Cross-border citizenship: mothering beyond the boundaries of consanguinity and nationality

Abstract

The article examines how encounters in the everyday lives of three Cape Verdean migrant students in northern Portugal triggered acts of citizenship which assisted them in their new roles as mothers, cutting across indifference, solitude and inequality. By experiencing motherhood as an unexpected interruption in their lives, the women simultaneously occupied the subject positions of migrant mothers and of diasporic youth. The article discusses how, through the experiences of (symbolic) mobility, the minimal solidarity that characterizes the relations between strangers, between work colleagues and between students and college staff was expanded into affective kinship care relations that spanned the boundaries of consanguinity, ethnicity and nationality. Arguing that the mothering of both minority and majority ethnic groups holds the potential for challenging hegemonic conceptions of citizenship, the article posits the term careship as a means of characterizing a specific subject position of “being-with”: the mutual care giving commitment that develops between human beings.