Questions of migration and belonging: understandings of migration under neoliberalism in Ecuador
International Journal of Population Geography, (1999)Abstract
Migration studies across the social sciences are tackling exciting questions about the importance of local narratives of migration and the insights they can give on the importance of dialectical treatments of the places of migration. In this paper I explore alternative understandings and experiences of migration, drawing on in-depth interviews with urban-destined migrants in Ecuador to argue that mobility produces ambivalent development subjects. Recent research is retheorising the places of migration as deterritorialised households, labour markets and communities that explode singular concepts of uniform and contiguous origins or destinations of migration. Building from this work, I argue that in contrast to a dualistic and discrete treatment of the relationships between origins and destinations, migration research can develop a nuanced, imaginative, dialectical understanding of the interplay of identity and subjectivity, of desire and longing, across the places of migration. By foregrounding these dialectical relationships between places and people, we can begin to disrupt the central tenets of modernisation, assimilationist approaches, and so mount a critique of the coherence of national projects of modernisation in places such as Ecuador. Copyright ? 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.