Doña Elvira, who lives eleven thousand feet above sea level in Ecuador, wakes up before dawn. These days, the first thing she does is check her phone. Her home is in the Colta Valley, at the base of the Chimborazo volcano, and in the early morning the thin air is cold. Elvira’s hands hurt when she brought them out from under the layers of her wool blankets to open TikTok. The previous day, her twenty-five-year-old daughter, María, who lives in New York City, had posted a video of herself sitting in a patch of grass, smiling. Ecuadorian- and American-flag emojis floated up the screen. “From Ecuador,” a singer on a background track declared. “¡Oye, corazón! This one’s for you.”
Elvira, a forty-nine-year-old mother of eight and grandmother of five, didn’t use social media before María and another daughter, Mercedes, left home. She didn’t even have a smartphone until the pandemic, when Ecuador switched to virtual schooling, bringing widespread Internet service to her impoverished area, in the mountainous center of the country. She doesn’t post comments on TikTok; she hardly knows how to write. Nor does she read or speak much Spanish—her native tongue is Kichwa, an Indigenous language spoken widely in the upper Andes. Nonetheless, whenever one of her daughters posts a video, Elvira watches it over and over.
She began the day by preparing a steaming pot of oatmeal-and-potato soup, which would be the family’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She, her husband, and their remaining children and grandchildren all live together in a two-room adobe house with a dirt floor, a hundred yards from the Colta Lagoon. By the time she went outside, to let the family’s three cows graze, the morning fog had lifted. In the distance, she could see the snowy peak of Chimborazo—the closest point on Earth to space. Later, she would hike up the western slopes of Tinkuk Mountain to harvest small chaucha potatoes on borrowed land. Her phone would stay with her, in a woven handbag draped over her blue poncho.
As she worked, she thought of her two eldest daughters, both of whom had gone to America. María and Mercedes, who is twenty-seven, were happy in New York—weren’t they? In August of 2023, the sisters, both of them pregnant, had left their small farming community to settle with their husbands in the United States. (Mercedes also brought along her daughter Jhuliana, who is eleven.) Their baby bumps were visible in the TikTok videos that they posted from the airport in Guayaquil; from the long trek north through Central America toward the U.S.-Mexico border, which they crossed furtively; and from LaGuardia Airport, where they landed after flying from Texas. Of course, they missed their mother and father, their siblings, their small home at the bottom of a green hill. Their most popular videos—which have tens of thousands of views—show the family sobbing and embracing on the day they said goodbye.
María, January 18, 2024
Song: Magaly Tu Flakita del Amor, “Papá Mamá”
Lyrics: “One day I left my parents, the village where I was born, and now I find myself very far away, working. . . . Mom, don’t worry about me, I’m doing fine, and soon I’ll come back.”
#lejosdeti #mamá🥹❤️ #migrantes🇪🇨🇺🇸 #lejosdecasa #💪 #👑❤️ #2024
Mercedes, March 1, 2024
“🇺🇸💔 To migrate is to be happy with a profound sadness 😭🥀” #sueñoamericano🇺🇸❤️🙏🏻🥺 #triste_realidad #despedida #sad😭💔🇱🇷 #fracesdelavida #dale❤️ #videoviral #familia #ecuador🇪🇨 #mama_papa #los_extraño_mucho
But now, Elvira told herself, her daughters had probably adjusted to their new lives, and had maybe even paid off some of their travel debts. In the TikToks that María and Mercedes posted after arriving in New York, they were always smiling. They looked beautiful as they showed off traditional Andean clothes—white blouses embroidered with colorful floral patterns, long anaco skirts—against the backdrop of the city. María and Mercedes and their small children posed in a plaza filled with giant video screens, in front of a huge American flag hanging in a grand building, and beside the river near where they lived. They also posted videos of themselves dancing in their bedrooms, where half-Ecuadorian, half-American flags hung on the walls.
The #sueñoamericano—the American Dream—was mentioned everywhere in their videos. It was the subject of the song lyrics they danced to and the captions they wrote, and it was the impulse behind the experience they were now broadcasting to others. Elvira’s daughters have twenty-two thousand followers between them on TikTok, but Elvira knows that she is the most important one of all. Shortly after daybreak, her phone suddenly lit up: María was calling.
