Emotions, inequalities and crises: Ecuadorian migrants in Europe during the COVID‐19 pandemic

Abstract

This article examines narratives of transnational belonging and transnational practices of care between a group of Ecuadorian migrants in Spain and Italy and their families and friends in Ecuador during the first semester of the COVID‐19 pandemic in 2020. Drawing on the concepts of transnational affective economies (Wilding et al., International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020, 23, 639), the circulation of care (Baldassar & Merla, Transnational families, migration and the circulation of care: understanding mobility and absence in family life. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, London, New York, 2014) and transnational forms of belonging (Boccagni & Baldassar, Emotions, Space and Society, 2015, 16, 73), we look at how despite their still precarious social and labour conditions in destination—which were exacerbated during the pandemic—Ecuadorian migrants activated different forms of belonging and transnational care. Findings reveal that emotions had a crucial role in enabling the transnational circulation of care between family members and friends and a revival of migrants' sense of national belonging. We argue that the crisis generated by COVID‐19 was the occasion for migrants to revisit their sense of belonging as well as their awareness of south–north inequalities since they experienced the crisis simultaneously in Ecuador, Spain and Italy. At the same time, emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger and concern for their families and communities triggered subjective understandings of local and global inequalities that reaffirmed their migration project.

INTRODUCTION

At the turn of the century, Ecuador experienced the emigration of more than 1 million people in response to an unprecedented economic crisis in the country (Herrera et al., 2005). Most Ecuadorians settled in several cities in Spain and to a lesser extent in Italy. These countries attracted international migrants because of an increasing demand for care work as well as the growth of low‐skill economic sectors such as construction, agriculture and tourism, sectors into which the native population were reluctant to insert itself (Triandafyllidou, 2013).

Currently, the Ecuadorian community in these two countries has settled, with a second generation of children born in Europe and an important number of Ecuadorians holding dual citizenship. However, migrants' occupations nowadays indicate little social mobility. For the most part, men and women remain in low‐skilled jobs, and the social and economic gaps between Ecuadorians and nonmigrant persist (Caritas, 2020; Correa & Tituaña, 2018).

In the first quarter of 2020, Italy and Spain were severely impacted by the COVID‐19 pandemic. Both countries reached the highest levels of contagion and death rates in Western Europe (Bosa et al., 2022; Fernández, 2020) and implemented strict curfews and stay‐at‐home orders to fight contagion.

In the same period, Ecuador was one of the most affected countries by the pandemic in Latin America. Both the health system and funeral services collapsed. After Peru, Ecuador had the highest mortality rate in Latin America that year (ECLAC, 2020). Guayaquil, the homeland of many Ecuadorian migrants living in Barcelona, Genoa and Milan, was the country's most affected city and information on the critical condition of its inhabitants circulated globally. As Alarcón (2022) reported, some public hospitals had run out of personal protective equipment; masks and ventilators were not available. Months later, it was revealed that corrupt health administrators had diverted crucial supplies and sold medication on the black market.

Ecuadorian migrant communities in Italy and Spain were also severely impacted by the pandemic. Many Ecuadorians worked in jobs where they risked contagion and even death such as the senior care industry, the health sector, transportation and food provision. While enduring these difficult conditions, Ecuadorians simultaneously experienced the pandemic transnationally, mainly through ITCs, since they were unable to travel to Ecuador due to border closures. The use of internet‐based communication, mobile phones and social media connected them with their families in Ecuador.

This article examines the narratives and practices of transnational co‐presence, care and belonging between a group of Ecuadorian families in Spain and Italy and their relatives and communities in Ecuador in the first semester of 2020, the pandemic's stay‐at‐home and border closure period. We look at how migrants' transnational subjective experience of bifocality (Vertovec, 2004) informed the intensification of transnational practices of care and belonging.

Drawing on the concepts of transnational affective economies (Wilding et al., 2020), the circulation of care (Baldassar & Merla, 2014) and transnational forms of belonging (Boccagni & Baldassar, 2015), we look at the role of emotions in triggering different kinds of exchanges that were activated during the pandemic by migrants and nonmigrants in both directions. On the one hand, we look at the ways Ecuadorians perceived the role of state and social protection in their home country. On the other hand, we examine the ways in which care circulated among transnational families: as co‐presence, information on health and contagion, and financial and material support.

Our analysis is guided by the following questions: What were migrants' perceptions of the effects of the pandemic in their home country? How do these perceptions shape their transnational practices? What was the role of emotions in triggering these transnational practices? What sort of subjective understandings of their migration project came out of this transnational way of experiencing the pandemic?

Findings reveal that emotions had a crucial role in enabling the transnational circulation of care between family members and friends, and a revival of a sense of belonging to their homeland. We argue that the crisis generated by COVID‐19 was the occasion for migrants to revisit their sense of belonging as well as their awareness of south–north inequalities since they experienced the crisis simultaneously in Ecuador, Spain and Italy. At the same time, emotions such as fear, anxiety, anger and concern for their families and communities triggered subjective understandings of local and global inequalities that confirmed their migration project.

