Ways of Staying Put in Ecuador: Social and Embodied Experiences of Mobility–Immobility Interactions

Abstract

Immobility is to be complicated as a topic of study in research on human migration. This paper analyses different ways of staying put, investigating the motivations, degree of (in)voluntariness and associated narratives, to show how immobility is as complex a research category as mobility. It does so in the context of irregular male migration from a rural location in Andean Ecuador to the USA. This paper also focuses on the interactions between mobility and immobility. Families with migrant and non-migrant members are imbued with and affected by changing mobility–immobility dynamics. This paper explores such dynamics to facilitate the understanding of local sociocultural logic, where mobility and immobility are infused with specific meaning, while placing such dynamics within global regimes of (im)mobility.

Keywords:

• Immobility
• Mobility Regimes
• Transnational Family
• Gender
• Ecuador

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the people who shared with me their struggles for achieving a better life in the village of Ecuador where this research was carried out. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Centro Regional de Investigaciones Multidisciplinares, Cuernavaca, Mexico. I would like to thank Fernando Lozano Ascencio and Martha Judith Sánchez for their valuable input. Comments by two anonymous reviewers also helped to improve this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Diana Mata-Codesal http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1438-7133

Notes

[1] The original research on remittances was based on a questionnaire and 34 in-depth interviews with returnees and non-migrant villagers in Ecuador.

[2] This use has been repeatedly found in the case of Ecuador. See for instance, Bendixen (2003), Calero, Bedi, and Sparrow (2009), FLACSO and UNFPA (2008), Mata-Codesal (2013) or Ponce and Olivié (2008).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Basque Country Government [grant numbers BFI07.13-AK and DKR-2012-03].