Transnational families

The limits and the possibilities of globalisation have affected every country in the world. Great numbers of people move from one country to another, from one city to another, and from the countryside to the city. Migrations have contributed to the emergence of new forms of family, transnational families, which literally live on both sides, fragmented, undergoing disadvantages, and advantages too, both for the family members who leave and for those who stay in the country of origin. The latter, migrants by transitivity, often come for consultation, but since they have not left, they do not necessarily mention the losses; therapists therefore do not frequently think that the symptoms presented might be linked to the changes brought about by the departure of loved ones. A family one of whose sons, sisters or nephews has left for a distant country, and whose daily life is thereby altered, enters — for certain parts of the nuclear family or of the three-generation family — into the definition of the transcultural family.

The losses of families that include migrants

All migrants — those who leave their country voluntarily as well as those who find themselves forced to seek asylum or political refuge, those who come from nearby places as well as those who come from distant ones, men, women, the young or the old, the rich or the poor — suffer, to one degree or another, from some form of loss, of sorrow or of mourning. Loss linked to migration has particular characteristics that distinguish it from other types of loss.

What are these characteristics?

Unlike the unalterable fact of death, to which it has been, I believe, wrongly compared, the migrant’s losses are at once vaster and smaller. They are vaster than the death of a loved one because migration entails losses of every kind: loss of the relatives and friends who stay in the country of origin, loss of the mother tongue, of customs and rituals, of the land itself.

And yet migration is also smaller than the complete loss that death is. Compared with death, the losses of migration are not entirely clear, complete or irrevocable. Everything is still alive, though absent. Nothing disappears with the finality of death. It is always possible to fantasise about an eventual return or a future reunion. Moreover, migrants rarely head towards a social void in the foreign country. A relative or a friend is generally waiting on the other side to help with work, with housing or with advice for this new life. There are also compensatory elements, such as the hope of economic improvement, opportunities for training or new political, economic or social freedoms.

These elements create contradictory emotions: sadness and joy; losses and restitutions; absence and presence, which make the losses incomplete, ambiguous, deferred and — as they have sometimes been called — of the order of “perpetual mourning”. This idea is not new. As early as the 16^th century, the physician Maimonides noted the illness of “nostalgia”, which produced many somatic and emotional symptoms, and found that the only remedy consisted in bringing the sufferer back to their native country. These same symptoms of palpitations, weeping, tics, trembling and complaints appear in the 21^st-century migrant and, in certain circumstances, in the family members affected by the departure. Perhaps we can advance a little in the description and treatment of the migrant in the present transnational context. [Editor’s note: the date is the original author’s; Maimonides lived in the 12th century.]

Ambiguous loss and migration

The concept of “ambiguous loss”, proposed by the researcher Pauline Boss (1999) to describe situations in which the loss is confused, incomplete or partial, is useful for understanding the migrant’s loss. Boss describes two types of ambiguous loss.

1. The first is the situation in which a person is physically absent but psychologically present (for example families one of whose members died in war, or the politically disappeared, whose bodies are never found). This lack of material proof sustains an open-ended expectation, without closure, however unrealistic it may be. The events of 11 September 2001 in New York demonstrated this precisely: the families who received, through the mobile phones of the victims of the plane hijacking or of the collapse of the Twin Towers, farewell calls and declarations of love were able to accept the loss more quickly, with better closure, than those whose story remains unfinished even today, in the hope of finding some trace.
2. In the second situation of ambiguous loss, a family member is physically present but psychologically absent. (For example families one of whose members suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, or those in which the father or the mother is emotionally isolated by excessive work stress.)

Migration represents both types of ambiguous loss simultaneously. On the one hand, the beloved people and places are physically absent and, at the same time, they are vividly present in the migrant’s mind. On the other hand, nostalgia and the stress of adaptation can leave certain family members psychologically absent, even as they are physically present.

The absence of rituals for ambiguous loss

Perhaps because of this particular quality of ambiguity, of incompleteness and of transitoriness, the trajectory of migration as a life transition is almost empty of marker rituals, or rites of passage. The preparations that precede migration may have some of the characteristics of rituals — packing symbolic objects (music, photographs, mementos) — but these practices are usually more personal than collective.

There is no formal structure, nor place, nor segment of time specially designated to mark the transition, to attempt to move beyond it and to provide a container for the strong emotions everyone feels.