Our analysis seeks to contribute to the growing literature on the role of emotions in transnational practices. By looking at the narratives of belonging and transnational practices developed by Ecuadorian migrants in a very particular moment of crisis, the first wave of the pandemic, this article offers an understanding of how that global crisis was experienced transnationally and the central role of emotions in this experience. While several studies have centred on how emotions are constitutive of transnational practices of care and belonging, the study of such practices in a crisis situation such as the pandemic makes visible a third dimension of transnational experience which is the subjective understanding of social inequalities and the lack of social protection in the home country. Overall, approaching the subject through emotions allows to deepen our understanding of the contradictory way in which transnational practices take place and are sustained by migrants.

The article is organized in five sections: we start with a discussion on the role of emotions in the construction of belonging and transnational practices of care. In Section Methodology, we present our methodology. In the third section, we provide some background information on Ecuadorian migration to Spain and Italy before and during the pandemic. We look at their labour conditions as well as their access to social protection within the COVID crisis as the backdrop for the following discussion. In the fourth section, we examine transnational practices of care and migrants' narratives of belonging. To close, we provide a few conclusions.

Emotions and transnational practices

Emotions, belonging and care in transnational fields

Our analysis of Ecuadorian transnational practices during the pandemic draws on conceptual discussions of the role of emotions in transnational fields. We start with some working definitions of emotions in migration and then explore two issues: the place of emotions in sustaining or transforming ways of belonging and the role of emotions in transnational care. In doing so, we seek to offer a set of concepts that enable an interpretation of the relationship between transnational practices and subjective understandings of social inequalities during the pandemic.

Emotions in migration studies have been mainly defined as socially constructed and intersubjective (Ahmed, 2004). That is, rather than personal and individual feelings, emotions are relational, and they produce social reality (Ibid). Second, emotions are culturally and historically situated (Boccagni & Baldassar, 2015). Migrants' feelings of concern, anger, longing or nostalgia for their relatives or for their homeland are not static; they evolve over time and may transform migrants' subjective understandings and forms of belonging (Ibid). Third, emotions are not only shaped by interactions but also rely on memories and imagination (Skrbiš, 2008; Svasek, 2010). We base our interpretation on a definition of emotions that embraces these three dimensions.

Regarding the specific relation between emotions and transnationality, in their review of the field, Boccagni and Baldassar (2015) articulate different ways in which emotions have informed transnational studies: (1) as central to the discussions of identity and belonging; (2) as part of the debates on transnational practice of care; and (3) in discussions about xenophobia and fear, among others. In this piece, we focus on the first two and look at the role of emotions in transnational care practices and in sustaining subjective ties to the homeland.

With respect to belonging, Boccagni and Baldassar (2015) point to the centrality of emotions, not only in sustaining attachment to the homeland, but on the transformative and contradictory character that belonging, and attachments hold in migrants' experience. They recall the “multilocality of migrants' emotional orientation” and “the coexistence of different, even conflicting and ambivalent emotional orientations, as part and parcel of migrants' emotional experience.” (Boccagni & Baldassar, 2015: 75). In their telling, immigrants' attachment to the homeland or the persistence (or abandonment) of transnational practices is not unilinear or straight‐line processes of assimilation or disengagement. Rather, emotions are a useful point of entry to examine the complexities, ambiguities and ambivalence of simultaneous affection and distress in migrants' experience over time (Boccagni & Baldassar, 2015). As we will see below, during a crisis such as COVID‐19, migrants may reinforce their sense of belonging to their homeland and at the same time fortify their resolve to stay in Europe as a more secure place. They may feel anger and anxiety and at the same time empathy for their homeland.

In addition to multilocality, a second aspect important for our analysis is the role of emotions in reinforcing transnational practices at certain moments. According to Tedeschi et al. (2020) “for certain individuals, transnationalism is a temporary, rather than a constant, way of living, where physical and virtual, mobilities and immobilities, are lived as flexible, loose, and non‐linear spaces in between” (Tedeschi et al., 2020: 611). Studies have shown that transnational ties may intensify in one period of time and decrease in another and that there is no fixed relation between settlement and cross‐border ties (Faist, 2019). Emotions play an important role in triggering transnationality in certain stages of migration. Migrants may sometimes idealize their homeland when discrimination occurs in destination or the opposite: frequent visits may discourage return and confirm the rightfulness of the migratory project (Tedeschi et al., 2020). In other words, discussions on transnationality and emotions with regard to belonging call for a nonlinear understanding of transnational subjectivities and practices; these can appear and re‐emerge in emotionally intense contexts such as the COVID‐19 crisis.

With respect to our understanding of emotions in transnational practices of care, we draw on the concepts of the circulation of care (Baldassar & Merla, 2014) and the circulation of affective economies in transnational families (Wilding et al., 2020) to examine Ecuadorian migrants' exchanges with their relatives and with their homeland.

Baldassar and Merla (2014) define the circulation of care as the “reciprocal, multidirectional and asymmetrical exchange of care that fluctuates over the life course within transnational family networks” (2014: 8) This concept captures the complexity of these engagements and is useful for our analysis on four grounds. First, it highlights the importance of temporality. Migrant families may start engaging transnational care exchanges with children left behind at the beginning of migration and shift over time to the transnational care of ageing adults. As we will see below, this notion of temporality is particularly relevant to our case since Ecuadorian families migrated on average 20 years ago, and while they may have maintained transnational care practice with their children in the early stage of migration (Herrera, 2013), during the COVID‐19 crisis they were deeply concerned about their ageing parents back home.

