sense of their caregiving in relation

to sacrifice and solidarity, and how do these values help grandmothers meet

the challenges of transnational family life? I explore these questions by situat-

ing grandmothers’ roles as intergenerational caregivers within Nicaraguan dy-

namics of gender and kinship, showing how sacrifice in part reflects gendered

inequalities, which place primary responsibility on women as mothers across

the generations to care for children. While grandmothering in Nicaragua is not

exclusive to transnational families, this discussion shows how grandmothers

and the children in their care cope with mother absence and distance and the

uncertainties surrounding return and reunification, all qualities of migrant

family life that make transnational care particularly challenging. The stories of

two women, Aurora and Olga, illustrate these tensions, which include legal vul-

nerabilities, conflicts with children’s fathers, and ambivalence over children’s

reunification with mothers abroad. Throughout this discussion, we see how

grandmothers embody values of sacrifice and solidarity through their care; in

so doing, they manage the challenges and uncertainties of intergenerational

care in transnational families.

No Hay Nadie Más: Kinship, Gender, and Grandmothers Grandmothers assume care for children after mother migration because “no

hay nadie más” (there is no one else), a sentiment that reflects kinship patterns

and gendered inequalities that structure grandmother sacrifice. All the grand-

mothers in this study assumed care for children after mothers had emigrated

through an informal transfer of caregiving, initiated when mothers first left

and continuing for the duration of migration. While solid data on the preva-

lence of grandmothers as caregivers in Nicaraguan transnational families are

unavailable, most Nicaraguan women who migrate are young (under forty),

and many leave children behind when emigrating.1 Economic constraints are

compounded by a Nicaraguan labor market that actively discriminates on the

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34 Care Across Generations

basis of gender and age, further limiting women’s job opportunities.2 In addi-

tion, for some women, factors such as intimate partner violence may influence

their decisions to emigrate (Torres and Barahona 2004).

The reasons mothers leave children in Nicaragua upon migration are many

but include the dangers of illicit border crossing as well as restrictive immi-

gration policies in host countries that make it difficult for migrants to secure

legal documentation for themselves and their children (Dreby 2010; Abrego

2014). During my fieldwork, I found that most parents (mothers and fathers)

who emigrate leave children in Nicaragua rather than taking them abroad. The

cost of child care abroad is a deterrent for migrant mothers as well; therefore,

most mother migrants opt to leave children in the care of their mothers, sisters,

or other female relatives in Nicaragua (Centeno Orozco and Gutiérrez Vega

2007).3 In fact, knowing they can count on their mothers to care for their chil-

dren may facilitate women’s initial migration decisions.

Nicaraguan family life and kinship patterns are perhaps best described as

matrifocal but patriarchal. In his ethnography of a working-class Managua

barrio in the late 1980s, Roger Lancaster described Nicaraguan family life as

“historically patriarchal” and conjugal relations as “brittle and impermanent”;

while women organize and sustain the routines of family relationships, men

exert control over women’s lives and autonomy (Lancaster 1992: 16). Rosario

Montoya has also described gender and conjugal relations in Nicaraguan rural

communities as patriarchal, arguing that a dichotomy between casa and calle

(house and street) delimits women’s movements and reinforces male control by

casting the street (and single women) in moral doubt and privileging the house

(and women who dedicate themselves to marriage and childrearing) (Mon-

toya 2002). Additionally, ties between family members centered on mothers’

kin are strong and enduring. Such kinship patterns look like those described

by anthropologists for parts of the Caribbean, where consanguineous ties are

stronger than conjugal ties and three-generation, mother-centered households

are more prevalent than nuclear family, male-headed households (Safa 2005).

In Nicaragua, heterosexual “marriage” has flexible cultural meaning,

often referring to a man and a woman who are sexually involved and co-

habitating in the woman’s mother’s house, even though their union has not

been formally arranged through church or state. Nicaraguans often use the

term casado (married) to refer to someone who is coupled but not neces-

sarily officially married. Women use other terms interchangeably to refer to

their male (sexual) partners, such as marido (husband), compañero or pareja

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Tenemos Que Hacerlo 35

(partner), and esposo (spouse). For the minority of Nicaraguans who are upper-

middle or upper class, the nuclear family model based on heterosexual mar-

riage and coresidence with biological children is a sign of class distinction. This

is seen in the ways new, large, private housing developments on the outskirts of

Managua are marketed to the upper-middle class on billboards, using pictures

of heterosexual, light-complexioned couples with two children standing in

front of brightly painted single-family homes, complete with driveways and

air-conditioning units. However, none of the families in my study are middle

class; all can be considered working class or poor. For these families, stable,

heterosexual marriage and nuclear family residence is uncommon.4

Nearly all the families in this study follow the pattern of extended family

households consisting of maternal grandmothers, their children, and grand-

children. For example, the family of Marbeya (first described in the introduc-

tion) consists of twenty members who share a small, four-room, wood-sided

house in a working-class barrio on Managua’s outskirts. The household con-

sists of three of Marbeya’s four adult daughters (the fourth daughter, Azucena,

having migrated), two sons-in-law (unmarried partners of two of Marbeya’s

coresident daughters), her only son and his compañera, Marbeya’s husband

(who works away from the household on construction projects outside the

city), and her eleven grandchildren. The large household size was evident by

the quantity of laundry often hanging out to dry across the front of the house.

Marbeya is the primary caregiver for Azucena’s two children and responsible

for their feeding, clothing, and schooling. She receives some support in this

caregiving from her coresident daughters, the children’s maternal aunts, but

Marbeya in turn also helps in limited ways with the care for her other nine

coresident grandchildren. Marbeya’s multigenerational household is typical of

many working-poor Nicaraguan families and of the families in this study.

Less typical is Marbeya’s husband’s presence in the family and in her life.

In fact, he was one of only two grandfathers present among the families in this

book. Paternal irresponsibility is upheld and justified by gendered ideologies

that view men as inherently unable to maintain fidelity in sexual relationships

with women, which facilitates multiple partnering.5 All the mother migrants in

this study had emigrated alone, without their children’s fathers. In the wake of

mother migration, most fathers do not assume primary caregiving responsi-

bilities for children, either because they did not assume responsibility for chil-

dren before the mother’s migration or, less often, because they themselves have

emigrated. Of course, there are exceptions to this pattern, and some men in

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36 Care Across Generations

the families in this study—fathers, uncles, and grandfathers—are involved with

children’s caretaking. However, because fathers are unreliable sources of care,

women’s migration shifts care responsibilities across extended female kin net-

works, with grandmothers often the preferred caretakers (Torres and Barahona

2004). Fathers were present in the household and in children’s daily lives in just

two of the families in my study, and in both families, paternal grandmothers

were the children’s primary caregivers. Maternal grandmothers were caring for

children of migrant mothers in the remaining families.

One of the two paternal grandmothers in this study who are primary care-

givers is Isabel, a fifty-four-year-old, confident, and energetic woman who as-

sumed care for her six-year-old grandson, Robin, after his mother Katherine

emigrated to Spain. When Katherine left, about two years before my study, she

decided to leave Robin in Isabel’s care, since she and Robin’s father (Isabel’s

son), René, had lived in Isabel’s house for several years. Before emigrating,

Katherine had worked full time in Managua, and Isabel had cared for Robin

while his mother was at work. After migration, Isabel’s caregiving responsi-

bilities shifted, as she became the full-time caregiver for her grandson. Isabel

pointed to Robin’s calling her mamá as a way of showing that her two years of

full-time caregiving had left her grandson viewing her as his mom. By com-

parison, Robin called his migrant mother Katherine. As Isabel and Katherine

renegotiated the relations of care for Robin, René remained largely on the side-

lines; although he lived with his son, he was not actively involved with Robin’s

everyday care. On the other hand, Isabel’s adult daughter Idelia lives in Isabel’s

household with her two children. Idelia provides some support to Isabel and

assists in a limited way with Robin’s care (e.g., by helping prepare his meals

or watching him while Isabel is out). Isabel had long since separated from the

father of her three children, who is largely absent from their lives. Isabel does

have a compañero, whom she describes as medio prestado (half borrowed),

meaning he has another family and visits Isabel only occasionally.

