Abstract
The interdependence of migration and family formation has been studied extensively, but studies that consider the embeddedness of this interdependence within gender and class relations are less common. Most existing research on family and migration treats gender and social class as separate determinants of family events or transitions, instead of analyzing how the intersections of both shape full family formation trajectories, defined as all partnership and childbearing statuses throughout an individual life course. We overcome this gap by using an intersectionality framework to analyze trajectories of family formation and migration collected by the Mexican and Latin American Migration projects (1982–2016). Using retrospective information, we reconstruct full family formation and dissolution trajectories (i.e., individuals’ marital statuses and number of children born from ages 15 to 39) for 16,000 individuals and apply sequence and cluster analysis to define a six-category typology of ideal family formation trajectories. Next, we associate this typology with individuals’ sex, age at migration (domestic, international), and educational attainment as a way to measure individuals’ social class position. Our results suggest that the relationship between migration and typical family trajectories depends on the intersection of individuals’ social class and gender. Previous studies have neglected this intersection by overly focusing on the “average” migrant's experience. Migration research must acknowledge and account for migrants’ heterogenous experiences and pay more attention to how intersecting social categories mediate the relationship between migration and other demographic processes.
Highlights
A key insight of family and stratification research is that the interdependence of life events contributes to the perpetuation of social inequalities (Furstenberg 2008; McLanahan and Percheski 2008)
Instead of testing the “common explanatory hypotheses” on how migration relates to family patterns, namely socialization, selection, disruption, and assimilation/adaptation (Adserà and Ferrer 2015), we rely on intersectionality theory to develop a bottom-up inductive analysis of family trajectories, one that links the interdependence of life events with class and gender differences in family and migration patterns
We argue that, accounting for class and gender, intersectionality theory hints at the answers to questions such as: how does socialization vary across class and gender; how does selection operate in origin countries and what are its consequences for family trajectories; which groups are more affected by migration-related disruptions; and who are the individuals with a greater need to adapt their family trajectories? We do not aim to provide a one-to-one relation between social groups and hypotheses in the form of “ hypothesis X is valid for individuals of sex Y and social class Z.”
Summary
A key insight of family and stratification research is that the interdependence of life events (e.g., entering a union, having children) contributes to the perpetuation of social inequalities (Furstenberg 2008; McLanahan and Percheski 2008). Because family formation and migration are structurally different for each sex, we analyze men and women separately and focus on the interaction of multiple socioeconomic and migration variables, such as age at migration, type of migration, and educational attainment (as a proxy for social class) The interaction of these variables allows us to study groups with different degrees of intersecting vulnerabilities, socioeconomically speaking, ranging from low-/uneducated young women who migrate to escape poverty, to adult migrants whose migration trajectories are associated with higher education and specialized training. We use this interpretation to reassess the “common explanatory hypotheses” and change the narrative of the mean differences in family events by separate socioeconomic and demographic variables to a full heterogeneous spectrum of relations between gender, class, and migration, developing diverse and unequal family trajectories
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