Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T19:25:55.343Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Sometimes you gotta get out of your comfort zone’: retirement migration and active ageing in Cuenca, Ecuador

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2020

Matthew Hayes Open the ORCID record for Matthew Hayes [Opens in a new window]
Matthew Hayes*
Affiliation:
Sociology, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
*
*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The article extends notions of ‘active’ and ‘successful’ ageing by exploring the narratives of ageing in the retirement migration of Canadian and American older adults in Cuenca, Ecuador. The article is based on 83 semi-structured qualitative interviews (11 of which are follow-up interviews), most conducted in the first half of the 2010s. I explore how notions of finite time and imaginaries of a fourth age of decline and death inform the migration decisions and imaginaries of Canadian and American retirement migrants. I argue that their desire to seek self-expansive, new experiences through migration and contact with cultural difference dialogues with an increasingly competitive neoliberal culture of ageing, that emphasises success through activity, youthfulness and consumption. While there are certainly other ideals that help inform North American migration to Ecuador, I argue that these particular ideals illustrate how discourses of ‘active ageing’ have been taken up ‘from below’, by ageing North American adults, many of whom identify with the aspirations of policy and corporate discourses of activity and success, but who find themselves ageing into material conditions that preclude them. Migration to a lower-cost country, like Ecuador, helps them to experience these aspirations more positively, but may have uneven effects on lower-income workers and their ability to remain in place in the communities marketed for this type of migration.

