“The earth becomes an orphan,” said Aída thinking of the effects of emigration on Azuay, Ecuador, the province where she was born. “Grandmothers also become orphans.” She reflected, “They lose children of their own, and later they will lose their other children, their grandchildren, whom they cared for. They are the children of their children that went to the United States before and now they ‘send for them’ so they’ll also migrate”. That chain orphanhood—mothers that lose their children; children their fathers, their mothers or both parents; grandmothers that lose their grandchildren; and whole communities that become deserted—, has left an imprint on the rural and urban history of the Ecuadorian Austro. This region, located on the southern range of Ecuador, is formed by the provinces of Azuar and Cañar. Men and women have steadily migrated from this region to the United States since at least the end of the 1960s.

Aída is 33. Though her only daughter is seven, she learned to be a mother at the start of adolescence.

“My older sister played the role of the young mother. She helped my mother, who minded for the children of my migrant siblings. Later, when she left, it was my turn”.

Aída 33,years old.

Aída was only 14 when she became the caregiver of her niece and nephew, both less than five years old, whose parents had migrated. Aída and her mother, Doña Leonor, shared the tasks of taking care of the children. Aída’s mother oversaw the home economics, the work in the chacra (farm), and sales in the central market of Gualaceo. Aída,

“[…] had other tasks. I made the food, washed the clothes. We went to school together because the three of us were studying. I would sing to my niece and nephew. I played with them, or we celebrated their birthdays.”

Aída 33, years old.

Meanwhile, Aída grew up and started living with the absence of part of her family. She missed her migrant siblings but spoke to them on the phone once a week, when they called their children. Later, with the internet on her cellphone, Aída could even see them. Those virtual meetings, she said, “help, they always help to forget, even for just a while, that they’re not here anymore.” The sorrow and pain her mother carried for living far from her children also accompanied her in her day to day life. Though with time, Leonor got used to the physical absence of her four children, she always missed them more, and the pain also grew more each day: in 20 years, Aída’s four siblings, still undocumented, could not return to Ecuador to visit their mother. And although Aída shared Doña Leonor’s anxiety because her grandchildren were growing without parents, she knew that her niece and nephew, young as they were, slowly soothed the pain of that absence. “My niece and nephew,” said Aída, “even though they didn’t have a father and a mother, had other mothers, and different types of mothers, and that helped them forget the pain of being far from their parents, my migrant siblings.” Thus, those who stayed, invented a new life in Dotaxi, the indigenous community where she was born and grew up in in Azuay. In the midst of the orphanhood that migration causes, they recreated a life that lasted until the nieces and nephews left to undertake the journey themselves. Paying “coyotes” [immigrant smugglers], her siblings sent for their two adolescent children that also left by the pampa. Since then, Aída and Doña Leonor, who is now 70 years, have reinvented their lives to cope with another pain a new absence has left them: that of the two children they both raised, the grandchildren and the niece and nephew who are now gone. 

Aída’s history multiplies itself in the Ecuadorian Austral. Like Aída, Angélica, who just turned 18, takes care of her nieces and nephews in Gualaceo. In the same way as Doña Leonor, Doña María Rosa, Doña Beatriz, Angelita, Doña Rosa, Doña Julia, and Doña María are also orphans, they live an inverted orphanhood, they are childless. They care for their grandchildren and are also waiting for the day when they will choose to emigrate. 

Many other unmarried mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and aunts take care of hundreds of children and adolescents, daughters, and sons of migrants that remained in Ecuador. Without them, the life experiences of those children and adolescents who grow in the absence of their fathers, their mothers, or both parents, could not be completely understood. Those children and adolescents reinvent themselves in the absence of their parents and decide later on if they leave or stay with their relatives, their caregivers.

Women and men go from Dotaxi to Long Island. From Mayantur to Brooklyn. From Jima, from Gualaceo, and from Girón to Queens. For more than five decades, different people get into debt of at least 10 000 U.S. dollars to pay the coyotes, crossing seven borders, traveling through Mexico and swimming in the River Grande, thousands have left their country of origin, Ecuador, in an attempt to have a different life, a better experience. 