We know, intuitively and academically, the importance of rituals as markers of transitions. There are nonetheless transitions for which no cultural ritual has been created. An interrupted birth represents a future cut short soon after it began; a divorce leaves each person with the feeling of what might have been and will no longer be possible. As in the case of the adopted child, the term “country of adoption” suggests that something happened beforehand, something like the map of a future territory that could have been inhabited, but was not. These transitions are deprived of the emotional benefit that cultural rituals bring.

The uprooting of meanings

Compared with other ambiguous losses, what most dramatically distinguishes migration is uprooting at the physical, social and cultural levels. If we use the metaphor of the plant torn from the earth, we can say that, when a plant is removed from the soil, it takes with it not only its roots, but also a little of the original soil around those roots. The ecological environment — the sun, the air, the proximity of other plants — is not transportable, but a little soil is. Every good gardener knows that this small quantity of earth clinging to the roots must not be washed off, because it is on those nutrients that a lesser transplantation shock depends, and therefore a more successful transplantation.

All right, you will say, enough botany lessons. And what has this to do with the losses of migrants?

I would say that the residue of soil that remains stuck to the roots and that the migrant carries with them is represented by:

• the kind of house, of home, that the migrant creates;
• the language one speaks, the dishes one cooks, the friendships one forms, the connections one maintains with one’s community of origin;
• in short, the traditions and identities one passes on to one’s children.

As I have already said, there are no established rituals for migration; there are, however, certain practices of migrants that you will recognise when I describe them, and which take on, I believe, the proportions of spontaneous rituals. These behaviours or practices perhaps arise from that little bit of the country’s soil that migrants carry away at the moment of transplantation. And these spontaneous practices can be interpreted as ways of coping with ambiguous losses, by creating bridges of physical and psychological presence that help to fill the absences.

These practices have qualities that make them akin to rituals and, as such, they foster continuity in the midst of change. Let us look at what these actions are.

Facing the ambiguous losses of migration: spontaneous rituals

1. Regular visits, messages and money orders: rituals of connection

These actions turn into rituals of connection, with ritualised behaviours such as contacting intermediaries at a precise moment each month, buying bank drafts to send money, going to the post office and obtaining confirmation that it has been received on the other side.

Those who stay also create rituals of connection, sending letters, photographs or messages to those who have emigrated. The feelings of those who stay are not devoid of ambivalence either. Emotionally, they miss the migrant brother or sister, or the absent mother or father; but neither do they wish for too swift a return, since that return would alter the economic solvency of the whole family.

Recent research emphasises that migrants who cut ties, detach themselves and deritualise connections display more clinical symptoms than families that maintain connections.

2. The recreation of ethnic and social spaces: rituals of recreation

In the cities where migrants live, one finds ethnic communities (the Jewish or Korean neighbourhood, the Lebanese or Cuban colony, the Argentine network). These urban landscapes and practices reproduce, in public space, the smells, the sounds, the images, the flavours and the languages of the native village. Sunday markets, in many cities of the United States, faithfully reproduce the meeting places of the past for many ethnic groups — without a doubt for Mexicans in Texas and California (Ainslie, 1998).

This ritualised and collective recreation, which represents and momentarily transports one to the familiar cultural space, can be seen as a psychological return, a ritual of mourning and of reincarnation, a sort of what Winnicott called potential space or the transitional object, suspended between fantasy and reality. These transportable settings seem to say that pretending to be at home is better than not being at home at all.

These powerful actions do not only help to re-establish ties with the lost land: they also transform the cultures that receive migrants into more familiar, less strange places, even if the dominant culture is always present in the kind of currency, the cost of things, the products or the mixing of languages.

Research shows that the absence of contact with ethnic social networks and with the cultural spaces those networks make possible is correlated with symptoms of depression in women and with an increase in violence in men.

3. Telling stories of the past: rituals of memory

We all know that migrants like to talk about their country, to recount the details of the saga of their migration, to speak their own language, to use the old proverbs, to repeat the anecdotes and customs of their country of origin. They also gravitate towards groups of compatriots with whom they can speak their language and compare impressions, idealise, disparage or complain about one country or the other, as though they were examining and digesting the new and the old values, rules or customs.

