Born mothers in migration. Unexpected practices of freedom?

Abstract

As so well described by anthropological studies on the topic, motherhood in reception centers can operate as an instrument of control and surveillance; alternately, it may become a means of accelerating processes of social or labor citizenship by reassembling the knowledge, objects and moral ideologies of the arrival context by cultivating aspirations and hopes for a future time. In this article, based on research with women who have become mothers in migration and residents of reception facilities, I reflect on freedom as a set of practices, devices and relations of the self in specific ideological and social contexts by observing the making and unmaking of the subject’s desires and socially prescribed performances. Through an ethnographic exploration of migrant mother’s aspirations, informal work and consumption/accumulation of goods, I analyze the ideas of freedom and autonomous subject which are at play, circulate and are shaped in local narratives of migrant reception.