Angela, whom we met in the introduction, is a maternal grandmother, and

her family caregiving arrangements are more common among Nicaraguan

transnational families. Angela assumed the primary caregiving role for her

granddaughter Laleska after her daughter Karla emigrated to the United States,

ten years before when Laleska was one year old. Karla had separated from La-

leska’s father within a year of leaving Nicaragua, and while he lived in the same

barrio only about ten minutes’ walk from Angela’s home, he had limited con-

tact with his daughter. When Karla announced to her mother she was going

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Tenemos Que Hacerlo 37

to emigrate, Angela assumed she would take over primary caregiving respon-

sibility for Laleska. In Angela’s words, “Who else would have done it? [¿Quien

más lo hubiera hecho?]” Her rhetorical question speaks to the sentiment of

women who assume caregiving of children of migrant mothers out of a com-

bined sense of responsibility, inevitability, and sacrifice. As I discuss further in

Chapter 4, Angela has three adult children living in Managua who provide a

limited amount of support to their mother (e.g., visiting on occasion, driving

her to appointments, and sharing meals and special occasions). And yet, when

Karla emigrated, it was to her mother and not to her siblings that she entrusted

the care of her daughter.

While nearly all of the grandmothers in this study receive some degree of

social, material, and emotional support from their nonmigrant adult children,

they remain the primary caregivers for their grandchildren. (See Table A.1 for

descriptive information on families, including grandmothers’ adult children

and their place of residence.) After mother migration, gendered inequalities

that reinforce paternal irresponsibility contribute to grandmothers’ sense

that “there is no one else” to assume primary caregiving responsibilities for

children. These gendered inequalities further reinforce the sense that intergen-

erational care by grandmothers embodies women’s sacrifice for the sake of soli-

darity in transnational families.

Intergenerational Care as Shared Sacrifice

Women describe intergenerational care as an instantiation of the value of sac-

rifice in Nicaraguan families extended over generations and across borders. In

this frame of shared, intergenerational sacrifice, mother migration is a sacrifice

for the sake of children’s futures, and grandmothers’ care is a sacrifice for the

sake of children’s and families’ well-being in the present. Before beginning re-

search with the women in these families, I had assumed that the assumption

of grandchildren’s care after mother migration reflected a carefully contem-

plated choice, something that was negotiated with mothers before migration,

in a way that mirrored a rational-actor model of migration.6 Therefore, and

somewhat naïvely, I would ask, “Why did you decide to take on caregiving for

your grandchildren?” My questions were met with grandmothers’ counter-

poised “What else was I supposed to do?” This reframing indicates how, for

grandmothers, assumption of grandchildren’s care after mother migration is

viewed as a constrained choice, one that reflects their feeling that “no hay nadie

más” to take care of the children. Further, while grandmothers may be involved

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38 Care Across Generations

in children’s care in Nicaragua in nonmigrant households, for all the women

in this study, raising children of mother migrants was a qualitatively different

experience because of the distance, absence, and uncertainties of transnational

family life. As I came to understand, grandmother care in families of migrant

mothers embodies the deeply held value of women’s sacrifice for children and

families, extended across generations. In assuming care for their grandchildren,

women are caring for their grandchildren and simultaneously caring about

their daughters’ sacrifices as migrant mothers.7

Grandmothers’ assumption of care involves daily activities of social repro-

duction for another generation of children. Evelyn Nakano Glenn has defined

care work as “the relationships and activities involved in maintaining people on

a daily basis and intergenerationally,” including direct physical care (feeding,

cooking, etc.), household maintenance, and the fostering of social ties within

families across generations (Glenn 2010: 5). Grandmothers in this study en-

gage in everyday activities of care: bathing, clothing, and feeding children. Even

when grandmothers cannot read or write and have only limited formal educa-

tion, they must oversee children’s homework and participate in required school

activities, such as parent-teacher meetings. While children are at school, grand-

mothers clean the house, wash and iron clothes, shop in the market and pre-

pare the midday meal, and engage in other household tasks. Grandmothers also

take care of sick children, purchasing medicines and taking them to doctor’s

appointments when needed. Grandmothers receive and manage remittances

from migrant mothers to purchase food and other needed goods for children’s

care. These daily routines of caregiving occupy the majority of grandmothers’

time and energy, constituting the care labor that supports children’s and fami-

lies’ welfare in Nicaragua while mothers labor abroad as migrants.

For Marbeya, raising her two grandchildren over the more than ten years

that Azucena has lived in Costa Rica had been a struggle. At fifty-two, Marbeya

is a vibrant woman, usually dressed in bright colors and wearing her hair dyed

red or purple. Despite her outward energetic appearance, Marbeya talked about

her role as an intergenerational caregiver as a “really difficult stage [una etapa

muy difícil]” of her life, which had left her worn out and weary. Marbeya de-

scribed caregiving as

a really hard battle [una batalla muy dura] because at my age, I can tell you, I’m

feeling it as a heavy burden, because I wash, cook—I do everything for them

[her grandchildren]. . . . If they get sick, I have to run around to take care of

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Tenemos Que Hacerlo 39

everything [tengo que pegar carreras]. And maybe . . . I have to go to the doc-

tor with them. So I say, whatever, I have to do it, because if I don’t, who else is

going to?

In addition to washing, cooking, and taking care of her grandchildren’s health

care needs, Marbeya’s daily routine includes securing water for her household.

This is an added challenge in homes in poor and working-class neighborhoods

of Managua, where water is scarce and its flow controlled by municipal author-

ities. Marbeya must wake in the early morning, when water flows through her

neighborhood’s pipes for an hour or two, to fill pilas (receptacles) with water

for daily washing, cleaning, cooking, and bathing. These everyday challenges

contributed to Marbeya’s sense of care as a “heavy burden.”

Emphasizing the burdensome aspects of caregiving is a way for grandmoth-

ers to frame care as part of the shared sacrifice across generations in transna-

tional families. In this framing, grandmother care in Nicaragua is a parallel

sacrifice to mother migration and employment abroad. Marbeya explained this

intergenerational sacrifice:

My daughter is still over there working for her daughter. . . . You should see how

this woman works. Over there she has two jobs. Two jobs. In the morning she

works in one; at midday, at two in the afternoon, she leaves one and goes to the

other, and that’s how the poor little thing—even Sunday mornings this woman

works. So I say, no way, I have to—I have to get used to my daughter being over

there because if she was here [in Nicaragua], she would live forever in misery . . .

because here money and salaries are really messed up.

Marbeya situates Azucena’s migration to Costa Rica as a necessary response

to economic constraints in Nicaragua, a sacrifice made for the economic well-

being of her child. Just as Azucena must migrate to help her household ec-

onomically, Marbeya feels she must “get used to” her daughter’s absence. In

other words, Marbeya also makes a sacrifice, forgoing her desires to have all her

family together and expressing solidarity with the aspirations of her migrant

daughter.

As another example, Aurora, whose story opens this chapter, expressed dis-

agreement with her daughter Elizabeth’s decision to migrate to Spain, and yet,

Aurora insisted, “And even if I wasn’t [in agreement], the poor thing had to go

[Y aunque no estuviera se tenía que ir la pobre].” Like other grandmothers,

Aurora views her daughter’s migration as a necessary response to the lack of

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40 Care Across Generations

economic opportunities in Nicaragua. Although Aurora misses her daughter’s

copresent support in her life and is concerned about how Elizabeth’s absence

will affect her two young granddaughters, Aurora’s assumption of care respon-

sibilities reflects her willingness to sacrifice her own desires for the sake of her

daughter and family. By assuming care of grandchildren, grandmothers are

embodying their solidarity with mothers’ migration ambitions, overcoming

their reluctance to accept their daughters’ absences, and providing intergenera-

tional care for the sake of family well-being.