It would be a mistake to think that telling stories of one’s country is something picturesque or self-indulgent; it is likely that this activity serves to create a narrative of the past and to invest the inevitable changes with meaning. Even more, telling stories builds bridges of memory with the children who are growing up in another country.

4. Preserving traditional cultural rituals

The important work on rituals by Evan Imber-Black, Janine Roberts and Richard Whiting (1988) has informed us about the power traditional rituals have to preserve continuity, family identity and community bonds. For many migrants, cultural rituals can be practised fairly faithfully, but they can also gradually reflect changing meanings and ambiguities that express and compare dual or hybrid lifestyles, such as being acculturated and ethnic at the same time.

In short, rituals fulfil a series of functions — and if not functions, perhaps effects — that contribute to the continuity and identity of the family, and that seem to contribute to the resilience of families in transition.

It is important that therapists ask about the existence of spontaneous rituals in the lives of migrants, including the continuation of ritual practices or the emergence of new spontaneous rituals among those who have remained in families fragmented by the departure of certain relatives. Even more, a very poor or a very exaggerated presence of these spontaneous ritual practices, in those who stayed as well as in those who left, may indicate family adaptations that turn the ambiguous losses of migration into a problem instead of learning to live with those losses.

What is the theory of adaptation to migration implied in this angle of observation?

Family resilience in the face of ambiguous loss

The migrant’s spontaneous rituals can be seen as attempts to embrace ambiguous loss and to find meaning in the new situation, recovering what it is possible to recreate and perhaps thereby managing to maintain what researchers of family resilience have called the “sense of coherence”.

The concept of “sense of coherence” was developed by Aaron Antonovsky (1987) and used by Froma Walsh (1998) in her work on family resilience. It is a search for narrative coherence, or for the making of meaning out of the story of our lives. It is linked to our capacity to adapt to change, but also to maintain sufficient continuity with the culture of origin.

This is perhaps why we see, in the field of migration studies, a progressive abandonment of linear models of acculturation and assimilation, and an increased emphasis on the notions of biculturalism and bilingualism, on the hyphen that separates while uniting the two identities: “Mexican-American, African-American, Chinese-American”. Rather than living “between” two worlds, the resilient migrant acquires the capacity to live “in” two worlds, alternating language and customs and accepting binationalism and dual identity. The acceptance of a permanent biculturality is perhaps the other face of the acceptance of ambiguous loss. The spontaneous rituals of migrants encapsulate this “both/and” which consists in rediscovering the familiar in the midst of change.

Maintaining this duality is not, however, sheltered from historical facts. Faced with attacks as tragic as those of 11 September in New York and Washington, an authentically felt patriotism arose in migrant groups, perhaps mixed too with the fear of being looked at with suspicion as the outsider. Thus, some Mexican migrants preferred to emphasise the “American” side, to the right of the hyphen in Mexican-American, rather than the Mexican side, to the left. Right down to that petrol-station employee with a Latino surname, in Arizona, who, having shot dead a Muslim man a week after the tragedy, declared that he had done it to “defend my country against foreigners”. In a moment of crisis, it is possible that a society composed of migrants may bring forward processes intended to strengthen national unity, rather than diversity and ethnic loyalty, as has been emphasised in the United States over the past two decades. The psychological consequences of this kind of brutal assimilation will doubtless be seen in future generations.

We must therefore not romanticise or simplify the resilience of migrants, nor underestimate the risks and the stress of migration for those who leave, for those who stay and for those who come and go, who are many. Migrants are exposed to multiple historical and personal circumstances that modify the experience of ambiguous loss.

The therapeutic conversation gains from gathering the facts, the motivations and the expectations that precede migration, as well as a narrative of the reality encountered, expected and unexpected, of what happened during the passage itself and during the current stay.

This narrative of migration is useful both for the people who emigrate and for the relatives who stay.

Let us now examine several situations that make it particularly difficult to live with ambiguous losses.

When ambiguous loss becomes intolerable

There are many situations that complicate reactions to migration, but I shall keep to five constructions, drawn from my clinical observations, with the intention of highlighting the differences that make a difference between the various experiences of migration and of ambiguous loss. There are surely other situations to describe, but I use the following ones to show that spontaneously emerging rituals may be insufficient to re-establish a sense of narrative coherence in the complex situations that a migrant’s life may hold in store.

For these situations, I propose the use of therapeutic rituals which, in their specificity, will be co-created by the family in collaboration with the therapist.

