Dana DülckeResearch Report: “Living and Working in Borderlands” 07.11.2011
“Living and Working in Borderlands: The Gendered Impacts of Transnational Migration on the 'left behind' in Guatemala”
Academia, especially studies that focus on migration, have a long tradition in examining, understanding and explaining the different aspects associated with the movement of people. These have mainly focused on the crossing of borders, the leaving and the arrivalin different spatial regions and the adaptation of the moving people within a new environment. However, this has led to a gap in knowledge about those that are just as affected by intensified outmigration of others, but who a rarely taken into focus when studying the migration phenomenon – the people that are left behind when others migrate.
The intention of my Master Thesis, and thus of my field research stay in Guatemala,was and continues to be, to identify and explain the implications that transnational migration has on the living- and working experiences of the people that stay behind in their communities in Guatemala, when their co-nationals migrate to other places. In my Master Thesis I am asking how particularly the outmigration of male adults is impacting upon the living- and working experiences of the women that are left behind in Guatemala.Here my focus is explicitly a gendered one because statistics not only show that mostly malesemigrate from Guatemala to foreign countries (70,5% male; cf. PNUD 2010: Guatemala) but also is it important to keep in mind that the migration process itself is a gendered one (cf. Eberhardt/Schwenken 2010) and therefore a study that focuses on the impacts on those that do not move, needs to ask for its gendered roots and underlying gendered power structures, as well.In theoretical terms I am engaging with a transnational perspective of migration that takes the “migration – left-behind nexus” (Toyota/Yeoh/Nguyen 2007) as its foundation in order to analyze the implications of migration on the northern border region of Guatemala, precisely the area of Quetzaltenango. Within this framework migration implies that family members as well as friends stay behind of those, who leave their place of origin, but that they nevertheless remain in a close relationship with each other and thus sustain linkages over both, a long period of time and long-distances.
Consequently my Master Thesis is highly connected to the personal experiences of the people that live in the region. Due to the nature of the research question, as well as the fact that I am departing from a qualitative research design, the necessity developed to engage with field research in the area. In order to find answers to my research questions, it was thus necessary to collect my own data. Amongst others, two reasons were most important, why I had to realize my own study within Guatemala. First, the topic of left behind in the area of Central America itself is only rarely researched upon in the literature and especially the Guatemalan case seems to be rather neglected, therefore collecting primarydata in the fieldbecame a necessity. And secondly, but more importantly, in order to understand and to solve problems that are currently affecting the countries of the Global South, like outmigration, it was necessary to switch perspectives and to listen to the voices of the people that have made their own real life experiences in this topic and thus to let them explain how they are affected. In a nutshell, the reasons as well as the goal of my field research were thus to engage with the people that live in Guatemala in order to let them explain, if and how they are affected by outmigration.
My field research plan entailed three different forms of methods in order to conduct primary data and to find answers to my research questions. Throughout my whole stay I made use of the methods of field observation and informal interviews that are derived from ethnographic studies. Here the small talks on the street or in small “tiendas” have led to a significant amount of information about the daily customs and behavior of the people living in Quetzaltenango. Additionally, I could observe how, for example housing has changed due to the sending of remittances. Another example for the use of the method of observation is, that I could recognize, how, in one small town near Quetzaltenango, outmigration ishighly valued by those that stay behind, because they had even constructed a 12 meter high monument dedicated to “el emigrante” that was visible for everyone around town. These observations and conversations were always noted down in a field research diary that I continuously wrote throughout my whole stay in Guatemala. This diary will help me to reconstruct the research situation within Guatemala more precisely, once I keep writing my Master Thesis in Germany.
