Living with Mother Migration: Grandmothers, Caregiving, and Children in Nicaraguan Transnational Families

This dissertation explores the consequences of mother migration for members of transnational families living in Nicaragua. In recent decades, the number of women among Nicaraguan migrants has increased; motivated largely by economic push factors, major destination countries include Costa Rica, Panama, the United States, and Spain, where women migrants find employment largely in the domestic and service sectors. This dissertation research focuses on the reconfigurations in family relationships that follow mother migration, specifically by studying families where grandmothers have assumed primary caregiving roles for children of migrant mothers. I argue that grandmother caregivers in mother migrant families play important---yet often overlooked---roles in what feminist scholars have referred to as "global care chains". Grandmothers' caregiving practices include: managing remittances, maintaining household health, raising another generation of children, and negotiating the shifting emotional ties between children and their migrant mothers. In this dissertation, I carefully attend to grandmothers' experiences raising another generation of children, assuming roles as what I term "mothers-in-the-meantime" during the often-prolonged periods of separation that follow mother migration. While migrant mothers consistently send money home for their children's care, I show how these economic remittances are insufficient from grandmothers' perspective, as they fail to compensate for mothers' physical absence from family life. I also focus on children's experiences of mother migration, their experiences having "multiple mothers", understandings of the reasons for their mothers' migrations, and how they respond to the future uncertainty of transnational family life. Finally, I highlight the emotional impacts of mother migration by discussing the cultural idioms of distress expressed by grandmothers and by children, particularly "pensando mucho" ("thinking too much"), as well as other embodied states of distress. By focusing on the lived, relational, and emotional dimensions of mother migration as experienced by grandmother caregivers and children in Nicaraguan transnational families, this dissertation contributes to existing migration scholarship through an analysis of the impacts of transnational migration on those "left behind" by contemporary globalization processes, and by arguing for the importance of intergenerational caregiving in sustaining cultural and family life within migrant sending communities such as Nicaragua.