Transnational concern and multi-cultural care : a case study of Casa de Milagros

Abstract

An eclectic social advocacy network - comprised of national and international grassroots actors, advocacy tourists, and celebrity advocates - operates across national borders to sustain Casa de Milagros, a home for indigenous children in the Sacred Valley of Peru. Emotions fuel the long-distance support that makes this home possible. This conglomeration of transnational advocates, together with the indigenous on-site care providers, collaborates on the provision of multi-cultural care for previously abandoned children. Qualitative fieldwork gave me a sense of the geographies of multi-cultural care practiced at Casa de Milagros, and this thesis examines some multifarious associated impacts. I investigate globalizing forces that have led to risky mobilities in the Sacred Valley, and how Casa de Milagros offers an alternative model to traditional survival strategies, such as child circulation. Central to Casa de Milagros tactics are the ways in which their children shape - and are shaped by - their emotional experiences. I explore how Casa de Milagros aims to offer a different cultural framework for hope and to recognize and reconfigure the children's socio-spatial relationships.