The second method I intended to use, were expert interviews. I planned to conduct these interviews in order to find out about the migration situation in Guatemala and also in order to embed my research in expert knowledge from within the country. Deciding upon who is an expert is a methodological question and thus my selection will be explained more in detail within my Master Thesis. For this report it is sufficient to explain that I conducted five different expert interviews, of which three were women and two were men. These experts belong to different types of organizations and come from different spatial areas, nevertheless all were within the region of Quetzaltenango and were engaged with either women’s questions/rights or migration and development questions. In these different interviews I could eventually attain information concerning the living and working “rules and regulations” that exist in the area and which will thus help me to evaluate in what manner outmigration has impacted on this system of “usos y costumbres”. Additionally I was able to ask more precisely about the experiences these organizations or individuals had with the topic and if it plays an important role in their daily work. These answers will help me to find out, whether or not organizations see a necessity in engaging with the issue of the left behind in the area or if this topic has not yet become a point on the day to day agenda. Lastly, I also asked for their opinion upon the impacts of male outmigration on women that stay behind, especially wives with children. These questions were necessary in order to receive also information about the issue, if my initial research plans, to talk to women who have husbands abroad, would not have been able to be realized.
This leads to the last method I engaged with in my stay in Guatemala. I also conducted several interviews with women that are left behind in Quetzaltenango. This means I conducted narrative interviews with family members of migrants that are currently, or that have been in the past, working and living in another country – mostly the United States of America. Deriving from theory as well as in close consultation with my supervisor I developed a qualitative and open questionnaire that focused primarily on the testimony and thus on the experiences of the family members that stayed behind in Guatemala when their husbands, brothers, or brothers-in-law had migrated to another country. I was able to conduct in this manner different interviews and could thus get profound insights into the thoughts and histories of those people that have a lived experience of being left behind in their communities. The interviews were conducted in different regions of Quetzaltenango, within the city as well as in surrounding small towns that belong to the “departamento” of Quetzaltenango. Additionally I spoke to these people in different places, ranging from popular cafés to their private houses. The decision where the interview took place was done by the interviewee, if he or she invited me to his or her house, I was happy to go there, but if a public place was preferred, which was due to different reasons, I did not intervene, either. All, but one, of these narrative interviews were conducted with women. This is due to the research question of my Master Thesis. In order to understand how the outmigration of males effects the living- and working experiences in Quetzaltenango it was necessary to listen to the narrations and perceptions of the women that have lived here in times when their husbands, for example, had migrated to the United States.
In order to reconstruct better my activities the table in the Annex will list all of my interviews during my field research phase in Guatemala.
Lastly I will focus in this report on the evaluation of my field research with respect to writing my Master Thesis and additionally I draw attention to the positive as well as negative experiences that I made during my stay here.
Initially I had planned to do an eight week internship with a small labor union that is called Union de Trabajadores de Quetzaltenango. It turned out that I could not realize to do this internship. There were different reasons to this problematic start in Guatemala. On the one hand I did not realize the importance and the impact of the upcoming elections in Guatemala (on 11th of September there was the first round of the general elections in Guatemala, the second round of the presidential elections took place on 6th of November). With my arrival here, I was told that working as a foreigner with a labor union in the times before the elections was very problematic – in safety terms, because it was located in an area that is apparently rather dangerous for foreigners, but also in terms of getting contact into the community, which then would have been highly connected with my work of that explicit political organization.
Fortunately, I also planned to stay some weeks within a language school that is called “Proyecto Lingüístico Quetzalteco” (PLQ) to further deepen my knowledge of the Spanish language before I would conduct the interviews. This not only allowed me to live within a Guatemalan family, where I continued to live throughout the whole three months, but also to “learn” about the Guatemalan history and society. My language school offered me the possibilities to attend different lectures that deal with various topics that are related to the history, society, culture and also current issues that are important in Guatemala and the geographical region of Central America. PLQ is at the same time a social organization that is highly linked to different societal actors and to other social organizations of the region. Eventually I did study three weeks as a language student at PLQ and following that I worked for two more weeks as a volunteer within the social organization of this school. During this time I already started to do informal interviews and to start with my observations in order to get a better picture about my research interest and to narrow down my research questions. These first ethnographic studies helped me to get a better understanding about the current issues that migration causes in this area of Guatemala.