Two hours before María called, she had stepped out of her building, in the Soundview section of the Bronx, and hurried to catch the bus. She had a job at a cookie factory, and the commute was long. At 5 a.m., the streets were practically empty and the stars were still out, so she fast-walked in the middle of the street. “Usually, I run,” she told me in Spanish, clutching her backpack to her chest. “Three times now, crazy men have hissed at me.”
It was early September, and the air was cool in the predawn dark. María wore a wool knit sweater over a pink T-shirt. This was the first leg of her precisely choreographed journey to work, in which she crossed two city boroughs and one state line. “I wake up at ten to four,” she said. “I leave my house at ten to five. I take the bus at five-twenty-three, and it drops me off somewhere in the city.” She used the Spanish words la ciudad to mean Manhattan, as many Latin American migrants in the outer boroughs do. “There, the van picks up workers to take us to the factory. New Jersey, I think it’s called. I don’t know where, exactly.” (She told me that the cookie company pays workers five hundred dollars a week, and charges them thirteen dollars a day for the round-trip van fare across the George Washington Bridge to and from the plant.)
María’s ten-month-old daughter, Ale, was still sleeping when she left the house. A few minutes later, her husband would head to a street corner where hundreds of migrant men wait each day to get picked up for jobs on construction sites. He found work about half the time. During the day, Ale was watched by their landlord, an older Ecuadorian woman who rented them a single room in her apartment for eight hundred dollars a month. María usually got home first, at around five, in time to prepare dinner and to put Ale to bed a few hours later. “That’s the sueño americano, isn’t it?” she told me. “Not having much time for my daughter.”
Two of María’s shift-mates, also Ecuadorian women, were already waiting for the bus when she arrived at the stop. After taking their seats, they all opened their phones to a WhatsApp group chat called Turno 1 (“Shift 1”), where they typed their names and a confirmation that they would be working that day. For twenty-five minutes, as the bus crossed the South Bronx, they rode in silence.
I watched as one of the women seated in front of me began scrolling through TikTok. The algorithm on her For You page mostly served up influencers peddling things related to her personal interests—beauty products, Bible verses—but every few swipes a different kind of video appeared. These were short posts made by other Ecuadorian migrants, highlighting some aspect of life in the United States. I’d seen many similar videos: men on the job, filming construction sites or home renovations; mothers and children posing in front of the shiny white tiles of subway stations; young couples recording themselves doing dance trends in American-style bedrooms. I first started coming across such clips last year, when my own TikTok algorithm registered that I was interested in Indigenous Latin American migrant communities in New York.
Cartoon by Oren Bernstein
At first glance, the videos are fairly unremarkable. They often feature shaky, low-quality camerawork and use kitschy stock effects that give the people in the clips glittering faces or puffed-up lips. But overlaid on the group choreography and the street scenes are grainy, scrapbook-style photographs of relatives still back home in Ecuador, to whom the videos are dedicated. The captions and onscreen text are messages to loved ones, often in poorly written Spanish: “Me duele estar lejos mi kerida familia. . . . Dios me los vendida” (“It pains me to be far away, my dear family. . . . May God bless you”), “Tu y yo por100pre juntos los 3 luchemos por nuestro sueños” (“You and I together forever, the three of us, let’s fight for our dreams”). The clips almost never use camera sound. Instead, they are set to chicha music, a popular genre of cumbia that combines traditional Andean sounds with techno-psychedelic instrumentals, and is known for lyrics about heartbreak and migration. Many previously unknown chicha artists have become famous in recent years because songs of theirs have gone viral on TikTok. Some artists—such as Ángel Guaraca, who sings the hit “El Migrante” and calls himself the Indio Cantor de América—have even embarked on U.S. tours, stopping in places with large Ecuadorian communities, such as Queens and Brooklyn; Fall River, Massachusetts; and Danbury, Connecticut.
The most popular videos have hundreds of thousands of views. It is clear that users are emulating one another, particularly given that certain errors are repeated so often that they become trendy. The emoji of the red-white-and-blue Liberian flag is regularly used instead of the American one, and places in the New York area are spelled as they would be pronounced by Spanish-speaking migrants. (Junction Boulevard in Queens is called “La Jonson”; Roosevelt Avenue is “La Rusbel.”)
