Motherwork, Daughterwork

Abstract

This article explores how young women born in Sweden, or arriving in Sweden as toddlers, who belong to the Latin American diaspora give meaning to and act on their experiences of being the daughters of migrant mothers, whose political activism shapes their views and practices of mothering and migration. The analysis is inspired by feminist/antiracist methodologies and consists of eight in-depth interviews with young adult women, all of them daughters of political refugees who came to Sweden to escape persecution by the military dictatorships in Latin America in the late 1970s. The interviews are combined with two focus groups that took place in the two largest Swedish cities. The category we will bring to light is that of the daughters; adults now, aged between thirty and forty-five (six of them mothers themselves). The central question in this article is what perceptions of mothering can be articulated from the perspective of daughters of Latin American migrant mothers, in a context where memories of political persecution and exile and experiences of institutional and everyday racism shape the conditions of motherwork for both the migrant mothers and their daughters.