Global lifestyle migration, racialized dispossession, and social-environmental change on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast
Open Access
- Author:
- Emard, Kelsey
- Graduate Program:
- Geography
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- November 08, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Lise Nelson, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Lise Nelson, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Brian H. King, Committee Member
Melissa Wright, Committee Member
Courtney Morris, Outside Member
Cynthia Ann Brewer, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- lifestyle migration
amenity migration
equitable development
human-environment geography
feminist political ecology
postcolonial intersectionality
Black geographies
Latin America - Abstract:
- Over the past twenty years a rapidly growing number of lifestyle-motivated migrants from North America and Europe have moved to destinations throughout the Global South, including Costa Rica’s Caribbean Talamanca coast. The arrival of these comparatively wealthy and mostly white residents has profound implications for receiving communities. While a number of scholars have begun examining this growing migration pattern since the mid-2000s, their studies are dominated by a focus on the motivations and experiences of lifestyle migrants themselves. Critical analyses of the impacts of this migration on destination communities, particularly communities already marginalized within their nation-states, are strikingly infrequent. To help fill this gap, this dissertation examines the impacts of global lifestyle migration on land use, livelihoods, and community participation in coastal Talamanca, a community that prior to the 1990s was comprised primarily of Afro-descendant and Indigenous farmers who have long been marginalized with national political and economic structures. Empirically, I ground my analysis in semi-structured interviews, a household survey, document analysis, participant observation, and geospatial image analysis. Drawing on theoretical approaches in political ecology, Black geographies, intersectional feminisms, and anticolonial theory, I offer an example of an anticolonial approach to studying global lifestyle migration in which the multiple perspectives of diverse local residents in receiving destinations are foregrounded and the enduring colonial logics perpetuated through global lifestyle migration are named and critiqued. Through this approach, this dissertation finds that 1) global lifestyle migration to Talamanca is facilitated by and extends racialized processes of dispossession that began during the colonial era and have been perpetuated through neoliberal capitalist development, 2) social-environmental changes have been both important antecedents to global lifestyle migration and exacerbated by global lifestyle migration, and 3) the impacts of this migration are not felt uniformly by all residents of Talamanca but are mediated by social power structures so that some are able to benefit from the arrival of migrants while others bear the brunt of the negative impacts. These findings point to the importance of shifting the focus of global lifestyle migration scholarship to include the impacts of this migration and the perspectives of local residents.