Geographies of global lifestyle migration: Towards an anticolonial approach

Abstract

This article brings the critiques of anticolonial theorists into conversation with the burgeoning literature on Global North-to-South lifestyle migration – including scholarship employing related terminologies such as residential tourism and amenity migration. Our review synthesizes strengths in this multi-disciplinary literature while also drawing attention to most scholars’ limited engagement with the ways colonial relations of power constitute these flows. We propose an anticolonial approach for conducting global lifestyle migration research and demonstrate both the conceptual and methodological dimensions of such an approach by drawing on research conducted in Talamanca, Costa Rica.

Keywords

amenity migration anticolonial decolonial lifestyle migration postcolonial residential tourism

I Introduction

In the mid-2000s, geographers, sociologists, and interdisciplinary migration scholars began to note the rapid growth of a migratory pattern that had previously received little attention: the flow of relatively wealthy and overwhelmingly White migrants from the Global North to areas of the Global South for a desired lifestyle associated with lower-cost access to amenities such as tropical beaches, large properties, domestic services, and slower-paced daily rhythms (Banks, 2004; Dixon et al., 2006; Knowles, 2005). While domestic amenity / lifestyle migration in postindustrial contexts has been a focus of scholarship since the 1980s, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States (Cloke and Thrift, 1987; Johnson and Beale, 1994; Phillips, 1993), and intra-European lifestyle flows began to garner attention in the 1990s (Buller and Hoggart, 1994; King and Patterson, 1998), it was largely post-2005 that scholars began writing about lifestyle migration flowing from the Global North to the Global South.¹ It is our contention that the study of North-to-South flows of lifestyle migrants, unlike (postindustrial) domestic or intra-European lifestyle migrations, demands an anticolonial approach – conceptually and methodologically. Yet few scholars, as we show in the course of our review, have fully embraced an anticolonial framework. Our central objective in this article is to explore what an anticolonial approach to global lifestyle migration research looks like and why it is important.

A key challenge in undertaking this review and making a coherent intervention is the range of terminologies used by scholars to examine these migration flows, including the terms lifestyle migration, amenity migration, residential tourism, and retirement migration. Although there are notable distinctions between the meanings and studies associated with these conceptual vocabularies, as we review below, we find much value in drawing connections and lessons across them. All are connected to a common empirical phenomenon – comparatively wealthy, mostly White residents of the Global North moving part- or full-time to ‘their’ paradise in the Global South. It is a privileged migration not motivated primarily by economic need, but by a desire to consume a particular set of amenities critical to an imagined recreational lifestyle unavailable or unaffordable in their home country. For the purposes of our discussion we will rely on the term lifestyle migration, a term commonly used in the literature but one not inherently more valid than others. At the end of the day we are not interested in quibbling about terminology but call for a conceptual and methodological shift in how scholars approach this topic, a shift that is not dependent on the specific adjective used to qualify this cross-border migration stream.

A second important challenge in investigating this migratory flow is the lack of precise data that could accurately assess its shifting volume or geographical configuration. Accurate quantitative data on lifestyle migration is not collected, but there are several measures, both quantitative and qualitative, that signal its growing importance. For example, migration from North America to Latin America and from Europe to Africa grew by 3.1 and 3.5 percent per annum between 2000 and 2017, respectively (United Nations, 2017). The US Department of State (2018a, 2018b, 2019) estimates that 1.5 million US citizens are living in Mexico, 700,000 in India, 220,000 in the Philippines, and 120,000 in Costa Rica (see also White House, 2017). It is difficult to assess with any of these numbers what percentage are moving primarily for leisure reasons rather than employment, or how many are naturalized citizens or second-generation immigrant returnees not motivated by recreational lifestyle per se. However, a recorded growth of retirees abroad provides some indication of the increase of lifestyle-motivated movements: the UK noted a 26 percent increase in retirees drawing on social security from abroad in the past decade (Hughes, 2019) and the US saw a 17 percent increase between 2010 and 2015 (CBSN, 2016). Equally important, individual studies indicate a rapid increase of lifestyle-motivated migrants in ‘hot spot’ destinations in the Global South since the late 1990s (Jackiewicz and Craine, 2010; Kiy and McEnany, 2010). Together these data suggest that lifestyle-motivated migration from the Global North to the Global South is a growing trend with geographic importance.

We begin our review and intervention from the premise that North-South flows of lifestyle migrants are constituted by colonial histories and enduring colonial relationships of power, and as such they are profoundly racialized. We make this a foundational starting point to argue that scholars of global lifestyle migration (and all related terminologies) should put anticolonial perspectives at the center of their scholarship in both conceptual and methodological terms. As we explain over the course of this article, this would involve taking close account of the ways that lifestyle migration is situated within the longue durée of colonial histories and contemporary relations of coloniality. These conceptual shifts, in order to be anticolonial, must be paired with decolonial methodologies that decenter a colonial gaze by listening to marginalized voices from the Global South and building accountability to those actors during the research process.

The article progresses as follows. First, we trace the emergence of literature on Global North-South, lifestyle-motivated migration since the mid-2000s, charting the key questions and themes explored by scholars across various terminologies. We draw particular attention to whether and in what ways scholars engage questions of coloniality and race to understand these geographical flows. Second, we engage post/decolonial scholarship to develop a proposed anticolonial approach for studying global lifestyle migration. In doing so we highlight the work of two scholars who place an anticolonial ethic at the center of their work on lifestyle migration: Santiago Bastos (2014) in his research in Mexico and Sharlene Mollett (2016, 2017) in her work in Panama. Third, we elaborate what this kind of approach looks like methodologically and conceptually through a discussion of empirical research on the impacts of lifestyle migration in Costa Rica conducted by Kelsey Emard. By combining a conceptual critique with an empirical example, we are able to flesh out the core tenets of an anticolonial approach to global lifestyle migration that we hope will provide guideposts for future research on the topic.

