ABSTRACT
IN SUMMARIZING THE IMPACTS OF HER ADULT daughter’s outmigration on her own health and well-being, 52-year-old grandmother Marbeya told me, with resignation in her voice, “me pongo a pensar mucho” (“I get to thinking too much”). During my year of field research (2009-2010) with Nicaraguan transnational families who had a mother or father migrant living abroad, I heard this idiom of distress expressed repeatedly by grandmothers and children and came to realize it had cultural significance that I needed to attend to. My study, research for my doctorate in sociocultural anthropology, was designed to explore the lived experiences of grandmothers, women of the “third age” (tercera edad), who had assumed caregiving responsibilities for children following parent outmigration. This interest in grandmother caregiving within transnational families had emerged from previous research and fieldwork I had conducted as part of my master’s in public health, which had explored the social determinants of health among rural Nicaraguan women. I stumbled upon outmigration in that earlier fieldwork, as I found it to be one of the most significant, culturally disruptive forces impacting the lives of women of the grandmother generation in rural Nicaragua.
