Migration, Gendered Translocality, and Rural Wellbeing in the Western Highlands of Guatemala

Abstract

Background: Rural out-migration is highly prevalent in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. In response to a confluence of factors, including economic poverty, exclusionary state policies, gang violence, and the effects of climate change, men and boys are leaving rural spaces in pursuit of opportunity elsewhere. While Guatemalan women are increasingly engaging in various forms of mobility, they are still the dominant group remaining at home while spouses, older children, and their parents emigrate. For this so-called “left behind” population, male out-migration shifts socio-spatial relations, altering livelihoods, health, and community life in complex ways. Understanding these evolving dynamics requires an attentiveness to translocality – the connections between mobile and immobile actors sustained through the flow of resources, knowledge, and ideas in migration-induced translocal networks. A growing number of studies have used the lens of translocality to examine how migration reworks household and community relations across space; however, few have integrated a gender perspective. Accordingly, this research positions gender as constitutive of everyday translocal negotiations, and in doing so, explores how gendered translocality shapes various aspects of rural wellbeing in a high out-migration context. Methods: This doctoral thesis takes a translocal perspective by considering the relational ties that exist across places and scales. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted across two data collection phases during May-June 2023 and October-December 2023 in Tojchoc Grande, a community in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. Data collection included interviews with women and men representing various migrant typologies, as well as with local health providers and community leaders. This thesis employs translocal Feminist Political Ecology, systems thinking, and social resilience to explore the multiscalar dimensions of how rural wellbeing was produced across connected places. Further, analysis moves from the household to the community scale to capture how translocal relations operate across everyday practices and institutional settings. Results: Findings show that contemporary rural wellbeing in Tojchoc Grande is both deeply translocal, and gendered, with women playing a critical, but overlooked role in mediating connections between households, migrants, and community institutions. Engaging in labour, care, and community organization within this context necessarily involves negotiating entrenched gender norms that privilege male authority, decision-making, and access to resources even from abroad. Within the translocal household, male out-migration leads to partial shifts in women’s roles and responsibilities, but changes rarely translate into the feminization of agriculture. Further, gendered care roles, remittance flows, and declining trust in public services interact to produce reinforcing patterns of psychosocial and physical strain for women. At the community level, gendered translocal social relations shape who participates in institutions, who makes decisions, and how community organizations function under conditions of demographic upheaval. Conclusion: This thesis underscores the gendered character of migration-induced translocality, illustrating how those left behind confront new socio-spatial realities as they are embedded into translocal networks at various scales (e.g., individual, household, community). It reveals that in Tojchoc Grande, translocal ties modify women’s everyday negotiations within agricultural production, household health, and community organization. However, these reconfigurations tended to reproduce, and in some cases, intensify inequalities in labour, responsibilities, and access to resources, rather than evening them out. In this way, rural wellbeing was marked by constraint: everyday life is still profoundly influenced by, and responsive to patriarchal gender norms and practices that transcend place. For rural communities to adapt and build resilience in response to migration, policy and research must recognize that translocal networks are not gender neutral. They can extend gender inequalities as readily as they enable transformative social change.