Transnational Peasants: Migrations, Networks and Ethnicity in Andean Ecuador

A study of the variety of transnational migrations from Ecuador, providing a historical and sociological exploration of a contemporary migration mystery: why do two groups from the same country pursue radically different economic strategies of transnational mobility? David Kyle examines the lives of people from four rural communities in two regions of the Andean highlands of Ecuador. Migrants from the southern province of Azuay shuttle back and forth to New York City, mostly as undocumented labourers. In contrast, an indigenous group of Quichua-speakers from the northern canton of Otavalo travel the world as handcraft merchants and musicians playing Andean music. In one village, Kyle found that Otavalans were migrating to 23 different countries and returning within a year. Kyle rejects the notion that contemporary globalization through technology is the primary cause of this mobility. He argues that patterns of transnationalism, developed over several centuries and varying by region and ethnicity, continue to play a crucial role in who will leave Ecuador and who will stay.Yet migrants’ use of professional “migration merchants”, including smugglers, leads to a phenomenon that transcends the original sending conditions of the 1980s; even cash-poor rural small-holders in communities lacking telephone service can but a clandestine passage to Manhattan.