In the decade between 1998-2008, Spain became the main destination for Ecuadorian migrants, and Madrid, Spain's capital, became the city with the largest Ecuadorian population outside of Ecuador. Through a combination of ethnographic research and cultural analysis, this book addresses the interconnections between spatial practices, cultural production, and definitions of citizenship in migration dynamics between Ecuador and Spain, showing how Ecuadorians are key actors in Madrid's recent urban history. Looking at the city as form and content, constitutive and constituting of ideological processes, each chapter analyzes the spatial practices of Madrid's Ecuadorian residents through various forms: the body, the home, public and leisure spaces, the city, the nation, and transnational circuits. Rather than addressing migrants as a general human type marked by (dis)placement, each chapter offers an illustration of how Ecuadorian migrants forge transnational processes through their everyday lives in specific time and place, and how these processes manifest culturally on both sides of the Atlantic.
"In Ecuadorians in Madrid, Araceli Masterson-Algar ... sets out to explore the role of this collective in shaping everyday urban life on both sides of the Atlantic. ... Masterson-Algar sheds light on migrant urban life in millennial Madrid, where the city could prove at once hostile and beguiling to its newest residents. ... Ecuadorians in Madrid is a welcome and important addition to the scholarship on contemporary Spanish urbanism and the spatialization of migration." (Sophie Gonick, EuropeNow, europenowjournal.org, July, 2017)