The general categories of situations and of interventions are the following.

1. Forced or constrained migrations, or migrations without adequate preparation: rituals of preparation

Migration is not always a democratic decision-making process. There is frequently a subtle line of gender and generation that marks the differences between migrations of voluntary initiative and those that occur through the persuasion of one person by another. Among the persuaded but not convinced are children, women who follow their husbands with great difficulty (even if it is sometimes the other way round) and elderly people who answer the call of their children, whether to help them or to be helped by them. These individuals, who feel deprived of initiative, generally have more difficulties in adapting than those who actively decide to emigrate, and they are more frequently encountered in consultations with symptoms of depression, anxiety or somatisation.

This category also includes situations of hasty decision, generally because of an offer that is hard to refuse or of an unexpected event, such as the death of a spouse in an elderly person. There is, on one side, a lack of preparation and, sometimes, ambivalence in those who receive the migrant on arrival.

Therapy can be facilitated by the use of anticipatory rituals, “as if” one were preparing in advance for what may happen with the migration, in such a way that the person who felt constrained has for the first time the power, the empowerment needed to explore the parameters of the migration and the plans for the future. In this way, even if it is not possible to modify the initial decision, the possibility opens up of talking about it and even of changing it, as will be seen in the following example.

2. Traumatic passages: rituals of testimony

Migrations sometimes involve traumatic passages. Many women (and a few men) are raped or robbed while crossing the border, or exploited on arrival by unscrupulous employers. The dream of migration is replaced by nightmares, trauma, horror and immense disillusionment. Panic attacks, feelings of guilt and shame, or other symptoms of post-traumatic stress are frequent. The perpetual fear of being spotted gnaws at undocumented migrants. The encounter with the racism and classism that exist towards poor people and people of colour, in matters of employment, of access to health care or to other social services, complicates a migration begun in the desire to feel more powerful and less stressed.

The use of the ritual of testimony, which we all know from the work with Central American refugees, with its emphasis on a first-person narrative, oral and written (frequently dictated, taken down in notes by the therapist), documents the story of when, where and how the injustices and the abuses were committed. For it to qualify as a therapeutic ritual, this testimony must be told again and again, repeatedly, each time adding more details. By validating and extracting from this narrative the positive elements that prompted the journey, the victimised person can recover some of the initial goals and perhaps the hope of a new beginning, and to a certain extent the “sense of coherence” of their life. Testimony is also a useful technique for work with family members traumatised by the same events, by transitivity, even though they have not migrated.

3. Polarisations within the family: rituals of oscillation

The ambiguity implicit in the experience of migration sometimes takes hold, so to speak, of the family psyche. Family members, and particularly the couple, split and take on the opposite poles of the ambiguity. One identifies with the wish to stay and the other with the wish to leave; or one idealises the new place and the other disparages it; one expresses optimism, the other plunges into pessimism. The migrant’s perpetual doubt is not “to be or not to be”, but the perpetual “to leave or not to leave”.

These impasses generally lead to escalations, especially if the therapist makes the mistake of trying to settle the question of leaving or staying. Therapeutically, I have found it useful to prescribe a moratorium period of three or six months, which prescribes remaining precisely in limbo, without knowing what the final decision will be, but using in the meantime, as a practice, a ritual of oscillation, similar to Mara Selvini Palazzoli’s odd and even days. The two polarised people are asked to think, to feel and to act together as if they were staying in the country of adoption on even days. On those days, they must learn English, make new acquaintances, connect with the children’s school, with the neighbourhood, with the church, or buy themselves an armchair, as if they were staying. On odd days, by contrast, both of them must act as if they were returning to their country of origin. They must save up for the return, communicate with their relatives and reconnect emotionally, find out about possible jobs, about housing, and keep informed about the current political situation in their country.

Anchoring ambivalence in alternating but joint actions gives the polarised couple a sense of power, of control and of collaboration, rather than of competition, regarding its options. In this way, empathy for each position increases. Another advantage of the ritual of oscillation is the creation of a climate of rehearsing skills that will not be useless for any of the decisions to come. This mobilisation supplants the climate of paralysis that rigid polarisations create.

