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Care Across Generations: Solidarity and Sacrifice in Transnational Families. Kristin E. Yarris. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. 2017. xx - 190 pp. Heather Rae-Espinoza, California State University, Long Beach

Yarris’s new book, Care Across Generations, details the intergenerational dynamics of grandmother care in Nicaraguan transnational families. The ethnography elegantly weaves daily life and longstanding migration theory to describe the emotional, social, and global impacts of migration. Yarris uses the concept of solidaridad, or strength, empathy, and active sacrifice in the face of collective adversity, to unite the chapters.

While she occasionally uses the term “left behind,” especially in the introduction when summarizing existing theory, Yarris’s work succeeds in responding to the underanalysis of surrogate caregivers in migrant-origin countries, an underanalysis that originally fed into the delineation of such terms when conceptualizing a “care-deficit” for those “left behind.” Her work clearly exemplifies newer approaches to migration analyses that acknowledge the circulation of care in interchanges across and within transnational spaces. Her work includes families with a range of durations of migration, showing how temporary shifts can become permanent across generations. Care in Nicaragua is reconfigured even while mothers maintain a caregiving role in accord with existing and altered cultural expectations.

Chapter 1 describes how grandmothers care for their grandchildren after maternal migration, integrating references to comparable findings such as the transference of care across extended female kin, complexity of motivations to migrate, daughters’ work as domestic help abroad, the role of policies in shaping return visits, and the inadequacy of the unidirectional concept of reunification. Yarris has a talent for connecting existing observations, such as the legal vulnerability of caregivers, to thoughtful, empathic narratives of the grandmothers she studies. The chapter moves seamlessly from the general to the particular and back, in a way that both those new to, and tired of, migration studies can follow along with interest.

Chapter 2 examines grandmothers’ gendered and generational experiences with economic remittances. It opens with a vignette from the media that exhibits the stereotyped cultural images of grandmothers’ actions as motivated by money over love. The chapter details grandmothers’ emotional and social experiences with money in response to these stereotypes instead of focusing on the financial details. Perhaps because she recruited participants through NGOs to help migrants, it becomes clear that the families Yarris describes are not enjoying economic prosperity and class mobility even with continued remittances from daughters. Instead, they often experience difficulty meeting primary needs like food, education, and health care for the children in their charge. Staying connected to the emotional lives of the grandmothers she studies, Yarris conveys their sense that remittances do not measure up, or “no se ajustan,” financially or morally, causing them distress.

©2018 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/etho.12203.

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Chapter 3 contributes especially meaningfully to psychological anthropology, and could be used as a stand-alone chapter for an undergraduate course in global mental health. Yarris details various ways in which the embodied distress of grandmothers registers their complaints about social change. Pensando mucho, or thinking too much, is an idiom of distress these women use to express feeling powerless to prevent their daughters’ out-migration or to make remittances measure up. Emotions mark the timeline of migration journeys; “becoming sick” characterizes initial departures and a cultural elaboration of depression integrates a moral dimension afterward. Her thorough analysis looks at precipitating factors and somatic symptoms, integrating previous work on dolor de cerebro, to give a holistic depiction of grandmothers’ emotional lives. Notably, she maintains a connection to transnational experiences such as communication practices and lifecourse perspectives on caregiving of elders as she describes coping strategies. Taking care of their grandchildren seems to alleviate the distress from their daughters’ distance by providing a purpose, while the need for caregiving simultaneously symbolizes this distressing distance.

Most useful to advancing migration theory, chapter 4 describes one family’s experience with international migration to show how the past influences present caregiving, which folds into possible future temporalities, ultimately shaping ambivalent reunifications. The chapter directly challenges unidirectional views of familial reunification as a solution, demonstrating that for those like grandmother Olga, the reunification of mother and grandchild can cause these caregivers to feel left behind. This chapter better integrates the socio-cultural milieu where other chapters may be lacking, providing rich information about experiences like rites of passage that require maternal presence or the role of religion in shaping (grand)parenting practices. In other chapters, snippets of cultural context can leave more questions than they answer, such as how do the patriarchal conjugal relationships (p. 34) blend with matrilocal kinship patterns described (p. 154)? Ethnographies of transnational families face steep expectations to describe a cultural setting that is neither here nor there, and Yarris more successfully contextualizes her ethnographic insights in this chapter.

While chapter 3 contributes the most to psychological discussions and chapter 4 contributes the most to migration theory, I would suggest a section on kinship mapping in the appendix benefits the nexus of the two. In work of my own, I recently struggled to convey the temporalities of migration studies with the emotional connections of psychological anthropology, using kinship charts (Rae-Espinoza 2018). Yarris’s (p. 154) efforts to symbolize the dynamics of shared household residence, caregiving relations, and out-migration situations on a modified kinship map should be emblematic of the benefits from such ethnographic ventures.

The book’s conclusion briefly connects the ethnography to social policy in general, along with the ethnographer’s work furthering human rights initiatives. However, I think a more appropriate conclusion could have assessed how socially, culturally, and psychologically effective the familial reconfigurations were. In the introduction, Yarris (p. 7) cites Coe’s (2015) argument that “members of transnational families come to reconcile differing cultural expectations for care across the life course.” It is not clear if reconciliation is possible for the grandmothers that Yarris describes. Caregiving is both a role and a sacrifice. The question

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becomes, is this becoming a culturally prescribed role, or does it represent a disruption of roles? The discontinuity of expected kin roles is a continuation of gender and religious values expecting women’s sacrifice. The idea of grandmothers, a symbol of cultural continuity, altering cultural values to reconcile different cultural expectations is an intriguing one. Yarris indicates relationships are neither radically transformed nor completely reinforced (p. 73), but the reader is not given sufficient details on the sociocultural position of grandmothers to interrogate how these relationships are transformed and reinforced.

Overall, the ethnography offers a thorough summary of existing literature while maintaining a beautiful and nuanced description of emotional ambivalences across varied temporalities, to further our understanding of transnational families. The voice is wise, thoughtful, and clear, befitting the grandmothers it discusses. Instead of a distant theoretical ethnography coached in policy debates, it grapples with perspectives from migration theory as life happens.

Coe, Cati. 2015. “What is Love? The Materiality of Care in Ghanian Transnational Families.” International Migration 49(6): 7-24.

Rae-Espinoza, Heather. 2018. “Scattering Seeds in Las Orquideas: The Role of Kin Networks in Ecuadorian Parental Emigration.” In Parenting From Afar and the Reconfiguration of Family Across Distance, de Guzman, M. R. T., Brown, J., and Edwards, C. P., eds. Oxford University Press.

Yarris, Kristen. 2017. Care Across Generations: Solidarity and Sacrifice in Transnational

Families. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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