Multi-directional Migration, Land Ownership and Livelihood Strategies in the Peruvian Andes: Conceptualizing Urban-Rural Return Flows during the Covid-19 Pandemic
(2025) Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies — Vol. 52, n° 2 (2025)
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- The Covid-19 pandemic has affected human mobility dynamics worldwide. In Peru, thousands of people left the cities to return to their rural homelands, which had the characteristics of a historical reversal of internal rural-urban migration flows. This study challenges and contextualizes such a conceptualization as a reversal through an ex-post analysis of pandemic urban-rural returns between 2020 and 2022 in the Peruvian Andes, drawing on theoretical approaches from migration studies, rural livelihoods and peasant studies. The qualitative case study with ethnographic fieldwork in the department of Cusco offers two contributions: First, it empirically illustrates rural individual agency behind the massive pandemic population flows in the Andes for new insights on internal mobility, livelihoods strategies and social/kinship networks in Peru in times of crisis. Secondly, our case study shows how much these flows were, although shock-induced, manifestations of traditionally fluid peasant mobilities that have long been practiced in rural life, enabling reticular livelihoods among interwoven family networks across urban and rural areas in Peru. Rather than conceptualizations as “reversal” or “return migrations”, the findings therefore argue for their understanding as “mobilities” to reflect their multi-spatiality, the reticularity and historically networked construction of rural livelihoods strategies in the Andes, surfacing in times of crisis.
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Delmotte, c., Davidsen, C., & Piccoli, E. (2025). Multi-directional Migration, Land Ownership and Livelihood Strategies in the Peruvian Andes: Conceptualizing Urban-Rural Return Flows during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 52(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2520379 (Original work published 2025)