Teresa also expressed resigned support for her daughter Lisdamur’s migra-

tion to Costa Rica (where Lisdamur lived for two and a half years). Teresa is

fifty-six and lives in an economically poor neighborhood on the edge of the

polluted Lake Managua, its foul odor often wafting into her home with the af-

ternoon breeze. Teresa has a total of five children, two of whom have emigrated.

In addition to Lisdamur, Teresa’s son Jorge left for Texas two years prior, leaving

his son in Nicaragua in the care of the maternal grandmother. Teresa is aware of

her children’s vulnerabilities while living undocumented abroad, and this adds

to her sense of concern about migration and her family. “I . . . didn’t want my

children to have to end up doing it [migrating]. It’s even worse without papers;

it’s harder for migrants. I don’t agree with them that they should leave their

land, their home.” Teresa articulates her displeasure and disagreement about

migration, but she also assumed care for Lisdamur’s two daughters (ages eight

and twelve) for nearly a year, until Lisdamur sent for her daughters to join

her in Costa Rica. For Teresa, migration is a “mal necesario” (necessary evil),

needed to secure family economic well-being, and her caregiving is a necessary

responsibility for her family’s survival:

However many times it’s necessary, I’m going to support my children . . . and

take care of them in the moment that they need me. I’ll support them in what-

ever way. This is why we grandmothers are here, to take care of the family, to

support the family in whatever [way] we can—maybe not economically but a

moral support.

Teresa frames intergenerational care as an affirmative moral stance, an expres-

sion of unconditional support for her migrant children and for the grand-

children in her care. Teresa obtains a sense of purpose through her role as a

caregiver; care allows her to participate in the shared sacrifice of migration.

That grandmothers like Teresa are able to overcome their overt disapproval of

migration and support their children by caring for grandchildren illustrates the

intergenerational solidarity that supports migration and care.

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Tenemos Que Hacerlo 41

Like other women of the grandmother generation facing the realities of

poverty and economic necessity in Nicaragua, María Luisa understands “our

children have to migrate.” In fact, María Luisa and her husband, Miguel, helped

their daughter Denia buy a plane ticket to Spain three years earlier by taking out

a loan from an agricultural cooperative. The family lives in a rural community

in Chinandega, a Nicaraguan state with much out-migration. Upon Denia’s

departure, María Luisa, in her fifties, assumed care for her three grandchildren,

ages thirteen, fifteen, and eighteen. María Luisa has four other children who are

migrants or migrated at some point: a coresident daughter who migrated to

Spain but was not permitted to enter and was returned from the airport; one

son who migrated to the United States, was deported, and then went back; and

two sons who live and work in El Salvador, one of whom has a child (with him

in El Salvador). Even though María Luisa and Miguel facilitated Denia’s migra-

tion by purchasing her plane ticket, María Luisa remained deeply ambivalent

about her daughter’s migration. Her experiences of her other children’s unsuc-

cessful migrations and her migrant son’s difficulties in the United States as an

undocumented migrant, including a short period of detention by immigration

authorities and a period of unemployment due to La Crisis, left María Luisa

worried that similar harms would befall Denia. She also felt that the difference

between having Denia in Spain and having two sons in El Salvador had to do

with geographical distance: “It’s different, because from El Salvador they can

come and go easily; they come and go, but those two who are far away can’t

come back.”

As the permanence of migration settled in, María Luisa was increasingly

worried about the separation and distance of her family. She observed her

grandchildren becoming inclined themselves toward migration, impatient

with their limited options after secondary school in Nicaragua. She worried

about her grandchildren and missed her daughter’s support in her household,

and yet she viewed migration as a necessary response to economic poverty in

Nicaragua:

We were bothered by her departure, but because of the same poverty we experi-

ence, we understand our children have to migrate. What else are we supposed

to do? [¿Qué más debemos hacer?] Because of this poverty they have to go [por

la misma pobreza tienen que irse].

For María Luisa, assuming care of her daughter’s children is part of the shared

sacrifice of migration; her daughter works abroad and sends money home, and

she and her husband assist with their grandchildren’s care. Despite her concerns

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42 Care Across Generations

and ambivalence about migration and the separation it has caused in her fam-

ily, María Luisa feels she has no other option but to participate in the shared

sacrifice of intergenerational care; in her words, ¿Qué más debemos hacer?

Grandmothers as Mothers Again

As grandmothers assume care for the children of migrant mothers, they be-

come mothers again, for another generation of children. In their newfound

mothering roles women can find pleasure, insofar as they experience a renewed

sense of purpose in their lives. The emotional ties that grandmothers form with

the children in their care are usually strengthened over time, with longer du-

rations of migration and with the uncertainties of migration. These ties are

evident in the kinship terminology children use to refer to their grandmothers,

using “mamá” as a descriptive adjective for both their grandmother caretakers

and their migrant mothers. For instance, Marbeya’s grandchildren refer to her

as “mamá Marbeya” and to her migrant daughter as “mamá Azucena.”

Norma is an energetic woman of fifty-seven who has been raising her

grandson Jeremy (age eleven) since his mother, María José, left for the United

States ten years ago. Like other children of migrant mothers, Jeremy referred to

his grandmother as “mamá Norma” and to his mother as “mamá Mari.” Norma

and Jeremy shared a small house in a suburban district of Managua; in the

backyard area, Norma’s coresident adult son Michal lived in a detached home

with his wife and two children. Jeremy enjoyed his cousins’ company, and his

uncle helped with his caregiving by picking him up from school every day. Still,

it was Norma who had been Jeremy’s primary caregiver ever since her daughter

had emigrated. Norma viewed her relationship with Jeremy as an extension of

her role as a single mother for her four children (whose father had emigrated to

the United States in the 1980s, when they were very young). Norma described

her mothering across the generations of migration this way: “I’m a single

mother. I was mother and father [fui madre y padre] for my four children, and

now I’m a mother again [soy madre de nuevo], for Jeremy” (emphasis mine).

By raising Jeremy, Norma considers herself completing a reproductive cycle

that has extended across two generations, four children, and one grandchild.

Norma is resolute in her conviction to raise healthy, productive children alone,

as a single mother (and grandmother), without the help of their fathers. Years

earlier, her husband had sent remittances only in the first few months after emi-

grating to the United States; after that, he never provided consistent economic

support to the family. In Norma’s words, after migrating, “he forgot about his

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children [se olvidó de sus hijos].” As a result, Norma became her children’s

primary source of emotional and economic support. Following several years of

informal employment and economic struggle, Norma completed her university

law degree and worked as a family lawyer for the municipal government of

Managua. Because of her knowledge of the law and access to legal resources,

Norma had completed the administrative process to obtain guardianship for

Jeremy, something no other grandmother in my study had been able to do.

This provided her a relative sense of security in her caregiving relation with

Jeremy. (Jeremy’s father has limited contact with his son and does not provide

economic support to Norma for his care.) For Norma, mothering and then

mothering again is a source of self-esteem and optimismo (optimism), as she

orients her labors toward Jeremy’s well-being. She obtains a sense of pride from

her role as a grandmother caregiver.

Over roughly a decade of caring for Jeremy, Norma has grown close to her

grandson, and yet she has always been supportive of María José’s intentions to

reunify with Jeremy in the United States. While María José had not had the op-

portunity to visit her family in Nicaragua since her emigration (having taken

nearly ten years to obtain legal status as a U.S. resident), an opportunity to

visit came during my fieldwork. Norma and Jeremy anxiously anticipated the

visit, as the family understood that María José was intending to take Jeremy

back to New York with her. In the weeks leading up to the visit, Norma took

Jeremy shopping for winter clothing, and Jeremy told me he was ready for the

frío (cold) of New York with his new coats and jackets. As it turned out, Jeremy

was not able to leave Nicaragua with María José; essentially, his U.S. visa had

not yet been approved, which the family found out only when they showed up

for an immigration appointment at the U.S. embassy. Needless to say, everyone

was disappointed, including Jeremy, but he tried to put a positive spin on the

outcome, telling me a few days later that his “mamá Marí” would return to

Nicaragua soon and finally take him to New York.

