Original scientific paper
Spanning National Borders: Split Lives of Croatian Migrant Families
Jasna Čapo Žmegač
Abstract
Using the ethnographic approach, the article describes three modalities of family arrangements practiced by Croatian migrants in Germany over the past thirty years. In all three, family members were divided between two localities in physical space, which were situated in different states – Croatia or Bosnia-Herzegovina and Germany: in one case only the father was a migrant while his wife and children stayed in the native country; in another the couple left for Germany leaving the child in Croatia; in the third the couple lived with some of their children in Germany while other children were living in Croatia. Some of these families were dispersed across international borders during the entire life and migration course (thirty years or more), while some experienced shorter or longer periods of separation followed by reunion of all or some family members, who crossed borders in one or another direction. It follows from this presentation that, rather than being a temporary phase aimed at reintegration of the family at a higher economic level, bilocality, viewed from a diachronic perspective, is a more or less continuous family arrangement and a way of life of migrant families. The question remains open as to whether transnational families are units in which emotional ties and closeness between its members are maintained. The data might point in this direction but might also lead to a hypothesis that, precisely because it is dispersed across long distances, the family needs to construct its unity (emotional if not physical) and therefore narratively presents itself as integrated and reconfigured.
Keywords
economic migration; migrant family; transnationalism; bilocality
Hrčak ID:
14469
URI
Publication date:
29.6.2007.
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