Communication as Care across Borders: Forging and Co‐Opting Relationships of Obligation in Transnational Salvadoran Families

Abstract

ABSTRACTRecent scholarship on care urges close ethnographic attention to specific care practices rather than to the reflexive, meaning‐making accounts that dominated previous work, setting up a distinction between enacting and signifying care. However, as transnational Salvadoran families care through cross‐border communication, they produce and enact imaginaries of relational obligation that constitute asymmetrical care roles for migrants and nonmigrants. Communicative care practices thus simultaneously produce care and make care meaningful. As a multifunctional form of social action, care through communication works to sustain transnational kin ties even as it mirrors and incrementally reproduces global inequalities between North and South. The communicative mobilization of care across space and time thus regenerates kinship in ways that enact political belonging and exclusion. [care, communication, transnational families, migration, political economy]