Precariedad laboral y construcción social de la “ilegalidad”: familias indígenasecuatorianas en Nueva York

Abstract

This article examines the migration of Ecuadorian indigenous families to New York City in the context of the 2008 Financial Crisis and the tightening of immigration policies in the United States. Migration trajectories show increasingly risky travel conditions, and significant changes in labor market integration as well as settlement. The article shows that job insecurity and the social condition of illegality are mutually connected in the different stages of the migration trajectory and constitute a different experience from that of Ecuadorians who emigrated in previous decades.

Deportees in Transit Between Ecuador and the US: A Historical and Ethnographic Approach to Migrant Disobedience and its Spatial Impacts

“…The US has been Ecuador's leading commercial partner, the primary destination for non-oil exports (Ibarra Villalva 2021), and one of the two main foreign debt creditor countries (Lucero 2020). Ecuador's dependence on the world's largest economy has brought inevitable political consequences in compliance with unequal foreign trade policies (Acosta and Cajas 2015) and the adoption of neoliberal structural adjustment requirements as part of the national debt programs since the 1980s (Harvey 2005). This geo-economic dependency worsened since the year 2000, when Ecuador renounced its national currency and adopted as legal tender the US dollar (Davidson 2002).…”

“…In Ecuador, as in so many other post-colonial racial states, the legal production of a disposable, hyper-precarious population (De Genova and Roy 2020) has been strategically used to reinforce the maxim of nationalist fundamentalism-which controls the national territory and mobility inside that territory under a scheme of hierarchical, racialised citizenship that establishes who does and who does not hold full national citizenship-and the maxim of capitalist accumulation based on super-exploitation and the dispossession of certain categories of the population of their rights, in this case indigenous people (Harvey 2005). That is why, according to Guerrero (1998:117), "escaping from the private sphere", or fleeing tutelage, was an important act of resistance that gave subjugated populations an opportunity to rebuild their own lives.…”

“…Without romanticising their disobedience, but intending to understand this historical movement that marks the spatial struggle of these indigenous migrants' dispute, it is worth recalling Marx's (2010:593) reflection: "The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production". As an effect of capitalist uneven geographical development (Harvey 2006), there is an abysmal (and insurmountable) difference between the US, the world's largest economy, and Ecuador: while the former does not cease to offer informal labour niches for migrant labour, the latter cannot provide decent work for its citizens. Opting to re-commence their transits back to the US is for migrants like Felix, Manuel, Andr es, and Fabian just one step further in an enduring struggle-the struggle deployed by labour power to modify their existing living conditions towards their freedom (Marx 2010:593).…”

“…Economic articulations in the form of remittances from the US, together with oil and non‐traditional exports, have been the pillars of the national economy (BCE 2020) This money, historically topping all other sources of income, has sustained families and rural and indigenous communities of origin. Cultural articulations resulting from the Ecuadorean version of the “American dream” and transmitted from generation to generation (Hochschild 1996) also configure this space, as do family articulations derived from new forms of transnational care (Herrera 2019). Socio‐economic articulations resulting from smuggling networks or coyoterismo are also present.…”

“…In such an aircraft, handcuffed by hands and feet and under strict surveillance, Manuel (aged 28), Andrés (29), Fabián (33), and Felix (38) arrived in their home country at different times between 2015 and 2017. The mobilities of these four deportees, like those of thousands of other indigenous Ecuadoreans seeking a better life in the US (Herrera 2019), were prompted by systemic inequality and systemic racism, an abiding violent colonial legacy in contemporary Ecuador materialised, amongst other things, in high rates of indigenous and rural poverty (García 2014). While still teenagers, the four men left Ecuador por la chacra , as irregularised migration guided by coyotes is locally known.…”