Doña Beatriz is 67. She is a peasant living in Cochapamba, another indigenous community located in the Azuay Province. Every day she works the land, sells produce in the market and she also takes care of children. Her daughter, Neiva, left for New York when her grandchild was one year and seven months old. Her departure was not the first in the family: previously, her husband, her compadres [godfathers of one’s children or parents of one’s godchildren], her siblings and nieces and nephews had left.

Doña Beatriz’s account repeats itself among the other caregivers. Immigration crosses their lives ‘ histories. Their husbands, fathers, brothers, daughters, mothers, brothers in law, friends, neighbors, nieces, and nephews, and their children have left. They left to transform their precarious living conditions. In fact, in some cases, even the caregivers had to go. But they came back or were returned by the migra [immigration authorities] and never attempted to emigrate again. In their stories, departure is constant.

In contrast, the return of their loved ones seems like an impossibility. At least that’s what Doña Rosa, 65, asserted. She is another caregiver also from Cochapamba, who was left to care for her granddaughter from the time she was born, and since her daughter left 11 years ago:

When facing the pain caused by this absence, like Doña Rosa, the rest of the caregivers think of those who are no longer there, they reminisce about them, and they bring them to the present with each story. For this reason, they take great care of their memories and the few photographs they still have, and that illustrates their stories. Thus, they gather stories about their lives. These stories are the stories of their families. They collect stories and memories of Ecuadorian migration. These women don’t forget that poverty triggered the departure of their loved ones. Nor have they forgotten how each of their sons and daughters, or their husbands, or their siblings departed. They always remember the last goodbye. 

They recount what they used to hear about how migrants went by ship from Ecuador to New York, bypassing Mexico. They know how the route has changed. How today you must travel by land to Colombia, to Peru or Bolivia, and from there to Central America. They recount how before you had to cross all this to reach Mexico and how now it’s easy to arrive there by plane because, since 2018, Ecuadorians no longer require a visa. They know stories about coyotes, of smugglers, of forgers of visas, of enganchadores [labor contractors] and chulqueros, local moneylenders that lend thousands of dollars to immigrants to cover the cost of the journey. These women know many stories of deceit on the migration route, as well as stories of successful arrivals at the much-desired northern destination. 

The caregivers know what happens at the borders and the clandestine crossings because they are told and remember many stories. They know whom to pray to: Our Lady of the Wayside, the Señor de Andacocha, or the Infant Jesus of Prague. They also know when to join a procession or leave offerings during mass to pray for the protection of all the people who will emigrate. They know the stories of shipwrecks of Ecuadorian immigrants; stories of those who have died at the border or the ones that disappeared and never returned. Those stories would seem forgotten by a society that doesn’t acknowledge how chain orphanhood is a historical feature that constitutes and determines this society. But caregivers are unwilling to forget. They cannot forget their children or their husbands, who are no longer there. They also are unwilling to let their grandchildren forget their migrant mothers or fathers. Hence, they tell these children and adolescents who their parents were, why they left, where they are. Yes, these women, the caregivers, are unwilling to forget. Their unwillingness seems like an outcry in the night for the loss of the vital presence of their relatives and loved ones. Not only because their loved ones are no longer physically there, but because in many cases, they died in their attempt to emigrate. Remembering, yes, remembering, they preserve the memory of their dead. That’s the story, for instance, of Doña Julia, 60, a caregiver in Girón, an urban parish in Azuay. She was left in charge of the two granddaughters since her daughter and son in law died on the route: 

