As Schielke (2020) shows, “imagination”, particularly of places, is central to projects and experiences of migration (see also e.g. Salazar 2014). Powerful narratives leading people to “collectively envision the world and their own positionalities and mobilities within it (Morley, 2000)” (Salazar 2011:577) fuel such imagination. Such narratives often activate a dominant ideology of “development”/“progress” (see e.g. Pajo 2008; Raffaetà and Duff 2015) that gives prominence and value to the economic domain and results in ratings and rankings of places according to a shared criteria, the places themselves becoming metonymies of what is valued. These processes tend to display a reductive understanding of places – emerging as bounded entities, most often countries (see Malkki 1992; Pajo 2008; Wendland 2012; Merry 2016) – and to (re)produce national and cultural stereotypes. They allow social actors, however, to construct a “geographic imagination” (Gregory 1994), as imaginaries of a “better life” come to be associated with a given region, country, and social, cultural, economic, and political context.
In Spain, Elise made a habit of asking new Ecuadorian and Cuban research participants if they ever considered going back to live in their home countries. Much to her surprise, her questions were consistently met with a single, uniform response, animated in distinct ways. As she braided Elise’s hair in the living room of her apartment, Lucinda, a Cuban woman in her twenties who had been in Spain for just two years, remarked, “There’s nothing in Cuba. There is only tremendous hunger and tremendous need. Nothing else. I would never want to go back – what for?” Lucinda’s friend Yusy, whom she knew from Cuba, had been listening from the opposite couch. She scoffed. “Go back to Cuba? What for? To go hungry again?”
Elise first met Nicolás, who had arrived in Spain two years earlier from Havana, at the apartment he shares with his wife Bianca and her son in Tarragona. Elise and Bianca were in the middle of breakfast on Bianca’s terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, when Nicolás arrived home from a morning of construction work. After introductions, Elise tried to include him in their conversation, explaining that she and his wife were just discussing where one lives better: in Spain or in Cuba. Without skipping a beat, Nicolás exclaimed “In Cuba!”. From the other side of her flat, Bianca erupted in protest. “Noooo,” she scolded. “Stop messing around! This is for a project she’s doing.” Elise asked if Nicolás was joking and he replied, “Of course, I’m kidding! Life is better here, obviously.” For the next half hour, Nicolás would explain the “obvious”, paradoxically recounting how well he had lived in Cuba, with his car, and his air conditioning. What he took issue with was the political system there. If he were to go back now, he explained, it would only be to visit. Five days should be enough. And it would be expensive – he would have to bring gifts and be ready to spend.
Nicolás’s explanation signals both the oppression he felt in Cuba, for which he mostly blamed government corruption, but also an unmistakable fondness for his homeland. His initial tongue-in-cheek response, followed by his detailed elaboration of why he preferred life in Spain, alludes to an ambivalence that, like a red thread, ran through numerous otherwise cursory conversations each of us had over the course of our fieldwork. Moreover, in highlighting how well he lived, with access to comforts not every Cuban enjoyed, Nicolás distinguished himself from so-called “economic migrants” and portrayed his journey as an act of agency and choice, something his comparisons made plain.
Time and time again, Elise’s line of questioning was met in a similar way to that of Nicolás: with incredulity, sarcasm, and guffaws. People consistently reacted as though the very idea that there was a comparison to be made was laughable. But while interlocutors across our field sites served up quick, perfunctory evaluations of global geography, contrasting the living standards of nation-states and animating their assessments with personal anecdotes, their ease concealed more nuanced, profound, and affective dimensions of comparison. If Elise’s interlocutors ultimately seemed to conform to a dominant comparative script, our next two examples shed light on efforts to subvert and disrupt prevailing expectations of migration and where a “better life” may be found.
Ozmin was a Cuban man in his forties who had lived for over a decade in Japan. As he roamed the streets of Old Havana with no apparent purpose, his peers, who knew him well before his first marriage with a Japanese woman, gossiped about his trajectory. What was Ozmin doing back in Cuba? Had he returned with some business plan in mind? No, argued most of Valerio’s interlocutors. Late one evening, sharing some rum in a park in Old Havana, Yaniel, who was familiar with Ozmin’s story, openly challenged him, arguing that he had simply wasted a once in a lifetime opportunity to live abroad and make something good – notably, money – out of it. He hinted at the fact that, even if Ozmin would never admit it, he had most likely been deported.
