Ageing, agency and work: Brazilian older adults building spaces of opportunity in the United States

Abstract

This article examines an understudied dimension of transnational mobilities and ageing: namely, the experiences of ageing parents who take on short-term informal jobs during their extended visits to their migrant offspring abroad. Based on ethnographic research with ageing parents in Brazil and their accounts of short-term (visitor) transnational mobilities and paid work in the United States, where their children have emigrated, the article examines how older parents on a visitor (‘tourist’) visa take on short-term jobs and how their work and earnings abroad make them feel empowered. The article draws on a spatio-temporal analytical framework to discuss how migrants’ temporal and spatial journeys are shaped by their ability to mobilize resources such as trusted transnational networks and translate these into transnational spaces of opportunity. The article concludes that through these specific configurations of time and space older adults are able to make use of their own work to improve livelihoods for themselves and their families, which they recount as enabling and empowering.