After this episode, in my conversations with Norma, I asked her how she

was able to see the prospect of Jeremy’s reunification with María José so posi-

tively, seemingly without doubt or hesitation. Norma told me that she had al-

ways viewed her daughter’s migration in terms of creating this opportunity “for

Jeremy to have a better future [para Jeremy tener un mejor futuro].” Yes, I said,

I understood that motivation, but how would Norma feel once Jeremy had left

to join his mother abroad? Norma replied, “Yes, of course, I’m going to miss

him, but it’s another necessary sacrifice [Sí, claro, me va a hacer falta, pero es

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44 Care Across Generations

otro sacrificio necesario].” For Norma, her first sacrifice was in assuming care

for her grandson; this sacrifice is extended across generations as she sacrifices

her personal desire to keep Jeremy physically proximate and instead encourages

his reunification with his mother in the United States. Norma’s stance on reuni-

fication reveals how grandmother caregivers in transnational families usually

form strong emotional ties with grandchildren through their caregiving—ties

that must be relinquished if and when the children join mothers abroad. Re-

unification with mothers becomes a further instantiation of grandmothers’

sacrifice as intergenerational caregivers in transnational families.

The Ambivalence of Return and Reunification

The prospect of children’s reunification with mothers abroad is a source of

uncertainty and ambivalence for grandmothers. Even when grandmothers like

Aurora and Norma have assumed care for grandchildren over long durations

(of ten years or more), their care is made tenuous by gendered cultural expecta-

tions for mother-child ties. And it is precisely these longer-term durations of

migration and care that shape strong emotional bonds between grandmothers

and the children in their care, making reunification that much more distressing

for grandmothers. Nonetheless, one important dimension of grandmothers’

caregiving is encouraging children to view their mothers as upholding their

roles as mothers through migration and its resulting sacrifices. Even after years

of migration, grandmothers will relinquish their roles as mothers again, despite

the emotional pain this entails for them on a personal level, as a further expres-

sion of personal sacrifice for the sake of family solidarity.8

Although reunification between parent migrants and children who stay in

origin countries has often been addressed unproblematically (i.e., as an ulti-

mate goal for transnational families), focusing on grandmother caregivers’ ex-

periences offers a different, more complex, perspective on reunification. Even

the term “reunification” reflects a unidirectional view of migration, a seemingly

inevitable flow of family members following the first migrant from origin to

destination countries. However, focusing solely on children’s reunification with

migrant mothers (or fathers) sidelines the lived experiences of grandmothers

and other surrogates who have cared for children in mothers’ absences. As

demonstrated here, grandmothers form emotional ties with the grandchildren

in their care over years, even decades, of caregiving. The prospect of children’s

migration to reunify with mothers in destination countries implies yet another

separation and yet another loss for grandmothers. A Nicaraguan migration

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scholar has described this cycle of departures and separations as “una herida

resangrienta” (a reopening wound) that festers in the emotional lives of mem-

bers of transnational families in sending countries.9

Marbeya’s experience offers an example of grandmothers’ ambivalence

about reunification and uncertainty about the future of their transnational

families. Marbeya understood her daughter Azucena’s migration as a necessary

measure to support her children and family back home in Nicaragua; Marbeya

cared for her two grandchildren in what she assumed would be a temporary

arrangement. During her first two years in Costa Rica, Azucena could not visit

home because she did not have legal residency documents; by her third year

abroad, she had secured a legal work permit, which enabled her to travel back

and forth to Nicaragua. In subsequent years, Azucena returned several times

a year, on Semana Santa, Mother’s Day, and during the December holidays.

I dropped by Marbeya’s household during one of these December visits and

talked with Azucena and the rest of the family. I noticed that Marbeya looked

especially energized and happy that day, and when I commented about her

mood, Marbeya said, “Well, this is how I am when I have all my family together.”

While the visits helped Marbeya and her grandchildren feel connected to

Azucena, they also opened up the possibility of permanent return and led to a

greater ambivalence about the family’s future. As Marbeya explained,

Well, for us, the uncertainty that we have had for the last two years, every time

she visits, is whether she is staying [in Costa Rica] or coming home—because

this girl [Vanessa] is getting older. And with the boy [nine-year-old Selso], there

are moments when you can see in his face that she—that he needs her. But

she [Azucena] tells me, “Mom, if I come back, what am I coming back for if

there is no work? And I can’t earn here what I’m earning there. What I earn

there every two weeks it’s rare I’ll be able to earn here in a month. So why am I

going to come back here?” So it seems that she doesn’t think she will be able to

be back here [no tiene idea de estar aquí] anytime soon.

Just as grandmothers frame their initial assumption of children’s care in re-

sponse to economic scarcity in Nicaragua, so too does economic necessity

shape women’s sacrifice through migration and care over long separations.

While Marbeya would have liked Azucena to return to Nicaragua, she simul-

taneously felt that her daughter’s return was an ambiguous and indeterminate

possibility. This uncertainty left Marbeya feeling frustrated, a frustration she

occasionally expressed to her daughter or to interested others. For instance,

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46 Care Across Generations

at one meeting of the NGO La Red, at which I was present, the women in the

group were talking about the troubles of Nicaraguan migrants in Costa Rica,

including their difficulty accessing health care or traveling home to visit their

families. Marbeya shared a recent conversation she had had with Azucena, in

which she confronted her daughter about whether she planned to stay in Costa

Rica or return to Nicaragua. Seeming to gain confidence from the other women

in the room, Marbeya said she was firm in reminding her daughter about the

burden of her care work, telling Azucena, “It’s fine that you send the monthly

remittances, but you’re not here, you’re not in your children’s lives; the washing,

the ironing, the breakfasting, making sure they’ve done their homework, that

if they’re sick, you take them to the clinic—in all this is me.” Marbeya glanced

up at her audience and recounted her final exhortation to Azucena: “Tell me

the truth, so that I can stop fooling myself into believing you’re coming home

when you’re not.” In my field notes from that meeting, I recorded my impres-

sion of Marbeya, who was usually somewhat reserved, noting that her tone

was confrontational and that her voice filled with emotion as she resoundingly

emphasized the ongoing sacrifice of her caregiving and her simultaneous desire

for some sense of certainty about the future of her transnational family. I also

noted that Marbeya’s hopes for Azucena’s return seemed to be wearing thin and

that she appeared to be assimilating the idea that what she had assumed at the

outset of her daughter’s migration would be a temporary reconfiguration of

care was looking increasingly permanent with the passage of time.

At forty-seven, Juana was among the younger grandmothers in this study.

In fact, Juana herself had migration experience (she was the only grandmother

who herself had migration experience), having lived and worked as a doméstica

in Costa Rica in her thirties. At the time of the study, Juana was caring for

her three-year-old granddaughter, Loryi, daughter of one of three of Juana’s

migrant children (Juana has two daughters and a son living in Costa Rica).

Until just a few weeks before I met her, Juana had also been responsible for

two other grandchildren, ages nine and five, before their mother sent for them

to join her in Costa Rica. Migration had inflicted a series of departures, over

generations, on Juana and her family. First, as a migrant mother herself, Juana

left her four children behind in their rural community to be cared for by their

father and a female neighbor. While Juana had hoped her children would be

able to avoid migration, they joined hundreds of others from their community

several hours north of the Costa Rican border who cross the border seasonally

to work in agriculture and service industries. Before they emigrated, Juana’s

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children and their children had lived with her, so Juana had coresident grand-

children before her children’s migrations. When her daughters left, Juana felt

their absence as an emotional loss, because they had morally supported her, as

well as materially. Still, she and her husband, Pedro, assumed care for her three

grandchildren. She found in this responsibility a sense of everyday purpose

and usefulness that helped her overcome the sadness of her daughter’s absence.

