Ways of Staying Put in Ecuador: Social and Embodied Experiences of Mobility–Immobility Interactions

Abstract

Immobility is to be complicated as a topic of study in research on human migration.\nThis paper analyses different ways of staying put, investigating the motivations, degree\nof (in)voluntariness and associated narratives, to show how immobility is as complex a\nresearch category as mobility. It does so in the context of irregular male migration from\na rural location in Andean Ecuador to the USA. This paper also focuses on the\ninteractions between mobility and immobility. Families with migrant and non-migrant\nmembers are imbued with and affected by changing mobility–immobility dynamics.\nThis paper explores such dynamics to facilitate the understanding of local sociocultural\nlogic, where mobility and immobility are infused with specific meaning, while placing\nsuch dynamics within global regimes of (im)mobility.