Parental Emigration and Conceptions of Better Futures in Ecuador

Ideas about best practices for children's futures shape global and local, lay and expert, and personal and clinical discussions. Debates can evolve around sociocultural and political dividing lines. In Ecuador, transnational families and non-emigre families espouse contrasting ideas on whether parental emigration constitutes a better life for children or not. Through data from ethnographic interviews over three years of fieldwork, this article details the differing local cultural expectations of how to provide 'better childhoods'. The two perspectives contrast on the effects of parental emigration on children. However, these local cultural expectations share similar underlying concerns regarding discipline, education, kinship roles and family devotion. A long-standing cultural logic permeates these ideologies of children's needs as traditional perspectives combine with globalized experiences in a culture of migration. Conceptions of 'better' childhoods can be enriched through understanding how people negotiate local cultural knowledge with global experiences. Working in an Andean Ecuadorian village school in 1998, I noticed a different perspective on parental separation due to emigration than the perspective on parental separation in Western expert and folk models. I began to ask questions about how families adjusted to the absences with such frequent adult emigration. Who cares for the little boy with both parents gone? How is this little girl coping with her mother's distance? I interpreted physical separation from emigration as both emotional and physical abandonment; however, interpretations of child abandonment can vary across cultures (Panter-Brick & Smith, 2000). Perplexed by my questions, eventually some Canari villagers sought to understand my perspective. Some asked if, through some misfortune, my mother was an only child or if my grandparents had died prematurely, because I misunderstood how families function. Within this community, an aunt launders a niece's clothes and a grandmother cooks empanadas for all her grandchildren, whether the parents live next door or in New York City. I began to see how emigres' children thrived with parental emigration rather than survived despite parental emigration. For example, emigres' children usually held the flags in the frequent parades, while other children marched. Teachers told me that emigres' children attended classes regularly because they did not have other responsibilities, such as working the fields (1), and represented the school with newer, better-fitting uniforms. Emigres' children had soccer balls and the leisure time to play with them. My existing concepts inaptly described my observations - the children who 'lost' their dependence on a parental figure in many cases 'gained' a childhood. Other children envied emigres' children, who lived in houses with glass windows and indoor plumbing, rather than sod structures. One little boy voiced this envious perspective. After his father publically disciplined him, I asked him if all parents punished children like that. He told me: 'No. The good ones emigrate'. This boy's statement greatly contrasted with ones I heard in 2004 in another corner of Ecuador. At a community forum in the largest city in Ecuador, Guayaquil, I presented some