The Remittance Landscape

The Remittance Landscape
Author: Sarah Lynn Lopez
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2015-01-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 022620295X

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Immigrants in the United States send more than $20 billion every year back to Mexico—one of the largest flows of such remittances in the world. With The Remittance Landscape, Sarah Lynn Lopez offers the first extended look at what is done with that money, and in particular how the building boom that it has generated has changed Mexican towns and villages. Lopez not only identifies a clear correspondence between the flow of remittances and the recent building boom in rural Mexico but also proposes that this construction boom itself motivates migration and changes social and cultural life for migrants and their families. At the same time, migrants are changing the landscapes of cities in the United States: for example, Chicago and Los Angeles are home to buildings explicitly created as headquarters for Mexican workers from several Mexican states such as Jalisco, Michoacán, and Zacatecas. Through careful ethnographic and architectural analysis, and fieldwork on both sides of the border, Lopez brings migrant hometowns to life and positions them within the larger debates about immigration.

The Remittance Landscape

The Remittance Landscape
Author: Sarah Lynn Lopez
Publisher:
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2011
Genre:
ISBN:

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Across the United States migrants work in service sector jobs and live in cramped apartments while in their home countries their newly built houses stand empty. Remittances--funds sent from economic migrants abroad to family members who remain in the home country--have radically altered everyday built environments throughout the developing world. In rural Jalisco, Mexico, remittance construction, which once meant building a dream house for oneself and one's family, has evolved into a community-wide project of rebuilding entire hometowns. Such construction has been formalized and institutionalized by the Mexican government's Tres Por Uno (3x1) program, which triples dollars dedicated to development projects with federal, state, and municipal funds. I argue that migrant use of remittance dollars to improve and develop their hometowns, encouraged by the 3x1 program, simultaneously demonstrates a newfound independence and agency for the rural poor and results in a host of unanticipated consequences for migrants and their communities, including familial fragmentation, the financialization of traditional society, and emerging conflict between migrants and villagers. A disjuncture between migrant aspirations and project outcomes is revealed through analysis of what I call "remittance space"--the sum of individual migrants' and their communities' construction practices and narratives, as well as the macro-scale political and economic processes, and symbolic and spatial transformations that are collectively shaped by and shaping remitting as a way of life. Focusing on a series of villages in the south of Jalisco, I begin my analysis by tracking the evolution of the "remittance house" as both a site of architectural hybridity and domestic change. Next, I explore the Tres Por Uno development discourse as it interfaces with the spatial legacy of rural Mexico, formalizing remittance construction. The heart of my research consists of "building ethnographies"--my term for fine-grained ethnographic research of the envisioning, construction, and use of building projects--on three Tres Por Uno projects that identify the social and spatial consequences of what I term the Remittance Development Model (RDM). The rodeo arena produces a spectacle of traditional culture and gendered expectations amid the commercialization and financialization of the jaripeo or bull-riding event; the cultural center imports U.S. norms of public space and participation that destabilize the traditional social hierarchy based on compadrazgo or extended familial networks; meanwhile, the old age home, an attempt by migrants to prepare for aging and death, raises questions about the lack of public services for rural constituents, and the relation between social capital and societal obligations. These projects contribute to understanding the RDM and its implications. The Remittance Landscape brings a material analysis of migration to Latina/o scholarship and a perspective of mobility and transnationalism to the study of architecture and place. Anthropological and sociological studies on migrant subjectivities often overlook the built environment as a medium through which individual and group identities are formed and contested. Urban and architectural historians who address ethnic and immigrant neighborhoods do not theorize migration itself, nor do they address the places immigrants come from as constitutive of the places where they arrive. Similarly, a material analysis of migrants' here-there connections contributes to migration scholarship both methodologically and epistemologically. North American migrant urbanism cannot be understood without addressing migrant hometowns that have become, in a sense, the distant hinterlands of American cities.

The Remittance House

The Remittance House
Author: Sarah Lynn Lopez
Publisher:
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2006
Genre:
ISBN:

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Remittances and Development

Remittances and Development
Author: Pablo Fajnzylber
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 410
Release: 2008-02-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0821368710

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Workers' remittances have become a major source of financing for developing countries and are especially important in Latin America and the Caribbean, which is at the top of the ranking of remittance receiving regions in the world. While there has been a recent surge in analytical work on the topic, this book is motivated by the large heterogeneity in migration and remittance patterns across countries and regions, and by the fact that existing evidence for Latin America and the Caribbean is restricted to only a few countries, such as Mexico and El Salvador. Because the nature of the phenomenon varies across countries, its development impact and policy implications are also likely to differ in ways that are still largely unknown. This book helps fill the gap by exploring, in the specific context of Latin America and Caribbean countries, some of the main questions faced by policymakers when trying to respond to increasing remittances flows. The book relies on cross-country panel data and household surveys for 11 Latin American countries to explore the development impact of remittance flows along several dimensions: growth, poverty, inequality, schooling, health, labor supply, financial development, and real exchange rates.

