Why do People Move? - Mapping a Brief History of Migration

Ecuador

By Masoom Moitra; Maria Morales
migration, violence, displacement, awareness, education, resource

This project traces the factors that were responsible for the migration of indigenous people from rural to urban areas, in Ecuador.

Urban areas in Ecuador have been heavily shaped by intense flows of migration that have unfolded in the last 50 years. The global discourse on migration is often dominated by statistics and it is assumed that the people and families involved have been moving out of personal choice, in search for better opportunities.

The maps on this website were created to draw attention to the fact that migration and displacement can be a result of larger scale events that have taken place over a long period of time, which most migrants have no control over. A singular lens cannot successfully define the complexity of migration and any simplification may lead to the misconception that governments have no responsibility for these people.

A large population of migrants who move from rural to urban areas in Ecuador are indigenous families, who end up working in informal sectors under exploitative conditions and get little or no support from the State. In order to understand why these conditions need to change and who needs to take responsibility for their support, it is important to ask the question - Why do People Move?

The objective of this project is to create an online resource which people working in outside Ecuador can go to in search of information that has neither been mined and georeferenced before and nor have they ever been in one location. The information found here has been sourced from old government reports, charts, graphs, spreadsheets and books. It is certainly not an exhaustive source, though our partners in Quito who were very happy to see the website, proposed to make it a space where they can also continue to add information to, in order to make it richer.

For instance, one of the reasons that people have been moving from the coastal areas to the city, is because of the decline in banana production. Bananas have historically been very important for Ecuador’s agricultural economy. They are the biggest cash crops and are mainly grown along the coast. In the 60s, a large number of men from the inner provinces moved here to work on plantations. The production in most provinces has seen a dramatic reduction in production since 1954. This has caused many workers to move to Quito in search of jobs in the informal economy like shoe shiners, vendors and carriers. This map shows the decline over time, which can be accessed by switching on different layers.

Another instance is the map that overlays areas that have been leased out for extraction in the Amazon, over highly protected forest areas. Ecuador’s natural resources have been heavily exploited by mining companies since its economy started shifting from being agriculture-based to being oil-based. In the map, it can be seen that a lot of land from highly protected environmental zones in the Amazon have been leased out for extraction. When Rafael Correa came into power in 2008, he nationalized many of the mining operations. Indigenous groups who used to support him are now protesting against him, for having failed to protect areas like Yasuni that are being given out to Chinese companies, to whom Ecuador owes a lot of debt. In the picture, a farmer shows the toxins that have seeped into his farmland. This has caused people to move from their farms to cities in search of an alternative livelihood. To access the different sets of data, please change the layers or use a combination of them.

While maps like the ones shown above already have information overlaid on them that tell a story, the others, like tourism, would be more effective when overlaid with socio-economic data. This is the next step in the project, though we hope that people will already start using this previously unavailable data as a resource and create their own maps in the process. For maps that currently stand alone, for instance the El Nino map, we have added text and pictures that offer an explanation about why this factor led to displacement and migration.

Ecuadorians are also one of the largest population of immigrants from Latin American. For access to international data on immigration, that shows the larger scale of Latin American immigration to the US, this website (created by Masoom Moitra), can be useful- http://moitm249.github.io/ .