Juana grew close to her grandchildren during the time they were in her care,

viewing them, she said, “as if they were my own children [como si fueran mis

hijos].” She described this responsibility:

Well, we took on the responsibility, as if they were our own children and not

grandchildren. When they are sick . . . we take them to the doctor. [We took on

the responsibility] by taking care of their children—that’s right—by dedicating

this time of our lives to our grandchildren. The children of our children. See,

that’s where you feel closer to your children; for example, when I care for my

granddaughters, I feel like I have my daughter close by because she’s part of my

daughter—right?—so taking care of my granddaughters brings me closer to her.

Juana describes caregiving as a responsibility, which includes overseeing the

health of her grandchildren, and yet she also finds in care a way to maintain sol-

idarity with her migrant children. Caring for grandchildren is a way of feeling

proximate to her children, despite their physical absence. Juana grew emotion-

ally close to her grandchildren during the months they were in her care. When

her daughter telephoned her from Costa Rica and told her she planned to send

for her children to join her, Juana was disappointed and yet relinquished their

care to support her daughter’s desire for a better life for her children. For Juana,

when her granddaughters left, it was as if her “children had left” all over again.

Through everyday provisioning of care, Juana’s grandchildren had become like

her children; their migration left Juana coping with a double absence, that of

her children and her grandchildren. In this way, grandmothers’ sacrifice is ex-

tended over time and across generations—first in the assumption of grandchil-

dren’s care and then in its relinquishing to support mother-child reunification.

Care in the Face of Uncertainty

Thus far, this chapter has described how grandmothers come to assume grand-

children’s care as an act of sacrifice and solidarity for the sake of their migrant

daughters and their transnational families. We have also seen the challenges

and uncertainties grandmother caregivers in transnational families face, which

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48 Care Across Generations

include the ambivalence surrounding migration’s future, especially the possi-

bility of reunification. To deal with these challenges, grandmothers draw on

sacrifice and solidarity to motivate and find meaning in their intergenerational

care. In what follows, I illustrate how grandmothers respond to the uncertain-

ties of transnational family life through the stories of two women, Aurora and

Olga.

Aurora: Care and Negotiations of Reunification

After her daughter Elizabeth migrated to Spain, Aurora, who we met at the

start of this chapter, assumed full-time caregiving for her two granddaugh-

ters, Salensca and Daniela. Elizabeth’s migration was motivated by economic

hardship, including mounting credit card debts and overdue house payments,

exacerbated by her daughters’ father providing no economic support. Aurora

understood the economic motivation for Elizabeth’s migration and viewed it

as an unavoidable, while undesirable, necessity given the children’s father’s ir-

responsibility. Aurora summed up the reason for her daughter’s migration in

terms of these gendered inequalities: “He [the children’s father] didn’t help her

[Elizabeth], and a mother isn’t going to let her daughters die of hunger.”

Aurora struggled to make ends meet, since she had to dedicate most of the

remittances Elizabeth sent to paying off Elizabeth’s debts. The girls’ father of-

fered Aurora only limited, sporadic financial help, but Aurora was reluctant

to reproach him because he had threatened her and Elizabeth in the past.

In fact, during a return visit to Nicaragua, Elizabeth had confronted her ex-

partner about not providing child support, and he had reacted violently, run-

ning her over with his motorcycle in a major marketplace. Elizabeth’s injuries

fortunately were not serious, and she recovered and returned to Spain. Still,

the episode illustrated to the family, and especially Aurora, how dangerous it

could be to provoke this man. A short time after this incident, the children’s

father showed up at Aurora’s house and threatened to take the girls into his

custody if Aurora and Elizabeth kept pressuring him for money. This was one

of a number of times he showed up at Aurora’s house and threatened to take the

girls away. While Aurora was troubled by his threats, she also thought he would

not follow through because she did not consider him capable of caring for his

daughters. Aurora tried to reason with him by reminding him that if he wanted

to win his daughters’ affection, he had to invest in his relationship with them as

she herself had done. Aurora explained her view about the relationship to her

granddaughters’ father:

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When parents divorce, the children will go to the father or mother, depending

on the case. In this case, Elizabeth had custody, and he [the father] was sup-

posed to put 5,000 córdobas [about $250] a month into an account as child

support for the girls’ food. And he didn’t do it, not even once. But this didn’t

matter because I fed them; all I wanted was peace. That’s what I told him, that

we should talk like adults and arrive at an agreement—end the conflict, I told

him. He told me, “Tell the girls they have to come with me.” But I told him, “No,

you can’t force children to love you; you have to win them over with your love.”

Later he told me that I was making the girls not like him. No, I told him, I just

earned their love.

In this passage, Aurora articulates an awareness of her vulnerable legal sta-

tus in relation to her granddaughters. Elizabeth was awarded legal custody of

her daughters after the divorce and their father was to pay child support. Af-

ter Elizabeth migrated and the girls’ care was transferred unofficially to their

grandmother, Aurora found herself legally vulnerable and unable to insist that

her granddaughters’ father provide child support.

When grandmothers assume primary caregiving of grandchildren, they

most often do so without legal recognition, because Nicaraguan family law

privileges biological mothers and fathers and because families lack the legal

resources for transferring children’s care officially to grandmothers. In 1992,

Nicaragua reformed its national family legal code known as the Ley de Alimen-

tos (Law of Nurture), or Child Support Law, which delineates the responsibili-

ties of biological parents for the sustenance and care of their children.10 The

law specifically outlines mechanisms for mothers to seek financial assistance

from children’s fathers, even when men have denied paternity and otherwise

neglected their paternal responsibilities (Asamblea Nacional de la República de

Nicaragua 1992). While this law provides the legal framework through which

women can petition for child support, de facto enforcement is infrequent as

many women are unaware the law exists. Even when women know about the

law, they lack the resources—especially access to legal assistance—needed to

file petitions under the law’s purview. Unless mothers formally transfer guard-

ianship of their children to grandmothers before migrating, which they sel-

dom do, grandmother caregivers are left without legal protection. Fathers can

(and do) take advantage of this liminal legal status to intimidate grandmothers,

pressuring them to turn over mothers’ remittances and not to challenge fathers’

own failure to provide economic support to their children.

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50 Care Across Generations

Despite her legal vulnerability, Aurora was confident in her role as an in-

tergenerational caregiver, and she even asserted herself in her interactions with

her granddaughters’ father. She gained this confidence through the very act

of her caregiving, through which she felt she had earned her granddaughters’

love and loyalty, and she criticized his failure to win his daughters over with

love. While Aurora was unsuccessful in getting the girls’ father to pay child sup-

port, she was able to stem his demands for control of remittances, showing the

important role grandmothers play in negotiating relationships with children’s

fathers after mother migration.

Over the two years of Elizabeth’s migration, Aurora developed a strong af-

fective tie with her granddaughters, earning their love through her dedicated

caregiving. As she said in the quote above, for her, children’s love is earned

through care, such as that she gave to Salensca and Daniela over two years of

being their primary caregiver. These strong ties of relatedness earned through

care made it extremely difficult for Aurora when her daughter returned in Jan-

uary 2010 to take her granddaughters back with her to Spain. Instantiating the

intergenerational sacrifice that motivates grandmother care in transnational

families, even though anticipating emotional despair after their departure, Au-

rora helped Elizabeth arrange for them to migrate. This involved processing the

legal paperwork required for the girls to leave Nicaragua and convincing the

girls’ father (something Elizabeth herself had been unable to do) to sign legal

documents allowing them to leave the country.11 Aurora was able to obtain this

crucial signature (only after several difficult attempts to communicate with the

father), and she proceeded to process all the other legal documents that her

granddaughters needed (passports, visas, health and school records). In this

way, Aurora actively supported her daughter’s desire to reunify with her chil-

dren, even while she knew that it would mean an emotionally painful separa-

tion for her. In other words, she sacrificed her own desire to remain with her

granddaughters for the sake of solidarity in her transnational family.

