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ABSTRACT
Unravelling the emotional and relational bases of migrant transnational housing is an emerging challenge for research on home, family and migration. Based on a house biography in Cuenca, Ecuador, this paper reconstructs how a transnational family strived to preserve their past house by renovating it as a bed-and-breakfast. Building on narrative and ethnographic fieldwork, we explore how far a house with a commercial purpose and no permanent dwellers reproduces a sense of “home”, and to the benefit of whom. We thereby connect this house biography to four societal questions: the retention of family memories, the interdependence between distant kin, the temporalities of housing and the commodification of the domestic. This fourfold analysis has fundamental implications for the meaning of home for migrants and for its interplay with housing, fixity and continuity, with an ultimate focus on what the house does, rather than on what it is.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to Estrella, Lucho and Carla for the time they shared with them, as well as for their warm hospitality in Cuenca, Ecuador. Boccagni visited their family house on several occasions and finalized the article while being hosted, as a fellow, by the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Amsterdam.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Serrano, in Ecuador, refers to people coming from the central highlands (Sierra). Mestizo refers to people of a mixed European and American Indian ancestry. This is an ethnic/racial classification whose first use dates back to the time of the Spanish Empire.
2. We have changed all the names of our participants in order to protect their identity and privacy.
3. While in Cuenca, Boccagni had also informal conversations with the B&B manager and her staff. However, he was unable to engage directly either with Estrella’s parents, due to their health conditions, or with siblings other than Lucho and Carla, most of them living elsewhere.
4. Hogar is a Spanish term that could be roughly translated as home. It is a common understanding among Spanish-speaking populations that hogar is not simply a house (casa). Rather, it is the place where people feel most “in place” and nourish their intimate familiar relationships.