From Cuenca to Queens: An Anthropological Story of Transnational Migration

8. Lives and Stories

8 Lives and Stories This book has been most concerned with telling the story of transnational migration as it is understood by one Ecuadorian family. Along the way I hope that I have given the reader some sense of the underlying dynamics that create not only the circumstances that make migration seemingly inevitable but also those that give life texture, nuance, and meaning. Ecuador is a nation severely challenged economically, and Cuenca a city firmly entrenched in a patriarchal tradition. The Quitasacas are constrained by these conditions and suffer considerably becauseofthem ,buttheydonotrepresent‘‘fixedattributes’’(Buechlerand Buechler ). Indeed, what the points of view presented here show is how cultural meanings are artfully reworked by individuals and families at different points in time. To be sure, the lives presented here have been changed dramatically by transnational migration; but the direction of those changes defies easy summaries. In the end, I hope that this book is not just an account of transnational migration but also a story about poverty, social inequality, resilience, unending toil, and, always, dogged perseverance. The Quitasacas are unlikely heroes in this human drama. They are obscure , unimportant people who have their share of flaws. I have shown here that they fight, conspire, and gossip, while at the same time they are extremely hard workers, very generous, and unfailingly thoughtful. But, like all of us, they are more than the sum of their good and bad characteristics . Indeed, explaining the complexity of human lives and how an anthropologist comes to understand them has been a central concern in writing this book. Sometimes I have looked for structural explanations, as in the failing economy; sometimes globally or locally constructed cul-  From Cuenca to Queens tural ones, such as the juxtaposition of identity images; and sometimes I have speculated on the nature of intrafamilial dynamics. Always, I have been concerned with exploring the ways in which power dynamics and the pressures of competing interests—on the level of the state, community , or family—influence individual lives. Indeed, I am not unaware of how power dynamics that are taken for granted affected the production of this book. This multisited ethnography is predicated on the assumption that I, as a middle-class North American, can move easily between Ecuador and New York. The Quitasacas, positioned structurally very differently than I am, do not enjoy this luxury. While the subtitle of this book says that it is a ‘‘story’’ about transnational migration, in reality multiple interconnected stories are presented here. Sometimes these stories cover the same ground, but often they do not. This became the driving force behind the organization of this book: my aim was to show the subtlety of differences as the interpersonal intersects with the structural and ideological. Rosa and Beto, for example, interpret Vicente’s migration very differently because of the different affective relationships they have with him, which are partly constructed from the larger models of gender, family, and class that are broadly shared by poor Cuencanos. I have tried to show how these cultural ideologies can shape some of the thoughts and behaviors of the Quitasacas; but my focus has been on the ways in which these ideologies are interconnected and how family members rework and reposition them as they move through time. The Quitasacas are like the rest of us, created from a complex of influences that range from the completely idiosyncratic to the blatantly stereotypical. Emotions and interpersonal relationships are culturally coded and framed just as surely as religion and ritual are—yet that does not negate the fact that they are felt and experienced deeply and very personally. My use of the word ‘‘story’’ to describe this book should not be interpreted as meaning that what is written here is ‘‘fiction.’’ Like the Spanish word historia, which translates to both ‘‘story’’ and ‘‘history,’’ to me it implies that what is told is understood to be ‘‘true,’’ but with the biases that perspective invariably lends. I like the word ‘‘story’’ because I think we all use stories to make sense of our life experiences and our feelings about those experiences (see Wikan ). Moreover, stories give meaning and order to individual experience at the same time that they generate sentiments in others. As Linda Garro and Cheryl Mattingly point out, ‘‘stories are intended to be evocative and provocative’’ (Garro and Mattingly :). Lives and Stories  The Quitasacas...