Keywords

active ageingsuccessful ageinginternational retirement migrationcultures of ageing
Type
Special Issue Article
Information
Ageing & Society , Volume 41 , Special Issue 6: New Frontiers in International Retirement Migration , June 2021 , pp. 1221 - 1239
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahmed, A and Hall, K (2016) Negotiating the challenges of ageing as a British migrant in Spain. GeroPsych 29, 105–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allain, K and Marshall, B (2017) Foucault retires to the gym: understanding embodied aging in the third age. Canadian Journal on Aging/La Revue canadienne du vieillissement 36, 402–414.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Baars, J (2016) Aging: learning to live a finite life. The Gerontologist 57, 969–976.Google Scholar
Baars, J, Dannefer, D, Phillipson, C and Walker, A (2016) Aging, Globalization and Inequality: The New Critical Gerontology. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bellah, R, Madsen, R, Sullivan, WM, Swidler, A and Tipton, SM (1985) Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. New York, NY: Perennial.Google Scholar
Bender, D and Schweppe, C (2019) Care facilities for Germans in Thailand and Poland: making old age care abroad legitimate. International Journal of Ageing and Later Life 13, 115–143.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bender, D, Hollstein, T and Schweppe, C (2018) International retirement migration revisited: from amenity seeking to precarity migration? Transnational Social Review 8, 98–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benson, M (2012) How culturally significant imaginings are translated into lifestyle migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 38, 1681–1696.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benson, M (2016) Deconstructing belonging in lifestyle migration: tracking the emotional negotiations of the British in rural France. European Journal of Cultural Studies 19, 481–494.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benson, M and O'Reilly, K (2016) From lifestyle migration to lifestyle in migration: categories, concepts and ways of thinking. Migration Studies 4, 20–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boltanski, L (2002) The Left after May 1968 and the longing for total revolution. Thesis Eleven 69, 1–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Botterill, K (2017) Discordant lifestyle mobilities in East Asia: privilege and precarity of British retirement in Thailand. Population, Space and Place 23, e2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buffel, T and Phillipson, C (2019) Ageing in a gentrifying neighbourhood: experiences of community change in later life. Sociology 53, 987–1004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Castles, S (2010) Understanding global migration: a social transformation perspective. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 32, 1565–1586.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ciobanu, RO and Hunter, A (2017) Older migrants and (im)mobilities of ageing: an introduction. Population, Space & Place 23, e2075.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ciobanu, RO, Fokkema, T and Nedelcu, M (2017) Ageing as a migrant: vulnerabilities, agency and policy implications. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43, 164–181.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dillaway, H and Byrnes, M (2009) Reconsidering successful aging: a call for renewed and expanded academic critiques and conceptualizations. Journal of Applied Gerontology 28, 702–722.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duménil, G and Lévy, D (2011) The Crisis of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Forbes (2019) Is retiring abroad right for you? Forbes, July 8. Available at https://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2019/07/08/is-retiring-abroad-right-for-you/#6301388d2477.Google Scholar
Foster, L and Walker, A (2015) Active and successful ageing: a European policy perspective. The Gerontologist 55, 83–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gambold, L (2013) Retirement abroad as women's aging strategy. Anthropology and Aging Quarterly 34, 184–199.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gatta, M (2018) Waiting on Retirement. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Gilleard, C and Higgs, P (2005) Contexts of Aging: Class, Cohort and Community. Malden, MA: Polity.Google Scholar
Gilleard, C and Higgs, P (2011) The third age as a cultural field. In Carr, D and Komp, K (eds), Gerontology in the Era of the Third Age: New Challenges and New Opportunities. New York, NY: Springer, pp. 33–49.Google Scholar
Gilleard, C and Higgs, P (2020) Precarity and the assumption of rising insecurity in later life: a critique. Ageing & Society 40, 1849–1866.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glick Schiller, N (2009) A global perspective on migration and development. Social Analysis 53, 14–37.Google Scholar
Glick Schiller, N (2013) The transnational migration paradigm: global perspectives on migration research. In Halm, D and Sezgin, Z (eds), Migration and Organized Civil Society: Rethinking National Policy. London: Routledge, pp. 40–58.Google Scholar
Grenier, A, Phillipson, C, Laliberté-Rudman, D, Hatzifilalithis, S, Kobayashi, K and Marier, P (2017) Precarity in late life: understanding new forms of risk and insecurity. Journal of Aging Studies 43, 9–14.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hayes, M (2014) ‘We gained a lot over what we would have had’: the geographic arbitrage of America's lifestyle migrants to Cuenca, Ecuador. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40, 1953–1971.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayes, M (2018) Gringolandia: Lifestyle Migration Under Late Capitalism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hayes, M (in press) The coloniality of UNESCO's heritage urban landscapes: heritage process and transnational gentrification in Cuenca, Ecuador. Urban Studies. Available online doi:10.1177/0042098019888441.Google Scholar
Hayes, M and Carlson, J (2018) Good guests and obnoxious gringos: cosmopolitan ideals among North American migrants to Cuenca, Ecuador. American Journal of Cultural Sociology 6, 189–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Higgs, P and Gilleard, C (2010) Generational conflict, consumption, and the ageing welfare state in the United Kingdom. Ageing & Society 30, 1439–1451.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Higgs, P and Gilleard, C (2020) The ideology of ageism versus the social imaginary of the fourth age: two differing approaches to the negative contexts of old age. Ageing & Society 40, 1617–1630.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hitchings, R, Venn, S and Day, R (2018) Assumptions about later-life travel and their implications: pushing people around? Ageing & Society 38, 1–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hochschild, A (2013) The Outsourced Self: What Happens When We Pay Others to Live Our Lives for Us? London: Picador.Google Scholar
Horn, V and Schweppe, C (2017) Transnational aging: towards a transnational perspective in old age research. European Journal of Ageing 14, 335–339.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iecovich, E (2014) Aging in place: from theory to practice. Anthropological Notebooks 20, 21–33.Google Scholar
Katz, S (2000) Busy bodies: activities, aging, and the management of everyday life. Journal of Aging Studies 14, 135–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Katz, S (2005) Cultural Aging: Life Course, Lifestyle and Senior Worlds. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, R, Lulle, A, Sampaio, D and Vullnetari, J (2017) Unpacking the aging–migration nexus and challenging the vulnerability trope. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 43, 182–198.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kurzac-Souali, A-C (2013) Les médinas marocaines: un nouveau type de gentrification? In Coslado, E, MacGuiness, J and Miller, C (eds), Médinas immuables? Gentrification et changement dans les villes historiques marocaines (1996–2010). Rabat: Centre Jacques-Berque, pp. 79–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lardiés, R (2011) A pocos kilómetros, pero en otro país: el retiro de jubilados estadunidenses en Baja California, México. Geographicalia 59–60, 183–197.Google Scholar
Marrow, H and Klekowski von Koppenfels, A (2020) Modeling American migration aspirations: how capital, race, and national identity shape Americans’ ideas about living abroad. International Migration Review 54, 83–119.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McHugh, K (2000) The ‘ageless self’? Emplacement of identities in Sun Belt retirement communities. Journal of Aging Studies 14, 103–115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Näre, L, Walsh, K and Baldassar, L (2017) Ageing in transnational contexts: transforming everyday practices and identities in later life. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 24, 515–523.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oliver, C (2008) Retirement Migration: Paradoxes of Aging. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Oliver, C and O'Reilly, K (2010) A Bourdieusian analysis of class and migration: habitus and the individualizing process. Sociology 44, 49–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
O'Reilly, K (2000) The British on the Costa del Sol: Transnational Identities and Local Communities. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
O'Reilly, K (2017) The British on the Costa del Sol twenty years on: a story of liquids and sediments. Nordic Journal of Migration Research 7, 139–147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ormond, M and Toyota, M (2016) Confronting economic precariousness through international retirement migration: Japan's old-age ‘economic refugees’ and Germany's ‘exported grannies’. In Rickley-Boyd, JM, Hannam, K and Mostafanezhad, M (eds), Tourism and Leisure Mobilities: Politics, Work and Play. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, pp. 134–146.Google Scholar
Phillipson, C (2013) Aging. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.Google ScholarPubMed
Polivka, L and Luo, B (2015) The neoliberal political economy and erosion of retirement security. The Gerontologist 55, 183–190.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rowe, JW and Kahn, RL (1998) Successful Aging. New York, NY: Pantheon.Google ScholarPubMed
Rudman, DL (2006) Shaping the active, autonomous and responsible modern retiree: an analysis of discursive technologies and their links with neo-liberal political rationality. Ageing & Society 26, 181–201.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sigler, T and Wachsmuth, D (2016) Transnational gentrification: globalisation and neighbourhood change in Panama's Casco Viejo. Urban Studies 53, 705–722.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Swidler, A (1986) Culture in action: symbols and strategies. American Sociological Review 51, 273–286.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, C (1991) The Malaise of Modernity. Concord, Canada: Anansi.Google Scholar
Toyota, M and Thang, LL (2017) Transnational retirement mobility as processes of identity negotiation: the case of Japanese in Southeast Asia. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 24, 557–572.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Toyota, M and Xiang, B (2012) The emerging transnational ‘retirement industry’ in Southeast Asia. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 32, 708–719.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Noorloos, F and Steel, G (2016) Lifestyle migration and socio-spatial segregation in the urban(izing) landscapes of Cuenca (Ecuador) and Guanacaste (Costa Rica). Habitat International 54, 50–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilers, J, Leibing, A, Guberman, N, Reeve, J and Allen, R (2012) The meaning of ‘aging in place’ to older people. The Gerontologist 52, 357–366.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
World Health Organization (2002) Active Aging: A Policy Framework. Geneva: World Health Organization.Google Scholar