Lifestyle Migration on the Southern Jalisco Coast: Sustainability and Cosmopolitanism in Community-Led Development

Abstract

This article expands understandings about the effects of lifestyle migration on local communities through an analysis of the relationship between lifestyle migration and local sustainable development initiatives. La Manzanilla is a small town with a large population of foreign residents whom I designate as “lifestyle migrants,” a category of consumption-driven mobility delineated in a growing field of scholarship about migrants moving primarily from the North to the South. I describe community development in the context of the shifting social and material landscape of the southern Jalisco coast of Mexico, with ethnographic attention to local sustainable development agendas that intersect with local conceptions of cosmopolitanism. In a community inhabited by lifestyle migrants for an entire generation of local residents, I analyze the influence of lifestyle migrant capital and ideology on an expanding local middle class youth, and suggest youth-initiated sustainable development is diminishing community vulnerability to displacement.