Family Networks, State Interventions and the Experience of Cuban Transnational Sport Migration

Abstract

There is a growing interest in the transnational movements of sports professionals. Absent from these burgeoning discussions is the impact family plays upon any potential migrant's decision to travel. This article is an initial attempt to address the lack of attention paid to this important area. Using research conducted over the last decade, it examines the influences two Cuban families had upon individual migrants and considers the consequences of their decisions. Their circumstances are elided through the use of extended ethnographic case studies and transnational ethnographic research, in which the focus is not on Cuba per se, but on individuals' mobility between Cuba and elsewhere. These cases highlight the need for greater attention to be paid to local conditions and personal circumstances instead of relying solely on macro-scale structures for describing and explaining patterns of transnational sport migration.

Better Off at Home? Rethinking Responses to Trafficked West African Footballers in Europe

“…This is not a shortcoming unique to research on irregular football migration. As Carter (2007Carter ( , 2013 notes, although academic interest in sport-related migration is growing, these discussions are limited because they place no interpretative weight on the role of family dynamics. This observation that the family should be moved from the periphery to the foreground in discussions concerning sport-related migration is particularly prescient in the context of football trafficking.…”

Migratory career contingencies of elite level soccer coaching talent

“…16 Academic attention has also drawn on the dialectic tensions of structure: agency as the focus of migration motivations and the cultural forces that contour the experiences of expatriate playing talent. 17 Some have adopted a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of football player mobility by embedding social, historical and economic perspectives. 18 In contrast, others have focused sharply on geographical 19 -or historical influences to help explain international football-related migration.…”

Three Athletes, Two Countries and a Single Club: The Process of Identity Formation of Immigrant Sailors in Brazil

“…The migratory processes and the displacement of athletes from a continent to other have taken place since the beginning of the Olympic Movement [4] [5] [6].…”