After my stay with PLQ I decided to make use of the advantages of the connections that the organization possesses. I could not only realize interviews with two different women that are related to the school, but I also got into touch with other social organizations. These organizations, for example, “Desgua”, “La Casa del Migrante” or “AMTEDICH” were valuable sources of information for my Thesis as well. With members of these organizations I could subsequently realize expert interviews. A further advantage of the connection to the schoolwas that I got into contact with the surrounding communities. PLQ offers trips to the local communities and I was able to encounter people in these communities, too. One of the towns that I first visited with the school is called Salcajá, which is one of the areas with the highest number of male outmigration in whole Guatemala. After I had made contacts there, I could not only realize to speak with different members of the local government, but could also do observation, informal and narrative interviews within this town. Lastly, the connections to the school, but as well as to the individuals of the school, started a snow ball effect that led to the possibility of arranging many different narrative interviews with women that were left behind and were comingfrom differing social and economic backgrounds. Thus, I could finally reach the goal of listening to the voices of those people that have lived the experiences of being left behind.
Nevertheless, I also engaged in another organization, called Nuevos Horizontes. This organization offers help and a shelter to women that come from violent situations within their families and seek refuge. This organization offers one of the few possibilities for women to leave from intra-family violence and additionally maintains a daycare center for children of working mothers. Here I worked as a volunteer for six weeks in order to get another experience within Guatemala and also to “give something back” to the community from which I had gained so many useful information for my Master Thesis. The linkages to the research field that developed out of this connection were rather limited;however I think it was very interesting and inspiring to work with Nuevos Horizontes.
With respect to the positive and negative experiences of my research here, I have to admit that especially in the beginning it was very complicated for me to get access into the research field and also to be taken seriously by the people that I talked to. I first had to build some sort of reputation as a “real” researcher in order for the people to understand that I was not only in Guatemala to do holidays or to improve my Spanish skills. The closeness of the society, which is also reflected in the fact that I did not get entrance into many private houses of my interviewees, as well as the negative picture that preexists about foreign researchers, made especially the initial contacts a great challenge.
One shortcoming that I am aware of right now in my research, is reflected in the small number of indigenous women I was ableto interview. This is of course connected to the rigid social system that exists within the indigenous groups of Guatemala, but also in the fact that I could not reach the necessary level of confidence with the community, that they would have allowed me more access to “the women in the houses”. The daily life of an indigenous woman is taking place within a distinct area of the household and the market and it is very uncommon to have relationships or any sort of contact with other people outside of the family or the close community. The fact that I have only arranged to do interviews with three indigenous women, even though this ethnic group makes up the majority of the Guatemalan people, is a shortcoming of my research, which I do have to take into account. Thus, not only the long time period that was needed in order to set up interviews, but also the fact that often interviews did not take place for some reason or that I had to wait more than an hour for my interviewees, were other problems I faced throughout my stay here. Nevertheless I learned to become much more flexible and to adjust in some ways to the lifestyle of the Guatemalan people. I also made the negative experience that members of social organizations would promise me to do certain things or to get in touch with me, but they would just not call me or would not answer their phone. Additionally I was told by one organization that I could get good access to the research field through them and after making me wait two weeks, they finally told me that they cannot help me because the topic was too sensitive and so I did not get any further information from them.
Nonetheless, taking all my experiences into account, I am very happy with my field research stay in Guatemala and I can definitely say that I accomplished almost everything that I had planned. There is always something missing, but with respect to writing my Master Thesis I am very pleased with my research process. The next steps will be to transcribe and to analyze the interviews, which will then reveal the quality of my investigation. Yet, my observations, the informal talks and just the sheer fact of being “in” the field, helped me already tremendously to write my Master Thesis.
1