Emotions and gendered experiences of livelihood migration: memos from Nicaragua and Guatemala

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With increasingly difficult conditions for smallholder agricultural production, labor migration is an essential component of livelihoods for many rural families in the Global South. This migration is gendered and is often normalized as part of households’ livelihood portfolios. Yet it also can reproduce livelihood precarity and help maintain underlying structural inequalities. The role of labor migration as a livelihood strategy therefore requires continued research attention. Livelihood processes, including those connected to gendered labor migration, are infused with and shaped by a variety of emotions, including stress, longing, suffering, or contrastingly, aspiration, exhilaration, wellbeing, or happiness, that are experienced intersectionally. In this Viewpoint, we present our perspective that excluding analysis of emotional experience imperils comprehension of the drivers, motivations, and impacts of growing livelihood migration and other gendered livelihoods shifts. Emotions are core to migration decision-making, impact, and experience and therefore are central to any holistic understanding of the migration-livelihoods nexus. Paying attention to the role of emotion at the livelihood-migration nexus, where emotions often take center stage, is also a helpful entrée for taking both affect and intersectionality more seriously in the broader context of gendered livelihoods in general. We have developed this perspective while conducting fieldwork for research on labor migration and environmental change in Guatemala’s Pacific lowlands and Nicaragua’s northwest and draw upon that fieldwork to make our case.