Guatemala

The academic debate on gender and migration has missed some of the key factors that impact women's lives and communities of origin. Interviews conducted in Jacaltenango, a Mayan sending community in Guatemala, suggest that while the migration of a spouse does bring substantial financial benefits there are significant individual and social costs that result from migration. More importantly, the interviews uncovered the crucial impact of transnational gossip on women's lives, a feature that has been absent in previous academic treatments of gender and migration. Transnational gossip has exacerbated the negative effects of migration for women in migrant-sending locations, pushing women to stay in the "private sphere" and serving as a form of social control that keeps women from actively participating in their communities. For many women, long periods of time living apart from their spouses combined with fears about transnational gossip have brought severe loneliness, anxiety, health problems and even seclusion. This phenomenon is helping define the contemporary social structures of Jacaltenango, and represents one of the most important effects of migration in terms of the lived reality of spouses and families of the predominantly male immigrants who leave Mayan communities in Guatemala to seek work in the United States.