Cultural remittances

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In anthropology, Cultural remittances are the ensembles of ideas, values, and expressive forms introduced into societies of origin by emigrants and their families as they return home, sometimes for the first time, temporary visits, or permanent resettlement. The term, which has been summarized as "product sent back", developed in the early 2000s, is also used to describe "the way that migrants own and build homes in the country of origin." [1] [2]

Anthropology is the scientific study of humans and human behavior and societies in the past and present. Social anthropology and cultural anthropology study the norms and values of societies. Linguistic anthropology studies how language affects social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.

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Monetary Remittances versus Cultural Remittances

Monetary remittances are the transfer of money from migrant workers in a host country to a developing country through various financial institutions such as Western Union, Banco Agricola, and Banco Cuscatlan that transfer monetary capital from the host country of the migrant worker to the home country. [3] Monetary remittances from the United States to various countries in Latin America often make up significant portions of the GDP of Latin American Countries. [4] The impacts of monetary remittances differ from those of cultural remittances in that, monetary remittances mainly influence the economic sector of the receiving country, although monetary remittances can also be introduced into communities through individuals or organizations that receive remittances in order to create basic infrastructures within the communities.

The Western Union Company is an American financial services and communications company. Its headquarters is in Meridian, Colorado, although the postal designation of nearby Englewood is used in its mailing address. Up until it discontinued the service in 2006, Western Union was the best-known U.S. company in the business of exchanging telegrams.

United States federal republic in North America

The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is slightly smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico. The State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U.S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The extremely diverse geography, climate, and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.

Latin America Region of the Americas where Romance languages are primarily spoken

Latin America is a group of countries and dependencies in the Western Hemisphere where Romance languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, and French are predominantly spoken; it is broader than the terms Ibero-America or Hispanic America. The term "Latin America" was first used in an 1856 conference with the title "Initiative of the America. Idea for a Federal Congress of the Republics", by the Chilean politician Francisco Bilbao. The term was used also by Napoleon III's French government in the 1860s as Amérique latine to consider French-speaking territories in the Americas, along with the larger group of countries where Spanish and Portuguese languages prevailed, including the Spanish-speaking portions of the United States Today, areas of Canada and the United States where Spanish, Portuguese and French are predominant are typically not included in definitions of Latin America.

The term cultural remittances was created in the context of Caribbean migrants and the Caribbean diaspora but it the theoretical structure can be applied to various countries that experience return migration as well as visits from emigrants. The application of this term is not limited to the Caribbean experience or the Latin American experience of return migration.

Effects of Cultural Remittances

Cultural remittances are altered by the to and fro movements of migratory patterns. They impact the experience and expressions of not only those in the diaspora, but also their family and friends who still reside in the homeland.

Cultural remittances are positive in that they have led to the expansion of kinship bonds between the families that remain behind and their members who migrate. Through greater forms of telecommunications relationships between family members are easier to keep up and through this communications cultural remittances get easily transferred. According to Teófilo Altamirano Rua in Migration, Remittances, and Development In Times of Crisis, remittances are rooted in internal migration from the countryside to cities and vice versa. [5] Their origin lies in the reciprocity, interchange and bonds of kinship that lie between family members. Kinship will grow stronger and affect the nation because practices of reciprocity will continue as a form of cultural remittances.

Kinship human relationship term; web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of most humans in most societies; form of social connection

In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated. Anthropologist Robin Fox states that "the study of kinship is the study of what man does with these basic facts of life – mating, gestation, parenthood, socialization, siblingship etc." Human society is unique, he argues, in that we are "working with the same raw material as exists in the animal world, but [we] can conceptualize and categorize it to serve social ends." These social ends include the socialization of children and the formation of basic economic, political and religious groups.

Telecommunication transmission of information between locations using electromagnetics

Telecommunication is the transmission of signs, signals, messages, words, writings, images and sounds or information of any nature by wire, radio, optical or other electromagnetic systems. Telecommunication occurs when the exchange of information between communication participants includes the use of technology. It is transmitted either electrically over physical media, such as cables, or via electromagnetic radiation. Such transmission paths are often divided into communication channels which afford the advantages of multiplexing. Since the Latin term communicatio is considered the social process of information exchange, the term telecommunications is often used in its plural form because it involves many different technologies.

