Conclusiones

Away from those big numbers, I spent nine months knocking on Xarbán and Pindo villagers’

doors to fill in a questionnaire about material remittances. In this section of the chapter I present the data on material remittances (both financial and in-kind, to and from the migrants) for the two villages. The questionnaire was designed consciously to avoid questions on remittances use. Instead, I phrased the questions to focus on the changes that villagers with relatives abroad had experienced since starting receiving money from abroad. Explanations about common and different patterns between the two villages are provided in this chapter;

data on remittance use and the changes triggered by remittance inflows in Xarbán and Pindo will be presented in the next chapter.

As I pointed out in chapter three, the target population of the research was made of households with members abroad. My main research concern was the impact of remittances on households and not so much the motivations to send money. All of the households surveyed in Pindo with members abroad receive money (or have received money at least once in the previous year) from their relatives abroad. Only three households in Xarbán did not receive any money from their members abroad. Tables 5.1 and 5.2 set out the resultant survey data.

Table 5.1: Sending migrants

Table 5.2: Receiving households

Due to the maturity of emigration from Xarbán, households in this village are more likely to have more than one migrant compared with Pindo, where most households only have one member abroad (Table 5.3).

Table 5.3: Percentage of households by number of migrant members

The different number of migrants in each household explains why a smaller proportion of migrants from Xarbán send money to their relatives in the village compared with Pindo migrants. More than one migrant member in a household means no need for all migrants to send money. This can be captured by the migrant-household member ratio which illustrates

the proportion of household members in Ecuador supported by a single migrant. As expected the ratio is higher for Pindo than for Xarbán. A sending migrant from Pindo (this is a migrant who effectively is sending money home) is supporting with their money more than two people in Ecuador while a migrant from Xarbán supports less than two members (see Table 5.4).

Table 5.4: Migrant-household member ratio

Table 5.5 shows the percentages of migrants who do send financial remittances at least once a year according to how often (and regularly) they send money. I have shaded the rows in the table that provide the most interesting insights on remitting frequency. Most migrants from both villages send money to their relatives in Xarbán or Pindo on a monthly basis (darkest shaded row). In the case of Xarbán, 16% of migrants send money more often than once a month (medium shaded rows). This fact is closely related to migrants’ income structure abroad. While in the US most construction workers are paid on a weekly basis; in Spain wages are usually paid at the end of the month. It is more likely then for Xarbán migrants in the US to send more than once a month than for Pindo migrants in Europe. There are also important percentages of transfers in Xarbán (8%) and Pindo (12%) which do not follow any periodicity (light shaded row). These irregular transfers fall within any of the following categories: they are gifts for special occasions (e.g. birthdays, visits to Ecuador, Christmas), transfers for emergencies (usually to pay for unexpected health expenses) or the consequence of migrants’

inability to send more regularly. It is important to realise that if migrants do not have stable jobs or work in casual short-term jobs they will not be able to sustain a regular sending pattern. As will be explained in the final section of this chapter, financial remittances must be read within the possibility framework created by migrants’ income and expense structure. This structure is different depending on migrants’ place of residence, length of stay abroad and ideas of return.

Table 5.5: Remitting frequency by migrants

Annual remitted amounts to Xarbán and Pindo households range from $20 to $25,200, with an annual average amount of $3,430 for Xarbán and $2,100 for Pindo households⁴⁵. The mean of monthly received money per household is $285 in Xarbán and only $175 in Pindo; and the mode is $200 for Xarbán households and $100 for Pindo (Table 5.6).

Table 5.6: Descriptive statistics of received amounts by household (all figures in US$)

45 All the amounts are given in US dollars, as this is the currency in Ecuador since 2000 when the country was dollarized. Due to the currency exchange rate between the euro and the dollar, remitted amounts from Europe are subjected to higher variability (BCE, 2007).

If households in each village are grouped by annual received amount (Table 5.7), Xarbán shows a more equal distribution. In Pindo there are bigger differences among receiving households in terms of amounts received. Figure 5.1 converts the data into a visual representation.

Table 5.7: Households by received amount per year in US$

Figure 5.1: Households by received amount per year in US$ (in %)

Not only is money sent to the villages. Xarbán and Pindo are also the origin and destination of in-kind transfers. Almost half of the migrants abroad had sent in-kind remittances to their

relatives in Ecuador at least once since they have been abroad (see Table 5.8). As shown in Table 5.9, the most common type of in-kind remittances are clothes, followed by toys, and technology such as laptops.

