This thesis explores the experiences of transnational agricultural migrant workers in Canada’s guestworker programs. Examined through a gendered lens, it focuses on migrant’s experiences as parents to children whom they must leave behind in their communities of origin when they migrate. Drawing on interview and ethnographic data, this thesis argues that transnational parents, especially mothers, face a unique set of challenges and barriers as participants in these programs. It explores how the injustices that migrants suffer impact parents’ ability to focus on their primary motivation to migrate— their children— thereby limiting their ability to fulfill their roles as parents and hindering their parent-child relationships.

This study explores how English-speaking migrant parents in Sweden value transnational and linguistic cultural capital, and how they draw upon their own cultural resources in order to help their children acquire these forms of capital and inculcate a habitus. Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital, social capital and habitus are used in a qualitative study in order to investigate how parents cultural capital was valued in the new cultural context, how they acquired new, more relevant capital for themselves, and how this shaped the aims, expectations and strategies they had to help their children acquire valued forms of capital.  Despite possessing a valuable form of linguistic capital, parents sometimes felt themselves to be limited within the Swedish setting, however this was justified due to the opportunities seen to be available for their children. Parents expressed they wished their children to develop a global perspective and develop skills and knowledge that would allow them to operate in transnational settings. In a rapidly changing world, it was difficult to know which skills would be required, but due to their knowledge of multiple national contexts, they felt that they were in a good position to help their children acquire the forms of capital that had been useful for them in their own experiences of migration. The parents negotiated these multiple national settings, taking what they saw as valuable from each, thereby helping their children’s acquisition of both linguistic and transnational capital.