Who knew where, on the map of the American continent, Chiapas is. Doña Julia didn’t care. What mattered was to confirm that “up there,” as she said, where widespread violence along the Mexico-U.S. border is perceived more sharply, her daughter died there. At the same time, the grief that Doña Julia bears confirms that the violence is not as far from the Andes, not so up there, as you think. Violence at borders, violence towards immigrants, has had and still has an impact on the lives of people like this caregiver. Like her granddaughters, who became orphans when their father and mother attempted to pass through Mexico, what Doña Julia cared the most about was to know where the body of her dead daughter was. Tearfully she remembered that after months of unceasing searches, she eventually found her. In this process, she did not receive any help from any institution of the Ecuadorian State. When it came to  the death of her daughter on the journey, there was only silence. When it came to her two granddaughters being orphaned, there was only silence. Her neighbors, some relatives, and acquaintances of those neighbors, were the ones who helped and guided the search from a distance. In essence, she, a native of Girón, from an urban parish in the Ecuadorian Andes, tried to locate in Mexico, the body of her dead daughter. While she thinks back to this search process, her profoundly sad gaze combines with a gaze of unyielding fortitude bestowed to her by the granddaughters she has taken care of for 14 years. 

The story of silence and oblivion is also the story of Angelita, who at 32 became a widow responsible for five children. It was in 2005 when the ship his husband sailed away on, with a hundred other Ecuadorian migrants, was wrecked on the route from Ecuador to Guatemala. 

Unlike Doña Rosa, Angelita could never locate on the map of the American continent the body of Ángel, his dead husband. The Pacific Ocean took him away along with more than one hundred immigrants that were shipwrecked. How many thousands of Angels have been lost in the maritime routes connecting Ecuador and Guatemala? How many hundreds of Ecuadorian children and adolescents, kids of immigrants that were shipwrecked, grow up without anybody knowing their story? If migration has left an imprint on Angelita’s memory, one of those 60 mothers, and on the rest of the caregivers, it’s because, in Ecuador, her country of origin, the departure of their sons and daughters cuts through the historical memory. 

For five decades, generation after generation of Ecuadorian men and women have migrated. Despite being a small country located in the Andes, with around 17 million inhabitants, estimates indicate that approximately 3 million Ecuadorians, or 17% of the total population, live outside of the country. One can explain Ecuadorian emigration by its single-product economy, highly dependent on the international market, and the unceasing systemic poverty and inequality in the country. In fact, in Ecuador, poverty has found a niche in farm and rural life to spread rampantly. In 2018, 43% of people living in rural areas were impoverished, while in urban areas, only 16% were. Also, in rural areas, 74% of the people are employed in the informal sector, compared to 26% in urban areas. Thus, it is not a coincidence that to avoid and fight against  violence related to poverty, men and women, particularly form rural areas, have emigrated, mainly to the United States, the primary migratory destination for the Andean country. By the chacra, by the pampa, by the road, with counterfeit documents, with a visa, without a visa, they have traveled to that destination in such quantities that today 738 000 Ecuadorians live in that country and are the tenth largest group of Latin American descent.

This unceasing exodus has had inexorable effects on the children and adolescents of Ecuador. According to the latest census in 2010, 37% of the migrant population left behind sons and daughters in Ecuador under the care of immediate relatives. Data from the Observatory for the Rights of Children and Adolescents confirm that 2%, accounting for more than 200 000 children and adolescents, have at least one parent living abroad. Thus, a considerable number of Ecuadorian children and adolescents have stayed in the country and lived with other family relatives. These relatives are mainly their grandmothers or aunts, their caregivers. They live in transnational families, and these children and adolescents may later emigrate to reunite with their migrant fathers and mothers in the United States. This practice is a constituent element of the historical memory of the primary migrant-sending areas, like the towns in the Ecuadorian Austral. 