Table 5.8: Migrants who send in-kind remittances

Table 5.9: Type of in-kind remittances sent by migrants

Due to the transfer cost and the increasing availability of products in Ecuador, migrants are currently less willing to send in-kind remittances to their relatives. No sending of in-kind remittances for commercial purposes is taking place in any of the two villages, contrary to the situation in areas like the North of Africa (ECA, 2007: 5) or the Pacific Islands (Brown and Connell, 1993).

Migrants are not only remittance senders but also the receivers of ‘reverse remittances’, a term recently brought to the literature by Mazzucato (2006)⁴⁶. Although Mazzucato focused her analysis on the non-financial support Ghanaian migrants in the Netherlands received from their non-migrant relatives (2009: 1113), she very successfully attracted attention towards the presence of two-way transfers. It is a useful step forward within a postcolonial approach on migration and remittances (Faist, 2010: 81). Sometimes these reverse remittances are independent of other types of remittances being sent by migrants, although this is not always the case. For instance the sending of traditional pollera skirts from Xarbán to the US is in fact a counter-transfer of the collective remittances sent from the US to fund the local fiesta.

Reverse in-kind remittances are far more common than its counter-transfer, particularly in the case of Xarbán, where almost ninety per cent of households with migrants abroad have sent them in-kind remittances since migration took place. In Pindo, the percentage is lower but still significant, as shown in Table 5.10.

Table 5.10: Reverse remittances by sending households

Food is the reverse remittance par excellence: 98.5% of those households that send remittances to their relative migrants at least once since migrants’ departure in Xarbán and 96% in Pindo have sent them food. This is particularly intense in Xarbán where there is an incessant traffic of food parcels to New York City. These parcels play a crucial role because in a context of 'meaningless' food to just feed working bodies, the food parcels that are sent from Ecuador are essential in the relationship between migrants and their relatives back in Ecuador (Mata-Codesal, 2010). Cuy (guinea pig), a culturally loaded foodstuff throughout the Andes (Archetti, 1997), is often sent from Xarbán because it ‘travels well’ (Abbots, 2008: 225). In Pindo, food parcels to Europe are not as common as from Xarbán. It is the consequence of striking differences between sending mechanisms to Spain and the US (in terms of cost, availability and time). On average, sending a two pound parcel to New York from any of the

46 The origin of the term itself is unclear. Some authors were in fact dealing with reverse remittances long before Mazzucato labelled them as such (see for instance Connell et al., 1976; or Skeldon, 1990).

numerous sending agencies located in the Gualaceo area would cost around 6 dollars and take 3 days (summer of 2009). The same parcel will take over 8 days to get to Spain and will cost 22 dollars (same agency and same date).

Several reasons explain why parcel sending mechanisms to and from Spain are poorly developed compared with those to and from the US. Among others are the age of the flow (older in Xarbán), the different legal status of migrants (that permits migrants’ mobility to and from Europe allowing them to bring and take their own products), and a different gender composition of migration: males in the US from Xarbán do not know how to cook customary foods, while females in Europe do (Mata-Codesal, 2010). In anecdotal cases, clothes or medicines, such as traditional medicine brands migrants cannot find abroad, are sent. I also encountered one case in which non-migrants were sending money to migrants in the US, where the latter were encountering difficulties due to the current crisis. This phenomenon has been acknowledged by some journalists in the US (Penaloza, 2009) although its extent is still unclear (Ratha, 2009).

Depending on who is the actual receiver, we also encounter family or collective remittances (Goldring, 2004). The questionnaire captured data on collective remittances. Collective remittances are mostly intended to fund fiesta and religious events, as well as to pay for basic development projects in the villages (e.g. potable running water). Table 5.11 shows the percentage of migrants in the questionnaire who had ever sent remittances for a collective project. Due to the specific features and consequences of this type of transfer, I will deal with it in greater depth in chapter six in the context of changing fiesta and community landscapes in the villages.

Table 5.11: Collective remittances from migrants

5.2. Typology

By weaving together questionnaire, interview and participant observation data, I have developed an emic typology of material transfers between migrants and their villages of origin in Ecuador. Some authors have similarly provided remittances typologies. Goldring (2004) and Levitt (1998) provide probably the two best-known categories of remittances. Levitt focused our attention on the non-material sending by migrants, what she labelled as ‘social remittances’, which will be exhaustively treated in chapters seven and eight. As an explanation for the low amounts of remittances which were ‘productively’ invested, Goldring proposed a three-category typology: family, collective and investment remittances (2004). Although useful, I do not consider her typology detailed enough to cover the wide spectrum of money transfers taking place in Xarbán and Pindo. Before looking at the main transfers which emerged from my own survey data, I present first some theoretical considerations.