Chapter 11: Signs of confrontation: Ruptures in Family Dynamics and in the Education of Children of Immigrant Mothers

Human life is marked by a constant flow of experiences. We move from the most extreme and challenging situations to very ordinary ones, in a world full of meanings in transformation. This requires that people develop mechanisms through which to give meaning to their lives. Events such as immigration are uniquely rich, once characterized by promoting a shift in people’s place from one whose symbolic references appear secure and stable, forcing them to enter a new symbolic universe which is almost always

From the point of view of individuals and the community, the phenomenon of immigration—an encounter with a new texture of social conditions that present different social, moral, religious, and legal arrangement— involves, in most cases, conflicts, tensions, challenges and transformations that require significant adaptive effort, which is not always satisfactorily completed (Hermans, 2003; Zittoun, 2009). Therefore, these changes are marked by the emergence of mechanisms that redefine the realm of experience.