Second, the concept of care circulation points to the combination of physical proximity (through frequent visits) and practices at a distance. While several studies have acknowledged that ITCs enable a sense of co‐presence and of “being there” in spite of physical distance, face‐to‐face interactions are still central to the persistence of transnational care (Baldassar et al., 2016). Indeed, the interruption of visits may cause care crises within transnational families as demonstrated by studies that examine the consequences of immobility regimes affecting refugees, undocumented migrants or migrants in transit (Merla et al., 2020).

Physical proximity is precisely what came into crisis during the pandemic with the closing of borders, and while ITCs were already part of migrants' everyday life, we are interested in looking at how Ecuadorian migrants in Spain and Italy reinforced their transnational digital practices through various means to cope with the impossibility to travel. In a similar vein, Svasek (2022) has explored lockdown routines among migrants in Ireland and arrives at the conclusion that Covid‐19 had, “paradoxically, both intensified contact and reinforced a sense of distance.” She found that forced immobility generated an emotional need for increased contact and for additional communicative engagement.

Wilding et al. offer a unique perspective to interweave emotions and transnational care practices. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's concept of affective economies, they propose to analyse emotions as relational and productive: “circulated emotions ‘do things’, aligning individuals and constructing social fields that are binding and meaningful because they are ‘felt’, and become part of the self and of the collective” (Wilding et al., 2020: 643). Thus, transnational affective economies are created through kin work and emotional work that people perform in transnational fields and are central to the existence of transnational families and communities (Ibid).

In this article, we use the concept of the circulation of care to study how migrant families circulated financial, emotional and practical support during the pandemic while being impeded from accessing physical proximity. Thus, digital co‐presence and a sense of “being there” through ITCs were crucial for Ecuadorian migrant families in the critical phase of the pandemic.

At the same time, we use the concept of affective economies to examine the circulation of emotions in transnational exchanges. We are interested in looking at how emotions triggered practices of care, enhanced or transformed migrants' sense of connection to their homeland and produced subjective and moral understandings of their transnational lives.

Social inequalities and transnational exchanges

A third dimension that we introduce in the analysis is the relationship between inequalities and migration, and how it relates to transnational care practices and belonging.

The relationship between migration and social inequalities has been extensively examined in Latin American migrations to Europe. Many studies refer to migration as a transnational way to deal with precarious livelihoods and a lack of prospects in the countries of origin. The feminization of migration inspired approaches based on concepts such as global care chains (Hochschild, 2001), transnational motherhood (Hondagneu‐Sotelo & Ávila, 1997), transnational social reproduction (Parreñas, 2002) and transnational families (Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002). These approaches were adopted by scholars in Latin America to analyse the migration of Ecuadorian, Bolivian and Colombian women and their families to Italy and Spain (Herrera, 2020; Lagomarsino, 2006; Oso, 2016; Parella, 2013). Many of these works examine women's migration and their active participation in transnational practices through remittances, communications and caregiving activities as part of the globalization of social reproduction. Overall, these studies argue that migration is part of a system of structural global inequalities and underline the migrants' role as transnational actors of globalized networks of care.

Recent works have articulated informal systems of social reproduction (families) with the institutional organization of care, such as states, the market and social organizations. Notions such as transnational regimes of care (Skornia, 2014) or transnational forms of social protection (Bilecen et al., 2019; Faist, 2019; Levitt et al., 2016) connect transnational social reproduction with discussions on social protection. These works discuss how migrants deploy cross‐border strategies to deal with different types of risks: health, care for the elderly and children and unemployment (Bilecen et al., 2019; Castellani & Martín‐Díaz, 2019; Levitt et al., 2016). They examine formal and informal mechanisms of transnational social protection that migrant families deploy in the face of global inequalities and a lack of protection from states (Boccagni, 2011; Herrera, 2013; Parella & Speroni, 2018; Skornia, 2014).

As pointed out by Merla et al. (2020: 394) transnational families' engagements in care‐related practices function as informal sources of social protection across space and time. These engagements change over time and could become more or less intense depending on multiple factors. As we will see in our case study, during the COVID‐19 crisis, migrant families were well aware of the lack of social protection in the countries of origin and of their role as care providers to their families.

Along these lines, Thomas Faist's work (2019) is particularly relevant for our analysis. Faist argues that international migration is a reflection of global economic and political inequality that reinforces long‐term forms of social stratification but can also provide opportunities for social mobility. Therefore, looking at how migrants challenge these locations of social inequality is a central task. “Migration may be an adaptive response to social risks and threats in countries of emigration and at the same time perpetuate old inequalities and create new ones” (2019: 21).

We think the pandemic, as a crisis, is an event that renders visible this double role of migration as a way to cope with risks and vulnerability and as a site for the accentuation of social inequalities. By looking at transnational practices of care and transnational belonging, we examine how the pandemic revived migrants' perception of global inequalities between the nations of origin and destination, and in particular a sense of vulnerability and lack of protection. Such perceptions were mainly triggered by emotions such as fear, anger and concern for their families and communities. These emotions in turn triggered transnational practices of emotional and material care.

