Mobilizing Mothering: Chinese Migrant Mothers and Transnational Cultural Capital

With global migration, many Chinese mothers quit their jobs in China and go abroad to help their young and teenaged children live and study in North America. Previous studies on capital and migration have examined how cultural capital interacts with people's migration processes to achieve educational credentials (Kim 2016; Munk, Poutvaara, and Foged 2012; Pherali 2012), and how migrant parents help children acquire cultural capital (Carlson, Gerhards, and Hans 2017; Erel 2010). This paper introduces the notion of "transnational cultural capital" and examines how Chinese migrant mothers in the United States and Canada deploy cultural capital, learn culture and language, and parent their children transnationally. More specifically, utilizing semi-structured, in-depth interviews with fifteen Chinese migrant mothers in North America, this paper argues that Chinese migrant mothers mobilize mothering as cultural capital via transnational migration. This paper suggests that a multi-level analysis—through the micro-level of individual strategies, the meso-level of transnational family relations, and the macro-level of structural factors (e.g., the state and neoliberalization)—might be especially useful analytically, when considering the notion of "transnational cultural capital" in examining migrant mothers' transnational experiences.