Remittance Markets in Africa

Remittance Markets in Africa
Author: Sanket Mohapatra
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2011-01-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0821385534

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Remittances sent by African migrants have become an important source of external finance for countries in the Sub-Saharan African region. In many African countries, these flows are larger than foreign direct investment and portfolio debt and equity flows. In some cases, they are similar in size to official aid from multilateral and bilateral donors. Remittance markets in Africa, however, remain less developed than other regions. The share of informal or unrecorded remittances is among the highest for Sub-Saharan African countries. Remittance costs tend to be significantly higher in Africa both for sending remittances from outside the region and for within-Africa (South-South) remittance corridors. At the same time, the remittance landscape in Africa is rapidly changing with the introduction of new remittance technologies, in particular mobile money transfers and branchless banking. This book presents findings of surveys of remittance service providers conducted in eight Sub-Saharan African countries and in three key destination countries. It looks at issues relating to costs, competition, innovation and regulation, and discusses policy options for leveraging remittances for development in Africa.

Migrant Housing

Migrant Housing
Author: Mirjana Lozanovska
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2019-02-26
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1351330136

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Migrant Housing, the latest book by author Mirjana Lozanovska, examines the house as the architectural construct in the processes of migration. Housing is pivotal to any migration story, with studies showing that migrant participation in the adaptation or building of houses provides symbolic materiality of belonging and the platform for agency and productivity in the broader context of the immigrant city. Migration also disrupts the cohesion of everyday dwelling and homeland integral to housing, and the book examines this displacement of dwelling and its effect on migrant housing. This timely volume investigates the poetic and political resonance between migration and architecture, challenging the idea of the ‘house’ as a singular theoretical construct. Divided into three parts, Histories and theories of post-war migrant housing, House/home and Mapping migrant spaces of home, it draws on data studies from Australia and Macedonia, with literature from Canada, Sweden and Germany, to uncover the effects of unprivileged post-war migration in the late twentieth century on the house as architectural and normative model, and from this perspective negotiates the disciplinary boundaries of architecture.

Beyond Small Change

Beyond Small Change
Author: Donald F. Terry
Publisher: IDB
Total Pages: 431
Release: 2005
Genre: Banks and banking
ISBN: 1931003866

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Examines the role of money transferred by migrant workers to their home country. Focuses on how the remittances meet the basic needs of family members there, whilst also generating opportunities for local communities and national economies. Considers the impacts in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and Asia.

Varieties of Exile

Varieties of Exile
Author: Mavis Gallant
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2003-11-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781590170601

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Mavis Gallant is the modern master of what Henry James called the international story, the fine-grained evocation of the quandaries of people who must make their way in the world without any place to call their own. The irreducible complexity of the very idea of home is especially at issue in the stories Gallant has written about Montreal, where she was born, although she has lived in Paris for more than half a century. Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks's extensive new selection from Gallant's work, demonstrates anew the remarkable reach of this writer's singular art. Among its contents are three previously uncollected stories, as well as the celebrated semi-autobiographical sequence about Linnet Muir—stories that are wise, funny, and full of insight into the perils and promise of growing up and breaking loose.

Diasporas, Development and Governance

Diasporas, Development and Governance
Author: Abel Chikanda
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2015-12-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3319221655

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Drawing on examples from the global North and South, this book examines the relationship between migration, development and diaspora engagement from a governance perspective. It explores the ways that governments interact with their own extra-national diasporic populations in order to boost economic development, build global trading and investment networks, and increase their political leverage overseas. Inside, readers will find fifteen essays which highlight such issues as diaspora engagement by governments at different scales, the divisions that often exist within diaspora groups, diaspora transnationalism and return migration, diaspora knowledge networks and higher education capacity building, and the neglected issues of South-South migration and diasporas as well as North-South migration and diasporas. The book presents empirical case studies from various geographical contexts including Australia, Canada, the Philippines, India, the Caribbean, Zimbabwe, and the United States. Overall, this book presents fresh insights into how and why migrant-sending countries are increasingly turning to the diaspora option to attempt to benefit from the transfer of knowledge, skills and financial and social capital. It provides policy makers, researchers, and students with new perspectives on governance and the means by which states are attempting to utilize their diaspora resources.

Born Out of Place

Born Out of Place
Author: Nicole Constable
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2014-03-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520957776

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Hong Kong is a meeting place for migrant domestic workers, traders, refugees, asylum seekers, tourists, businessmen, and local residents. In Born Out of Place, Nicole Constable looks at the experiences of Indonesian and Filipina women in this Asian world city. Giving voice to the stories of these migrant mothers, their South Asian, African, Chinese, and Western expatriate partners, and their Hong Kong–born babies, Constable raises a serious question: Do we regard migrants as people, or just as temporary workers? This accessible ethnography provides insight into global problems of mobility, family, and citizenship and points to the consequences, creative responses, melodramas, and tragedies of labor and migration policies.