In a country characterized by chain orphanhoods caused by emigration, the role of the caregivers has been defining the lives of thousands of children and adolescents that have stayed on and will continue to do so. Caregivers like Aída, Doña Leonor, Doña Beatriz, Doña Rosa or Angelita, and women of all ages. They are 14, 18, 33, 43, 48, 60, 67 or 70 years old. They are widows, married, single; they are also divorcées. They are the mothers, the aunts, or the sisters of migrants. They live in indigenous communities in the rural areas of Jima, Dotaxi, or Cochapamba, or the peripheral neighborhoods of Cuenca, Girón, Gualaceo, and other cities in the Ecuadorian Austro. Some of them finished primary school, others, high school. They are bakers. They are peasants. They farm the land. They start working in the early hours. Some go to Cuenca to sell bread. Others to Girón to tend their fruit and vegetable stalls or sell juice in the market. There are still others who work from a very young age in the chacra and in housekeeping. 

They pray for their children. They beg the Virgin to take care of them. Every year on September 14, they go on a pilgrimage to Guachapala to reach the temple of the Señor de Andacocha, patron saint of migrants. They light candles for him, and they pay offerings, they leave written messages asking all travelers to be safe and protected. They leave photographs with the names of their children written, so he takes care of them during the journey. They care for grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. They imagine their children making buildings in Manhattan. They listen to their daughters when they are walking in Long Island. They look at pictures of them. They gather memories. They cry. They shed tears when they recount the day their children left by the chacra because they had an outstanding debt of more than 10 000 dollars with the coyote. They weep because their sons told them they would be back in a year, and 25 years have passed, and they haven’t returned. They sob because their children said they would build a house and would come back, and it is ready, but empty, because they can’t return. They cry because they never knew if their children ate, were scared, or were cold when they traveled the road. Others cried for their dead husbands or brothers, for those who disappeared, for the bodies that never arrived. 

They recall the stories on the road and stop talking because they know that in the sea, their children are at risk of being shipwrecked. They know that they can become victims of assault along the route. They also are aware that the small sticks and stones on the Mexican border are small bones and heads of other peregrines like their sons or husbands, that have died trying to migrate. That’s why they don’t want to talk anymore. They speak in silence, with their eyes. A gaze emerges ridden with grief from the absence and the strength of a presence in their lives: that of the children they raise, their grandchildren. 

They keep praying for their grandchildren not to feel grief. They cook morocho [spiced corn pudding or drink] and colada [oatmeal drink], so they go to school with food in their stomachs. They arrive on time, and they almost are never delayed after-school. They iron their uniforms. When they can, they check their homework. They are their children and grandchildren’s representatives at school. They talk to the teachers, but they don’t hear them. The teachers do little to help their grandchildren, their nieces, and nephews or their children, the children of migrants. There is no help at school. There are no programs. There is no reading, anything that explains the orphanhood migration causes. They speak to their children and, through slim digital screens, meet their new grandchildren born in the Yoni (the United States). They cry again, but in a flash, their tears become smiles when their grandchildren’s eyes meet theirs; and when a hug from the children of their children who are no longer there, that won’t come back, fills the void of grief these women bear. And they don’t stop praying to stay healthy, so they can keep taking care of the children. 

Aída, Doña Leonor, Doña Beatriz, Doña Julia, Doña Rosa, Angelita, and the other caregivers repeat that their grandchildren, their nieces, and nephews, and their children are orphans. Indeed, those children and adolescents they take care of, as children of migrants, grow up without their fathers, their mothers, or both parents. In some cases, de facto orphans, because their folks have died on the road, like Angelita’s children or Doña Rosa’s granddaughters. But somehow this orphanhood mutes and transforms, and this is due in considerable measure to the caregivers. 

The word “care” derives from the Old English carian, cearian “be anxious or solicitous; grieve; being concerned or interested.” It is a word that registers an action that requires attention, dedication, and effort. Every caregiver from the Austro thinks of her ward. She pays attention, dedicates time and energy to her nieces and nephews, her grandchildren—the children of her children that have left. This care began when they entrusted these children and adolescents to them. Grief takes hold of their voices when they recall the departure of their loved ones to the United States and their farewells. But the sadness hides because they remember that their grandson or their nephew remain in their care. They had to explain that they would grow in the absence of their fathers, mothers, or both parents.

