![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
Focusing on the recent phenomenon of massive Ecuadorian migration to the United States and Europe, this essay explores how digital technologies are changing the experience of displacement, and how nostalgia – the longing for a home and a time left behind – may feel different in this era of global capitalism when, as advertisements posted on immigrant-oriented web sites claim, home is ‘just a click away’. Due to the encounter with new technologies intent upon shrinking space and time, nostalgia might be becoming digital – a quest for continuity of space and time through the simultaneity offered by digital technologies. This essay, then, proposes the category of digital nostalgia as a critical tool for analysing the experience of displacement within the contradictory discourses of globalization, which relentlessly sell the erasure of space, distance and borders, while encouraging legal and territorial barriers that prevent the free circulation of people. For Ecuadorian migrant workers, digital technologies have become the terrain of a daily negotiation between the challenges presented by the reality they physically inhabit and those other commitments based in Ecuador. From this perspective, digital nostalgia is about the annihilation of longing through constant and real-time exposure to a home and a time that are never fully left behind. However, digital nostalgia is also about the conscious use of the simultaneity offered by digital technologies to construct an ‘effect’ of continuity, secure a sense of belonging, and reverse the processes of fragmentation and uprooting encouraged by global capitalism.
Acknowledgements
A very special thank you to Regina Harrison, my dissertation advisor, who generously guided me through the obscure first steps of this work. I also would like to thank Susan Antebi, Alessandro Fornazzari, and particularly Freya Schywi, for their enormous effort in putting together this special issue of Social Identities. I want to thank, as well, our anonymous reader, whose pertinent suggestions I have tried to incorporate in this last version of the essay. And finally, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my husband, David Morrow, who has patiently reviewed innumerable versions of this text and encouraged me to enrich it and keep working on it … even though that always meant more work for him too.
Notes
1. As explained by Matías CitationZibell in the article ‘El sombrero que no era de Panamá’, the toquilla straw grows in the coastal province of Manabí. Here is located the town of Montecristi, where the world's finest ‘Panama hats’ are woven. In Montecristi, a few masters take months to weave a hat that costs about 500 US dollars. However, the center of mass production of these hats is located in southern Ecuador. The toquilla straw is delivered from Manabí to thousands of weavers spread in the provinces of Azuay and Cañar. They will take a few days to produce a hat valued at about 8 to 10 US dollars. Historically, Cuenca, capital of the province of Azuay, has been the center of straw hat exports.
2. The Latin American Debt Crisis exploded in 1982, when Mexico announced that it was unable to service the debt to international creditors. Like Mexico, Ecuador had acquired many short-term credits throughout the 1970s for industrialization and infrastructure programs. Also, during the 1970s, vast oil reserves were discovered in Ecuadorian territory, and oil exports became the main source of income for the country. However, in the early 1980s, when oil prices dropped and international creditors raised interest rates, Mexico collapsed and the rest of Latin American nations collapsed along with it. Those governments that had been hoping to renegotiate their short-term loans found that creditors would not lend to them anymore. As private capital fled Ecuador, the national currency was devalued and, as in the case of most countries in the region, Ecuador adopted the neo-liberal structural adjustment programs designed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
3. According to the press in Ecuador, between 750,000 and 1,000,000 Ecuadorians live currently in the United States. These numbers practically double the information obtained by the US Census Bureau, which in 2000 determined that 396,400 people of Ecuadorian descent live in the US territory, most of them – 177,957 – in New York City, concentrated principally in the borough of Queens. Between 1990 and 2000, the Ecuadorian population in the United States grew 53.7%, according to the Census Bureau. The percentage could be even greater if one takes into account that the majority of Ecuadorian immigrants get to the United States illegally and, in consequence, tend to avoid being counted in the census (Jokisch, Citation2001, para 2). In Spain, according to data released by the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas, in 2004 there were about 390,000 Ecuadorians. Thus the Ecuadorian community became the most numerous (Troya, Citation2005, p. 154). As for Italy, it has been estimated that approximately 100,000 Ecuadorian immigrants live currently there, with a 50% of them concentrated in the cities of Milan and Turin (Avilés, Citation2005, p. 133).
4. The difference between the two incomes in this particular year may seem enormous but, put in context, it actually reflects one of the main advantages of remittances: their steady growth and reliability, as opposed to the unstable behavior of oil export prices, governed by the capricious global market. In 1998, for instance, due to the falling prices of petroleum, oil exports and remittances provided the country with almost exactly the same income: about one billion US dollars each. Whereas since 2001 the Ecuadorian diaspora has steadily sent to the country approximately 1.5 billion US dollars per year, oil exports have followed an erratic pattern that varies from about 2.5 billion US dollars in the year 2000 to 2 billion in 2001 as well as the already mentioned 4.8 billion in 2004, a direct consequence of the war in Iraq and the rise in the prices of petroleum provoked by the conflict (Acosta et al., Citation2005, p. 232).
5. The Migration, Communication and Development Project partners non-profit organizations from Ecuador and Spain in a joint effort to coordinate initiatives related to the phenomenon of migration. Their main goal is to transform Ecuadorian migration into a generator of cultural exchange and co-development between Ecuador and Spain. The project started in 2001. In the documentary video Just a Click Away from Home, three leaders involved in the Project are interviewed: Alberto Acosta, Luis Dávila and Father Fernando Vega (head of the Pastoral Social de Cuenca).
6. According to Acosta et al. (2005, p. 250), ‘in the case of the remittances sent from Spain, fees fluctuate between 3.7% and 14.4% of the total amount, while in the case of those sent from the United States it has been estimated that the transfer services charge between 10 and 30%’.
7. ‘In 1979, Steve Jobs and a contingent from Apple Computer visited PARC and were quite impressed with what they saw. But it took them over three years to introduce a computer that had a graphical interface. This was the ill-fated Apple Lisa in January 1983. A year later, however, Apple introduced the much more successful Macintosh’ (Petzold, Citation1999, p. 370).
8. In the United States, although the number of Ecuadorian immigrants has augmented rapidly during the past decade, they constitute the seventh group of Latin American descent population in the country: a minority within a minority (Hispanics for government and corporations and Latinos for grassroots movements). Whereas Puerto Ricans circulate freely between the island and New York in the ‘guagua aérea’ (aerial bus), and other Latin American immigrants like Salvadorans or Guatemalans have legalized their situation through amnesties, most Ecuadorians must interact with illegal transnationalism in order to enter the US, and there are no agreements between governments that could allow them to cross the threshold of illegality.