The project addresses people’s (re)assessment of what makes for a ‘good life’ as a result of experiences of ‘crisis’, notably economic crisis. Its contribution rests on a multi-sited, empirical study of imaginaries and experiences of ‘return’ of Ecuadorian and Cuban men and women who migrated to Spain, are dissatisfied with their lives there, and envisage/carry out the project of going back to their origin countries. Three interrelated sub-projects structure the research. The first focuses on Ecuadorian and Cuban migrants living in Spain and how they articulate experiences of crisis with projects of return and imaginaries of a ‘good life’, while the second, in Ecuador, and the third, in Cuba, focus on migrants’ return experiences and their (re)assessment of good living in light of their migratory trajectories. At a theoretical level, the project contributes to three main areas of inquiry in the social sciences, which are 1) the study of morality, ethics, and what counts as ‘good life’, 2) the study of the field of economic practice, including its definition, value regimes, and ‘crises’, and 3) the study of migratory aspirations, projects, and trajectories. Situations of ‘crisis’ are approached as generative moments in which notions of the ‘good life’, its components and whereabouts, are explicitly articulated, debated, and compared.
Seeking a better life is arguably the goal of many migratory projects and an issue at the core of public and political debates in present day Europe. While much attention is paid to the influx of migrants into Europe, often underpinned by assumptions about the ‘better living’ conditions there, the issue of ‘return’ is less prominent, as is a more profound discussion of what ‘better living’ may consist of. The project highlights the need to empirically unearth what a ‘better life’ stands for, accounting for key socio-demographic variables, notably gender, and migrants’ embeddedness in transnational social networks. The findings indicate that a ‘better life’ is a container for disparate desires, values, competing individual/collective aspirations, and socio-cultural norms that cannot be presupposed. To understand migrants’ aspirations and trajectories, as well as their changes over time, closer attention needs to be devoted to the values they come to prioritize, why they do so, and which places they perceive as more conducive to their realization.
The project provides an in-depth analysis of how migrants pondering and/or making sense of return to their countries of origin renegotiate different spheres of value and redefine their relative importance for their lives. It thus uncovers how participants often strive to assert the primacy of what they see as ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ values - among them autonomy, freedom, choice, cosmopolitanism, belonging, and sociality - over perceived ‘economic’ ones - such as wealth and economic success. Such valuations, however, are in tension with the difficult living conditions migrants face in Spain and returnees in Cuba and Ecuador, and with their material obligations towards family members and peers ‘back home’. The research provides unprecedented insights on how influential circulating notions of what constitutes a ‘good life’ challenge migrants’ aspirations and trajectories, illuminating their heterogeneous responses to dominant expectations of ‘successful’ migration as the path for economic prosperity and the leveling of North-South inequalities.
