What’s in a (Migrant) House? Changing Domestic Spaces, the Negotiation of Belonging and Home-making in Ecuadorian Migration

ABSTRACT

Migrants’ constructions of their domestic spaces, and their struggle to feel at home in both receiving and sending societies, are an emerging focus of research in migration studies. Housing issues are also a privileged observatory on their transnational social engagement, as well as on the changing boundaries of their membership and belonging. This article addresses the everyday bases of their home-making and house-building practices, drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of Ecuadorian migration to Italy. What can be inferred from the ways in which migrants inhabit their houses “here”, while typically investing in better housing arrangements “there”, as to their alignment towards either society? What do their housing-related practises suggest about the potential to feel locally and transnationally at home, given the structural constraints they are subject to? By tracing the meanings, enactments and locations of migrants’ home, I aim to advance the debate on home and migration in two respects: the persistent materiality which underlies the home experience, and the significance of migrants’ houses, particularly in sending societies, as a window on the mixed social consequences of migration.

KEY WORDS:

• Migrant houses
• Home-making
• Belonging
• Transnationalism
• Ecuadorian migration

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all the Ecuadorian migrants, and their family members left behind, who let me in their houses and helped me to feel something of their homes. My thanks go also to the following colleagues, for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this article: Ludger Pries, Ralph Grillo, Sarah López, Andrea Brighenti, Jan Willem Duyvendak. Likewise, I received helpful criticisms and feedback from the two anonymous reviewers of Housing, Theory and Society. A preliminary draft of this paper was presented at the ESA 10th Conference, RN35, session on Migration and shifting boundaries of belonging (Geneva, 2011).

Notes

1. That my sample was somewhat “unbalanced” on the Italian side is no surprise, as the latter was far more accessible and closer to my day-to-day life experience than the Ecuadorian one. Apart from the greater logistical difficulties, my access to the domestic spaces of migrants’ kin was sometimes constrained (possibly in one case out of five) by the tense relationships between leavers and stayers. While perhaps unwelcome for my fieldwork aims, such instances were a helpful reminder of the potential for conflicts in transnational family life, particularly when it comes to the household management of remittances. Concerning demographics, most of my immigrant informants in Italy were aged between 25 and 35 years, only a few of them being already in their forties. Their average length of stay in Italy was about six years. Most of their jobs were in personal care and cleaning (women) and in the construction and carrying trade (men). Nearly all of them had still some dependents in Ecuador. The latter were most commonly elderly parents, whose family reunification was relatively infrequent. About half interviewees (and 3 women out of 4) had also, more critically, minor children “left behind” in Ecuador. On the Ecuadorian side, interviewees were primarily immigrants’ parents (mothers in 8 cases, fathers in 4); then brothers and sisters (4) or spouses (2); in a couple of cases, children in their twenties, as well as other relatives (3). Methodologically speaking, my fieldwork was the fruit of an extended participation in the immigrants’ contexts of informal sociability, facilitated by previous acquaintance with some of them. Participant observation and trust-building in Italy were the necessary condition for me to gain some access to their domestic spaces in Ecuador as well. Importantly, almost all of the conversations and interviews with my informants were conducted in Spanish.

2. I will not expand theoretically, here, on this concept – a complex, ambiguous and value laden, and still a fundamental, one. I will rather try to infer its situated and distinctive meanings from migrants’ narratives and practices, as I approached them through my ethnography. For a general review of the social science literature – which includes many “classical” authors, from Simmel to Douglas – see, however, Mallett (2004). This author argues for a conceptualization of home as “a multidimensional concept or a multilayered phenomenon”, to be analyzed in culturally and historically embedded ways. Importantly, as she adds, the concept of home need not overlap with that of dwelling, and should be systematically understood in the light of the changing interaction between physical, social and emotional spaces. On the major relevance of the concept of home in migration studies see, amongst others, Olwig (1998), Ahmed et al. (2003) and Ralph and Staeheli (2011).

3. Among the more recent exceptions see Fletcher (1999), Van der Horst (2010), Levin and Fincher (2010) and López (2010).

4. As I visited migrants’ houses in Ecuador, and then returned to Italy, I often felt perceived as a witness of their “success abroad” – insofar as their new or refurbished house in Ecuador, rather than their more precarious housing arrangements in Italy, were expected to embody this.

5. Ironically, as far as migrant domestic workers were concerned, a peculiar variety of home-making was part and parcel of their day-to-day work commitment. Recreating a sort of domestic atmosphere, in favour of the elderly they cared for, was a tacit and emotionally laden expectation they had to meet. This was even more the case for women doing in-home care work on a nearly round the clock basis: a paradoxical form of forced domesticity – being closed within a “home” that is totally alien to them – unique to this work setting (Ambrosini 2012).

6. While this perception is based on my fieldwork in coastal Ecuador, similar remarks have been made elsewhere in the country – e.g. Pribilsky (2007) on the Andean area.

7. Spanish, just like Italian, uses the same word both for home and house – a fortunate circumstance, as using either term would have not done justice to migrants’ complex and mixed relationship with their Ecuadorian casas.

8. The cross-border relationships underlying house building and maintenance, though, are not necessarily easy or collaborative ones. As my fieldwork suggests, migrants’ financing of their own houses from afar required a significant amount of trust in those in Ecuador. Even so, it was exposed – just like all forms of remittance – to the fear of non-migrants’ opportunisms or misappropriations. On the critical relationships with those in charge to look after migrants’ buildings, and on the variety of functions enacted by them, cf. Smith and Mazzucato (2009).