II Global North-to-South lifestyle migration

As mentioned in our opening, scholarship on Global North-to-South lifestyle migration builds on earlier work investigating domestic amenity migration, particularly in the United States and United Kingdom. This work in postindustrial contexts linked a growth of amenity-seeking migration after the 1970s to geographies of global capital accumulation (Whitson, 2001), new communication and transportation technologies (Beyers and Nelson, 2000), and ‘white flight’ from urban areas (Frey and Liaw, 1998). As scholarship on postindustrial domestic amenity migration matured, researchers began to consider more closely impacts on destination communities, charting class polarization (Ghose, 2004), environmental conflict and land use change (Walker and Fortmann, 2003), and the emergence of new hierarchies of racialized exclusion in destination communities (Nelson et al., 2015).

During the 1990s a distinct group of researchers began to attend to the expanding lifestyle-driven flows of northern Europeans to southern European coasts and countrysides (King and Patterson, 1998; King et al., 1998; Warnes et al., 1999). This scholarship provides important accounts of lifestyle migrants’ identities, aspirations, and practices, offering a relatively coherent understanding of the lifestyle migrant as a subject with specific imaginaries and desires motivating their migration (Benson, 2009, 2011; Buller and Hoggart, 1994; Huber and O’Reilly, 2004; Kordel, 2016; O’Reilly, 2000). A handful of scholars within this literature supplement this migrant-focused work with attention to the impacts of their migration on receiving communities. Employing the language of ‘residential tourism’, these scholars focus on how new built landscapes associated with the arrival of lifestyle migrants contribute to environmental degradation (Aledo, 2008; Aledo and Mazón, 2004), accelerate socio-demographic changes (Casado-Diaz and Angeles, 1999), and strain infrastructure in destination sites (Aledo et al., 2010).

Building on these earlier traditions, Global North to Global South lifestyle migration began to receive significant scholarly attention in the mid-2000s, when these flows became more visible and widespread (early interventions include Banks, 2004; Chevari, 2006; Knowles, 2005; Sunil et al., 2007). Researchers found similarities in the causal factors between North-South flows and the longer history of lifestyle / amenity migration within the Global North. Migrants in both cases represent a similar demographic: frequently White retirees from the baby boom generation, they are usually well-educated and affluent (Janoschka, 2009; Kiy and McEnany, 2010). In both cases, migrants are motivated by desires for lifestyle change informed by ideas of rurality, leisure, and nature (Moss, 2006). Both sets of migrants are usually looking for lower living costs, and in the case of those moving to destinations in the Global South, lower healthcare costs are also a common motivating factor (Chevari, 2006; Dixon et al., 2006; Howard, 2008; Sunil et al., 2007). As Croucher (2009a) aptly summarized, retirement incomes that could not sustain previously enjoyed standards of living in the Global North are more than sufficient to purchase a property of some distinction, pay for lower healthcare costs, and even hire domestic help in many areas in the Global South.

Scholarship on North-South lifestyle migration also linked newly observed, cross-border migration patterns to an increase in international tourism: many lifestyle-motivated migrants visit destinations as tourists prior to deciding to move on a full- or part-time basis to the destination (Casado-Diaz, 2012). Further, the built environment and infrastructural changes associated with tourism are similar to those produced by the arrival of lifestyle migrants (Aledo, 2008; Jackiewicz and Craine, 2010). Finally, after relocation, many lifestyle migrants choose to remain socially and spatially separate from the residents of their new hometown, choosing instead to maintain ongoing social and political connections with their places of origins (Banks, 2004; Croucher 2009a, 2009b; McWaters, 2009). Despite significant connections between tourism and lifestyle migration, we believe there is a fundamental difference between the economic, political, and cultural impacts of short-term tourists and those of lifestyle migrants who may own property, work locally, and directly influence local politics and decision making in ways not possible for tourists.

Published scholarship on North-South, lifestyle-motivated migration has expanded significantly since its emergence in the mid-2000s. As noted already, this work has deployed a range of terminology to help conceptualize these movements. At the risk of oversimplifying, we have summarized the literatures associated with various terminologies in Table 1 in order to demonstrate some of the key differences between them. In this review we draw across all of these literatures as each provides important insights into this empirical phenomenon.

Table 1.

Research in Global South destinations by terminology.

Terminology	Key studies	Most prevalent research themes
Lifestyle migration	Benson, 2013, 2015; Benson and O’Reilly, 2018; Botterill, 2017; Ertugrul, 2016; Escher and Petermann, 2014; Green, 2014, 2017; Hayes, 2014, 2015b, 2015c, 2015d; Karkabi, 2013; Knowles, 2005; Kordel and Pohle, 2018; Morrissey, 2018; Ono, 2015; Spalding, 2013a, 2013b; Therrien and Pellegrini, 2015; Van Noorloos and Steel, 2016	Migrant motivations, identity, and experiences
Residential tourism	McWaters, 2009; Mollett, 2016, 2017; Van Noorloos, 2011a, 2011b, 2013; Wortman et al., 2016	Landscape change, land ownership, place-making, inequality
Retirement migration	Bastos, 2014; Dixon et al., 2006; Howard, 2008; Miles, 2015; Rojas et al., 2014; Sunil et al., 2007	Migrant demographics, motivations, and practices
Amenity migration	Chevari, 2006; Cortes et al., 2014; Matarrita-Cascante, 2017; Matarrita-Cascante and Stocks, 2013; Matarrita-Cascante et al., 2015; Pera, 2008	Community development and political participation
Privileged migration	Conway and Leonard, 2014; Croucher, 2009a, 2009b, 2012	Migrant identities and social positions