The return migrant also brings back with him the ability and incentive to challenge and change the society to which he returns because of his experiences. He brings back new ideas, work skills, artistic expression, and capital which help benefit the home nation. Not just in terms of money, but these new ideas will serve as a type of social change where there is progress toward the establishment of a self-reliant society. [6] Remittances, monetary and cultural, help support the nation in building a stronger economy and contribute education, housing and business development.

Music is also a cultural remittance. In Flores’ book The Diaspora Strikes Back, he notes that music has been largely affected by cultural remittances, there is a cultural collision between host and home land. With Flores’ main example: Salsa. Salsa has served as a cultural remittance in that it is a mixture of Afro-Cuban samplings with styles from Puerto Rico, Colombia, Panama, and other Afro Cuban references with the essence of the Nuyorican’s musical taste in jazz, soul, and rock. The Salsa sound is not only cross cultural but the lyrical implications refer to the complex diaspora the musician and his fans have gone through. Salsa was created in New York City, but as part of this circular migration has reached back to the island, in this case Puerto Rico, establishing itself as a form of Puerto Rican authenticity while also being a marker of Nuyorican diasporic authenticity. “Salsa is the musical baggage, the stylistic remittance of the diaspora on its return to the Island.” [7] As a cultural remittance, Salsa and other forms of music which have been transformed due to the constant flow of migrants, offers a free form of cultural expression where one can find national belonging, self-identity, or use music as a form of social resistance.

Salsa music Latin American dance music genre

Salsa music is a popular dance music genre that initially arose in New York City during the 1960s. Salsa is the product of various musical genres including the Cuban son montuno, guaracha, cha cha chá, mambo, and to a certain extent bolero, and the Puerto Rican bomba and plena. Latin jazz, which was also developed in New York City, has had a significant influence on salsa arrangers, piano guajeos, and instrumental soloists.

Afro-Cuban ethnic group

The term Afro-Cuban refers to Cubans who mostly have native West African ancestry and to historical or cultural elements in Cuba thought to emanate from this community. The term can refer to the combining of native African and other cultural elements found in Cuban society such as race, religion, music, language, the arts and class culture.

Puerto Rico Unincorporated territory of the United States

Puerto Rico, officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and briefly called Porto Rico, is an unincorporated territory of the United States located in the northeast Caribbean Sea, approximately 1,000 miles (1,600 km) southeast of Miami, Florida.

See also

Peggy Levitt is professor and chair of the sociology department at Wellesley College and a senior research fellow at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organization where she co-directs the Transnational Studies Initiative. Peggy writes regularly about globalization, arts and culture, immigration, and religion. Her latest book, Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation on Display, is published by the University of California Press.

"Gifting remittances" describes a range of scholarly approaches relating remittances to anthropological literature on gift giving. The terms draws on Lisa Cliggett’s “gift remitting,” but is used to describe a wider body of work. Broadly speaking, remittances are the money, goods, services, and knowledge that migrants send back to their home communities or families. Remittances are typically considered as the economic transactions from migrants to those at home. While remittances are also a subject of international development and policy debate and sociological and economic literature, this article focuses on ties with literature on gifting and reciprocity or gift economy founded largely in the work of Marcel Mauss and Marshall Sahlins. While this entry focuses on remittances of money or goods, remittances also take the form of ideas and knowledge. For more on these, see Peggy Levitt's work on "social remittances" which she defines as “the ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving to sending country communities.”

Chain migration is a term used by scholars to refer to the social process by which migrants from a particular town follow others from that town to a particular destination. The destination may be in another country or in a new location within the same country. Chain migration can be defined as a “movement in which prospective migrants learn of opportunities, are provided with transportation, and have initial accommodation and employment arranged by means of primary social relationships with previous migrants.” Or, more simply put: "The dynamic underlying 'chain migration' is so simple that it sounds like common sense: People are more likely to move to where people they know live, and each new immigrant makes people they know more likely to move there in turn."

