Migrating money : the social status repercussions of US-Mexico remittances
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Monetary remittances, the money that immigrants send to their countries of origin, are incredibly important sources of economic support to the Global South. Perhaps due to their economic importance, there has been less work examining the social repercussions of this economic process especially in times of massive demographic change. The US-Mexico remittance corridor is the most consistent and abundant remittance relationship in the world. Contemporarily, it is experiencing dramatic economic and demographic shifts: continuing to break records in the amount of remittance sums that traverse it, the drop to a net zero Mexico to US migration, and finally the increasing feminization of remittance flows. This provides an opportunity to glimpse how changes in the remittance corridor could impact social factors like social status and emotional payoffs that are known to be negotiable via transactions. Using original qualitative and quantitative data sources I examine the question of how monetary remittances impact social status as well as how these impacts differ based on actor characteristics. Drawing on thematic analysis of 30 interviews with related remitters, receivers, and direct relatives in both the US and Mexico, I find that the remitter's gender and the receiver's age are very important to social payoffs. Specifically, I find that women remitters drew a lot of the affective parts of status from their role while experiencing a heavy economic burden. I also find that the cultural norm of deferred reciprocity, where care is cyclical between parents and children, drove which kinds of remittance transactions led to status and affective payoffs and which did not. Finally, I test these trends on a broader quota sample of N=379 Mexican remitters in the US and find that the most robust trend is that of rewarding and emphasizing remitting to young people—with remitters who sent money to the young consistently reporting significant status payoffs. Findings set the groundwork for future work on how remitting impacts how immigrant communities value others and draws attention to how important the receiver's characteristics are to determining status payoffs.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Higuera, Kimberly Benazir |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Jiménez, Tomás R. (Tomás Roberto), 1975- |
| Degree supervisor | Rosenfeld, Michael J, 1966- |
| Thesis advisor | Jiménez, Tomás R. (Tomás Roberto), 1975- |
| Thesis advisor | Rosenfeld, Michael J, 1966- |
| Thesis advisor | Granovetter, Mark S |
| Thesis advisor | Ridgeway, Cecilia L |
| Degree committee member | Granovetter, Mark S |
| Degree committee member | Ridgeway, Cecilia L |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Sociology |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Kimberly Higuera. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Sociology. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/hq027sr4156 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Kimberly Benazir Higuera
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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