Even the most fraught moments of a journey from South America are now mined for content, though such clips are usually uploaded only after users have arrived at their final destinations in the United States. “People leave quietly,” one of María’s former neighbors told me this past summer, when I visited the Colta area, which has a population of around thirty thousand. “You don’t know anything about it until one day they post with the American flag.” One TikTok I saw had been filmed in a remote part of the Andes highlands, and showed a large Indigenous family saying goodbye to a relative who was leaving. When I clicked to hear the accompanying song, “A Dónde Vas” (“Where Are You Going”), the app showed me a grid of hundreds of similar sendoff scenes set to the same soundtrack. Thousands of videos document journeys through the treacherous, roadless Darién Gap, a rain-forest zone on the Colombia-Panama border; the clips are accompanied by encouraging comments from loved ones and strangers. (One such video, filmed selfie style by a teen-ager, shows dozens of exhausted migrants taking a break in the jungle, the forest behind them strewn with discarded clothes and Ecuadorian flags.) Other people share the moment they illegally crossed the U.S. border; in one video, a group of migrants wave to the camera as they pass through a hole in a fence. Yet another popular trend is to film the moment when migrants descend the escalators at an American airport, marking the end of their journey, and are greeted by relatives or friends who have already settled in the U.S.; these clips are typically set to dubbed audio from the Spanish-language version of the Pixar movie “Inside Out”: “You did it!”
Once the migrants are in the U.S., their accounts tend to follow a similar pattern. Migrants begin to show themselves living, in real time, the sueño americano for which they risked everything. I knew that most of these people were now working precarious jobs—indeed, living precarious lives—in the migrant underworld of New York, which has been unsettled by a surge of more than two hundred thousand new arrivals since 2022. In this informal economy, which touches every borough and county in the metropolitan area, there is widespread unemployment, food insecurity, loneliness, and crippling debt. Affordable housing is nearly impossible to find, and many migrants end up renting single rooms in homes or apartments for about a thousand dollars a month, which they share with relatives or others to further defray the cost. The extreme stress regularly leads to alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and other issues. Such difficulties, however, are largely left out of the online picture; whenever sadness or nostalgia is expressed, it is vague and sweetly sentimental, conforming to an inspiring narrative of enduring temporary hardship to achieve future prosperity. More often, the struggle is not shown at all.
One young Ecuadorian man, who came to Queens more than a year ago from a Kichwa farming community called Palacio, described the dynamic to me recently. He talked about “that place with the screens” where nobody could afford to live but where everybody went when they first got to New York City. He couldn’t remember the name.
“Times Square?” I offered.
“Yes, that’s it,” he said. “People go there and they make these videos that are cropped just right to show everything nice, but not the fact that they’re selling things off to the side.”
“I refuse to believe that the conversations I engage in are as insipid as the ones I eavesdrop on.”
Cartoon by William Haefeli
These migrants, of course, are curating their lives on social media in roughly the same way that everyone else does. They do not intend to mislead; most are simply young adults in their late teens and twenties who seek the gratification of likes and followers, and feel constant pressure to appear perfect on their profiles. But the wide gulf between what migrants are sharing and what they’re actually experiencing—coupled with the near-endless stream of enticing videos made accessible by algorithmic platforms like TikTok—is having powerful consequences for their communities back home, where many people are relative newcomers to the mobile Internet. The government of Ecuador, despite the country’s challenging terrain and fragile economy, has been pushing for universal digital access, and the proportion of the population using the Internet has skyrocketed in the past few years, rising from sixty-nine per cent in 2020 to eighty-three per cent in 2024. Personal digital devices are also becoming more affordable, and everyone from the central highlands I spoke with, both in New York and in Ecuador, pointed to the pandemic as the hinge point when smartphones and social media became ubiquitous in their communities. Some families still did not have reliable access to clean water and electricity, but they did have Androids.
