Child Desire and Transmission in the Migratory Project of Cape Verdean Women
This text is based on an ethnographic field started in 2003 (27 missions to date) about Cape Verdean families facing migration. The article analyses the way women, confronted with economic insecurity, consider their child desires. The singular history that produced the Cape Verdean family promotes a mistrust between the sexes, and a real fragility of alliances, with official marriages generally resulting from calculations. The child desires concentrates then all the strategies. In this context, the mother-child relationship, and more particularly the mother-son relationship, becomes decisive and establishes the « matrifocal family », which at the same time plays a role in the quest for the long-term safety of mothers. From the moment of its conception, the unborn child is already « in charge » of the survival of his mother. The child’s education is crucial, as the acceptance of the project for which he or she was conceived must be transmitted. Once adult, the question becomes simpler : how can he live as a man, with all the moral debt he owes to his mother, and as the same time turn to the mother(s) of his children ? In this context, collaboration between a man and a woman depends on what the partners can bring to each other.