Care at a Distance: Ukrainian and Ecuadorian Transnational Parenthood from Spain

Abstract

Maintaining intimate relationships in transnational families depends on various care practices that involve the circulation of objects, values and persons. Comparing our observations among Ukrainian and Ecuadorian labour migrants in Madrid, we argue that such care practices are structured by geographical distance, and that the distinction between overseas and overland is significant. We claim that differences in distance produce diverse constraints, possibilities and preferences for migrants’ practices of remitting, communicating, revisiting and reuniting with their children left behind. Care at a distance moves through formal and less-formal market channels—like international communication technologies, remittance enterprises and transport facilitators. From our material we are able to identify clear distinctions in how migrants of the two nationalities make use of these market channels to nourish their relationships with their children. We also argue that there is a correspondence between geographical and cultural distance (where language communion vs language rupture is crucial) on the one hand, and the preference of Ecuadorians for family reunification and of Ukrainians for revisits to children left behind, on the other.

Keywords:

• Transnational Parenthood
• Care at a Distance
• Labour Migration
• Spain
• Ecuador
• Ukraine

Notes

1. The children of one of the couples lived with their parents in Spain for three years, but decided to go back to Ukraine for their higher education.

2. In addition, Tymczuk carried out eight semi-structured interviews in Ukraine with returned migrants and with children left behind by migrating parents, during a two-month period of fieldwork in Lviv. He also initiated a literary contest for the children of Ukrainian migrants, and many of the 150 texts received contained family biographies with valuable information on the migration process from Ukraine to different European countries.

3. In this article, we interchangeably use the terms ‘il/legal’, ‘un/documented’ and ‘ir/regular’, but tend to prefer the latter, since the analytical use of the label ‘illegal’ confirms a political categorisation of migrant populations (see Khosravi 2006: 284), and since the label ‘undocumented’, in our view, is an imprecise concept for persons with a range of different legal statuses or identities in relation to formal authorities. Irregular migrants are basically not without documents, but hold incomplete, unrecognised or non-verified documentation of their actual formal identity in relation to legal norms and authorities in the migrant context.

4. The Schengen Area is a zone with no internal border controls, consisting of the majority of the countries in the European Union, along with Norway, Iceland and Switzerland. The Schengen Treaty specifies police and judicial cooperation within the borders of the Schengen Area, in addition to shared border-control arrangements.

5. The total number of Ukrainian labour migrants is estimated at between 2 and 7 million persons (Karpachova 2003). There were 103,000 registered Ukrainians in Spain in 2007. However, the Ukrainian embassy there estimates that there are approximately 200,000 Ukrainians living in Spain; see http://www.mfa.gov.ua/spain/ua/2028.htm (accessed 28 April 2009).

6. An additional aspect worth mentioning here is that migrants’ usage of ICT and virtual sending arrangements depends on their relatives’ access to these technologies in the country of origin, which to a certain extent is linked to social class (see Parreñas 2005).

7. The bus fare from Madrid to Lviv and back costs around 170 euros, while the air ticket Madrid–Quito–Madrid would cost around 800–920 euros.