Signalling the End of the Migration Journey: Exploring Transnational Ageing Narratives on Residential Selection
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Signalling the End of the Migration Journey: Exploring Transnational Ageing Narratives on Residential Selection Shamette Hepburn 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract After migrating from Jamaica to Canada, many transmigrants eventually become retirees. With increased insecurity in later life, older adult transmigrants continue to experience the ever-shifting conceptions of identity and belonging. With most of their working lives spent in Canada, they now have multi-layered identities stemming from their transnational and diasporic experiences. These considerations remain important when they are faced with residential decisions about where to live when they retire. This paper illustrates the spatial and temporal contexts of the transnational ageing experience by exploring the findings of a multi-sited ethnographic study of Jamaican Canadian retirees (age 60 and over). The study aimed to foster an understanding of the transmigrant experiences of Jamaican Canadian older adults who live in and across Canada and Jamaica. Central questions were the following: How do retired Jamaican Canadian transmigrants perceive their experience of retirement? What are some of the considerations in selecting a final residence after they retire? How do they signal the end of their migration journey from Jamaica to Canada? Data collection took place in Toronto, Canada, and in Trelawny and Manchester, Jamaica. The study revealed opportunities and challenges associated with ageing across borders and the factors which determine where older adult transmigrants select as their final residence post-retirement, a process which signals the occlusion of their migration endeavour. Keywords Canada . Jamaica . Transnationalism . Retirement . Ageing . Ethnography
Introduction In the field of migration studies, the hypervisibility of transnational communities presents an interesting paradox: silent transnational narratives such as those of ageing
* Shamette Hepburn [email protected]
1
School of Social Work, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, York University, 880 South Ross Building, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON M3J 1P3, Canada
Hepburn S.
transmigrants who enter old age and retire away from their countries of origin (Mendes et al. 2018). Transmigrants are ‘immigrants who develop and maintain multiple relationships – familial, social, organizational, religious, and political – that span borders’ (Basch et al. 1995 p. 7). They are distinguished from emigrants, immigrants and return-migrants through their simultaneous rootedness in social fields that span more than one society. Transmigrants’ daily lives are shaped by sustained interconnections. They simultaneously (both physically and metaphorically) oscillate between different places as they construct the topographies of their everyday life, which includes work, social and kinship ties in what is ostensibly a social configuration of distinct practices, symbols and artefacts that span different locales (Basch et al. 1995; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004). When transmigrants reti
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