https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7794-5748
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ABSTRACT
After Ecuador’s worst economic downturn in 1999, women left the country in the thousands. They migrated for economic reasons but also hoping to distance themselves from gendered duties and obligations that confined them to oppressive feminine roles. Less than a decade later they bought into Spain’s housing bubble in an effort to ‘make up’ for their departure. I argue that Ecuadorian migrant women’s decisions to buy mortgaged homes in Barcelona were in part informed by their conceptualizations of domesticity, care giving, and motherhood. For women portrayed as culpables or ‘culprits’ for leaving Ecuador and failing to upkeep their caregiving responsibilities in their country of origin, the promise of homeownership became a way of accomplishing complex forms of transnational caregiving as well as upward mobility. This article focuses on gendered conceptualizations of care, motherhood, and kinship amongst Ecuadorian migrant women and the relationship these notions have with housing financialization.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the families at PAH Barcelona who have so generously allowed me into their homes and lives over years of research and friendship. I am grateful to Deborah James and Insa Koch for inviting me to participate in this special issue and for their comments and suggestions. My thanks to Ana Gutierrez for her close reading of this piece, and to Alpa Shah and Jorge Núñez for shaping the ideas presented in this article. Research for this paper was funded by Ecuador’s SENESCYT [Secretaría Nacional de Educación Superior, Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación].
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 All names are pseudonyms.
2 For a discussion on structural adjustment policies and the way in which the promotion of free markets, deregulation, international aid, and privatisation of public services have negatively affected countries in the global south see Pfeiffer and Chapman (Citation2010).
3 Following Ecuador’s financial collapse of 1999 out-migration grew exponentially. Until the early 1990s it averaged 20,000 Ecuadorians annually, mostly traveling to the USA. In the years prior to the 1999 crisis and immediately following it, the number grew six-fold, averaging 130,000 migrants a year between 1999 and 2003, peaking at nearly 176,000 in 2000 (FLACSO-Ecuador & UNFPA Citation2008).
4 In Ecuador public transportation operates through bus cooperatives that lease units to individual drivers. Drivers keep between 10 and 20 percent of daily profits but cooperative participants (usually a rather small number of individuals) pocket the rest. These cooperatives have an exclusive agreement with municipalities to provide the service at a set price. This effectively creates a semi-privatized (and often an oligopoly) in public service that can generate significant financial gain depending on how many buses the cooperative owns (cf. Chauvin Citation2007). Angelica’s father was a cooperative member and made good earnings from that.
5 For an overview of middle-class studies during the 1990s economic downturn in Ecuador see Vera Toscano (Citation2013).
6 I have dealt at length with the role of the PAH, the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages or Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, and Ecuadorian migrants losing their homes in Barcelona elsewhere (Suarez Citation2017a).