The Place of Migration in Girls’ Imagination

Abstract

This article focuses on rural girls’ aspirations of becoming migrants in a setting where girls are subjected to social constraints curtailing their movements in the midst of an otherwise mobile society, where mothers and grandmothers frequently recall their experiences in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, and boys set off on their first migration in their mid- or late teens. However, the high level of mobility affects both intergenerational relations and the ways in which girls can justify their wish to migrate. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research between 2002 and 2008 in Burkina Faso and Cote d'Ivoire, the article explores the ways in which images of success and material wealth of (trans)national migrants feed into adolescent girls ' imaginations of migration and its outcome. Furthermore, the article examines how everyday relationships in households influences girls’ imagination about their own position in the family. The aim is thus to understand how local conceptualizations of womanhood and migration practices both create a frame for female youth’s life worlds and provide them with a range of role models showing them how spatial and social mobility allows them to transcend boundaries but also generates new demands on their resources. The article argues that the social status ascribed to migrants in rural communities pushes adolescent girls to circumvent constraints on their mobility by marrying earlier and to avoid challenging their husband by accepting to use their economic resources for the benefit of the migrant household instead of enhancing their social status by sending remittances to their own family.