Transnational Peasants: Migrations, Networks, and Ethnicity in Andean Ecuador (review)

Field work in Ecuador during the early 1990s provided the basis for Transnational Peasants: Migrations, Networks, and Ethnicity in Andean Ecuador. This book focuses on four small highland villages where David Kyle studied the social and economic lives and cultural history of 2,185 Ecuadorians, some of whom have engaged in transnational migration to New York and other cities in North America and Europe. A detailed historical treatise and chronicle of field research, this comparative study of South to North transnational migration reveals a geographic pattern of behavior among those traveling abroad for work, which is explained by differing ethnic and historical contexts. The study uses qualitative (ethnographic) and quantitative (village surveys) data collection techniques to study transnational networks, with information assembled through interviews, secondary data sources, historical literature, monitoring of migrant movements over time, and participant observation. Two of the villages, Quipal and Tomebamba, are in the southern highlands in the province of Azuay. The other two villages, Guanansí and Peguche, are in the northern highlands near the town of Otavalo, home to the largest and most famous traditional outdoor market in Ecuador. The residents of the southern highlands during the early-twentieth century became well known for the production and international sale of Panama hats. They also have a history of working as agricultural laborers. At the time of this study, Azuayans favored working abroad as laborers. The residents of the northern highlands have a history of entrepreneurial independence in their work, earning money by marketing hand woven textiles and playing Andean music at home and abroad.

Conceptually, Kyle's research among highland Ecuadorians falls in the area of transnational household and village economic strategies and social forms of ethnicity. The everyday networks of social and ethnic relationships are studied. Historically, local and global migration connections combine with local elite political decisions to influence the further differentiation of migration patterns from one region to another. Kyle explains that the economic strategies used by migrants vary from region to region even though the migrant communities have similar socio-demographic characteristics. Past migrations shape socio-economic development patterns and help establish ethnic identity, thereby affecting current migrations.

The author expresses frustration in not finding adequate existing theoretical frameworks with which to explain the migratory processes and geographic patterns observed. He contends that a new framework is needed that goes beyond the wage-differential, push-pull, and chain theories of migration. Such a framework would consider community and regional attributes, and bring together socio-economic, geographic, and historical context. Transnational individuals and communities engage in global networks of family, friends, labor, and business. They earn income and live abroad, continuously or periodically, while maintaining close contact with their place of origin. These migrant cosmopolitans are characterized by their use of resource pooling, remittance flows, new forms of electronic communication, exchange of information, innovative and sometimes illegal modes of international travel, and global marketing of their own labor or products. Their geographically diverse experiences are important to document and understand because they are redefining socio-economic, cultural, and political processes locally, regionally, and globally. Research in this broad area is of necessity often interdisciplinary. The notion that identity can be bounded geographically or territorially by a local community has become obsolete. Thus, social scientists are increasingly interested in studying transnational identities and processes to develop appropriate conceptual frameworks and theories.

The peasants studied in this book might more accurately be referred to as transnational campesinos, a Spanish term that refers to a socio-economic group consisting of rural small agricultural landholders/producers. Kyle explains, "The oxymoron, transnational peasants, is meant to underscore the tension, even ridiculousness, inherent in conceptualizing a household as peasant in one context and transnational in another and is not meant to signal the transnationalization of 'the peasantry' as an evolutionary trend in...