Emotions and gendered experiences of livelihood migration: memos from Nicaragua and Guatemala

Abstract

With increasingly difficult conditions for smallholder agricultural production, labor migration is an essential component of livelihoods for many rural families in the Global South. This migration is gendered and is often normalized as part of households’ livelihood portfolios. Yet it also can reproduce livelihood precarity and help maintain underlying structural inequalities. The role of labor migration as a livelihood strategy therefore requires continued research attention. Livelihood processes, including those connected to gendered labor migration, are infused with and shaped by a variety of emotions, including stress, longing, suffering, or contrastingly, aspiration, exhilaration, wellbeing, or happiness, that are experienced intersectionally. In this Viewpoint, we present our perspective that excluding analysis of emotional experience imperils comprehension of the drivers, motivations, and impacts of growing livelihood migration and other gendered livelihoods shifts. Emotions are core to migration decision-making, impact, and experience and therefore are central to any holistic understanding of the migration-livelihoods nexus. Paying attention to the role of emotion at the livelihood-migration nexus, where emotions often take center stage, is also a helpful entrée for taking both affect and intersectionality more seriously in the broader context of gendered livelihoods in general. We have developed this perspective while conducting fieldwork for research on labor migration and environmental change in Guatemala’s Pacific lowlands and Nicaragua’s northwest and draw upon that fieldwork to make our case.

Keywords:

• Climate change
• emotional geographies
• intersectionality
• labor migration
• smallholder agriculture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Conversations referenced in this work are part of data collected through funding from the National Science Foundation under Grant #1056811. Human subjects research approval was obtained under Utah State University IRB exempt protocols #2852 and #5890. Informed consent was obtained orally from all individuals participating in surveys, interviews, or workshops. We want to thank the special issue editors and the anonymous reviewers and especially all individuals who shared their stories with us.

Notes on contributors

Claudia Radel

Claudia Radel is a Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Environment and Society, in the S. J. and Jessie E. Quinney College of Natural Resources at Utah State University in the United States. Her research interests lie at the intersections of smallholder farming livelihoods, social inequalities including gender, natural resource conservation, and climate change.

Lindsey Carte

Lindsey Carte is an Assistant Professor in the Núcleo de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades at the Universidad de la Frontera in Chile. Her research focuses on the dynamics of migration in Latin America. Her recent work examines the linkages between rural change and migration in both Central America and Chile.

Richard L. Johnson

Richard L. Johnson, at the time of writing, was the Assistant Director for the Master’s in Development Practice (MDP) Program at the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona in the United States. His research explores how expanded border and immigration enforcement in the Americas restructure landscapes and livelihoods in migrant-sending communities in rural Guatemala. His recent work reveals how mass deportation and widespread migrant debt foster novel forms of agrarian change and cycles of return migration in migrant-sending regions.

Birgit Schmook

Birgit Schmook is a Research Professor in the Department for the Observation and Study of the Land, Atmosphere and Ocean at El Colegio de la Frontera Sur (ECOSUR) in Mexico. Her research focuses on smallholder behavior in southern Mexico, with emphasis on shifting agriculture; labor migration and its relationship to environmental change in southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Nicaragua; and human-wildlife interactions as part of the conservation agenda.