Feminised financial flows: how gender affects remittances in Honduran–US transnational families

Abstract

This article focuses on Honduran immigrants in Alexandria, Virginia USA and their family members in Nacaome, Valle, Honduras. It traces the transfer of remittances from migrants to their families at home, in 20 transnational families. It focuses on six issues: gendered motives for migration, reproductive labour across borders, gender inequalities in the US labour market, intricate intra-familial power negotiations, the empowerment of women and new forms of dependence. It concludes by constructing a ‘counter-narrative’ of migration, based on women's experiences, and considering the implications of this for development policies and programmes that seek to mobilise remittances for development.

Keywords:

• gender
• remittances
• transnationalism
• development
• Honduras
• migration

Acknowledgements

The research and writing of this article took place within two contexts: Clark University's International Development, Community and Environment Department in Worcester, Massachusetts (US) and the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ)/Honduras project ‘Transnational Bridge’. The author would like to thank Dr Barbara Thomas-Slayter and Dr Liza Grandia at Clark, and Sarah Hirsch at GTZ/Honduras for their support throughout the project

Notes

1. In 1998 Hurricane Mitch caused devastating flooding and mudslides which killed approximately 7000 people and erased 50 years worth of infrastructure development in the country, according to then-president Carlos Roberto Flores.

2. The neighborhood is known as Chirilagua because of the influx of Salvadorans from the eponymous town in El Salvador. Control over Chirilagua flip-flopped between opposing factions during the civil war in the 1980s, which led many of its residents to flee to the USA.

3. The ‘Transnational Bridge’ project began as a GTZ pilot project in Honduras in 2007. It aims to strengthen the connections between Hondurans from certain departments (Intibucá and recently, Olancho) who live in the USA and their communities of origin, in order to stimulate local economic development.

4. Comment made in a panel on remittances at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, DC, early 2007.

5. Bryceson and Vuorela (2002, 3) define transnational families as ‘families that live some or most of the time separated from each other, yet hold together and create something that can be seen as a feeling of collective welfare and unity, namely ‘familyhood’, even across national borders’.

6. ‘Banking the unbanked’ is a phrase commonly used by proponents of the remittances-for-development model to describe efforts at incorporating those without a bank account into the formal banking system. According to this paradigm, this is a critical first step to increasing the availability of credit and therefore the access of the poor (read: unbanked) to financial services, which in turn will foster the creation of small enterprises and promote local economic development.