‘The Best Investment of Your Life’: Mortgage Lending and Transnational Care among Ecuadorian Migrant Women in Barcelona

Suárez, Maka

doi:10.1080/00141844.2019.1687539

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…From 1998 onwards, the major economic and institutional crisis in the Andean country resulted in unprecedented outflows (Herrera & Torres, 2005) and in an accelerated settlement of Ecuadorian individuals, and then households, in Madrid and elsewhere in Spain (Córdoba, 2015). Over the span of two decades, Ecuadorians have been heavily and disproportionately affected by the housing crisis in 2008-2009 and by the severe economic downturn that followed (Gonick, 2020;Suarez, 2014Suarez, , 2020. However, they have also benefited from fast rates of acquisition of dual citizenship, making for a remarkable potential -at least in theory -for circular mobility between Ecuador and Spain (Iglesias et al, 2015).…”

Section: Research Context and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selling a house, staging a dream

Murcia

Boccagni²

2022

Migration and Development

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Migrants' transnational housing investments are a relatively overlooked field to explore the workings of so-called migration industries, as we do, in this paper, through a case study of Ecuadorian migration. Based on fieldwork with two real estate agencies in Madrid and visits to their housing projects in Quito, we show how these companies support Ecuadorians' collective socio-cultural practices in Madrid, in order to capitalise on their potential to invest in the homeland. As the agencies claim, migrants who buy properties in Ecuador do not just pursue their own interest. They also display their unremitting attachment to the country, besides paving the way for a 'successful' return. As our analysis reveals, housing investments can indeed facilitate migrant's physical, emotional, and existential mobility. However, the repertoire of 'Ecuadorianness' these agencies deploy in Spain has little to do with the symbols and imaginaries of modernity and success on which their real estate developments in Ecuador rely. This reveals the inherent tensions in status and life projects between immigration and emigration contexts, and the role of transnational housing investments in mediating them.

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Section: Research Context and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Selling a house, staging a dream

Murcia

Boccagni²

2022

Migration and Development

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“…In Spain, too, nancial crisis generated social activism and the production of new collectivities when yoked to the dissolution of mortgages, which had earlier established terms for national inclusion and social mobility . When the global banking meltdown drained mortgages of their promises and rendered these debts unpayable, the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (P AH) came together to resist evictions and to provide mutual help to group members (Palomera 2014(Palomera , 2020Sabaté 2016a,b;Sabaté Muriel 2018Suarez 2022). Joiners, however , had to be seen to "work to earn" P AH support and inclusion in the activists' community (Gutierrez Garza 2022).…”

Section: Formats Technologies and Responsesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Financialization and the Household

Zaloom,

James

2023

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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Finance and the household are a pair that has not received sufficient attention. As a system, finance joins citizens, states, and global markets through the connections of kinship and residence. Householders use loans, investments, and assets to craft, reproduce, attenuate, and sever social connections and to elevate or maintain their class position. Householders’ social creativity fuels borrowing, making them the target of banks and other lenders. In pursuit of their own agendas, however, householders strategically deploy financial tools and techniques, sometimes mimicking and sometimes challenging their requirements. Writing against the financialization of daily life framework, which implies a one-way, top-down intrusion of the market into intimate relations, we explore how householders use finance within systems of social obligations. Financial and household value are not opposed, we argue. Acts of conversion between them produce care for the self and others and refashion inherited duties. Social aspiration for connection and freedom is an essential force in both financial lives and institutions.

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“…To my interlocutors, gaming the crisis meant learning to play with credit brokerage services, such as leverage —a technical financial term to describe the employment of short‐term debt to magnify the size of an investment (Allon 2015; Núñez 2017). Debt and credit are not inherently productive or inherently destructive, as some claim (Graeber 2011; Han 2012; Peebles 2013); rather, the debt–credit dyad is a constant site of manipulation, negotiation, and improvisation, informed by multiple registers of affect, knowledge, and value (Gregory 2012; James 2015; Suarez 2020).…”

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confidence: 99%

Gaming the crisis: Derivatives and unemployment in Spain

Núñez

2020

Economic Anthropology

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This article analyzes nonprofessional trading in derivatives during the Great Spanish Recession. It depicts playful engagements with speculative forms of credit and debt on the part of everyday people facing mass unemployment. The article calls into question contemporary theories of debt that characterize it as inherently destructive or inherently productive. My main argument suggests that credit‐debt dyads are constant sites of manipulation, negotiation, and improvisation informed by multiple registers of affect, knowledge, and value. In showing how play and playfulness arise in the field of finance, my research sheds light on extractive business models that exploit socioeconomic uncertainties as well as labor reforms advanced in times of recession. My ethnography traverses a variety of social terrains ranging from social media to brokerage firms, trading courses, stock exchanges, and self‐help workshops in order to complicate further the anthropological work on financialization. Without denying the negative and damaging effects of financialization, I focus on the contradictory ways in which ordinary citizens become financial subjects.

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‘The Best Investment of Your Life’: Mortgage Lending and Transnational Care among Ecuadorian Migrant Women in Barcelona

Cited by 7 publications

References 36 publications

Selling a house, staging a dream

Selling a house, staging a dream

Financialization and the Household

Gaming the crisis: Derivatives and unemployment in Spain

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