Migration and Development: Equalisation and Inequalities in Ecuador's Southern Sierra

Abstract

Based upon a case study of the municipality of Cañar, in Andean Ecuador, this paper examines the conflictive relationship between migration and development to show how current approaches fail to consider the political issues implicit in this link. Instead, the concept of displacement is proposed, which, as argued in this work, implies an action (that of moving to another place) which subjects perform reflexively upon themselves. This challenges the notion of this action as a transitive one, in which the subject exerts the action on an object. Cañar combines two important elements that make it relevant for highlighting this relationship: on the one hand, it is a district with a high indigenous population and, on the other, it has had historically a high rate of immigration to the USA and Spain. These two factors make it possible to confront both the immigrants' practices and the role of nation-states in the construction of structures of exclusion and, thereby, to examine why the result of this confrontation does not necessarily turn into development. From this viewpoint, the paper discerns the role of the nation-state in constructing structures of social, political, cultural, and symbolic exclusion in the locality of origin as well as in the locality of destination of migrants, further presenting the forms of agency used by the migrants to overcome these structures. In other words, it is an attempt to take the analysis into a terrain that escapes the dichotomies between state (structures) and actors (agency).