Aurora’s case offers insights into the emotional consequences of reunification

for grandmother caregivers. For women like Aurora, reunification compounds

the initial emotions of mother migration. Grandmothers cope with their daugh-

ters’ absences in part by dedicating themselves to their grandchildren’s care.

Then, after years of caregiving, having adapted to their daughters’ absence and

having grown accustomed to the daily routines of mothering again, grandmoth-

ers find themselves having to accept the departures of their grandchildren.

In an interview I had with Aurora about a week after Elizabeth had left with

her two daughters, Aurora was visibly distraught and cried on several occasions

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during our conversation. Aurora related her feelings about her granddaugh-

ters’ recent departure to how she felt two years earlier, when Elizabeth had first

migrated:

Of course, I missed her a lot—I cried a lot, just like right now when the girls

left too [begins to cry]. But they give—they gave me strength; they said, “Look,

Grandma, don’t cry. We are going to come back for you when we grow up.” How

beautiful they are, my precious girls. They said, “Don’t cry, because we are leav-

ing happy.” I know, I told them . . . [breaks into tears].

In this passage, the past turns into the present and folds into possible futures, as

Aurora’s present feelings about her granddaughters contain traces of the previ-

ous loss of her daughter. In the wake of her granddaughters’ departure, Aurora’s

feelings of sadness and loss expand across time and space, so that what she feels

in the present about her granddaughters encompasses what she felt two years

earlier about her daughter. In her account, the past envelops the emotions of

the present, and one departure becomes the next, leaving Aurora to cope with

the grief of two generations of migration.12

During my interviews with Aurora, I was struck by the complicated ways

mother migration results in (re)configurations of family life and by grand-

mothers’ willingness to sacrifice their own emotional welfare for the sake of

their daughters. To secure some semblance of peace in the wake of her daugh-

ter’s migration, Aurora successfully managed a contentious relationship with

an abusive and domineering ex-son-in-law. Aurora formed close emotional ties

with her grandchildren through her loving caregiving and then actively sup-

ported her daughter’s decision to have the children reunify with her in Spain.

In one sense, Aurora’s case illustrates how transnational caregiving relation-

ships are stratified by generation, whereby migrant mothers leave their children

in their mothers’ care and grandmothers adapt to these reconfigurations by

(re)enacting their moral responsibilities as mothers for another generation of

children. Yet in another sense, Aurora also exemplifies the moral commitment

and sacrifice that motivates grandmothers’ caregiving, a sacrifice oriented to-

ward solidarity in transnational families, even when this involves great personal

emotional cost.

Olga: Caregiving, Vulnerabilities, and Uncertainties

Olga has similarly experienced raising her grandchildren following their

mother’s migration to Panama as a source of pleasure and of potential pain.

At seventy-two, Olga is one of the older women in my study, and her life of

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52 Care Across Generations

economic poverty and social hardship (including the premature deaths of two

husbands and one adult son) shows on her weathered face. Olga was usually

dressed in a simple housedress when I visited her small, two-room home. If

my visit was in the morning, I would find Olga washing clothes or preparing

the midday meal over her two-burner electric cocina (stove); in the afternoon,

she would be seated alongside nine-year-old granddaughter Juliana in plastic

chairs in their small living room watching afternoon cartoons on TV. On one

occasion, I found Olga and Juliana dressed up and waiting at their neighbor-

hood bus stop; Juliana was wearing a pretty yellow print dress and her hair

was neatly pulled back in matching barrettes. Olga told me they were going to

a reunión (meeting) of the Jehovah’s Witness church in which Olga regularly

participates along with Juliana.

In one of my first interviews with Olga, I asked whether she viewed caregiv-

ing for Juliana and her seventeen-year-old brother Dayton after their mother

Manuela’s migration as an added responsibility in her already-difficult life.

(While Dayton was in Olga’s care, as a teenager and college student, he was

largely independent. He also fell outside the seven–thirteen age range for chil-

dren in my study, and so I never interviewed him.) Olga quickly responded,

“No, no. . . . I take it like fun [a distraction] [No, no. . . . Lo agarro como una

diversión].” Indeed, despite her life of hardships, Olga enjoys caring for Juliana.

Her daily caregiving routines help her feel active, energetic, and healthy. Olga

described her busy morning routine:

In the morning, I make coffee for both of them. While they’re drinking their

coffee, if I have a dirty towel to wash, I take the soap and wash it while they are

finishing eating. When she’s done eating, I make sure she [Juliana] brushes her

teeth, then I give her money for a snack, and then, “Vamonos,” I take her and

drop her off at school. While she’s at school, I wash, I cook, and I wait until it’s

time to pick her up.

Through this and other exchanges, I came to understand how Olga’s entire daily

life revolved around caring for Juliana. From the time she woke in the morning

to the time she went to bed at night, Olga was oriented toward (grand)mother-

ing. She did not experience this as a burden but rather as an opportunity to be

a mother again for Juliana and to enjoy the close companionship of her young

granddaughter. Olga told me, “It’s that, to me, I like going around with Juliana,”

and that, after Manuela migrated, “I haven’t separated myself from her [Juli-

ana].” This togetherness provided Olga with a reason to get up in the morning

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and the energy she needed to carry on with her day. Like other grandmothers,

Olga gained a renewed sense of identity and purpose through caregiving, de-

spite the hardships and troubles of transnational family life.

Over the course of my fieldwork, as I spent time with grandmothers and

children, and we discussed the possibilities of migrant returns or children’s re-

unifications, I became aware of their profound uncertainty about the future of

transnational family life. Grandmothers might say that their migrant daughters

were planning to visit muy pronto (really soon), but this did not necessarily

mean a visit was imminent. Instead, these claims and temporal referents index

grandmothers’ desires for family unity, which they hope to achieve through mi-

grant return and family reunification in Nicaragua (rather than through chil-

dren’s leaving to join mothers abroad). This ambivalence is reflected in Olga’s

experience, as she and Juliana experienced the possibility of multiple return

visits that never materialized, leaving Olga unsure about whether her daughter

would stay in Panama or return to Nicaragua and whether her granddaughter

would remain in her care or join her mother abroad.

The main reason Olga’s daughter Manuela had migrated was related to the

mounting personal debts she had accumulated in Managua. According to Olga,

once Manuela’s debts were paid off, “then she would come back [despues se

venía].” Indeed, Olga facilitated this hoped-for return by using a portion of

the monthly remittances Manuela sent home to pay off her daughter’s credi-

tors. With the debtors paid off, Olga saw no reason for her daughter to remain

abroad and anticipated her return soon. With this background of expectation,

Manuela’s visits (including those that were never realized) represented the am-

bivalence of return or family reunification abroad.

As an example of the ambivalence surrounding visits and returns, Olga told

me in October 2009 that Manuela was going to visit for the December holi-

days. Manuela had told her mother that she would ask for time off from her

employer and save the money needed to make the trip. Olga eagerly anticipated

this visit, as it would be Manuela’s first time home since leaving for Panama two

years prior. However, the family’s plans seemed to have changed a month later;

when I asked Olga in November about Manuela’s possible December visit, Olga

was less confident that it would occur. Instead, Olga said that Manuela might

not visit because she would have to spend money needed for Juliana’s school

tuition. Olga emphasized the high costs of four international border crossings

(Panama into Costa Rica, Costa Rica into Nicaragua, and then the return).

While disappointed, Olga explained to me that her daughter’s undocumented

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54 Care Across Generations

status made traveling to Nicaragua too risky—she could be detained by im-

migration authorities in Costa Rica and then deported back to Nicaragua. As

if to justify her daughter’s continued absence, Olga emphasized that the poten-

tial costs—personal, political, and economic—were too high for a visit home.

These dangers and risks were of course understandable, real, and apparent, yet

it is interesting that Olga framed her daughter’s decisions to visit or not in light

of these broader political inequalities, almost as a means of upholding the im-

age of solidarity in her family even though disappointed by an unrealized visit.