Across these literatures, we note three broad themes that specifically bring attention to inequality and power relations in destination sites. The first examines how political economic factors shape migrants’ decisions to move and their experiences abroad. The second explores migrants’ identities and senses of privilege in destination sites, asking how migrants make sense of their experiences and understand themselves in relation to other residents of receiving communities. The final theme investigates social and spatial segregation between lifestyle migrants and other residents in Global South destinations. In synthesizing the contributions under each of these themes, we demonstrate that the literature is dominated by a focus on the experiences of lifestyle migrants rather than long-time locals or less privileged in-migrants, both of whom provide a low-wage workforce that services Northern lifestyle migrants. Further, we show that most scholarship on this topic bypasses serious engagement with the ways that Global North-South lifestyle migration is implicated in racialized colonial legacies that make this migration possible and actively (re)produce inequality in Global South destinations. We argue for an approach that places anticolonial theories at the center of our inquiries, an approach we flesh out in the later sections of this article.

1 Political economic factors shaping global lifestyle migration

A number of scholars publishing on this topic focus on the ways political economic conditions shape global lifestyle migrants’ mobility. This work emphasizes that these migrants simultaneously experience both privilege and vulnerability, complicating the assumption in early research that migrants’ decisions were based on a high level of economic and political freedom and agency (Hayes, 2014). For example, Matthew Hayes’ (2014, 2015b) research on North Americans living in Cuenca, Ecuador demonstrates the extent to which his 69 North American respondents relocated to Ecuador for economic reasons, many of them driven at least partially by decreased investment accounts and worsened employment opportunities resulting from the 2008 US economic downturn. Economic motivations seem to be particularly strong in older-age migrants who are facing lower than expected retirement incomes and increasing medical expenses in their home countries (see also Miles, 2015; Viteri, 2015). Scholars working in this theme have demonstrated that many lifestyle migrants also experience some level of precarity and vulnerability abroad, particularly those who relocated in order to lower their living costs. For example, Kate Botterill (2017) and Paul Green (2014) have shown that British lifestyle migrants often experience financial insecurity in their Southeast Asian destinations, where difficulties accessing pension funds internationally, shifting exchange rates, and high-income residency requirements create a sense of vulnerability among lifestyle migrants. This scholarship demonstrates that assumptions of lifestyle migrants’ privilege should be nuanced by understandings of their frequent experiences of vulnerability.

A few scholars have shown that international agreements and state policies aimed at attracting wealthy in-migration have played a major role in facilitating international lifestyle migration (Ono, 2015; Pera, 2008; Spalding, 2013a). Benson and O’Reilly (2018) take this work a step further, showing that state policies intended to facilitate in-migration of wealthy foreigners in Panama and Malaysia have emerged out of these countries’ colonial histories. This is an important step toward an anticolonial frame, and one which we build on later in this article. However, the focus of work in this theme, even of Benson and O’Reilly’s, remains on the experiences of lifestyle migrants themselves. It includes little attention to how this migration may also increase precarity for local residents or to why Global South destinations are affordable in the first place. It is one thing to understand geographies of capital accumulation and political economy as driving wealthy, White lifestyle migrants to seek out lower-cost, amenity locales; it is another thing to understand how geographies of capital accumulation, colonialism, and neoliberalism have dispossessed these areas in the first place – creating the ‘cheap’ land and labor that undergird the desires of North White lifestyle seekers.

2 Migrant identities and global lifestyle migration

A second theme among scholars revolves around global lifestyle migrant identities and senses of self in destination sites. Several scholars working on this theme have more directly engaged racialization processes and questions of racial and class privilege, which is a positive move toward an anticolonial approach. Michaela Benson’s (2013, 2015) interviews with 25 North American lifestyle migrants in Boquete, Panama are one example of this body of work. Benson (2013) shows that many North American migrants become increasingly aware of their relative wealth and privilege vis-á-vis local Panamanians after arriving in Boquete. This sense of inequality is overtly racialized, as interpersonal encounters with locals cause lifestyle migrants in Boquete to become increasingly aware of their Whiteness and its association with economic and cultural capital (Benson, 2015; see also Green, 2017; Hayes, 2015c; Kunz, 2018). Many lifestyle migrants express discomfort with this growing sense of inequality and attempt to rationalize their exercise of privilege in the destination by participating in charitable work and viewing themselves as contributors to local development (Benson, 2013; see also Benson, 2015; Kordel and Pohle, 2018; Rojas et al., 2014).

While the scholars reviewed above focus on the discomfort expressed by some global lifestyle migrants with their positions of privilege in comparison to local community members, Goükçen Ertugrul (2016) shows that in practice global lifestyle migrants frequently work to maintain and reinforce these positions of difference. In her study, she finds that many British migrants to Turkey actively seek to preserve distinct and racialized national identities between themselves and other residents by emphasizing different cultural practices and occupying different spaces. The migrants she interviewed expressed a desire to leave the United Kingdom in part because they feel that British national identity is deteriorating under the effects of in-migration and multicultural state policies. In Turkey, British lifestyle migrants find comfort in maintaining notions of essentialized cultures – both British and Turkish (for similar arguments regarding British lifestyle migrants in South Africa, see Conway and Leonard, 2014). Other scholars have similarly explored the racialized cultural imaginaries held by lifestyle migrants, and some have drawn connections to earlier colonial imaginaries of the ‘exotic other’. For example, Mari Korpela (2010) demonstrates that global lifestyle migrants to Varanasi, India imagine an essentialized, ‘authentic’ Indian culture against which they define themselves. Korpela views these attitudes as replications of colonial mentalities, since it is ‘Westerners who decide how to imagine and act out “authentic India” and how to interact with Indian people’ (2010: 1312; for similar arguments in Hong Kong, see Knowles, 2005, and in Bali see Green, 2017).²

