66

Though migratory experience offers opportunities for new kinds of practices, traditions, and family dynamics to develop, it also often replicates patterns and codes of behaviour that already exist in the migrant’s home culture. Senegalese migrants residing in Italy and elsewhere tend to send their children to Senegal to be raised by relatives. This practice among Senegalese parents long predates contemporary Senegalese migration to Europe. It follows a long-standing custom of receiving young family members into the home, drawing on the fundamental Senegalese value of teranga, often inadequately translated as hospitality. In the migrant context, this kind of teranga becomes crucial and works both ways. The article highlights how distance parenting is organized in the particular Senegalese context of teranga, and how migrants live their separation from their children.