“Está difícil” [“It’s difficult”]: Accounting practices and the surfacing of relational expectations in transnational family talk

This paper explores how accounting practices involving holding-self-accountable and holding-other-accountable foreground tacit relational expectations contingent upon the affordances and constraints of “doing-family-at-a-distance.” Drawing on interactional pragmatics and membership categorisation analysis (MCA), I examine how accounting practices surface the interlocutors’ multimodal evaluations of conduct (in)appropriateness vis-à-vis their relational expectations, entitlements and responsibilities, thereby implicitly operationalising membership in relational categories, including parent–migrant-adult-child and husband–wife. Through micro analyses of interactions between Spanish-speaking family members, I illustrate how interlocutors implicitly foreground and negotiate relational expectations tied to “doing transnational family,” such as visiting children overseas and “doing family transnationally” by pursuing aligning stances, thereby orienting to the relational relevance of sustaining stability within their relationships. The findings highlight accounting as a category-implicative action and a window into implied relational expectations consequential for how we interactionally accomplish “family” at a distance.