Consumption Dilemmas: Tracking Masculinity, Money and Transnational Fatherhood Between the Ecuadorian Andes and New York City

Abstract

This article explores the consumption dilemmas encountered by migrant men from the Ecuadorian Andes living and working in New York City. Specifically, it looks at how the priorities of budgeting and saving money that are necessary for generating remittances conflict with migrants’ practices of consumption. New consumption practices take shape as young men experience the city as an engagement of perceived modernity. I argue that the changes involved in this process require men to confront long-standing relationships between ideas of what constitutes proper masculinity and the uses of money in the Andes. They also require men to find new ways to balance consumption and their gender identities. In this space, new models for fatherhood emerge as migrants shape their role as breadwinners through the specific practices of providing for families back home.

Keywords:

• Transnational Fatherhood
• Consumption
• Drinking
• Masculinity
• Money
• Ecuadorians

Notes

1. For a discussion of the role of men's gender in migration studies, see Pribilsky (2007: 13–19). For general treatments on gender and migration, see Hondagneu-Sotelo (1999) and Pessar (1999).

2. Jatundeleg, along with all personal names, is a pseudonym.

3. Methodology and fieldwork details can be found in Pribilsky (2007: 24–31).

4. For an elaboration of iony as a specific form of modern experience, see Pribilsky (2007: 10–13).

5. Rates of failure, while not quantified in migration statistics, are nonetheless high, with many men and women returning to Ecuador soon after leaving.

6. Gutmann (1996: 151) defines ‘degendering’ as a way in which ‘activities become less … gendered—less … identified with women or men in particular’.

7. In the Ecuadorian Andes, nervios is a condition that typically only afflicts women (see, e.g. Finerman 1989). The fact that this migrant claimed he fell victim to nervios, signalling a potentially feminised subject position, may suggest the particularly strong degree to which he understood his failure to generate remittances as a gendered failure.