Guatemala's Remittance Economy
CAJOLÁ, Guatemala – Israel Vail Lopez walks from room to room, treading across construction dust that powders the hardwood floor in this new home. Although construction is almost complete, no one will live here any time soon.
This is a so-called “remittance home,” built with money sent back to Guatemala by one of his sons who works as a landscaper in New Jersey. Mr. Vail Lopez calls the home a safety net: If his son is deported, he will have an asset and a place to land.
Remittances sent to Guatemala from the US – totaling roughly $10.5 billion in 2019 – fund infrastructure projects, put siblings and children through school, and ensure there’s enough food to eat. But the colorful remittance homes with grand balconies and chiseled pillars are transforming towns like this one, where rolling green farm land has been erased by sprawling – and often empty – homes.
They may encapsulate the American Dream, but there are consequences.
“It can create [these] sort of social differentiated communities that draw more people into the ‘migration economy’ as a means of keeping up,” Richard Johnson, a Guatemala expert at the University of Arizona. Here, big homes divide the small town into successful migrants and those who don't have the economic cushion of remittances. Rising cases of coronavirus may shrink remittances and slow the rapid rise of homes like these, but migration and deportation continue despite the pandemic.
Marina Diaz, a former migrant, fears these homes do more harm than good: even if someone is deported or chooses to return, they aren’t likely to stay in a subsistence-farming town like this one for long, she says. A big house doesn’t change the fact that Guatemala lacks economic and educational opportunities.
But for Vail Lopez, building a home with remittances changed his life.
“My dream was to build a place to live,” he says. “And, I did it.”
