Mobility, social reproduction and triple minority status: young Senegalese-Americans’ experiences of growing up transnationally

ABSTRACT

A growing body of literature explores how transnational migration from Africa to Western countries affects childrearing practices. While the motivations and constraints underpinning parents’ decisions to raise children partly or entirely in the ‘homeland’ are fairly well documented, much less is known about young people’s experiences of transnational mobility and about its relationship to social reproduction. Drawing on data collected over 14 months among Senegalese migrant communities in New York and New Jersey, and in Islamic schools receiving migrants’ children in Dakar, Senegal, this paper explores how educational stints in the ‘homeland’ equip young people with cultural and religious resources to deal with the challenges of living in the US as part of a triple minority as Blacks, immigrants, and Muslims. At the same time, homeland stays produce a series of new vulnerabilities, as young people struggle to adjust to an unfamiliar language and disciplinary regime in the US.

KEYWORDS:

• transnational families
• social reproduction
• West Africa
• transnational migration
• Islamic education

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to the young people, parents and teachers in both Senegal and the US who generously shared time and insights with me, and who made this research possible by allowing me into their schools, families, and lives. Financial support from the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO) and the Fondation Wiener-Anspach is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I changed the names of research participants to protect their identities.

2 Fieldnotes, 2017.

3 Being sent ‘back’ can mean for some children going to a country they have never been to and that they know only indirectly from their parents’ tales, or phone calls with relatives there.

4 Private full-time Islamic schools mostly charge fees of $US 400 minimum per month, which is beyond the financial reach of most migrant families, especially if they must cater to several children simultaneously.

5 Marriages are extremely fragile in a context where both spouses work long hours outside the home. This triggers conflicts about the distribution of domestic chores, and about financial responsibility for the household budget (Kane 2011).

6 Not everybody accepted responsibility for members of their extended family in Senegal quite as easily though. Notably my older research participants (in their early twenties) who had entered the job market asserted that they were ready to support their aging parents, but unwilling to shoulder quite as heavy a burden as their parents, especially fathers, had carried to support extended families in Senegal.

7 Kane (2011, 240) attributes such tense relationships to continental Africans’ lack of sensitivity towards the long history of institutional racism and the civil rights struggle, to discrimination in the job market against Black Americans in favour of immigrants, and to continental Africans’ self-perceptions as ‘hardworking Blacks.’ Many continental Africans accept entrenched stereotypes about Black Americans as lazy welfare scroungers and criminals unquestioningly, showing little awareness of either the racist history of these stereotypes, or the socio-economic stratification among America’s Black population (ibid, p. 240). Conversely, American Blacks may not be completely immune to widespread stereotypical / racist depictions of Africa as poor, backward and conflict-ridden.

8 See e.g. President Trump’s executive order halting all refugee admissions and temporarily barring people from seven Muslim-majority countries widely dubbed the ‘Muslim ban’ (see e.g. ‘Trump’s executive order: Who does travel ban affect?,’ 2017).

9 See e.g. ‘Nigeria Chibok abductions: What we know,’ 2017.

10 Many Senegalese hold strong opinions about American-raised youngsters (see e.g. Hoechner (2017)), which are to some extent gendered. American-raised boys are often deemed disrespectful and unruly, whereas American-raised girls are presumed to have looser morals than their Senegalese-raised counterparts.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fondation Philippe Wiener - Maurice Anspach [Postdoctoral Fellowship]; Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [Postdoctoral fellowship].