We applaud these scholars for moving toward a more critical frame for understanding how race and privilege shape the experiences of lifestyle migrants in the Global South. They push us to consider how global lifestyle migration occurs within a racialized postcolonial system, one which shapes the experiences of migrants within destinations. However, there remains a tendency in this scholarship to conduct interviews solely with migrants from the Global North and to avoid consideration of how ‘locals’ and labor migrants from neighboring countries in the Global South experience and respond to this influx of privileged foreigners. Much of the research emphasizes the efforts of lifestyle migrants to impact local communities positively through participation in local cultural activities, charitable giving, or creation of income opportunities (Benson, 2013; Ertugrul, 2016; Kordel and Pohle, 2016), while sidestepping questions about how these attitudes operate within and reproduce colonial ‘white savior’ mentalities. Scholars of North-South lifestyle migration should examine how colonial attitudes may be unwittingly normalized within our own scholarship. To unsettle this normalization, it is critical to practice methodologies that engage local populations and experiences.

3 Socio-spatial segregation and global lifestyle migration

While scholarship discussed above focuses almost exclusively on the experiences and identities of lifestyle migrants, a third line of inquiry engages more directly with the ways this migration manifests in destination sites. Work here documents the socio-spatial segregation characterizing many Global South destinations, recognizing that most global lifestyle migrants choose to live in gated communities or houses surrounded by high fences, which spatially separate them from other residents of the community (Lizarraga Morales, 2010; Van Noorloos, 2011a; Van Noorloos and Steel, 2016). Spatial segregation is exacerbated by language differences, separate socializing habits, and the hypermobility of lifestyle migrants who frequently travel to and from their country of origin (Escher and Petermann, 2014; Pera, 2008; Rojas et al., 2014; Spalding, 2013a; Therrien and Pellegrini, 2015; Van Noorloos, 2013). Together these factors have caused significant social segregation between lifestyle migrants and other residents, which often results in uneven participation in community decision-making processes (Kordel and Pohle, 2018; Pera, 2008; Van Noorloos, 2013).

An example of this line of inquiry is David Matarrita-Cascante and Gabriela Stocks’ (2013) interviews with 15 foreign and 15 local residents in Nuevo Arenal, Costa Rica. They show that although the two groups frequently interact with one another, these interactions are limited to the everyday exchange of goods and services and include minimal integrative social activities, such as visiting friends’ houses or sharing birthday parties. The limited nature of interactions between lifestyle migrants and other residents in Nuevo Arenal prevents them from sharing community development efforts, as neither group is aware of what the other group is organizing (see also Matarrita-Cascante, 2017). While most research in this theme does not directly link socio-spatial divisions to racialized relations of power and exclusion, Nadeem Karkabi (2013) does so by showing how government policies in South Sinai, Egypt exacerbate class-based and ethnic exclusion between global lifestyle migrants and other residents in local politics. Because tourist-oriented towns have semi-autonomous administrative status, civic participation has come to be based almost solely on economic standing. European residents, due to the value of their assets in their home countries, now hold considerably more power in local decision-making than do Indigenous Bedouins or other Egyptians.

Like Karkabi, a handful of other scholars have recognized growing inequality in destination sites. For example, in Mauritius and Ecuador respectively, Wortman et al. (2016) and Hayes (2015d) found that although lifestyle in-migration creates new employment opportunities, particularly in the construction and service sectors, those opportunities remain notably low-wage and are often available only to some local residents (e.g. those with bilingual language skills). Further, sometimes competition for these jobs between local residents and economic migrants from neighboring areas may be acute, as Van Noorloos (2011b) found in the case of northwestern Costa Rica where Nicaraguan immigrants compete with Costa Ricans for service sector jobs catering to lifestyle migrant needs. While livelihoods remain scarce and low-wage for most residents, these same scholars (Hayes, 2015d; Van Noorloos, 2011b; Wortman et al., 2016) noted that property prices and living expenses in the destinations are rising to the point that some long-time residents are displaced and compelled to relocate to cheaper areas (see also Van Laar et al., 2014; Zoomers, 2010).

The work on socio-spatial segregation by scholars reviewed above demonstrates how wealth and nationality delimit residents’ political and economic possibilities in lifestyle migrant-receiving communities. Yet most of the work in this theme treats socio-spatial segregation as the result of individual choice rather than seeing it as a problem of racialized exclusion rooted in colonial power systems. Scholars should identify and call out the ways in which inequality in Global South destinations is reproduced through colonial civilizing discourses that position White lifestyle migrants as bearers of an educational and cultural status that will slowly help local residents ‘develop’ (see Kunz, 2018). Attention to socio-spatial segregation is a positive move in the literature but should be clearly linked to enduring colonial relations of power.

In sum, our review of the literature on global lifestyle migration, including scholarship that explores this topic using distinct terminologies, found an evolution in scholarly approaches. From early work that viewed lifestyle migrants largely as rational choice agents (see Croucher, 2009a; Dixon et al., 2006; Howard, 2008; Sunil et al., 2007), a number of scholars began to treat lifestyle migrants in more complex ways and to situate this migration within broader political economic dynamics (see for example Benson and O’Reilly, 2018; Green, 2014; Hayes, 2014, 2015b). Moreover, many researchers have moved away from assuming the arrival of lifestyle migrants is inherently beneficial for local communities (see for example Spalding 2013a, 2013b; Van Noorloos 2011a, 2013; Van Laar et al. 2014; Wortman et al., 2016), and some have situated these processes in relation to questions of race, privilege and the colonial present (see Benson, 2013, 2015; Escher and Petermann, 2014; Green, 2017; Hayes, 2015c; Karkabi, 2013; Knowles, 2005; Korpela, 2010; Kunz, 2018). We argue that gestures toward a more critical and anticolonial approach to lifestyle migration in this last set of scholarship should be pushed further. As we hope to demonstrate in the following sections, an anticolonial approach offers key methodological, conceptual, and ethical guidelines that should be considered for any study into this topic.