METHODOLOGY

In this article, we present qualitative data gathered between April and July 2020 during the most severe impact of COVID‐19 on mortality rates in Spain and Italy. Both countries implemented strict lockdowns to prevent contagion. We were confined and working from home during the research period, while our interviewees worked outside despite the lockdowns.

Gathering information via traditional research methods under those circumstances was impossible; the only way to collect data was through mixed online tools, such as online forms and remote interview modes as telephone‐assisted or video interviews.

Previously established relationships of trust and work with migrant groups and association leaders in Italy and Spain enabled us to take a snowball approach during the research phase. Other factors also contributed to gathering information amidst the difficulties and the little availability of our respondents: Both researchers in Spain and Italy are Ecuadorian; they not only share cultural understandings with respondents but also experienced similar fears and concerns about the COVID‐19 crisis in their homeland.

The interviews addressed four aspects: Migrants' work before and during the pandemic, risks to their access to social protections and public health resources, the impact of COVID in Ecuador, and the transnational practices with the home country. In Italy, 34 interviews were collected; 18 were conducted by telephone and 16 via online form.

We gathered information on 21 women and 13 men living in the following cities: Milan, Genoa, Vado Ligure, Rome, Parma, Turin, Bergamo, Savona and Melzo. With an average age of 47, most of our respondents have been living in Italy for about 20 years; 41% hold higher education degrees, 21% have professional training, and 26.5% completed high school. In terms of family structures, 41% were married, 27% single and 21% divorced. With regard to occupation, most of the respondents—men and women—were care workers, either privately or in nursing homes. Other respondents work in housekeeping, commercial and industrial sectors. 75% of them hold a residence permit, and 25% hold dual citizenship. All of them have relatives in Ecuador, and some also do in other European countries and in the United States.

In Spain, 17 interviews were collected, 14 were conducted using video‐conferencing and three were completed via online form. Twelve of the respondents were women, and five were men; they live in Madrid and Barcelona, the main destinations for Ecuadorians in Spain. Respondents' ages range between 30 and 56 years old; 41% hold higher education degrees, 24% have professional training, 29% are high school graduates, and 5% did not finish high school. They have been living in Spain for about 20 years. In terms of family structure, 76% live with a partner and children, 17% are not living with their children anymore, and 6% are single mothers. In terms of occupation, they mainly have jobs as domestic workers, care workers or health operators. Others work in supermarket chains and one in the army.

During the interviews, we were able to collect different emotional narratives related both to their daily situation in Spain or Italy and, above all, to their family's situation in Ecuador. We think that the fact of conducting the interviews in the midst of the pandemic, of being nationals of the same country, and sharing specific cultural understandings and assumptions, created an atmosphere conducive to the deployment of emotional narratives. We were able to identify four main recurrent types of emotions: fear, nostalgia, anger and deep concern or anxiety. These feelings were not fixed but could easily change during the interview.

Following Svasek (2010), we classify these emotional narratives into three categories: discourses, practices and embodied experiences. The first refers to emotions as cultural categories that produce a certain knowledge about the world and the self. In our analysis, we include narratives on belonging and moral judgements on their home country as part of these emotional discourses. The second category of practices refers to the performative nature of emotions in terms of learned behaviour or the deliberate politics of emotions. Narratives about the kind of transnational care practices deployed by our interviewees—such as videos, supportive calls, WhatsApp group chats and collective fundraising activities—are part of what we conceptualize as emotional practices. Due to the limitations of online interviews, we were unable to capture embodied experiences.

ECUADORIAN MIGRATION TO SPAIN AND ITALY: NAVIGATING BETWEEN CRISES

Over the past 50 years, migration has been a livelihood strategy for more than one and a half million Ecuadorians. From the seventies to this day, the United States has been an important destination for men and, more recently, for women too; Spain and Italy became the main destinations in Europe. Ecuadorians migrated to Europe at the turn of the century, when the country went through an acute economic crisis (Herrera et al., 2005; Ramírez & Ramírez, 2005). Currently, Ecuadorians are the largest Latin American community in Spain and they represent the second largest Latin American community in Italy.

With the advent of the 2008 global financial crisis, migration to Europe decreased and some migrants went back to Ecuador or re‐migrated to other EU countries (Herrera & Pérez Martinez, 2015). However, a large majority of Ecuadorian migrants stayed in Spain and Italy (Correa & Tituaña, 2018; Iglesias Martínez et al., 2015).

By 2021, INE counts 413,642 people of Ecuadorian origin living in Spain, 301,642 of whom have Spanish citizenship (INE, 2021); a large majority of the noncitizens hold resident permits (Iglesias Martínez et al., 2015). In Italy, by 2020, there were 72,644 Ecuadorians, 18,750 of whom held Italian citizenship (Ministero del Lavoro e delle Politiche Sociali, 2020).

