Family Transnationalism, Gender and Migration Policy. Latin American Migrant Families in Spain

CLAUDIA PEDONE; BELÉN AGRELA ROMERO; SANDRA GIL ARAUJO

Californis

Encuentro; 81st Annual Pacific Sociology Association Meeting: Revitalinzing the Sociological Imagination. Individual Troubles and Social Issue in a Turbulent World; 2010

Pacific Sociology Association

 Our proposal aims to analyse the impact of public policies and discourses on migration, family and integration in the strategies and trajectories of Latin American migrant families in Spain. Previous researches on Spanish migration policies from a gender perspective show that they have been designed from a fundamentally male point of view. Although women are, in many cases, the first link of the migration chain, they continue to be considered and treated as wives and mothers, dependent and reunified, In the field of public policies, immigrant women have been thought as stabilizers of the family unit and as an instrument for integration on the grounds of their traditional role assigned according to gender. Their presence is conceived as responsible for the emotional balance, the “social normalization” and even as an educational agent. Since the beginnings of immigration as a public issue, family reunification has been visualized as a tool for the integration of immigrant population, but together with this conception, appears the need for their sorting and control. In recent years, migration due to family reasons, hitherto omitted in the debates and statistics on immigration, has irrupted in the political field as a problem that requires greater control. Our study articulates the conceptual dimension (definition of family) with the political and normative dimension (family migration regulation and public intervention) and the subjective and micro dimension of these processes (family reorganization). The results we present here derive from: a) the study of regulations and documents (plans and programmes) from a gender perspective, b) in-depth interviews with representatives of the main political parties at a national level and also at a local level, in our case, from the Autonomous Community of Catalonia, and c) an ethnographic fieldwork with Bolivian and Dominican families located in Catalonia. The selection of these two nationalities is based on the differences in: migration patterns, time of arrival, administrative status and a variety of strategies to pursue family reunification.