III Toward an anticolonial approach

Critiques of colonial power and knowledge production have emerged from distinct geographies and temporalities, developing over the years into a range of terms and conceptual traditions. In short, the cloth of anticolonial critique is woven from the threads of postcolonial, decolonial, settler colonial, Black radical, and Indigenous theorizing, approaches often partnered with feminist or queer thought. Despite important distinctions between these traditions (for reviews, see Asher, 2013, 2017; Mendoza, 2015; Naylor et al., 2018; Radcliffe, 2017a, 2017b), we focus on the central contentions that unite diverse anticolonial theorists. Specifically, across these anticolonial approaches scholars emphasize that 1) racialized colonial power persists in shaping contemporary socio-spatial relations and 2) colonial ways of knowing permeate the present and obscure the existence of multiple ways of being (Collard et al. 2015; Grosfoguel, 2012; Quijano, 2000). As articulated by Kiran Asher (2017: 516), anticolonial critiques ‘foreground how colonial practices constituted the modern world and the Eurocentric forms of knowledge production that marginalize other forms of knowing and being in the world’.

An anticolonial approach analyzes the material workings of colonial power manifested in gendered and racialized social hierarchies and labor relations that have endured into the present (DuBois, 1935; Fanon, 1952; Lugones, 2011; Maldonaldo-Torres, 2007; Quijano, 2000; Rodney, 1972; Wynter and McKittrick, 2015). Moreover, anticolonial perspectives share an abiding concern with the ways that knowledge is produced, as that knowledge forms the basis for ongoing colonial power structures (Mohanty, 1991; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012; Said, 1978; Spivak, 1988). It is important to note that these two are closely intertwined: colonial power dynamics are rationalized through the production of a colonial knowledge system of ‘universal truths’ that breaks the world into simple binaries – developed/developing, civilized/backward, and modernity/tradition – and refuses to recognize as good those modes of being that are classified as ‘backward’, such as collective land ownership or subsistence production (Asher, 2013; Mollett, 2011, 2016).

Colonial binary thinking about how the world ‘should’ work is used to rationalize the implementation of ‘modern’ practices and institutions that reproduce inequitable relationships between European-descended populations and the rest of the world. These practices include, for example, private property law, an institution that has been implemented by (settler) colonial governments around the world to appropriate Indigenous lands (Bhandar, 2018; see also Bonds and Inwood, 2016; Naylor et al., 2018; Wolfe, 2006). Private property law was also used to encourage worldwide capitalist accumulation practices that oriented capital accumulation towards Europe (Cabral, 1974; Quijano, 2000; Rodney, 1972). Another example of a colonial organizing logic in practice, as argued by Joel Wainwright (2008), is the discourse and project of international development. Narratives of development perpetuate colonial knowledge structures about ‘proper’ ways to live and provide a supposed rationalization for ongoing colonial power relations between those who ‘bring development’ and those who ‘are developing’ (Escobar, 2011; Li, 2007; McEwan, 2009; Wainwright, 2008). These practices operate via the ascription of racialized difference as well as race-based exclusion and oppression (Cesaire, 1950; DuBois, 1935; Fanon, 1952; Mignolo, 2008; Quijano, 2000; Wynter, 2003).

An anticolonial approach demands both a conceptual recognition of the workings of colonial power in the present as well as a methodological commitment to a ‘decolonizing practice’ (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2012: 100). Such a practice entails shifting the power of authorial voice in our research to participants, thinkers from the Global South, or others who have been marginalized within colonial knowledge structures (Denzin et al., 2008; Mora, 2017; Smith, 2012). It also requires an honest reckoning with our complicity in colonial systems and the building of action-oriented partnerships with Indigenous and other previously colonized people groups (Esson et al., 2017; Tuck and Yang, 2012). Scholars in geography are increasingly engaging these anticolonial critiques in their research (e.g. Devine and Ojeda, 2017; Kothari, 2015; Naylor et al., 2018). Yet much scholarship originating out of the Global North continues to side-step or not deeply engage anticolonial critiques (Kim et al., 2012), including, we argue, much of the global lifestyle migration literature.

Based on the critiques outlined above, an anticolonial approach to lifestyle migration research requires situating this migration in relation to racialized and colonial power dynamics, in both their historical and contemporary manifestations. It also requires explicit critique of colonial dynamics, including a critique of the erasure of perspectives held by residents of the Global South that may contradict those held by lifestyle migrants from the Global North. Importantly, such a critique cannot be merely conceptual but should be methodological and practical in nature, characterized by methods that do not reproduce the silencing of local voices. For scholars of lifestyle migration, we propose three tenets of an anticolonial approach: 1) historicize ‘cheap’ land and labor available to lifestyle migrants within the longue durée of colonial histories and enduring colonial political economies of globalization (e.g. debt-induced neoliberal restructuring), 2) approach the contemporary production of inequality in destination sites from a non-binary perspective that considers the range of experiences of diverse local residents, and 3) embrace methodologies that center diverse local residents as knowers while building accountable, collaborative research with them. For us, an anticolonial approach is more than deploying the vocabulary of race, privilege and/or coloniality; it is about explicitly and thoroughly linking these dynamics to a colonial system both historical and contemporary in nature. Moreover, it is about embracing the ethics and strategies of decolonial methodologies that decenter contemporary versions of the colonial gaze.

