Conclusiones

Studies looking at remittances have traditionally focused on the sender and/or the receiver.

Some recent scholarly work has produced gendered perspectives on remittances (García and Paiewonski, 2006; Ghosh, 2009; King et al., 2006; King and Vullnetari, 2010; Kunz, 2008; Piper, 2005; Sørensen, 2005b) which focus on the relation between the sender (or senders) and the receiver (or receivers). Following Carling (2007), I use the tag ‘dyad’ to convey this relationship.

Remitters can send money to more than one person, and one non-migrant can receive money and gifts from more than one migrant. To capture this complexity, I use the terms ‘main dyad’

and ‘secondary dyad(s)’. As not all relationships are equally strong or bonding, I label as ‘main dyad’ the most strong and stable of the relationships between a remittance sender and the receiver. While each migrant only can belong to one main dyad, they can have weaker and less stable links within ‘secondary dyads’. For example, a married male Xarbán migrant in the US whose wife and children live in Xarbán can have them as his main dyad, while at the same time also sending occasional amounts of money or gifts to his elderly parents, who are his secondary dyad.

The gender of migrants combines with their civil status to explain different remittance behaviours. Single migrants tend to be the main dyad with their parents and sometimes with their younger siblings living in the parental house. Once female migrants are married they are

more likely to stop sending money to their parents, in contrast to their husbands’ parents, who are more likely to continue to receive money from their son. In patriarchal societies, daughters are not expected to contribute to their parents, while sons do even after they become married, as Smith found for Albania (2009: 559). Married migrants’ main dyad is usually their spouse and children, unless these family members are abroad with the migrant. As I will show later on, the fact of having young children encourages the establishment of stronger and more stable dyadic relations.

In Xarbán the most common dyads consist of married male migrants sending money to their spouses with children, and migrant couples sending money to their children in Xarbán. In the village, children can live on their own if they are old enough, or with a relative who takes care of them. Quite often grandchildren are taken care of by their maternal grandmother, as Bastia also found in Bolivia (2009). In Xarbán, dyads do not tend to challenge traditional gender roles, as men are still the main breadwinner from afar and women stay at home taking care of the children. In Pindo there is a greater variety of dyadic relationships as family arrangements are more complex, not just because both females and males migrate but also because of irresponsible paternity that led many mothers to migrate in the first place. The fact that in Pindo, female villagers pioneered the flow directly undermines the traditional gender role structure in the village. Migrant mothers are portrayed as mothers who abandoned their children (Pedone, 2008), while those husbands who receive money from their wives abroad are subjected to a lot of social pressure as a result of this change in the traditional gender division. In Pindo, fathers are very often absent, hence children of migrant mothers are taken care by female relatives (the maternal or paternal grandmother, older sisters or aunts), creating female-only dyads. Table 5.12 presents the most commonly-occurring dyads in both villages, listed in order of importance.

Table 5.12: Most common main dyads in the two villages

One unexpected and very interesting dyad is the ‘fraternal group’: siblings who send remittances for the daily expenses and education of their siblings living in their parents’ house in Ecuador. Julca has also acknowledged the importance of this group among Peruvian migrants in New York City (2005: 16), and Lindley for Somalia (2006: 6). The kind of support this group provides goes well beyond remittances. For instance older siblings abroad financially support their younger siblings’ migratory projects by acting as guarantors or lending them the money to pay for the journey (as in the case of Xarbán), or making possible a legal journey to Spain or Italy for their siblings (as in the case of Pindo). They also support their recently arrived siblings abroad by welcoming and accommodating them and using their network of contacts and information to help them find a job. Mutual support also continues after return. This is for instance the case of a Pindo, 30 year-old male returnee who upon return to Pindo pooled together his savings with his brother’s and applied for a joint loan to buy a coach in Ecuador. Both brothers now share the financial burden as well as the workload.

a) Power issues

Contrary to literature on migration that identifies the household as a harmonious unit (as in the New Economics of Labour Migration approach pioneered by Lucas and Stark, 1985), dyadic relations are not problem-free and there are power imbalances within the household that also need to be taken into consideration (Åkesson, 2004; Cliggett, 2005; de Haas, 2010; de Haas and Fokkema, 2010; Rodenburg, 1997). Following Sanz Abad (2009: 390), I find it useful to think about who decides what to do with the remittances (decision power), who manage them (management), and who eventually enjoys the consequences (enjoyment). It is also important

to look at the control mechanisms available for decision-takers. In schematic form, the model I have in mind is set out in Table 5.13:

Table 5.13: Power realms

There are decisions to be taken regarding four aspects of material remittances: the nature of the remittance, the frequency of sending, the sending channel, and the eventual uses.

