Circuitos migratorios, jerarquías espaciales y modernidad periférica : Cañar y Loja, 1960-1990
(2015)
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- During the second half of the XXth century, important patterns of internal and international migration emerged and strengthened in southern Ecuador, involving increasingly large segments of the population. At the same time, during those decades crucial transformations took place in the country, brought by changes in political and economic regimes. My thesis aims to understand how development projects have intervened in the emergence of migration circuits in the southern provinces of Cañar and Loja between the decades of 1960 and 1990. Migration circuits are defined as a complex dynamic of connections and circulation encompassing people, objects, and symbols, and linking spaces, with enduring effects for social groups and territories involved (Rivera Sánchez, 2012). This definition intends to go beyond a conceptualization of migration as unidirectional movements across places, and not exclusively focusing on migrants, but on the socio-spatial process that unfolds on the long-term, thus displacing the focus from migration to mobility. The research consists of a study of two cases with a historical approach and a methodological strategy focused in the spatial and temporal dimensions of migration circuits. Drawing on archival and secondary literature research, combined with in-depth interviews, I have analyzed how governmental projects on territory and population implemented in Cañar and Loja have configured these provinces as peripheral to the nation. Drawing on in-depth and biographical interviews conducted in several localities of the Cañar and Loja provinces, as well as in other cities of Ecuador and in the New York metropolitan area, I have mapped the heterogeneous migratory and circulatory trajectories of three generations of people from Cañar and Loja. I argue that these trajectories are a part of larger mobility circuits related to historically constructed socio-spatial hierarchies. Drawing on these same data, I also analyze tensions between development projects and mobility projects emerging from these peripheral provinces. My work evidences that large population movements that have taken place in these provinces are linked to a more ample social context in which mobility is central, as evidenced in the transit of goods and commodities, means of transport, and people from different social backgrounds; and linked to them, narratives, ideas, ideologies and symbols related to spatial hierarchies. I argue that these intense forms of movement arise in response to development projects and social, economic and political structures that construct hierarchical orders of spaces, society and the nation. I aim to show how the circulation of social remittances within those provinces is related to conflicting projects of modernity. I also aim to delve into the specific ways in which migration becomes a possible and desirable alternative for people in those localities, regardless of social background or socio-economic position. In other words, my goal is to understand how mobility has become a part of local subjectivities and how development regimes shape the vital experiences of subjects.
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Eguiguren Jimenez, M. M. (2015). Circuitos migratorios, jerarquías espaciales y modernidad periférica : Cañar y Loja, 1960-1990. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/186946