For this reason, they had to invent stories to help these children and adolescents to, in some way, appease the grief unavoidably caused by absence. Doña Leonor recalls:

Aída used games and singing as a mechanism to induce oblivion: “I made them play a lot so my niece and nephew would tire soon and wouldn’t remember […] Then, at night, I’d sing to them so they wouldn’t ask questions and sleep peacefully”. Doña Julia decided instead to narrate the departure in another way:

Care begins with the way we recount, with the way we reminisce. That careful and imaginative way of sharing helped these grandchildren and nieces and nephews to understand their grief, and to forget. If the caregivers agree on something is that the smaller the sons and daughters of migrants, the faster they forget the absence of their parents and the less grief they must endure. Angélica is 18. Since she was 13, she has been in charge of her nephews, 6 and 4. They all live in Gualaceo, and she reflects: “Taking care of my nephews was not nice at first because they cried with sorrow for their mom, they cried and cried. But then, since they’re young, they just forgot”. Doña María Rosa is 45, and she is a peasant from Jima, an indigenous community in Azuay, she shares this same thought. When her husband migrated, she oversaw children. The younger ones “didn’t even feel it, or felt it a little,” she says, but “the oldest girl got a nervous condition, or maybe it was grief because the father left. She lost a year in school because she didn’t recover, and she is still ill.” 

Adolescents are perhaps more aware of the orphans created  by migration. They know of the dangers on the route and that the journeys to the United States are not short; many involve not returning. They suffer for this, and it’s more hurtful to them. They also feel a resentment that seems to grow as they mature. “When he was a young boy, he liked talking on the phone with his mother, who used to call him once a week from a house in Gualaceo. When he grew up, the mother called him. But he didn’t want to speak to her; he’d say: “No, mommy, you talk, and he didn’t even speak to her,” Doña Beatriz recalled that about the problematic relationship between her adolescent grandchild and his migrant mother. The care they give thus begins in the grief of others, their grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. They try to reduce for them the burden of sorrow, or they share their pain to forget if they can while they grow up. But it’s not always possible, and they know it. That’s why they take great care of them. 

“My Evelyn has never called me granny. I am her mommy. That’s what she calls me.”, insisted Doña Rosa, while Doña Beatriz repeated, “she only calls me my mommy.” It’s no coincidence that these sons and daughters of migrants call them this way. From the time they are born, many are left to their care, and others have a vague memory of their parents. However, their caregivers play the role of mothers, or mothers and fathers at the same time.

 Taking care of them means waking them up, dressing them, making food for them, taking them early to school on the bus. It means having clean clothes ready for them, waiting for them after school, bringing them back home. It’s withdrawing the money their fathers and mothers send, paying the school fees, spending the money they send to them. It’s taking them every Sunday to talk on the phone with their fathers or mothers, to be sure they always remember them. 

Taking care of someone is also assuming the responsibility of overseeing another person’s child, that get ill, that grow and complain, of children that demand answers that caregivers don’t always have. Looking after them means helping other people’s kids to understand that not all children of migrants have somebody who takes care of them. Looking out for them means listening to the stories they bring from school from other children and adolescents that, like them, don’t have any food, don’t keep up with their homework or lack money because their fathers and mothers have left, and their caregivers don’t take care of them. These stories repeat themselves in the Austro, and caregivers make sure their children from other parents understand why this happens. 

They have their children from other parents so much in their minds that they care for them and dedicate time and effort. These women are so present with these children that the potential feeling of being orphaned seems to transform for these sons and daughters . They are grandmothers, aunts, and sisters that become mothers, that become fathers or mothers and fathers of the sons and daughters of migrants. Though they grew up without their folks, like Aída said, the care that each one of them received helped to “assemble a personal jigsaw puzzle of what a family is,” and that can be achieved only through care. Thus, they are children and adolescents who create and recreate other families with several “mommies,” where grandpas are “daddies” or where the absence of their fathers and mothers have been with them during their development. 