Depending on the transfer we are talking about, the sender, the receiver, or both, agree what (either money or gifts) and when to send. Migrants are usually the ones who decide how to send the money, as it is, first and foremost, their money in most cases. They also have a better knowledge of the available channels, although the type of transfer very much determines the channel. Depending on the transfer as well, senders or receivers decide what its use should be.

Some sending, either money or goods, is clearly targeted while some other remittances are not sent out with a clear aim in mind by the senders. In the case of in-kind remittances, it does not make sense to talk about untargeted in-kind remittances. Gifts like a washing-machine or clothes can seldom be used for other than their original purpose. Regarding financial remittances, sometimes receivers are the ones who decide, do the actual management and enjoy the consequences of their decisions. In other cases, senders decide what to do with the resources transferred, and will enjoy (or suffer) the consequences of their decision.

Nonetheless they cannot implement their decisions by themselves and need to rely on other people, mainly the receivers.

Control is irrelevant when the person who decides how to use remittances is the same as the person who does the actual management. This is the case of the small regular amounts sent by

migrants to cover their direct relatives’ daily expenses in Ecuador. Recipients decide how to distribute the relatively small amounts received among their competing needs for food, transport, utilities, education, or health care. As non-migrant receivers do the actual management and they will enjoy the consequences of their decisions and management, migrants do not usually supervise this type of transfer. Sending in-kind remittances is a type of control mechanism where senders make sure their decisions will bring the expected outcome.

Control is crucial in the case of migrants’ savings sent to Ecuador; money sent quickly to cope with unexpected emergencies; and money sent to repay debts, particularly journey debts or to pay the monthly instalments of loans or mortgages. Control is also very important in the case of collective remittances, where migrants have developed specific mechanisms to closely monitor non-migrants’ management to make sure that they actually follow their instructions – more on this in next chapter.

There are some supervision mechanisms in place for senders to monitor receivers’ behaviour.

Gossiping is perhaps the mechanism par excellence, particularly in the case of Xarbán due to migrants’ and non-migrants’ residential concentration and the fact that everybody knows everybody else (see also Guerra González, 2008: 65). Through telephone calls, gossiping travels back and forth in what Dreby labels as ‘transnational gossiping’ (2009). In the meantime, the content becomes distorted, making gossiping potentially very destructive. Videos and photos are also an important supervision mechanism for migrants who can check how non-migrants’

manage their money. This is very important in the case of remittances to build houses (Carrillo Espinosa, 2007: 291) and to fund fiestas. Migrants can also implement disciplinary measures, such as ceasing to remit or keeping savings abroad, if they suspect that their relatives are not following their instructions or mismanaging ‘their’ money.

It might appear obvious but, as Pribilsky found (2004), those families who learn to convivir (to live side-by-side) and have better relationships are more likely to perform better economically and socially. There is nothing better than having a good relationship, which usually implies that migration and remittances are a joint venture between husband and wife, among siblings or between children and parents. Because decisions are agreed, the need to control and monitor is less (de Laat, 2005).

The issue of enjoyment, as straightforward as it might appear, requires acknowledgement and engagement with the literature dealing with the motivations to remit. Although the reasons to send or not to send are not the primary scope of this thesis, I would just mention that under

the altruism approach the concept of enjoyment becomes in fact widened. In a less economic jargon than the one used by Lucas and Stark (1985), migrants’ enjoyment can be derived from the happiness of those they love or care for. Hence, enjoyment would be a shared and self-feeding situation. However, in the list above, I was not that much referring to vague feelings of happiness and accomplishment, but to the concrete act of enjoyment. Migrants can be happy because of the fact that one of their relatives is wearing proper shoes, whereas the actual pleasure of having the feet warm and comfortable goes to the person who is wearing the shoes. Under this narrow conceptualization I present the issue of enjoyment for each transfer in the typology below.