“Each person has the right to be where their heart is.”

Mothering a transnational family

Abstract

This article examines three central questions. We build this ethnography based on the concept of radical self-representation to explore how a migrant woman, mother whose life is profoundly affected by system of global governance of borders, represents herself? What discourses, practices and mechanisms of migratory governance control, but also systems of gender and racial contol, operate to heterorepresent maternity in transnational families? And, finally, in what sense do these two logics of representation perform new ways of exercising the work of motherhood and parenting? In this article we present a feminist reflection on migrant women seeking “a life that can be lived” in the United States-Mexico immigration system.