Offshoring Retirement: Lifestyle Migration, Expressive Individualism and the Future of Aging

This paper draws on interviews with North American transnational retirement or lifestyle migrants in Cuenca, Ecuador, who seek out a lower income community in which to pursue culturally specific forms of ‘successful’ and ‘active’ aging. These dominant cultural forms of aging require time and money in order to achieve, leading a growing number of financially vulnerable North American ‘baby boomers’ to pursue their later life course in low income countries—many in Latin America. The pursuit of these cultural ideals is increasingly dependent on the coloniality of contemporary global society, and the embedded inequalities between Global North and Global South. While leisure travel has been central to cultural notions of aging in the sociological literature, less attention has so far been paid to relocations to areas of cultural difference. Moving to ‘a different culture’ is, however, a crucial aspect of North Americans’ sense of risk-taking and adventure in Ecuador, and is tightly tied up with notions of successful aging. The paper is also attentive to the gender differences in narratives of adventure and cultural integration. Both men and women seek new, more ‘expansive’ horizons in Ecuador as a way to ‘stay young,’ and avoid aging in North American societies that devalue aging bodies and the experience and expertise of older workers, especially women. While North American lifestyle migrants often report positive experiences related to their relocations, their uprootedness is evident both in the risks of isolation to which they are exposed, and in their wanderlust for ever more transnational destinations, often pre-populated by small settlements of lifestyle migrants. Moreover, their condition in Latin American communities like Cuenca are marked by relative economic privilege and the symbolic power of their racialized whiteness, which shapes how their aging bodies are received and read in transnational contexts.