Ecuadorian Migrants Research Articles

‘We're Better Off Outside Our Country’

Increasing sociopolitical and economic instability – stemming, in part, from the adoption of neoliberal policies – has compelled at least two million (2 percent of total population) Ecuadorians to migrate to the United States and member states of the European Union in search of jobs and a means to survive. It is estimated that more than half a million Ecuadorians live in Spain, and constitute one of the largest immigrant national groups in this country, alongside Moroccans. Women, who have often migrated without their families, make up half of this diaspora.This transdisciplinary study is based on interviews with Ecuadorian women in Spain and Ecuador, and informed by feminist methodologies. It situates the epistemological standpoints of women from (lower) middle and professional classes within recent Ecuadorian migrations, while analyzing the impact of Ecuadorian women's migration to Spain on the sociocultural life of Ecuador, as well as on key aspects of Ecuadorian women's lives in Spain. Despite the discrimination, racism, and xenophobia that Ecuadorian women experience abroad, most agree that they are ‘better off living outside of Ecuador’.

Changes in education and family life in current Ecuadorian migration: a transatlantic perspective

Los procesos migratorios actuales de las familias ecuatorianas a Europa, especificamente, a Espana, se han convertido en un proceso transformador con profundas implicaciones a nivel familiar. De manera paralela a estas profundas transformaciones familiares, los ambitos socioeducativos tanto en origen como en destino se han convertido en espacios sociales transnacionales donde actualmente se socializan ninos, ninas y adolescentes ecuatorianos. La finalidad de esta ponencia es presentar algunos resultados de una investigacion, llevada a cabo teorica y metodologicamente desde una perspectiva transatlantica, que da cuenta de las nuevas dinamicas familiares transnacionales y su relacion con los cambios en las pautas de crianza y la vinculacion con los ambitos socioeducativos en origen.

Changes in education and family life in current Ecuadorian migration: a transatlantic perspective

The current migration of Ecuadorian families to Europe, specifically to Spain, have brought changes with deep implications for the family. In parallel, the school environment (both in the country of origin and the host destination) has become a site for the socialisation of Ecuadorian children and adolescents. The purpose of this study is to present some results of our research from a transnational theoretical and methodological point of view. This article analyzes the new transnational family dynamics and their relation to the changes in child rearing practices, and to and the links with the schools in the country of origin.

Changes in population and land use over time in the Ecuadorian Amazon

This paper draws upon a detailed longitudinal survey of households living on agricultural plots in the northern three provinces of the Ecuadorian Amazon, the principal region of colonization by migrants in Ecuador since the 1970s. Following the discovery of petroleum in 1967 near what has subsequently come to be the provincial capital and largest Amazonian city of Lago Agrio, oil companies built roads to lay pipelines to extract and pump oil across the Andes for export. As a result, for the past 30 years over half of both Ecuador's export earnings and government revenues have come from petroleum extracted from this region. But the roads also facilitated massive spontaneous in-migration of families from origin areas in the Ecuadorian Sierra, characterized by minifundia and rural poverty. This paper is about those migrants and their effects on the Amazonian landscape. We discuss the data collection methodology and summarize key results on settler characteristics and changes in population, land use, land ownership, technology, labor allocation, and living conditions, as well as the relationships between changes in population and changes in land use over time. The population in the study region has been growing rapidly due to both natural population growth (high fertility) and in-migration. This has led to a dramatic process of subdivision and fragmentation of plots in the 1990's, which contrasts with the consolidation of plots that has occurred in most of the mature frontier areas of the Brazilian Amazon. This fragmentation has led to important changes in land tenure and land use, deforestation, cattle raising, labor allocation, and settler welfare.

The Panic to Leave: Economic Crisis and the “New Emigration” from Ecuador

Prior to the late 1990s, Ecuadorian international migration was directed primarily toward the United States. Of the estimated 400,000 Ecuadorians living in the United States, most are concentrated in metropolitan New York and many hail from the south–central highlands of Cañar and Azuay Provinces. In the mid– to late–1990s, Ecuador entered a political and economic crisis just as clandestine transportation to the United States became increasingly expensive and dangerous. Within two years Ecuadorian migration diversified radically and a “new emigration” formed. Many thousands of Ecuadorians from throughout the country migrated to Europe, mostly Spain, but also to France, Italy, and The Netherlands. Prior to 1998, few Ecuadorians lived in Europe, but now, Ecuadorians are the largest immigrant group in Madrid and one of the largest in Spain. The migrant stream was led by women and composed of people from a variety of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Ecuadorians find themselves working in a variety of services (especially women) and negotiating a volatile, even hostile, social, and political environment.This “new emigration” has numerous implications for Ecuadorian families, the economy, and the nation–state. Understanding the implications requires a comparative approach that examines at least three aspects of the new emigration: the role of gender, the importance of transnational ties and connections, and the emerging roles of state and non–state actors in the formalization of migration.

