«La segunda madre»: La naturalización de la circulación de cuidados entre abuelas y nietos en familias transnacionales latinoamericanas.

The world's population is constantly on the move, making migration part of daily life for billions of people. The repercussions of these flows for family configurations constitute an issue for political agendas, academic research, and citizen-led protests around the globe. From the standpoint of the multidirectional circulation of care, this study identifies tensions and ambiguities in the caregiving that many Latin American grandmothers provide for their grandchildren in transnational families. The article problematizes the naturalization of the choice of the grandmother as substitute caregiver and proposes that it can be best understood as an intergenerational solution to the care dilemma. It is argued that the circulation of care affords us new understandings of kinship and of the boundaries between the public and private domains. Faced with the inability of Nation-states to meet their responsibility to guarantee social welfare, kin renegotiate their obligations to care for one another. A transversal reading of a corpus of 52 publications on transnational family dynamics in three subregions of Latin America (where child-shifting between households has deep historical roots) shows how the circulation of care forges a certain notion of family wellbeing predicated on the so-called intergenerational pact. Yet, at the same time, it provokes conflicts among the grandmother, her adult children, and her grandchildren. The analysis of discourses that justify the marshalling of energy and resources as well as the distribution of carework reveals that the participation of grandfathers and other relatives tends to be invisibilized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]