In fact, Manuela’s proposed visit in December 2009 never occurred. Ul-

timately, Manuela was unable to come up with the money needed, around

$180, for round-trip bus fare and the fees she would need to pay immigration

authorities at both borders (Panama–Costa Rica and Costa Rica–Nicaragua)

for her expired tourist visa. This shows how, even in considerations of short

holiday visits, international migration politics are always in the foreground,

shaping possibilities of returns and contributing to the uncertainty migrants

and their family members experience. Even if Manuela had been able to visit

that December, Olga faced a broader uncertainty about her family’s future and

whether Manuela would stay in Panama or return to Nicaragua. Olga said, “I

don’t know if she’s going to stay here or if she’s going to take off again [No sé si

se va a quedar aquí o si se va a volar de nuevo].”

In addition to the uncertainties of visits, returns, and reunifications, migra-

tion had pushed Olga (like Aurora) into a complicated negotiation with her

granddaughter’s father. For nearly two years after Manuela’s departure, Juliana’s

father, Johnny, stayed in Olga’s household, without contributing to household

expenses (such as food or utilities) or Juliana’s care. This despite Johnny having

work as a chef in a Managua restaurant and earning a steady income (unlike

other fathers of families in this study who were unemployed or infrequently

employed). Olga recounted to me how, on Johnny’s payday, she was astounded

to witness him giving Juliana a meager five córdobas (about twenty-five cents)

for school lunch money. “What a disaster! [¡Qué barbaridad!]” Olga told me,

visibly exacerbated that Juliana’s father contributed so minimally to her care.

Moreover, Johnny constantly intimidated Olga with threats that he was going

to take Juliana away from her, which caused Olga a good deal of stress and

anxiety. From Olga’s perspective, Johnny was attempting to “steal the girl away

[robar la niña].” Olga communicated her problems to Manuela, but from a

distance, there was little her daughter could do to influence Johnny.

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While the situation was more complicated than this brief summary allows,

I present this case because (alongside that of Aurora’s) it represents a rather

common dynamic in families of migrant mothers. Through my engagements

with study families and my work with NGOs, I came across similar complicated

and troublesome situations related to the custody of children of migrant par-

ents. Because grandmothers like Olga do not want to relinquish the informal

custodial relationship they have with their grandchildren and because they lack

knowledge and access to legal resources, they often, understandably, respond

to fathers’ threats with acquiescence (e.g., fearing that challenging the fathers

might provoke these men to remove the children from their custody).

As I became more familiar with Olga’s situation and as her frustration with

Johnny escalated, I decided to consult with a friend and colleague at the Nic-

araguan Ministry of Families (Ministerio de la Familia) about legal options

Olga might have. Olga agreed to meet with this lawyer (Karen), who informed

us about Olga’s limited legal options. Although Olga was not protected under

Nicaraguan law, she did have legal recourse, which included using the Ley de

Alimentos (Child Support Law) to demand child support from Johnny. She

could also formalize her guardianship of Juliana by submitting a legal petition,

which would have to be signed by Manuela and was a more complicated pro-

cess. Olga asked for time to consult with Manuela and her other daughter Ana

María (who lived near Olga in Managua) before making a final decision about

how to proceed.

A week later, I visited Olga, and she affirmed that she wanted to go ahead

with the intervention, which would consist of her processing legal guardianship

of Juliana and also pressuring Johnny for child support. Subsequently, Karen

drafted documents that would transfer guardianship of Juliana from Manuela

to Olga. Karen also set up a formal mediation meeting with Johnny to make

the case for his legal responsibility to provide child support (the mediation was

an alternative to a court hearing, giving Johnny a chance to respond and avoid

legal proceedings). The mediation was successful (in the short term, at least)

because, within a week of the meeting, Johnny had responded by paying off the

tuition owed at Juliana’s school and giving Olga a sum for Juliana’s care.

Assisting Olga in this way seemed an appropriate response to the troubles

she was having with her ex-son-in-law. After talking with Olga in person and

Manuela (via Skype) about how I could help, I arranged to meet Manuela in

Panama City so that she could sign the legal documents needed to transfer

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56 Care Across Generations

custody of Juliana to Olga. Olga sent me with a few recent photographs of

Juliana and other family members in Nicaragua to share with her daughter.

Manuela and I met several weeks later at an arranged location outside a large

shopping mall in Panama City. From there, Manuela walked me to the small

wood-sided house she shared with four other Nicaraguan women. The house

was located in a migrant shantytown in the shadows of the high-rise condo-

miniums where Manuela and other immigrant women worked as domésticas.

Sitting on a small twin bed, covered in mosquito netting and surrounded by

pictures of Juliana and Dayton and the rest of her family in Nicaragua, Manuela

and I sat for several hours talking about her migration experience. Manuela

told me how much she missed her children but also about how she found her-

self, over the years, increasingly tied to her friends and social networks and in

an intimate relationship with a Panamanian man. Manuela eventually told me

that she was considering marrying this man, obtaining legal status in Panama,

and bringing Juliana to Panama to live with her. Knowing that her plans would

upset her mother, Manuela asked me not to relay this information to Olga. We

also talked about how to support Olga in caring for Juliana and dealing with

Johnny in the meantime, and Manuela agreed that our child support interven-

tion was a good idea.

After Manuela signed the custody papers I had brought from Managua and

as we prepared to leave her house, she received a phone call from a migrant

friend and neighbor that Panamanian immigration authorities (la migra) were

conducting a raid in the neighborhood where they lived. We sat for another half

hour or so, before Manuela confirmed (through a phone call with her friend)

that the raid was over and the barrio clear of la migra. She then walked me back

to the bus stop where we had met, and we parted ways, with my promise to be in

touch from Managua and her request that I send hugs to her family back home.

As this example shows, my ethnographic research overlapped with the

formation of social ties and relationships with families in complicated ways.

Throughout fieldwork, I reflected on whether my intervention in Olga’s family

might put Olga at greater risk; for instance, by possibly increasing her vulner-

ability to Johnny’s demands. I wondered whether I was doing the right thing

by involving myself in Olga’s case in this way. My intervention felt right, mor-

ally and as a human response to a complicated situation, but I was concerned

about unintended consequences that could have followed from overstepping

the boundaries of the researcher-participant relationship. I wondered whether

my actions were motivated by, or might be understood by the family as, an

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Tenemos Que Hacerlo 57

expression of solidaridad with Olga and her family. And importantly, I pon-

dered the differences in access to power and resources between me and Olga

and her family—for instance, those inequalities that permitted me to board a

plane and fly to Panama City or to walk out of Manuela’s barrio without fear

of being detected and deported by la migra, because I carried a U.S. passport.

As I write this, I remain somewhat uncertain whether my intervention in

Olga’s family situation was right or wrong. Moreover, the experience of work-

ing alongside Nicaraguan transnational families impressed on me the blurred

boundaries that ethnographic research entails but also the importance of these

close ties for forming deeper understandings of the complexities of transna-

tional migration and family life. I am certain that my intervention was moti-

vated by a sense of alignment (solidaridad) with Olga’s family and a desire to

use the resources at my disposal to aid Olga in securing a more stable position

as an intergenerational caregiver. Uneasily, I remain aware that if Johnny had

turned against Olga or Juliana in a violent response to the child support claim,

I would have been directly implicated in—ethically and morally responsible

for—any resulting harm. While my intervention felt like an appropriate human

response at the time and seemed to shift some of Johnny’s pressure away from

Olga (he did, after all, move out of Olga’s household shortly after he received

the summons to appear in family court), it might have been inconsequential

for Olga’s longer-term situation.