While citizenship and resident permits provide migrants access to social protection systems in both countries, this does not necessarily equal social mobility for Ecuadorian migrants. For the most part, men and women remain in low‐skill jobs and social and economic gaps between Ecuadorians and nonmigrants persist (Caritas, 2020; Correa & Tituaña, 2018). According to Iglesias Martínez et al. (2015: 69), by 2015 only 3.5% of Ecuadorians were engaged in professional activities of medium and high qualification while 63.8% were concentrated in low‐skill or unskilled jobs. In the case of women, this increases to 73%. The situation is similar in Italy: only 4% of Ecuadorians are inserted in intellectual or technical professions; 40% are concentrated in unskilled sectors, followed by the industrial sector (23%); trade and restaurants (19%) and transport (17%) (Ministero del Lavoro e delle Politiche Sociali, 2020).

With respect to transnational practices, migrants make extensive use of social media networks to stay informed about their homeland and to communicate with relatives. After, on average, 20 years of migration, direct communication is particularly intense with ageing parents, and the use of social media to interact with other family members and friends is extensive. Facebook is the most used social network, and it is followed by communication via WhatsApp and regular telephone calls (Iglesias, Ibid: 121). As we will see below, these types of connections were greatly intensified during the pandemic. Meanwhile, remittances remained steady. In 2020, they reached 770M USD in Spain and 163M USD in Italy. Both numbers represented a slight increase with respect to 2019 (Banco Central del Ecuador, 2021).

Ecuadorian migrants facing the coronavirus crisis in Spain and Italy

During the pandemic, most of our interviewees did not stop working unless they got sick. They worked frontline jobs related to the food and care sectors which require physical presence, and consequently, a greater exposure to the virus; many of them expressed that they performed their activities in the midst of a climate of uncertainty and fear. Others were told to stop working. They were faced with the precariousness of their economic situation and the risk of having their work shifts cancelled until further notice.

With regard to those migrants who never stopped working during the lockdown in both countries, we find various scenarios which triggered different types of emotions and memories about their situation: For instance, Rodrigo, from Madrid, was in charge of logistics and transportation of food and other goods. In his case, more than fear about being in contact with other people, he experienced fear, uncertainty and loneliness.

Frontline workers expressed fear of contagion due to frequent interactions with other people. Key, a bakery assistant in Savona, did not know how to protect herself from the virus at the beginning of the pandemic, which created a great deal anxiety for her. Aracely and her son, both supermarket cashiers in Madrid, were scared of infecting their husband and father, who is in poor health.

Exposure to the virus was higher in workers who carried out logistical or cleaning tasks. Leonardo, who works in a cleaning company, was supposed to do cleaning services in four buildings where people had passed away, and many times he thought he was infected. Jefferson, as part of the Army, oversaw hospital logistics. He had to set up beds and to arrange several areas including the hospital that was arranged for COVID patients in Campo de las Naciones. In the midst of all this work, he fell ill.

The most exposed group were health and care workers. Clinics, hospitals and nursing homes were the most common outbreak locations where the virus spread despite the early sanitary measures adopted in these places. Mariana, a worker in the care services for the Municipality of Madrid, was infected by the 84‐year‐old woman she cared for. Many other Mariana's co‐workers got sick, and some even died.

In nursing homes, deaths were recorded every day. Violeta and Myrta in Madrid not only had to assist the elderly in their daily needs, but they also took care of the corpses when the crisis overwhelmed the nursing home's capacity. Referrals to hospitals were prohibited, creating a work overload for the staff at these facilities.

Social protection amidst the pandemic in Spain and Italy

While all of our interviewees have permanent residency or citizenship, their access to government social protection policies during the pandemic was not always guaranteed in both countries. This access depended on the economic sector workers were inserted in and on the kind of contract they held.

As mentioned above, Ecuadorian migrants in Italy and Spain mostly work in unskilled jobs that frequently include a wide range of informal arrangements. As stated by one of our interviewees, “Italian employers are used to lavoro in nero” (undeclared work) so they do not pay taxes. This is especially the case for care and domestic workers who do not always have employment contracts (Parella, 2020; Zanfrini, 2021).

In Italy, only one‐third or our interviewees benefited from Cassa Integrazione, the monetary compensation for workers due to the reduction or suspension of work enacted by the state during the pandemic. Cassa Integrazione was not intended for the care sector in which four out of 10 workers are foreigners (Zanfrini, 2021: 289). Thus, domestic workers and caregivers could not get it.

In Spain, the state set up the Temporary Employment Regulation File (ERTE for its acronym in Spanish), through which companies could lay off workers temporarily while employees received a percentage of their salary. As with Cassa Integrazione, ERTE only meant temporary relief for very few of our interviewees. In the case of domestic workers with formal contracts, they could receive the Extraordinary Subsidy for Household Employees. However, according to Parella (2020), of the 32,000 applications submitted in May 2020, by August 17 just 200 had been accepted.

Thus, for many care workers, the lockdown meant a temporal suspension of their work without compensation. For instance, Luz—whose main job was to assist an elderly woman—had to stop working because her employer decided to close his business and to look after his mother himself. Others had to suspend their secondary jobs due to police controls during curfews. Some workers had to spend the lockdown at their workplaces, in some cases without the possibility of even negotiating their wages. Jenny, for example, spent more than 65 days with her employer, and she was unable to see her husband who, at one point, got sick. Her employers refused to pay her overtime, and she had no choice but to accept; otherwise, she felt she would have lost her job. Jefferson's mother also had to agree to stay in her employer's home because, at her advanced age, she said she could not risk losing her job. It is very common for older immigrant women to feel even more vulnerable due to their status as foreigners and to holding informal jobs.

