The emotional politics of return migration: Negotiating im/mobilities across borders and generations

Abstract

In this article, I engage with the return migration and ageing nexus from an intergenerational vantage point. I build on the analytical power of emotions to argue for paying careful attention to the salient emotional dimensions of migration and what I term the emotional politics of return migration. I discuss the relationality, multiple temporalities and elusiveness of return by drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations with transnational families: specifically, the adult offspring who have emigrated to the United States – where they experience legal uncertainty – and their ageing parents in Brazil. The article contributes to scholarship on return migration and ageing in two ways. First, by emphasizing a temporal dimension where the emotional politics of return migration take shape through uneven rhythms, frequencies and intensities of contact, and second, by underscoring an intersubjective, familial component, where the return is mediated through bodily interaction, digital technologies and discourses of emotivity.