From breadwinner to bedridden

Abstract

Within transnational labor, the working capital of migrants may recoil as aging and disability occur, crushing people’s everyday life and aspirations. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with Indo-Pakistani minorities in Brescia, northern Italy, the author queries “a case for affliction,” seeing the experience of a breadwinner’s stroke disrupting his household. While for decades Punjabi diasporas have settled abroad remitting to the homeland, social attainment oft en remains precarious for first-time movers and their off spring. Aft er 20-year residence in a destination country, a migrant father’s collapse rebounds on his kindred, who regrettably turn to local welfare and public housing but also readjust personal desires toward sustainable family care. Intersectional analysis abets the participants’ narratives in challenging any set “sense of inequality,” embodied, and embedded in run-of-the-mill racialized capitalism.