Related Research Articles

Salsa (dance) dance form

Salsa is a popular form of social dance originating from Cuban folk dances. The movements of Salsa are a combination of the Afro-Cuban dances Son, cha-cha-cha, Mambo, Rumba, and the Danzón. The dance, along with salsa music, saw major development in the mid-1970s in New York. Different regions of Latin America and the United States have distinct salsa styles of their own, such as Cuban, Puerto Rican, Cali Colombia, L.A. and New York styles. Salsa dance socials are commonly held in night clubs, bars, ballrooms, restaurants, and outside, especially when part of an outdoor festival.

Human migration permanent change of residence of people

Human migration is the movement by people from one place to another with the intentions of settling, permanently or temporarily in a new location. The movement is often over long distances and from one country to another, but internal migration is also possible; indeed, this is the dominant form globally. People may migrate as individuals, in family units or in large groups. A person who moves from their home to another place because of natural disaster or civil disturbance may be described as a refugee or, especially within the same country, a displaced person. A person seeking refuge from political, religious, or other forms of persecution is usually described as an asylum seeker.

Music of Puerto Rico

The music of Puerto Rico has evolved as a heterogeneous and dynamic product of diverse cultural resources. The most conspicuous musical sources have been Spain and West Africa, although many aspects of Puerto Rican music reflect origins elsewhere in Europe and the Caribbean and, in the last century, the USA. Puerto Rican music culture today comprises a wide and rich variety of genres, ranging from essentially indigenous genres like bomba to recent hybrids like reggaeton. Broadly conceived, the realm of "Puerto Rican music" should naturally comprise the music culture of the millions of people of Puerto Rican descent who have lived in the USA, and especially in New York City. Their music, from salsa to the boleros of Rafael Hernández, cannot be separated from the music culture of Puerto Rico itself.

Nuyorican

Nuyorican is a portmanteau of the terms "New York" and "Puerto Rican" and refers to the members or culture of the Puerto Rican diaspora located in or around New York City, or of their descendants. This term could be used for Puerto Ricans living in other areas in the Northeast outside New York State. The term is also used by Boricuas to differentiate those of Puerto Rican descent from the Puerto Rico-born.

Nuyorican Movement

The Nuyorican Movement is a cultural and intellectual movement involving poets, writers, musicians and artists who are Puerto Rican or of Puerto Rican descent, who live in or near New York City, and either call themselves or are known as Nuyoricans. It originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in neighborhoods such as Loisaida, East Harlem, Williamsburg, and the South Bronx as a means to validate Puerto Rican experience in the United States, particularly for poor and working-class people who suffered from marginalization, ostracism, and discrimination.

Transnationalism is a social phenomenon and scholarly research agenda grown out of the heightened interconnectivity between people and the receding economic and social significance of boundaries among nation states.

Remittance money transfer by a foreign worker to his/her home country

A remittance is a transfer of money by a foreign worker to an individual in their home country. Money sent home by migrants competes with international aid as one of the largest financial inflows to developing countries. Workers' remittances are a significant part of international capital flows, especially with regard to labour-exporting countries.

Mixtec transnational migration is the phenomenon whereby Mixtec people have migrated between Mexico and the United States, for over three generations.

Circular migration

Circular migration or repeat migration is the temporary and usually repetitive movement of a migrant worker between home and host areas, typically for the purpose of employment. It represents an established pattern of population mobility, whether cross-country or rural-urban. There are several benefits associated with this migration pattern, including gains in financial capital, human capital, and social capital. There also costs associated with circular migration, such as brain drain, poor working conditions, forced labor, and the inability to transfer acquired skills to home economies. Socially, there are strong connections to gender, health outcomes, development, poverty, and global immigration policy.

Shaggy Flores Puerto Rican writer

Jaime "Shaggy" Flores is a Nuyorican poet, writer and African Diaspora scholar who forms part of the Nuyorical literary movement.

New diaspora displacement, migration, and dispersion of individuals away from their homelands by forces such as globalization, neoliberalism, and imperialism

A neo/new diaspora is the displacement, migration, and dispersion of individuals away from their homelands by forces such as globalization, neoliberalism, and imperialism. Such forces create economic, social, political, and cultural difficulties for individuals in their homeland that forces them to displace and migrate.