Another issue was uncertainty as to whether, in the face of the coming economic crisis, companies would prefer to hire Spanish or Italian citizens rather than immigrants. In Italy, half of respondents expressed a fear of losing their jobs as a consequence of the pandemic. This feeling was linked to concerns about eventually losing access to the public health system as well:

I have lots of friends who have ended up losing their jobs or where they are both out of work. And of course… I think that empathy will be more towards their own people, rather than us from overseas. I don't think it's racism as such, but I think that when someone applies for a job, I don't know, I think Spaniards are going to have more priority. So, in that regard, I think that many immigrants are going to be harmed. (Soraya, Madrid)

Such fears were fed by statements made by some political parties such as VOX in the case of Spain, which called for the withdrawal of free healthcare for undocumented immigrants during the state of emergency and for their expulsion from Spain (González, 2020).

These narratives of fear and concern arose in an emotional context. As Williams (2018) states, emotions are not limited to personal histories and individual anecdotes; they also bring otherwise abstract ideas of oppression and discrimination into stark relief for individual actors. In the case of Ecuadorian migrants, distrust of the protections (health and economic) that the government of their countries of residence could activate in the face of the coronavirus pandemic is related to the history of vulnerability of their migration experience, characterized in most cases by precariousness and, in some cases, discrimination (Iglesias Martínez et al., 2015).

In sum, our interviewees were not really confined during the pandemic; they were frontline workers or what Xiang and Sorensen (2020) called substitute workers, who went out so that other people could stay at home. They experienced income decreases or unemployment, and only some of them could access the government's compensation programmes. While narrating the social and labour conditions they faced, all of them expressed feelings of anxiety and fear for several reasons: first, due to the risk of contagion and death, and second due to their immigrant conditions which make them feel more vulnerable than the rest of the population. While all of them were regular residents or even citizens of Spain or Italy, a subjective feeling of being foreigners emerged when thinking about the possibility of losing their job.

EMOTIONS, BELONGING AND TRANSNATIONAL CARE PRACTICES

As mentioned above, Ecuador went through a devastating situation in the first months of the pandemic. This situation was mentioned by all our interviewees who, without exception, expressed strong feelings of concern and anxiety for their relatives in their homeland. In this section, first, we examine how the circulation of public information and private communications through ICT tools during the pandemic provoked the circulation of emotional narratives of despair, anxiety and anger among transnational migrants. Then, we look at how such feelings triggered the implementation of diverse forms of transnational care practices among families and communities. Drawing on Wilding et al. (2020) we examine how the pandemic crisis intensified the circulation of emotions and in doing so reinforced both migrants' sense of belonging to their homeland and the affective economies of transnational families. Both discourses on the homeland and transnational practices of material and emotional support raised awareness of the unequal conditions they and their families and fellow citizens were undergoing during the pandemic.

According to Boccagni and Baldassar (2015), the function of emotions as a catalyst of forms of belonging could be ambivalent and contradictory. For Ecuadorian migrants, images of corpses strewn in the streets and news about the collapse of the health system, which circulated globally, generated a paradoxical reaction of love and anger surrounding what one of our respondents called “our homeland drama”:

Unfortunately, the most negative part about Coronavirus is the drama of our people… what has affected us the most was to watch people running on the streets carrying their dead. That is a fact… the psychological and emotional damage that we have experienced by watching our homeland drama and being far from it. (Leonardo, Savona)

Following Svasek (2022), the pandemic enlarges the sense of distance and the impossibility of “being there,” thus creating more anxiety and increasing the need for more connections. For instance, several interviewees began to be part of international WhatsApp groups of friends and relatives as a way to stay connected and support each other with information and advice:

I come from a very poor neighborhood in Guayaquil, [called] Mapasingue… Messages from a WhatsApp group with my former neighbors mentioned 87 dead people within five blocks! In Guayaquil, my neighbors! The one next to our place died a few days ago, next was the one from the next door on the right, then the one on the left; the one across…. and, my mother's house in the middle of them… we were just waiting to be called on the phone by dawn and be told that our mother got sick. (Ivonne, Barcelona)

In this case, transnational digital interactions with friends and former neighbours enabled the circulation of emotions within such networks sustained by a shared cultural understanding of the situation, creating what Wilding et al. (2020) called “transnational affective economies.” For the authors, the type of emotions that circulate is not as relevant as the circulation itself which is what allows migrants to maintain not only a sense of familyhood but a sense of connection with their homeland and of belonging to a transnational community. Furthermore, other respondents highlighted in their narratives a strong disappointment for the negligent way in which the Ecuadorian government handled the crisis and set forth moral judgements on the state's corruption and incapacity to manage the pandemic. In line with Svasek (2010), emotions are also carriers of moral judgements which are socially constructed:

…knowing that the Ecuadorian military is not the Spanish military, right? Like, over there [in Ecuador] they're thinking of stealing the body bags. Like, there's no way to compare. (Dimitri, Madrid)