4. Separations and reunions: narratives of separate lives and celebrations of reunion

Migrations frequently involve separations within the nuclear family. Very often a mother or a father leaves their children with relatives in order to be able to face the undocumented crossing, because of economic constraints or of a lack of help with childcare. These transnational families, with one part over there and another here, often undergo multiple separations, sometimes over periods of several years during which new bonds are created with the people who care for the children and with the extended family, and then, eventually, new separations or reunions (Suárez-Orozco, C., forthcoming).

Departures and reunions place all the subsystems of the three-generation family, here and there, in a situation of ambiguous loss, which creates a lack of clarity about who is in or out of the family, and a lack of clarity about who fulfils which function or which role. This phenomenon has been called by Pauline Boss “ambiguous family boundaries”. When the man leaves, the woman becomes the head of a single-parent family; when the mother leaves, the grandmother takes the mother’s place; but more importantly still, whole chunks of personal history can no longer be shared.

Many structural, emotional and psychosomatic problems appear in the period of reunion, which may correspond to the return to the native country.

Among the useful therapeutic rituals is the construction of an updating narrative of the events that occurred during the separation, on both sides of the transcultural family.

For example, with children separated from their parents, one can construct a narrative in the form of a children’s tale that begins like this: “Once upon a time there was a child called Juan Chávez Sandoval… When Juan was 3 years old, his parents had to leave for California… when Juan was six, he went to live with his parents.” The events that occurred during the three years of separation can be described thus: “Juan lived with his grandmother in such a house and such a school, while his parents worked in such and such a place…”, and one goes on in this way telling the stories from both sides (feedback) until reaching the present — and even including ideas about the future (a feedforward), in which the family plans the activities it wishes to carry out together as a reunited family unit. The writing down of this story by the therapist, who reads and rereads it, can be completed with drawings, photographs or objects that integrate the past into the present and strengthen the bonds for everyone (Falicov, C., 1998).

5. The inevitable occurrence of life-cycle transitions: rituals of healing

There is no doubt that life changes run their course alongside migration for migrant families: births, deaths, marriages mark transitions in the family. In some cases these changes produce new ambiguous losses, such as divorce, or new unambiguous losses, such as the death of a family member, which come to accumulate on top of the losses of migration. In the case of the sudden death of a father in the country of origin, for example, the provisional quality of the departure and the ever-deferred possibilities of return accentuate feelings of guilt and the impossibility of reparation, and frequently the impossibility of taking part in the collective mourning. At such moments the migrant perhaps once again calls into question the wisdom of the decision to emigrate and wonders where their place of belonging really is.

Therapeutic rituals of healing may include the creation of equivalent ceremonies in the country of adoption: in the event of a death and of the impossibility of a family gathering, for example, rituals such as masses may be suggested, the creation of private altars with candles, photographs, flowers and objects belonging to the deceased, or the invitation to this ceremony of a member from the country of origin who is here or there; or else the creation of a ritual of connection with the family of the deceased person, or any form of message that symbolises the possibility that love may, in reality, be transnational.

In short, we can connect spontaneous rituals and therapeutic rituals, because both:

• bring relief to people in complex situations;
• create and maintain communities (frequently at long distance);
• are catalysts for feelings, thoughts and action;
• create stable meanings in the midst of change;
• compensate for losses;
• express both faces of the ambiguity: connection and disconnection, gain and loss.

Some leads for therapeutic work

I shall conclude with a summary of the steps suggested for therapeutic work:

• obtain a narrative of the migration (who, how, when, what happened during the premigration and preparation stage, on entry, and then during adaptation);
• consider the connections between the countries and the parts of the family;
• explore the positive and negative meanings of the migration for each family member;
• ask about the emergence of spontaneous rituals;
• co-construct appropriate therapeutic rituals with the clients.

Wherever we are, we are all part of a world almost without borders. Immigration is one of the central subjects of globalisation in the 21^st century. In the United States, in Europe and in Latin America, hospitals, care centres and private practices have become places of intercultural encounter between professionals and clients. Families increasingly function in transnational spaces. In order to become effective interlocutors, we must reflect on our own experiences of migration or of moving house, and on our own use of spontaneous or invented rituals — such as the ritual of psychotherapy itself. For rituals offer us an avenue that connects the concrete to the metaphorical, they create bridges between past, present and future, and they envelop the implicit contradictions of the ambiguous losses of the migratory trajectory.

Thank you very much, and peace to all.