Ways of Staying Put in Ecuador: Social and Embodied Experiences of Mobility–Immobility Interactions

Immobility is to be complicated as a topic of study in research on human migration. This paper analyses different ways of staying put, investigating the motivations, degree of (in)voluntariness and associated narratives, to show how immobility is as complex a research category as mobility. It does so in the context of irregular male migration from a rural location in Andean Ecuador to the USA. This paper also focuses on the interactions between mobility and immobility. Families with migrant and non-migrant members are imbued with and affected by changing mobility–immobility dynamics. This paper explores such dynamics to facilitate the understanding of local sociocultural logic, where mobility and immobility are infused with specific meaning, while placing such dynamics within global regimes of (im)mobility.