A clear example of how to develop an anticolonial approach to lifestyle migration is Santiago Bastos’ (2014) ethnographic research with Indigenous communities along Mexico’s Lake Chapala. Bastos examines how some of these communities resist land dispossession generated by the arrival of lifestyle migrants. He takes an anticolonial stance by arguing that the availability of ‘cheap’ land and labor for migrants from the Global North exists because lawyers and government officials arbitrarily enforce property laws along Lake Chapala to counter Indigenous peasant land claims and encourage capitalist investors to build residences for international lifestyle migrants. Officials rationalize Indigenous dispossession along Lake Chapala through claims that development by and for foreigners will ‘deliver the local population from backwardness’ and ‘bring them progress’ (Bastos, 2014: 56). Although Bastos does not explicitly situate these narratives in relation to colonial dynamics, he implicitly critiques the ways development discourses along Lake Chapala perpetuate dichotomous, civilized/backward narratives in order to allow developers to circumvent the law that nominally protects communal landholdings. At an explicit level Bastos takes a Marxist stance, arguing that the promise of ‘progress’ is never fulfilled because wages do not rise alongside property prices: ‘to be profitable, the tourist real estate business does not need “modern” citizens on the same level as the residents, but rather poor peasants who ultimately become servants, always poor’ (Bastos, 2014: 56). Although Bastos does not use the language typical of an anticolonial critique, his scholarship provides an excellent starting point for an anti-colonial approach: he historicizes the production of ‘cheap’ land and labor and embraces a participatory and accountable methodological approach that highlights the experiences of marginalized actors affected by global lifestyle migration flows.

A second excellent example of a clear anticolonial approach to lifestyle migration has been undertaken by Sharlene Mollett (2016, 2017). Her work in Bocas del Toro, Panama links residential development for migrants from the Global North to the enclosure, privatization, and foreign purchase of lands previously used by local Afro-descendant and Indigenous populations for food and everyday routines. While Mollett has used this research to critique scholarship on land-grabbing (Mollett, 2016) and ‘more than human’ geographies (Mollett, 2017) rather than address residential tourism / lifestyle migration scholarship per se, her work serves as an important corrective of the scholarship reviewed in the previous section. Unlike Bastos, Mollett squarely embraces an anticolonial stance in her recognition that land purchases by foreign developers are supported by the same logic that has facilitated foreign land-grabbing in Panama since the colonial period – a Eurocentric ideology that ‘exalts white bodies, capitalist investment and private property while simultaneously condemning brown and black bodies, subsistence production and collective and customary property arrangements’ (Mollett, 2016: 426). Further, her interviews with local Afro-descendant women show that the (residential) tourism economy has not provided secure or well-paid employment. Those who are able to get employment, usually as maids, often endure mistreatment and low wages, dehumanizing legacies of social and labor relations from past plantation systems in the area (Mollett, 2017). While other scholars have noted the impacts of low-wage employment in global lifestyle migrant destinations (see Hayes, 2015d; Van Noorloos, 2011b; Wortman et al., 2016), none except Mollett have squarely situated this as part of a profoundly racialized and colonial dynamic.

Finally, both Bastos and Mollett build their arguments from interviews and participant observation with long-time local residents of destination sites, particularly Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations who have been marginalized within a long history of Spanish colonialism and US neocolonialism in Mexico and Panama. Originating their arguments from the experiences of those who are most marginalized within plans for foreign residential development, they disrupt the normalization of knowledge originating in the experiences of the privileged. Further, both scholars interrogate the ways that lifestyle migration is connected to processes of dispossession, displacement, and servitude that are rationalized by colonial discourses about ‘development’. These scholars point the way toward an anticolonial approach to lifestyle migration scholarship, which we flesh out below in the context of lifestyle migration and residential development along Costa Rica’s Caribbean Talamanca coast.

IV The coloniality of lifestyle migration to Talamanca, Costa Rica

Over the past two decades, Costa Rica’s Southern Caribbean coastline – known as the Talamanca coast – has received an influx of global lifestyle migrants. The streets of Puerto Viejo, the central town along this coast, are lined with foreigners on bicycles carrying sunhats and freshly purchased produce, stopping to chat with friends in the open-air shops and restaurants along the road. While some of these foreigners are short-term tourists, many are long-term residents who own a home in the area and often a business. One such foreign-owned establishment is a coffee shop catering to European and North American clientele who use it as a space from which to work remotely or in which to attend yoga classes, poetry readings, and documentary film screenings. Sara,³ a 27-year-old, lifelong resident of Puerto Viejo, works at this coffee shop as a waitress. Sara is an Afro-Costa Rican whose great-grandparents came from Jamaica in the early 1900s to work on the construction of a transcontinental Costa Rican railroad and on the banana plantations of the US-based United Fruit Company. It was Afro-Caribbean laborers and Indigenous residents of Talamanca who founded Puerto Viejo and farmed the coastline prior to the arrival of lifestyle migrants (Palmer, 2005). Sara’s friend Yamileth, an Indigenous Bribri woman from inland Talamanca, opened a small restaurant neighboring the coffee shop, but it has received little attention from the White lifestyle migrants who frequent the foreign-owned coffee shop.

