Love for the Land: Remittances and Care in a Nicaraguan Transnational Community

Abstract

Despite renewed interest in Central American migration, little attention has been devoted to understanding the diversity of migration pathways within the region. This article explores the tensions in the complicated connections between migration, land, consumption, and love in the case of migration between Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Based on interviews and ethnographic observations with members of transnational families in Achuapa, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, I examine how migrants and nonmigrants talk about remittances to make arguments about both abandonment and connection—that is, love for the land and people. Houses and land mediate local understandings of both the absence and presence of migrants in Achuapa. However, those who send and receive remittances, women and men, and young people and old all understand the relationships between migration and care or abandonment differently. At the community level, discourses around remittances tie in to nation-building projects through the resurgence of revolutionary discourses of solidarity under the Sandinistas. In this context, migration has become a new way for poor Nicaraguans to participate in the global economy and care for loved ones, even as it threatens nationalist longings for solidarity.