Shortages of medications and oxygen tanks, among others, are aspects highlighted during our conversations. Several budget cuts had weakened the already poor Ecuadorian health system as part of structural adjustment policies undertaken right before the pandemic (Hurtado Caicedo & Velasco Abad, 2020):

Yes, my brother died in Ecuador. My brother died in those hospitals don't have medications. He went to get care and they did not give him medications and he died… he died from lack of oxygen and from lack of medications. (Heric, Milan)

My little niece was brought to the hospital …and we had to buy everything [medications] You know how things work in Ecuador, don't you? […] My niece could not breathe, they gave her oxygen… It was not enough… by the time we got the tests my niece was already dead. (Alex, Savona)

These two statements are categorical in showing the crisis of the health system in Ecuador as part of a shared understanding of the lack of social protections that is presented as part of a sort of fixed, idiosyncratic feature of their homeland. Alex held a similar narrative when expressing his anxiety of being far away in the midst of uncertainty on how “the government of my country is dealing with the crisis.”

At the same time, the fact of experiencing the pandemic transnationally induced a bifocal comparative assessment between their own situation and the situation in Ecuador that somewhat reinforced their contradictory feelings for their homeland.

As highlighted by researchers such as Svasek (2010) or Skrbiš (2008), emotions also rely on memories and imagination. When the great migration flow of Ecuadorians took place at the end of the 1990s, the reasons behind their decision were political instability, economic problems and the daily sensation of a lack of prospects for a better future (Carrillo & Cortés, 2008). The COVID‐19 pandemic crisis and the painful news coming from home engendered a revival of these feelings. Although the disease had serious effects in countries like Spain or Italy, it was not comparable to what was happening with relatives who could not even find medicines or a bed in a hospital:

I think our thoughts were mainly over there, not that much here. Here [in Madrid] I never considered that the sanitary situation was a problem. But I'm very concerned about my parents and my family in Ecuador, since we know that resources over there are just basic. (Soraya, Madrid)

This comparison was not only about health but also about the poor economic conditions that people were facing. Indeed, the pandemic affected people's livelihoods and worsened an already very deteriorated labour market. Between September 2019 and September 2020, Ecuador lost 700,000 jobs in the formal sector (Mideros, 2020). This crisis was perceived clearly by Ecuadorian migrants in Spain and Italy, thus confirming to them the persistence of limited life opportunities in their homeland:

As you can see, the crisis has worsened over there. They have neither ERTE nor unemployment compensations. People don't have jobs. So, it's worse. I am worried more than ever, I'm more concerned about what is going on in Ecuador than here. After all, here, we are somewhat overcoming the situation, but as for them, it's getting worse and worse. (Jefferson, Madrid)

Lastly, the reinforcement of a sense of belonging to the homeland during the COVID‐19 crisis was also expressed by feelings of empathy with a nation in need of help from its transnational migrants, as mentioned by Aracelly, who after explaining the kind of financial relief compensations she knew existed in Spain stated:

As for Ecuador, I haven't heard a thing [about compensations and specific policies]. I haven't heard of any help for the people… but what kind of help can we expect if what Ecuador needs is our help! (Aracely, Madrid)

As shown below, feelings of anger, sorrow and empathy for the homeland were followed by narratives of strong concern and anxiety for the situations of their relatives and activated a series of transnational care practices. We have identified three kinds of care practices: emotional support through intense digital co‐presence, the exchange of information on how to deal with COVID‐19 and financial support.

Indeed, migrants intensified their virtual communications—mainly phone and video calls—to support each other in enduring the virus. Interestingly, transnational support flowed in both directions. Initially, when the first COVID cases appeared in Europe, phone and video calls were made from families in Ecuador to relatives and friends in Italy and Spain. Later, when the situation in Ecuador got worse, support went the other way round. For instance, when Mariana was sick and in the hospital, her parents called her every day from Ecuador. She mentioned that these calls contributed to her recovery. Jefferson received several calls from his brothers who were scared about COVID‐19 in Spain. However, as the days passed, it was he who offered advice and recommendations to his relatives and friends in Ecuador.

Others went beyond emotional co‐presence and exchanged information on how to deal with COVID‐19 as a way to cope with their own anxiety. For instance, Esteban performed virtual support to his sisters while hiding his emotions of fear and dispiritedness that he was unable to travel to his hometown to help:

…some of my sisters are nurses so I talked to them, explaining some of the symptoms and the kind of pain. By watching YouTube videos I realized that in Ecuador many people pretended to be expert virologists….Everybody seemed entitled to give any kind of advice. I try to calm down my sisters, to give them some psychological support. Meanwhile, I myself got desperate since there's not even a flight I can board…I have a plane ticket for next August, but I don't know if by then I'll be able to travel. (Esteban, Rome)

As mentioned by other works, digital kinning (Wilding et al., 2020) is not exempt from silence and negotiations of what feelings are allowed to be shown or hidden within transnational families. In this case, Esteban decided to silence his anxiety of not being able to travel and be present and instead increased his digital exchanges.