This section explores the colonial threads underlying the mundane interactions between Sara and Yamileth and their customers in order to demonstrate the analytical power and ethical importance of moving an anticolonial approach to the center of research on lifestyle migration. Our analysis is drawn from ethnographic research conducted by Kelsey Emard in 2017–18 that included 60 interviews, 75 percent of which were with local residents (e.g. not lifestyle migrants). The research was designed to center life-long residents of Talamanca as critical authorities on lifestyle migration to their community. As a White scholar from the United States, my (Kelsey Emard's) position in relation to Sara’s and Yamileth’s is fraught with the uneven nature of our respective geographic and social positioning. My sources of funding from the Global North, comparatively free mobility, and shared social position with many lifestyle migrants in Talamanca certainly influenced the research and may also have contributed to rising living costs for local residents. In response to my role in these inequities, I attempted to build an accountable and collaborative project, obtaining the regular input of two Talamanca Afro-Indigenous social organizations. I sought to foreground the perspectives of diverse local residents, hold myself accountable to them, and partner with their efforts to build good lives in the face of lifestyle in-migration.

Documented as part of this research, Sara’s and Yamileth’s stories expose the tensions between their experiences in Talamanca and those of their employers and customers, largely lifestyle migrants from Europe, Canada, and the United States. In an interview, Sara acknowledged that she would rather be a dentist then a waitress, but she cannot afford to move to San José or abroad to study. She related that her foreign customers frequently tell her how lucky she is to live and work on the beautiful beaches of Talamanca, but Sara feels frustrated by their assumption that she would not want to leave. Sara said, ‘I would like to travel outside, or, or at least have money and not have to see everybody’s face every morning.’ Seeing the faces of her customers, overwhelming from the Global North and miles from their original homes, highlights Sara’s own sense of immobility associated with limited income, her family’s financial dependence on her, and barriers to obtaining travel visas.

The factors that Sara described as limiting her mobility are racialized in Talamanca, as explained here. Although her family previously owned a large and profitable cocoa farm where her employers’ coffee shop now stands, Sara’s grandparents sold most of their property to foreign buyers in the 1990s when the Costa Rican government failed to effectively help Afro-Costa Rican farmers recover from a crop blight. Thus, Sara has never owned land. She has worked at this particular coffee shop for five years because she says they pay well, almost $5/hour, while most of her friends earn only $2/hour in their employment. Her income supports herself, her three children, and her unemployed husband. Sara explained that her husband has been unable to find stable employment in Puerto Viejo because many foreign employers hold stereotyped beliefs that local men are lazy. Over the course of her interview, it became clear that Sara was referring specifically to stereotypes perpetuated about local Afro-descendant men rather than Indigenous or Mestizo men ‘from the mountains’ who are more easily able to find employment in foreign-owned businesses. Even if she had other ways of providing for her family, Sara described how difficult it would be for her to obtain a visa to enter the United States or Canada, in contrast to the ease with which North Americans can live in Costa Rica without special visas or residency. Even in comparison to other Costa Ricans, Sara feels certain she would have a harder time obtaining a visa than a Mestizo in San José. Wealth disparities, racism, divergent visa requirements, and other controls on mobility mark the ongoing coloniality of power that operates on multiple levels: it distinguishes not only between residents of lower-income and higher-income countries, but also between people of European and non-European descent within previously colonized countries like Costa Rica.

Noting the multiple layers of colonial power and rejecting simplistic binaries that subsume all local residents within a local-foreigner binary, attention to intersectional differences in the postcolonial context (see Mollett and Faria, 2013) shows how inequality is (re)produced not only between ‘locals’ and ‘foreigners’ but also according to the intersections of gender, race, and nationality among residents of Puerto Viejo. In Talamanca, Indigenous Costa Rican, Afro-Costa Rican, and Mestizo Costa Rican groups, as well as migrants from Panama and Nicaragua, each occupy different racialized positions that are simultaneously shaped by nationality and gender. For example, as an Indigenous woman, Yamileth has access to land and government-built housing in Talamanca because of Costa Rican multicultural policies that recognize Indigenous populations’ rights to collective territories as culturally distinct members of the citizenry. In contrast, Sara and most of her Afro-Costa Rican relatives struggle for land, housing, and government assistance in a country that has long tried to write the presence of Afro-descendants out of its supposedly White national identity (Christian, 2013, 2015). However, although Costa Rican government resources have helped Yamileth start her own business, it could be argued that she occupies a more marginalized position than Sara in her ability to gain employment from lifestyle migration. As Yamileth explained in an interview, she struggles to make a living because her restaurant receives very little attention from global lifestyle migrants who frequently choose Talamanca as their destination for its English-speaking, Afro-Caribbean culture. Sara, as an Afro-Costa Rican woman who speaks English and fits the cultural image sought by many lifestyle migrants, is more easily able to find employment in a coffee shop owned by and serving lifestyle migrants.

Although Sara and Yamileth occupy differently racialized positions within national and international discourses about Talamanca, both of their contemporary experiences can be situated in a shared (post)colonial history. Afro-descendant and Indigenous populations have long been marginalized vis-à-vis the Spanish-descended majority in Costa Rica. The Spanish-descended government of Costa Rica’s Central Valley gave vast tracts of Indigenous-occupied land in the country’s Caribbean region to US entrepreneur Minor Keith in the late 19th century in exchange for construction of the country's transcontinental railroad. Keith recruited Afro-descendants from Jamaica to build the railroad and work on banana plantations he established that later became part of the United Fruit Company (Echeverri-Gent, 1992; Harpelle, 2000). The region’s development during this period relied on racialized exclusion and hierarchies that set up the conditions of vulnerability and inequality still experienced by Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations in Talamanca today. Indigenous residents were largely ignored, and Afro-descendant migrants farmed land owned by Keith and were paid for their labor with company currency that could only be used in company stores (Chomsky, 1996). On the basis of the 1862 Ley de Bases y Colonización (Law of Bases and Colonization), which was intended to prevent Asian and African races from settling in Costa Rica, the Costa Rican government refused Afro-descendant residents citizenship until the 1950s (Alfaro, 2007; Echeverri-Gent, 1992). Further, when the United Fruit Company moved to the Pacific region in the 1930s due to banana diseases on the Caribbean side, the Costa Rican government passed Decreto No. 31 prohibiting the employment of Black workers in the Pacific and effectively containing thousands of Afro-descendants without paid employment on the Caribbean coast (Koch, 1981).

