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Fluctuating social class mobility of Filipino migrant children in France and Italy

par Fresnoza-Flot, Asuncion ;Nagasaka, Itaru
Editeur scientifique Baraldi, Claudio;Rabello De Castro, Lucia
Référence Global childhoods in international perspective: universality, diversity, migrations and inequalities, Sage, London, California, New Delhi & Singapore, page (185-202)
Publication Publié, 2020

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Résumé :

The children of transnational families have attracted important scientific attention for the last decades, which reflects the social concern about their well-being as they grow up separated from one or both of their parents. When family reunification takes place in the receiving country of the migrant parents, children themselves become migrants. How do these migrant children experience childhoods in terms of social class mobility? In what way do they confront the class (im)mobilities accompanying serial migration? In this chapter, we explore these questions by focusing on the case of Filipino migrants’ children, the 1.5 generation, who grew up partly in the Philippines and partly in Europe. We argue that these migrant children experience social class (im)mobilities differently from those of their adult counterparts who in many cases undergo “contradictory class mobility” (Parreñas 2001). The results of our ethnographic fieldwork among children of Filipino migrants in France and in Italy illustrate their fluctuating social class mobilities characterized by several upward-downward movements, and also include phases of immobility. Before family reunification, these children enjoyed a middle-class lifestyle in the Philippines thanks to their migrant parents’ remittances. When they migrated to rejoin their migrant parents, their class belonging in their country of origin was either maintained or further reinforced by their migration. However, at the same time, they underwent downward class mobility in their receiving country. All these fluctuating mobilities point to the importance of the influence of space on migrants’ lives, as changes in spaces of living most often entail changes in spaces of being.