A few months after my visit with Manuela, before the conclusion of my

fieldwork (in June 2010), Olga told me that Johnny was delinquent once again

on Juliana’s school tuition and had not given her money for food or other ne-

cessities in weeks. I worried about Olga, about Johnny’s renewed threats to take

Juliana from her care, and about the possibility that Johnny might physically

harm Olga in retaliation for her assertion of Juliana’s guardianship. But I also

felt there was little more I could do for Olga, other than asking my friend Karen,

the lawyer, to call on Olga every so often after I left Nicaragua to check in and

make sure she was doing all right. I had already left Nicaragua when, in Decem-

ber 2010, Karen told me that Manuela had returned to Nicaragua for a holiday

visit and, without previous notice, taken Juliana with her back to Panama. Olga

was left suffering the emotional consequences of another loss, lamenting her

granddaughter’s absence and missing the everyday companionship Juliana had

provided.

A year after Juliana’s departure, I visited Managua and stopped by Olga’s

house to visit. I found her, per her custom, dressed in her simple cotton house

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58 Care Across Generations

robe, doing late-afternoon housework, alone. We sat down to talk for over an

hour, with Olga growing emotional as she talked about Juliana’s departure

and about missing her granddaughter’s presence, missing her daily routines of

cooking for Juliana, taking her to school, and taking her to church activities.

We sat for several moments in silence, the weight of another absence hanging

over our heads. I tried to shift the mood by asking how Juliana was doing in

school in Panama, but I could see that Olga would not be easily cheered. In that

moment, the woman energized by the daily care for her young granddaughter

was gone, and in her place was a woman who appeared older, more weary, tired,

and uncertain about the future. Olga seemed to hold out hope that Manuela

and Juliana would one day return to Managua, but this hope glimmered and

seemed to fade with the passage of time.

When I consider Olga’s story, I recall how, during an interview in May 2010,

before Manuela had come back to Managua for Juliana, Olga had told me she

did not want Juliana to leave for Panama. Olga said, “I wouldn’t like her to leave.

Because here she goes to school on her own, [but in Panama] there are times

that her mom is going to go get her [from school], and she’ll only stay closed up

in [Manuela’s] room.” Olga had personal reasons not to want her granddaugh-

ter to leave but also viewed Nicaragua as providing a preferable childhood for

Juliana, one where her granddaughter could play in her neighborhood without

fear of being detected by immigration authorities and one where Juliana was

surrounded by friends and extended family, rather than being isolated indoors

while her mother worked. However, like other grandmother caregivers, Olga

was struggling to accept the idea that reunification between migrant mother

and daughter was a sort of inevitable future to which she was resigned. In her

resignation, Olga embodies the gendered sacrifice of intergeneration caregiv-

ing in transnational families, reenacting the original sacrifice of assuming care

for her grandchild by relinquishing this very child to her mother’s care, even at

painful emotional cost to herself.

The turns of transnational family life eventually left Olga alone, after years

of caring for her granddaughter, living with the emptiness of Juliana’s absence

and the growing distance and uncertainty that transnational family life entails.

This denouement to Olga’s family’s story, however fragile and uncertain, leaves

me with other, perturbing, questions: Did my connection with Manuela, my

conversations with her in Panama, my showing her pictures of Juliana—did

any of these encounters influence her decision to send for her daughter? By ex-

tension, how much is my intervention responsible for Olga’s resultant feelings

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Tenemos Que Hacerlo 59

of loneliness and abandonment after her granddaughter’s departure? These

questions are unanswerable but raise the messy human interconnectedness

that ethnographic engagement involves. Ultimately, it is impossible as an eth-

nographer to extract oneself from the intricate complexities of human social

relationships. And yet it is out of these very intricate, intimate ties and compli-

cations that anthropological understanding emerges.

Casí como Madres

Reconfigurations of care in transnational families are shaped by gendered

structures of family life in Nicaragua and by global political economies of mi-

gration. Grandmother caregiving in Nicaraguan families of migrants is also a

concrete expression of deeply held cultural values for women’s sacrifice and

solidarity in family life, as women take on the responsibility of raising another

generation of children in the wake of mother migration. Grandmothers as-

sume care of grandchildren as a concrete expression of these values, framing

their care work in Nicaragua as a parallel sacrifice to that made by mothers as

migrant workers abroad.

The expression “casí como madre” (almost like a mother) indexes the am-

bivalence of grandmothers’ positions as caregivers in transnational families, for

they are qualified mothers, “como” madres; it is as if they are mothers because

they engage in all the everyday acts of care necessary for children and families,

and yet their roles are temporary and vulnerable. Grandmothers’ vulnerability

is exacerbated by tensions with children’s fathers and when encountering the

ambivalent prospect of reunification. That all the grandmothers I worked with

expressed a willingness to relinquish their caring roles and relationships with

children given the prospect of children’s reunification with mothers abroad is

another instantiation of how sacrifice is embodied by grandmothers as inter-

generational caregivers.

The stories of Olga and Aurora highlight the legal and social vulnerabilities

of grandmothers in transnational families. Nicaraguan family law almost ex-

clusively privileges biological paternal and maternal ties to children and does

not recognize actual custody or caregiving in determining child guardianship.

While Nicaraguan family law does not recognize grandmothers as legal guard-

ians of children without a long, drawn-out process of establishing the absence

of biological parents, provisions in the law can still be used to push fathers to

provide child support. The problem, for women like Olga and Aurora, is that

they are unaware of the legal recourse they might have and lack access to the

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60 Care Across Generations

legal services needed to use the law to remedy their vulnerability. Exacerbating

grandmothers’ vulnerable social positions as intergenerational caregivers are

the often-contentious and potentially abusive relationships they manage with

children’s fathers. (One source of conflict with fathers is access to economic

remittances, which is discussed further in Chapter 2.)

Aurora’s and Olga’s stories also illustrate how the possibility of migrant vis-

its raise complicated questions about the potential of reunifications between

mothers and children and the uncertainties that families living with migra-

tion face. Grandmothers are instrumental in upholding the emotional relation-

ships between mothers abroad and their children in Nicaragua and encourage

mothers to visit regularly as a means of maintaining these transnational ties.

While it is grandmothers who assume the emotional work of mothering across

generations and borders over the months, years, and even decades between

migrants’ visits, grandmothers are willing to relinquish their caregiving roles

when children reunite with mothers abroad. Furthermore, despite knowing the

emotional cost of reunification to themselves, grandmothers reluctantly sup-

port mothers’ decisions about reunification. By relinquishing grandchildren to

mothers’ care, grandmothers reenact the original sacrifice of intergenerational

care, reinforcing family solidarity through another instantiation of personal

sacrifice for the sake of family well-being.

These examples also reveal how grandmother caregiving is ultimately a

temporary kinship reconfiguration, which can be reversed when mothers re-

turn or send for their children to reunify with them abroad. While they are

largely sidelined from decisions about reunification, grandmothers—given the

routines they have developed and the loving care they have provided to grand-

children over many years—have an emotional stake in reunification decisions.

To clarify, I in no way intend for this discussion of grandmothers’ ambivalent

feelings about reunification to undermine immigration policy reform efforts in

destination countries like the United States or Costa Rica to streamline parent-

child reunification processes and thereby reduce the uncertainty experienced

by grandmothers and children in migrant-sending families. Streamlining ac-

cess to legal immigration status, for migrants and for children and other fam-

ily members, would go a long way in reducing the time of emotionally costly

family separations that have been described in this chapter. (In the conclusion,

I discuss additional policy implications emerging from this examination of

grandmothers’ experiences in transnational families.)

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Gendered inequalities reconfigure care across generations in families of

migrants, and grandmothers respond to these reconfigurations by embodying

values of sacrifice and solidarity through their care. Grandmothers respond

with agency to the challenges of transnational family life and to the vulner-

abilities of their positions as intergenerational caregivers. While often sidelined

from discussions of global migration and global care chains, grandmothers, as

this discussion shows, are essential actors in transnational families. As Aurora

says at the chapter’s beginning, “We grandmothers are the ones who are left

in the end [Somos las abuelas que quedamos al final]” to deal with the conse-

quences of migration for children and families and for social reproduction and

cultural regeneration.

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