THIS chapter examines the ways in which villagers in Wanzai use the resources generated by migration to achieve goals such as improving their material well-being and participating more fully in the social life of both the village and the city. The analysis focuses on the spending patterns of rural producers in terms of the most common uses of remittances in the developing world: education, life-cycle goals (such as house building and marriage), and consumer goods. Scholars have widely observed the tendency for villagers to allocate a large portion of remittances and urban savings toward these three “nonproductive” goals while directing a comparatively small proportion of urban funds toward “productive” investment in agriculture and business. As discussed in Chapter 1, there is much scholarly debate about the implications of this aspect of remittance usage for development in the origin areas.

Structuralist and modernization approaches evaluate the impact of remittance usage on rural development in different ways, and here I offer crude simplifications of these two perspectives. For structuralists, rural dwellers are malleable subjects whose values, life goals, and spending activities are manipulated by powerful images of urban lifestyles displayed on billboards and in shop windows. “Taste transfer” is said to increase the dependency of traditional populations on imported items, undermining the market for indigenously produced goods. According to structuralists, the inculcation of urban tastes molds migrants into disciplined workers who are dependent on wages for satisfying their new consumer desires.