Transmigrant is a term, greatly developed by the work of Nina Glick Schiller, which is used to describe mobile subjects that create and sustain multiple social relations that link together their societies of origin and residence. These mobile subjects are now viewed as transnational migrants or transmigrants to distinguish them from migrants and immigrants.

Juan Flores was a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and director of Latino Studies at New York University. He was considered a leading pioneer, scholar, and expert in Latin American and Nuyorican culture.

AfroLatinidad is a collective cultural identity of Latinos and Latinas of full or partial African descent. There are an estimated 200 million African descendants in 19 Latin American countries. AfroLatinidad celebrates the cultural similarities among many African Latinos in Latin America. AfroLatinidad is thus born from the mixing of different African, North, South and Central Latin American and indigenous American cultures. Often, seclusion and rejection of Eurocentral national identities force them to become marginalized economically and culturally.

Since the late 20th century, substantial labour migration from developing countries to high-income countries has occurred. This includes a substantial portion of female migrants. The term feminization of migration has been proposed as a suggested "gendered pattern" in international migration where there is a trend towards a higher percentage of women among voluntary migrants. Studies on women migrant workers in high-income countries tend to focus on their employment in domestic work and care work for dual-income families.

El Mercado de Los Angeles, sometimes referred to as El Mercadito, is a market located in Boyle Heights on the corner of 1st Street and Lorena Street. El Mercado is a three-floor indoor shopping center that offers dining and restaurant services, entertainment with live mariachi bands and shopping from various vendors. The market is located by the Metro Gold Line's Indiana Station located two blocks east.

Zimbabwean Canadians are Canadian citizens of Zimbabwean descent or a Zimbabwe-born person who resides in Canada. According to the Canada 2011 Census there were 6,425 Canadian citizens who claimed Zimbabwean ancestry and 5,065 Zimbabwean citizens residing in the country at the moment of the census.

Hometown associations (HTAs), also known as hometown societies, are social alliances that are formed among immigrants from the same city or region of origin.Their purpose is to maintain connections with and provide mutual aid to immigrants from a shared place of origin. They may also aim to produce a new sense of transnational community and identity rooted in the migrants' country of origin, extending to the country of settlement. People from a variety of places have formed these associations in several countries, serving a range of purposes.

José Angel Figueroa is a Puerto Rican poet, actor, author, editor, and a professor in the Humanities who has published poetry, fiction, and drama in the United States. He is best known for his poetry and is considered one of the first Neorican poets and contributed to the rise of the Nuyorican Literary movement. He was an early contributor to the Nuyorican Poets Café and has influenced the scene of Latino literature in New York through education, writing, and outreach.

References

  1. ↑ Page, Kezia (2010). Transnational Negotiations in Caribbean Diasporic Literature: Remitting the Text. Taylor & Francis. p. 10. ISBN   978-0-415-87362-8.
  2. ↑ Izuhara, Misa (2010). Ageing and Intergenerational Relations: Family Reciprocity from a Global Perspective. Policy Press. ISBN   978-1-84742-204-0.
  3. ↑ Gammage, Sarah. “Exporting People and Recruiting Remittances: A Development Strategy for El Salvador?” Latin American Perspectives Vol. 33, No. 6, Migration, the Global Economy, and Latin American Cities, 85.
  4. ↑ Gammage, Sarah. “Exporting People and Recruiting Remittances: A Development Strategy for El Salvador?” Latin American Perspectives Vol. 33, No. 6, Migration, the Global Economy, and Latin American Cities, 80.
  5. ↑ Rúa, Teófilo A. "Retribution from a Distance: the Flow of Remittances." Migration, Remittances, and Development In Times of Crisis. Lima, Peru: Tarea Asociación Gráfica Educativa;, 2010. 73-77.
  6. ↑ Gmelch, George. Double Passage: the Lives of Caribbean Migrants Abroad and Back Home. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1992.
  7. ↑ Flores, 155.
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