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Good guests and obnoxious gringos: Cosmopolitan ideals among North American migrants to Cuenca, Ecuador

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Abstract

This article develops an empirical study of the cosmopolitan ideals of North American lifestyle migrants in Cuenca, Ecuador. It is meant as a corrective to existing studies, which often perceive cosmopolitanism to be a disposition, worldview, or cultural condition, but miss the importance of transnational and cosmopolitan cultural beliefs that emerge in novel ways within the new cultural fields constituted by lifestyle migration and that may significantly reconfigure status and economic class relations. In addition, it extends our empirical knowledge of North American cultural codes as they migrate to an international setting. North Americans in Ecuador express desire for cross-cultural contact and integration, and demonstrate this through a number of practices that serve to demarcate legitimate from illegitimate forms of transnational mobility. This legitimate form of transnationalism is painted in sharp relief from the profane ‘obnoxious gringo,’ who ‘should go back where they came from.’ These discourses emerge from North American cultural beliefs about travel and transnationalism, as well as from North American attitudes towards migration from low-income countries to the United States and Canada.

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Notes

  1. For elaboration on the racialized identities of North Americans in Latin American lifestyle migration communities see Benson, (2013, 2015) and Hayes (2015c).

  2. All names used to refer to research participants are pseudonyms.

  3. Obnoxious gringos are also frequently a topic of conversation in online blogs and social media fora. For instance, see this blog post from Panamá: http://alongthegringotrail.blogspot.com.es/2012/11/among-loud-and-obnoxious.html; or this one from Mexico: http://southernpacificreview.com/2012/05/08/dont-shout-the-obnoxious-gringo-tourist-in-mexico/. Generally, loud behavior operates as a sign of an obnoxious gringo, and the apparent antidote is often associated with acts of kindness and basic social decorum, which because of the racialized character of whiteness in non-white social spaces, enhances the symbolic importance of showing signs of integration.

  4. This reference to a moral code of the good guest, which equates transnational relocation with being a houseguest, says a lot about what North Americans think about migrants to the United States and Canada, where the former have, perhaps, developed some of their ideas about legitimate and illegitimate forms of transnationalism. The trope of the ‘good guest’ suggests a domestic polity of worth that justifies belonging on the basis of traditional customs and norms (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). Supposedly, ‘guests’ should not make political demands of their host community, a rule of etiquette that may be easier for North Americans in Ecuador to follow than Ecuadorians in Canada and the U.S., since the former retain their Canadian and U.S. citizenship.

  5. This moral outrage may be due to heightened concern about threats emanating from what Smith (2014) calls the ‘uncanny zone’ of ‘near pollution.’ Given the relative cultural similarities among North American migrants, especially shared racialized whiteness, the added invective seems directed against the threat of near pollution from ‘obnoxious gringos,’ who cast doubt on migrants’ claim to belonging to transnational and transcultural space.

  6. By ‘unsettled lives’ we draw on Swidler’s attention to how “people do active cultural work to maintain or refine their cultural capacities” (Swidler, 1986, p. 278). The instances of ‘unsettlement’ that she was thinking of were in life cycles, or in historical periods of a given cultural group. In addition, however, we would argue that instances of transnational migration offer examples of how individuals draw on their existing geo-cultural frameworks to make sense of and order their lives in new locations. In this respect, while cultural sociology has thought about the work done by social actors in unsettled times, they have not fully considered spatial elements of unsettlement, especially in transnational contexts such as migration.

  7. The emotional investments migrants make in these types of transculturality are noted in other work within lifestyle migration, especially Benson (2016).

  8. This may not be the case only for North Americans in Cuenca. Lawson notes the “strongly invoked moral obligation” that British lifestyle migrants in rural France express “to be seen to be making an effort to integrate” (Lawson 2016, p. 7).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Emmanuelle Piccoli for conversations that helped frame this paper, as well as members of the Canadian Network for Critical Sociology, whose comments on this work and on cultural sociology have been of immeasurable help. We are indebted to three anonymous reviewers and to Philip Smith for comments that helped improve the article. Its shortcomings remain the responsibility of the authors.

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  1. Department of Sociology, St. Thomas University, 51 Dineen Drive, Fredericton, NB, E3B 5G3, Canada

    Matthew Hayes

  2. Department of Sociology, Acadia University, Wolfville, NS, B4P 2R6, Canada

    Jesse Carlson

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Hayes, M., Carlson, J. Good guests and obnoxious gringos: Cosmopolitan ideals among North American migrants to Cuenca, Ecuador. Am J Cult Sociol 6, 189–211 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-017-0025-y

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