Aging into a New Place: How Older Latino Immigrants in Wisconsin Interpret Prior U.S. Destinations

• In Event: Latina/o Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 1: Migration, Place, and Latinx Belonging

Abstract

Scholarship on immigrants’ experiences in the U.S. has been dominated by studies of traditional gateway cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Yet, as immigrant destinations diversity, including into the Midwest, it becomes increasingly important to understand how migrants experiences and evaluate non-traditional destinations. While context of reception scholarship emphasizes structural conditions at arrival, it pays less attention to how migrants interpret place across the life course, especially as they age. We draw on 32 Spanish-language life history interviews with Latino immigrants aged 60 and older living in Wisconsin to examine how migrants retrospectively reconstruct prior gateway destinations from the vantage point of aging in a non-traditional destination. Nineteen participants first settled in another U.S. destination before moving to Wisconsin, including 15 who lived in major gateway cities. We identify four recurring narrative orientations through which participants evaluate place: Belonging, Autonomy, Opportunity, and Institutional Capacity. These orientations capture how migrants narrate identity and social integration, shifts in agency and constraint, terrains of risk and advancement, and encounters with care, labor and social service institutions. Aging in Wisconsin reshapes the evaluative criteria through which gateway cities are remembered. Participants narrate shifts from risk to stability, from constrained autonomy to self-determination, and from ethnic density to relational forms of belonging. Access to affordable housing, senior services, and health care becomes salient in later life, altering the hierarchy of what “matters” in place evaluation. By centering retrospective narrative and aging, this study extends context of reception scholarship beyond arrival and incorporation, showing how place is continually reinterpreted over time. We learn how later-life priorities shape immigrant settlement and satisfaction in quieter and less ethnically concentrated contexts like Wisconsin.

Authors

• Sarah Salas, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Johanna G. Nunez, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Michal Engelman, University of Wisconsin-Madison