This book explores how global migration transforms local dynamics in the communal life of indigenous peoples in southern Ecuador. At its heart, the focus is on Cañar, a region marked by more than seven decades of migratory flows to the United States. Cañar features one of the areas of greatest human mobility in the entire Andean Region. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews and dialogue-based workshops with indigenous youths, the author shows how migratory processes and forms of self-representation have challenged the idea that ethnic identity is tied to fixed cultural patterns. He further shows how youths’ transnational experiences reconfigure generational differences within indigenous communities. In analyzing how transnational life, adultcentrism, gender power dynamics, and institutional discourses intersect in the production of indigenous youths’ subjectivities, this book provides an innovative approach to the studies of indigenous peoples and migration.
Author(s): Jorge Daniel Vásquez
Series: Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 115
City: Cham
Acknowledgements
Praise for Transforming Ethnicity
Contents
About the Author
List of Abbreviations
List of Figures
List of Graphs
Chapter 1: Indigenous Identities, Migration, and Youth in Southern Ecuador
Introduction
The Historical Struggle for Indigenous Identities in Ecuador
Cañar and Its History of Migration
Researching Indigenous Youth in Latin America and Ecuador
Exploring Cañar’s Indigenous Communities: Theory and Questions
Youth and Adultcentrism
Identity and Ethnicity
Transnationalism and Experience
Questions
Fieldwork and Methodology
Organization of the Book
References
Chapter 2: Leaving Cañar: Transnational Experience and the Production of a Migrant Subjectivity
Individualization and Gender
Establishing Generational Differences: Education and Imagination
References
Chapter 3: Guarantee, Reinvention, and Disconnections of Ethnic Identities
“But they cannot remove the blood they carry”
“All of us musicians here are migrants’ children”
“They have even called the police without knowing what we are doing”
References
Chapter 4: Adultcentrism and the Dispute about Representation
The Local Construction of Adultcentrism
Why Dispute Representations?
References
Chapter 5: A Recapitulation
A Final Thought from the Field
Index