Countering these accusations, Ozmin insisted on the hardships of life in Japan – not for him, he specified at one point, insisting on the fact that he had done well and had freely chosen to return to Cuba – but for any foreigner. Ozmin explained that foreigners in Japan – all the more so when they were neither Asian nor White, as was his case – suffered from systematic racism, the cold-heartedness of its inhabitants, the poverty of social relationships, loneliness, and, put simply, the lack of “a life” that could be called such. He used our surroundings to illustrate his point: there we were, hanging out in the street, at one in the morning, listening to music and sipping rum, with beautiful Cuban women passing by. “This is life”, Ozmin exclaimed, becoming excited and trying to make others see his point. But for his audience that night, the bottom line was that his migration had produced nothing worthy of note.
Apart from aptly highlighting the “viral environment” of migration (Hage 2021:23), which envelops not only those with migration experience but also those who have never left their homelands, this ethnographic situation reveals the different criteria from which Ozmin and his peers drew to compare Japan and Cuba. These criteria belonged to different regimes of value and appealed to a different “higher principle”, to build on Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) formulation, or “meta-value”, borrowing from Lambek (2008) and Robbins (2012), making possible the commensuration, comparison and ranking of values, places, and people. On the one hand, Ozmin’s peers prioritized the economic domain and, consequently, the overarching importance of economic success, reproducing the global geopolitical and economic order. Where, they seemed to wonder, was the material evidence of Ozmin’s time abroad: a newly constructed house for instance, a universal symbol of one’s migratory success (Graw and Schielke 2012)? In its absence, Ozmin’s friends attempted to provoke an answer from him with the very same tropes of “failure”, which loomed large over all returnees, and signaled his peers’ continued allegiance to migration’s promise of a “better life” (ibid).
Ozmin, on the other hand, like other returnees Valerio met in Cuba, was trying to subvert the geopolitical and economic hierarchy put forth by his peers’ critique. Migration had led him to understand that aspects such as sociality, warmth, and “life itself” as he put it, were to be valued above all else, and must constitute the key principles according to which places are assessed and ranked. Ozmin was reproducing well established stereotypes about Japan and Cuba, but rather than consider economic development and success as the “meta-value” that encompassed others (Lambek 2008; Robbins 2012), he criticized his peers’ exclusion of what was, really, most important in life. The social conditions of return seemed to call for this: an explanation of why he had returned, and a defense of his decision as a free, reasoned, and reasonable choice.
In line with Schielke’s (2020) insight that imaginaries of migration are shaped by experiences of migration, Ozmin argued that what his experience had ultimately offered him was perspective – an empirically grounded and authoritative position from which to define the principle and values one ought to prioritize when comparing. He was pushing back against dominant comparative scripts of migration – with their taken for granted hierarchies and related drivers and expected results – proposing an alternative comparative reading and mode of evaluation.
A similar effort was made by Julio, a sixty-year-old Ecuadorian returnee, who had experienced a series of setbacks in Spain that pushed him to return in 2013. In Spain, he had lost his job, his flat, and his savings as a consequence of the 2008 crisis. Not only did he come back to Ecuador alone as he had separated from his wife, but upon his return, he did not find a job in his homeland. After joining a Catholic group, attending Mass and other activities, Julio began reassessing his priorities, moral values, and social relationships. He refocused on close relatives, like his parents, and on friends with similar spiritual concerns rather than material pleasures, like partying and drinking, which he told Jérémie had marked his life in Spain. In Quito, he lived in a small house and had set up a carpentry workshop where he worked alone, getting by with little money.
And yet, Julio told Jérémie that he was at peace. “I have just what I need”. He claimed that his current life in Ecuador was better than the life he had had in Spain: “I realized that one lives better like this… with little resources”, he said. “Here, with little money, I live peacefully, there with lots of money, I had troubles”. Julio still assessed his experience in Spain as very good: “We thought we were in paradise. We ate, we drank”, he explained. However, he was now inverting the conventional hierarchy of places, prioritizing an alternative sphere of value than the one he prioritized when he first left for Spain.
Julio’s example shows how “heterarchies”, referring to “multiple hierarchies of worth or systems of evaluation” (Lamont 2012:202) may work in practice. For him, Spain and Ecuador were better (or worse) situated in a hierarchy depending on the criteria and the principle of equivalence made relevant (Spain was better, and worse, for some aspects, Ecuador for others). In his current stage of life, he prioritized a “simple life”, for which Ecuador was a better place. His prioritization could also, however, be read as a retrospective justification of his return – much like Ozmin’s peers contended in the Cuban example analyzed above – and of the fact that he had decided to stay in Ecuador despite not having met prevailing expectations on economic improvement via migration.