Global governmentality and graduated sovereignty: National belonging among poor migrants in Ecuador

Global governmentality and graduated sovereignty: National belonging among poor migrants in Ecuador

Arguments within geographies of movement: the theoretical potential of migrants' stories

In this article, I engage the ways in which migrants' experiences are socially constructed and situated in particular political-economic and cultural contexts in meaningful ways. Drawing on migrants' own stories, I examine the ways in which social relations of gender and ethnicity shape their experiences. The analysis examines the interplay of desires, identities and subjectives in multiple sites in order to understand processes of belonging, exclusion and affiliation that are produced through migration. Secondly, I examine the ways in which migrants' social positionings allow them to question dominant narratives of neoliberal development. Thirdly, I take seriously the idea that questions about mobility only take on meaning in particular political-economic contexts which have produced those migrations and discourses. I suggest that these complex questions about identity, subjectivity and context call for critical ethnographies of migration, and I explore the potential of this approach for a case study of urban-bound migrants in Ecuador.

Questions of migration and belonging: understandings of migration under neoliberalism in Ecuador.

This paper explores alternative understandings and experiences of migration under neoliberalism in Ecuador. Through the case study, the study examines migrants' multiple motivations for mobility and their ambivalence toward the process. Insights from the transnational migration literature were drawn in order to think through the implications of an increasingly contradictory context of economic modernization and its impact upon the sense of possibilities and belonging of migrants. In-depth interviews with urban-destined migrants in Ecuador were drawn to argue that mobility produces ambivalent development subjects. This argument is developed in three sections. First, the paper centers on the epistemological and theoretical basis for the relevance of migrant narratives in extending theorizations of migration. Second, in-depth interviews with migrants to Quito are drawn to explore migrants' sense of belonging and regional affiliation, identity formation through migration, and experiences of alienation and disruption in their lives. Lastly, this paper concludes with a retheorization of the role of migration places in the migrant identity construction.

LA MIGRACIÓN DE LOJANOS A ESPAÑA Y EL SUJETO MIGRANTE EN LA SEDUCCIÓN DE LOS SUDACAS

Caracteriza el proceso migratorio de lojanos hacia España y los rasgos identitarios más sobresalientes del sujeto migrante representado en la novela La seducción de los sudacas de Carlos Carrión. Con el empleo de la metodología bibliográfico documental y la perspectiva sociológica de la crítica literaria se explicita la recreación literaria de la estampida migratoria de lojanos a España, a fines del Siglo XX y principios del XXI, en lo atinente a las causas, la salida, el viaje, la llegada y el asentamiento. Fundamenta, ejemplifica y analiza las principales características de la actual migración internacional de los ecuatorianos: cadenas y redes migratorias; cambio de destino migratorio desde Estados Unidos de Norteamérica a España; feminización del proceso migratorio; ocupaciones de los migrantes ecuatorianos en el sector secundario de la economía española; malos tratos a los inmigrantes “sin papeles”, por parte de algunos españoles xenófobos. Los rasgos identitarios que singularizan al sujeto migrante representado en La seducción de los sudacas son la cosmovisión y la racionalidad comunitaria andina; la creencia religiosa católica; la crítica al sistema educativo de nivel superior; la memoria; el amor a la tierra nativa, la nostalgia y los recuerdos; el sentimiento de desarraigo; la paradoja de no estar conformes ni en el lugar de destino ni en el de origen; la paulatina pérdida de la autoestima y la dignidad humana; y, el carácter performativo. Se concluye que hay una representación del proceso migratorio y del sujeto migrante muy cercana a la realidad y a los estudios sociológicos de la problemática analizada.

Crisis y estrategias migratorias de reproducción social. un análisis a partir del estudio de la migración ecuatoriana

Las trayectorias migratorias se caracterizan cada vez más por su carácter cambiante y por presentar continuas rupturas, transformaciones y recomposiciones en función de las circunstancias globales y de las estrategias de reproducción social desarrolladas por los migrantes. Este artículo analiza algunas de estas estrategias de reproducción social desarrolladas por parte de los migrantes en un contexto de crisis económica partiendo del análisis del caso ecuatoriano. En él se presta especial atención a aquellos aspectos que son más determinantes en la construcción del proyecto migratorio y a las formasen que se produce la articulación de las estrategias productivas yreproductivas dentro del grupo doméstico.En el texto, se señala la necesidad de pensar de forma unitaria y englobadora el proyecto migratorio y el retorno como parte de un mismo proceso a la vez que se destaca la importancia de adoptar una perspectiva procesual en el análisis de las migraciones