Other cases include all three components of transnational care: digital co‐presence and emotional support, the exchange of information and the provision of financial support. This is the case of Sandry, whose mother got very sick. Sandry coordinated her care from a distance with the help of friends and relatives in the United States and Quito:

My mom got sick and in order to help her I had to contact friends in the US and friends in Quito to see what we could do, so they were saying we have to give her Azythromycin! That has been the most difficult part because we have had to “assist” her telematically… My mother almost died, if it wasn't because we got the medicines, the oxygen, we even hired a nurse, all of it paid by us [from here], so we were able to get her out of it….going through this from afar has been terrible! Living through the crisis telematically! (Sandy, Parma)

Financial assistance was also very common and is understood as an obvious almost natural consequence of the situation, to show emotional support in difficult moments.

This is the case of Alex who sent remittances to his family the same day he learnt that his niece passed away:

When they called me and told about my niece's death, it was 11pm in Ecuador, 6am here… I went immediately to the “Indian's place” to transfer money. (Alex, Savona)

Or the case of Kelly, in Barcelona who financially supports her sister's family because both she and her husband lost their jobs:

I have been trying to help as much as I can… they need so much support…. My sister has two toddlers to take care of. My brother‐in‐law had to close his laboratory. They have been spending all their savings…. (Kelly, Barcelona)

Lastly, we also found some collective transnational care practices led by migrant associations. This is the case of Ivonne from Guayaquil, who is the president of the Nina Pacari Association in Barcelona. She set up online video meetings connecting people in Spain and Ecuador with tips on psychological support geared at helping people mourn after the passing of a loved one. This association also prepared tutorial videos for their former neighbours in Mapasingue on how to take care of the corpses of their relatives to prevent danger and contagion. They also included videos, interviews and selfcare information on a Facebook page.

Other fundraising initiatives in Spain were set up to send food, money and other supplies such as the one organized by “Madrid abraza a Ecuador” that raised money via Facebook.

In Italy, a Savona‐based Ecuadorian Association joined an initiative implemented by a partner project in Otavalo to support people in need during the pandemic. Fundraising actions were shared with affiliates and friends in Italy via WhatsApp messages. In the same way, an informal WhatsApp group named “assistenza COVID” was created in Lazio by an Ecuadorian psychologist. These actions recall the resourcefulness shown by Ecuadorian migrants after the 2016 earthquake, when several platforms of migrant organizations were launched to send money to the most destroyed regions. Both individually and collectively, this support is an example of the role of migrants as key actors in globalized networks of care.

The sum of emotional narratives of love and anger towards the homeland and the practices of care and support towards their families and beyond create a circulation of transnational affective economies among transnational migrants with their families and communities that reinforce a sense of belonging and familyhood. But they also unleash moral judgements and a painful verification of the lack of social protections in Ecuador.

As with the crisis of the health system, the failure of the state is seen as a structural feature of the country and the product, for some respondents, of the profound social inequalities that pervade it, once again, as compared to their current place of residence. This was clearly expressed by Soraya in Barcelona, when she said: “You know, it's not the same here than there. There's no middle class over there, just rich and poor people.”

Indeed, although Ecuadorian migrants endured economic crises in Ecuador before migrating and also in 2008 in the destination countries, they had not experienced the same global drama affecting each so unequally ever before.

In sum, the pandemic has fostered an ambiguous dynamic: emotions such as sorrow and anger over events in Ecuador reaffirmed a sense of national belonging and, at the same time, confirmed their decision to migrate and be somewhere else. Indeed, the pandemic meant for many migrants a way to revisit their motivations to migrate: little hope in the future, awareness of deep social inequalities and the absence of protections at many levels. At the same time, they deployed family and collective transnational practices of care that reinforced their sense of belonging and their emotional connection with their families.

CONCLUSIONS

This article tackles the relationship between structural inequalities and subjective understandings of inequalities and social protection and how this correspondence takes place in transnational fields. We examine how the COVID‐19 crisis triggered transnational practices and belonging in migrants' experience. In this sense, our analysis seeks to make a contribution on the relevance of emotions in understanding the many contradictions in which transnational migration is lived.

The dramatic situation in the homeland reactivated migrants' feeling of being part of the same national drama, such that feelings of anger and concern mobilized transnational practices to help both their families and their communities. At the same time, the tragic picture of Ecuador during the first peak of the pandemic reactivated memories associated with negative issues in the country and was used to affirm their original decision to move, despite the vulnerable situation that many of them still endure after 20 years of migration.

Migrants and families activated several kinds of transnational protection mechanisms in both directions. These exchanges enabled the circulation of emotional support between family members and friends. Care was channelled in different ways: emotional support through intense digital co‐presence, the exchange of information on how to deal with COVID‐19 and financial support.

Testimonials were paramount to understanding how the global effects of the pandemic had a significant effect on migrants' lives as they experienced it more dramatically since the uncertainty generated by border closures increased their sense of distance and nostalgia. Ecuadorian migrants had to arrange tremendous emotional work to find a way to help their families in their homeland where the situation was worse.

PEER REVIEW

The peer review history for this article is available at https://publons.com/publon/10.1111/imig.13070.

Herrera, G. Espinosa, M. C. C. & Lara‐Reyes, R. (2022) Emotions, inequalities and crises: Ecuadorian migrants in Europe during the COVID‐19 pandemic. International Migration, 00, 1–16. Available from: 10.1111/imig.13070

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.