From the Margins: The Migration Vortex Between and Beyond Ecuador and Massachusetts

• In Event: 30620 - Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 4: Migration, Incorporation, and Inequality

Abstract

This project explores the work of daily community creation in two towns – Azogues, Ecuador and Milford, Massachusetts, U.S.A. – connected by chain migration. This project looks at the ways in which meaning is created and applied to space specifically through the lens of placemaking. The central question is how personal and collective understandings of place change as in these two communities in flux. How do communities exist with a changing cast of characters? How is belonging cultivated on an ever-unsteady ground?
Seeing these places constructed by the web relationships that traverse national, ethnic, and linguistic borders, this project uses both spatial and social analysis to examine how individual agents interact with and traverse through the landscape, looking at forms of gathering, transit, and the organization of the built environment. This research uses qualitative ethnographic methods, making a claim that immigrant communities of origin and destination should be considered complex adaptive systems, where the sum of actions by individual agents is part of a larger independent system. Implications for research include connecting immigration studies to complexity studies as well as further research on the malleability of the built environment helping or inhibiting community cohesion.

Author

• Agustin Gomezjurado Demerath, Williams College