Between hearts and pockets: locating the outcomes of transnational homemaking practices among Mexican women in Canada's temporary migration programmes

Abstract

Temporary migration programmes (TMPs) contain features such as reduced costs and the social legitimation of regularized entry that allow women, including the very poor, to access transnational livelihoods. For mothers, taking up opportunities for employment abroad inevitably involves ‘transnational homemaking’, the set practices involved in caring for family relationships and maintaining household economies across borders. In this article, we examine the transnational homemaking practices undertaken by rural Mexican migrant women employed in highly masculinized TMPs in Canada, tracing how they construct and maintain household economies across borders through a delicate (re)negotiation of reproductive roles and responsibilities with non-migrating kin in Mexico. We find that migration yields material and subjective benefits that enable the expansion of their citizenship across multiple dimensions ranging from the economic to the sexual. At the same time, as racialized, gendered, migrants from the global South, their labour and status in Canada are highly precarious. The advantages derived from transnational migration are thus tenuous, limited, and contradictory.

Keywords::

• transnational families
• migration
• women
• transnational mothers

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank our anonymous reviewers for their valuable and insightful comments that contributed greatly to the final version. We also acknowledge support to our research with migrant women in Canada from the Programa Interinstitucional de Estudios sobre la Región de América del Norte and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (B. Leach 833-2004-1001; K. Preibisch, 410-2006-0122).

Notes

^1. There are also key differences. Migratory periods under the Pilot can be lengthier due to visas that extend up to 48 months versus the SAWP's maximum of eight. Also, after accumulating four years of employment, Pilot participants are barred from legally working in Canada for an equivalent period; the SAWP is exempt from this policy.

^2. We have used psuedonyms for all participants and translated their excerpts from Spanish.

^3. Approximately CAD$ 2.63 and CAD$ 3.50 per day, respectively.

^4. Approximately CAD$ 40,000.

^5. Queer relationships undoubtedly exist in Canada's Mexican migrant communities, but our research only uncovered hints of these. Heteronormativity is stringently enforced within the SAWP by migrants and Mexican authorities. Women perceived that accusations of making sexual advances on another woman or other queer behaviour could threaten one's tenure in the programme.