Although Afro-descendant and Indigenous residents persisted and developed an independent, farming-based economy in the Caribbean after the departure of the United Fruit Company, in the 1980s the Costa Rican government once again saw a national use for Caribbean land that disregarded the needs of the region’s residents. As part of neoliberal economic reforms required by the International Monetary Fund in response to the 1980s debt crisis, Costa Rica sought to encourage foreigners to purchase land in the country as a source of foreign exchange and means of development (Cordero and Paus, 2008). The government passed new lenient residency laws to encourage wealthy foreigners to move to Costa Rica, framing migrants from the Global North as bearers of development (Pera, 2008; van Noorloos, 2011a). As global lifestyle migrants began to arrive in larger numbers in the 1990s, many Talamancans sold their land and found low-wage service employment in sectors catering to lifestyle migrants. This history, which shows that the needs of White actors from the Global North have consistently been prioritized by national and international actors over the needs of Costa Rica’s Afro-descendant and Indigenous residents, created the ‘cheap’ land and labor to be consumed and utilized by lifestyle migrants from the Global North today.

Our analysis of Sara’s and Yamileth’s stories shows that international lifestyle migration to Talamanca is facilitated by histories of racialized, colonial dispossession and enduring inequities between the Global North and Global South. Our case extends Bastos’ and Mollett’s work by demonstrating that contemporary inequality is produced not only between lifestyle migrants and ‘local’ residents, but also between various local residents, who hold different positions in relation to the colonial present. We hope that this case demonstrates the analytical and ethical possibilities of an anticolonial approach that centers the stories of a range of local actors in scholarship on lifestyle migration and holds ourselves accountable to them in our work.

V Conclusion

Colonial legacies are always already racialized, embedded in nation-building and international development processes that have sought to transform countries of the Global South according to Eurocentric ideas of productive land use and civilized behavior (Escobar, 2011; Mollett, 2016; Mollett and Faria, 2013). As critical race scholars remind us, racial hierarchies (along with other social hierarchies) are enacted through the ordinary routines, practices, and institutions of society so that they appear natural and remain unchallenged (Delgado and Stefancic, 2012). In the literature on Global North-South privileged migration, racialized colonial legacies are rarely called out and challenged explicitly, contributing to a normalization of these hierarchies and the slow violences they produce.

In this article we outlined the potentials of applying an anticolonial approach to scholarship on global lifestyle migration. Such an approach critically advances current scholarship that has made important moves towards recognizing race, inequity, and power in lifestyle destinations sites but does not yet fully situate the impacts of lifestyle migration in the longue durée of colonial and neocolonial histories and racial formations. It is vital that scholars of lifestyle migration explicitly engage the political economic, institutional, and historical contexts which facilitate this migration and continually reproduce inequities in destination sites. Deeper examinations of these contexts will allow us to theorize how colonial racializing processes operate in the present, producing inequality according to race and nationality (Mollett and Faria, 2013).

An important dimension of an anticolonial approach is listening to the voices and experiences of long-time residents of the Global South in shaping our understanding of the impacts of this migration. Such a methodological approach decenters the Global North and its residents as the primary sources of knowledge on global lifestyle migration. While we should continue to include the perspectives of lifestyle migrants, who are important actors in the relational space-making that happens in destination sites, an anticolonial approach would place at the center the perspectives of those who are marginalized by racialized, colonial hierarchies. As part of this approach, we encourage the creation of participatory and collaborative research projects with a range of local community members in destination sites. Collaborative research creates potential for research designs which answer questions originating out of the experiences of those who are most impacted. It may also improve the likelihood that the results will be useful to local communities in destinations.

Global North-South lifestyle migration is likely to continue increasing due to the retirement of the baby boom generation, as well as cultural and technological shifts brought about by globalization (Hayes, 2015a). Thus, the work of global lifestyle migration scholars is timely and important in our understandings of contemporary geographic mobility patterns. Further, engaging anticolonial critiques builds on recent work to rethink contemporary geographies from an anticolonial perspective (Esson et al., 2017; Jazeel, 2017; Naylor et al., 2018; Radcliffe, 2017a, 2017b). We look forward to the ongoing development of the global lifestyle migration scholarship so that geographers and scholars from other disciplines are able to provide theoretically incisive understandings of the inequities implicated in global lifestyle migration and support the efforts of community members in destination sites to build good lives.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their generative feedback on this paper. Their thoughtful engagement with our work significantly improved the final version. We are also immensely grateful to all those in Talamanca, Costa Rica who chose to share their stories as part of this research and to leaders at the Puerto Viejo Cultural House and Talamanca Association of Ecotourism and Conservation for providing input and advice.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Kelsey Emard was supported by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant Award No. 1735708, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship program, the Society of Woman Geographers Pruitt Fellowship, the Pennsylvania State University Africana Research Center, and the American Association of University Women American Fellowship.

ORCID iD

Kelsey Emard

Notes

Author biographies

Kelsey Emard is a member of the Faculty of Geography at Oregon State University. Her research examines land and livelihood transformation in Costa Rica and the U.S. with particular focus on the intersection of agrarian landscapes, community action, governance institutions, gender, and race. She also writes on intersectional feminist methodologies.

Lise Nelson is an Associate Professor in the School of Geography, Development, and Environment at the University of Arizona. Her research explores the politics of place, identity, and belonging in the context of neoliberal globalization, with particular attention to the intersections of race, illegality, and gender within evolving geographies of work and social reproduction at the local scale.

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