Because they are children of their children, or children of their siblings, or even children of their own, but mainly they are children of migrants, their caregivers, know that they can leave at any given time. Sometimes they leave because their fathers and mothers send for them to finally reunite with them, usually in New York,after years of absence. Sometimes, they leave because those boys and girls grow up and decide for themselves to emigrate. 

Send for means paying a trusted coyote to bring their sons and daughters through the chacra. It also means that caregivers must hand over their grandchildren or nieces and nephews to enganchadores or the coyotes themselves for these individuals to take them away. It happened to Doña Leonor. One day her son told her he had the money to send for his children:

Doña Leonor’s grandchildren left Ecuador for Mexico and from there to New York. They were just 15 when they departed. They “didn’t want to go,” as she says, and that situation repeats itself in the stories narrated by other caregivers: “My daughter wanted to take him, but my grandson didn’t want to and didn’t want to. And didn’t leave. He only said I’ll go only if my mommy, meaning myself if I went with him, and I wasn’t leaving”, recounts Doña Beatriz. And they don’t want to leave, and they don’t leave because they are very attached to their caregivers. Only imagining that grief has prevented the departure of many sons and daughters of migrants, because even if their parents send for them, they simply decide not to leave. Others, in contrast, like Doña Leonor’s grandchildren, go eventually. Because of the departure of their grandchildren, of other persons’ children, immense grief swamps the caregivers, because from living in an inverted state of orphanhood, from being childless, they pass into a situation where they lose their grandchildren, other parents’ children that became their children.

Aída’s story serves as testimony of what happens when those who stayed leave: they leave the rooms, the squares, the schools, the houses, the neighborhoods, and leave the fields empty and silent. The caregivers are also abandoned, without the love that has sustained them and given them life. Many times, they feel blue, they say, because of the grief, because they have devoted themselves to the care of these children and adolescents that are no longer there. Sometimes they get ill from grief because sadness lingers and visits some months more than others. When the children of migrants leave, says Aída, “absence comes here and sticks to everything.” Gradually the absence starts to disappear. The stories and virtual contacts with grandchildren, with nieces and nephews that slowly discover what life is like in New York, also help to fill the absence. “We talk on the internet, and we see each other. With the internet, the only thing we can’t do is touch each other. If the thing is to laugh, we laugh; if it is to cry, we cry,” says Doña Leonor, and proceeds, “grief transforms, but it never leaves.” And it doesn’t leave because of the grief of being far from her children, the children of her children, she and Aída raised. 

Many of the caregivers would want to emigrate, “but just to visit,” they say. They would like to visit their children, their grandchildren, their nieces, and nephews. Others, in contrast, like Angélica, are ready to depart, leaving through the pampa and paying a coyote. She has a one-month-old daughter. She will probably remain under the care of Angélica’s mother, like her nieces and nephews, when her sisters left Gualaceo for the Bronx. Others say they will apply for a visa, to maybe “emigrate to visit,” and then return, but they doubt the visa will be approved. All of them coincide in that “Government permits” should disappear, like Doña Beatriz states, because only like that, people can go and come back. 

The stories of caregivers are the stories of thousands of Ecuadorians that have left. Ecuadorians that come back, are sent back, and that have returned to the United States. Their stories constitute a critical piece to understand the life experiences of the Ecuadorian children and adolescents that stay. Caregivers are not only in the Austro; they are in many other towns in Ecuador, and Colombia, Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and even in the United States. They look after children; they take care of them and our memories. For this, we should never forget their voices nor stop understanding and remembering their stories. The stories of orphans that migration leaves behind, are our own stories. These are the stories that leave an imprint on the lives of the sons and daughters of thousands of migrants.

This space makes me feel calmer because they show consideration, and ask me how life was, my life. I unburden when I talk.

Doña Rosa, caregiver in Cochapamba.