Indigenous people in highland villages are being propelled northward by an array of serious problems at home. Drought, irregular weather patterns, and soil degradation, all likely fuelled by climate change, have caused mounting crop losses. Ecuador has been enduring a national economic crisis since the pandemic, and nearly half of its rural citizens are living in poverty. At the same time, there has been an explosion of violent crime caused by drug cartels. Although this wave of violence has been felt most strongly in lowland coastal regions, the whole country has suffered; in August, 2023, a leading Presidential candidate, Fernando Villavicencio, was assassinated in Quito by a hit man.
Eighteen per cent of the migrants who have arrived in New York City since the spring of 2022 have come from Ecuador, clearly undeterred by frequent policy changes, political stunts, and growing anti-migrant rhetoric in the U.S. Whereas struggling farmers might once have first resettled in an Ecuadorian city, such as Quito or Guayaquil, they are now taking enormous leaps of faith, and going tens of thousands of dollars into debt, by trying to migrate directly to the United States, often without any real concept of what awaits them when they get here—if they get here.
Like many of the migrants I spoke with in New York, María and Mercedes said that their decision to leave Colta was at least partly influenced by TikToks they’d seen—videos very similar to the ones they were making now. At first, there were indeed reasons to be optimistic about their new lives in America. Mercedes’s older daughter, Jhuliana, enrolled in elementary school, where her teacher was a young, bilingual Ecuadorian American man who taught in both English and Spanish. But even after a year in New York the sisters had barely begun to pay off their debts, which collectively were tens of thousands of dollars. María was not earning nearly enough at the cookie factory, and Mercedes was risking fines for selling coffee from a cart on the street in downtown Brooklyn. They wondered if they’d made the right decision.
“They said that things would be easy here,” María said one Saturday afternoon in Parque de los Niños, a small trash-strewn park wedged into the Bronx River Parkway and the Bruckner Expressway. Her infant daughter fidgeted uncomfortably with a Mickey Mouse headband while her niece Jhuliana made friends with a Venezuelan girl whose mother was sitting nearby. “I thought that I was going to be able to find a job that would allow me to help my family,” María said. “But it’s not like that at all.”
“You said that money would fall from the sky,” Jhuliana muttered under her breath, picking at the thick, dirty grass.
In the Ecuadorian highlands, symbols of the American Dream are so abundant that it can at times seem like an obsession. As I travelled along narrow roads that snaked deep into the mountains, I passed farm trucks emblazoned with both the American and the Ecuadorian flags, slowly hauling bleating livestock and mesh bags of squirming cuy, or guinea pigs—a popular food in the Andes. In Colta, I stayed with a family who sold handcrafted ceramic piggy banks shaped like bald eagles and “PAW Patrol” characters. The U.S. dollar, which has been Ecuador’s national currency since 2000, itself adds lustre to people’s fantasies about America.
“There are a lot of cosmopolitan desires among Indigenous youth,” Ulla Berg, an anthropologist at Rutgers University who studies the transnational experiences of migrants from Andean communities, told me. “It’s been like this for a long time, even before these more contemporary social-media platforms.” After immigration from these communities began, in the nineteen-sixties, “youth would see peers with migrant parents who would send them sneakers and hoodies and baseball caps—all of this stuff.”
Today’s migrants are reconstructing these same status symbols online, and in much more public, far-reaching ways. The emojis, the displays of American clothing and accessories, the seductive framing of cityscapes, the placement of shiny cars in the background of videos—this all suggests a story of triumph. Berg said of migrant TikTokers, “If they can produce themselves as somebody who has access to all these spaces and are seen as having relative success abroad, then that also trickles down a little bit to the social status of the family and the community.”
Even the delivery of physical remittances, which remain a cornerstone of transnational migration, is now broadcast online. In every town center I visited in the Ecuadorian Andes, I came upon money-transfer offices and courier services offering three-day package deliveries to various American destinations. Migrants in the U.S. send mostly cash and American clothes to Ecuador; in return, their relatives send all sorts of items, from medicines to traditional clothing and food. These gifts are commonly shared in “unboxing” videos—a genre that has long been popular online. Doña Elvira scraped together the money to send her youngest granddaughters gifts of toys, roasted cuy, and baby clothes when they turned six months old; Mercedes thanked her mother with a video on TikTok. “My daughter loves cuy,” María said, smiling sadly when she told me about the packages. “I gave her a little bit to try, and she didn’t want to let it go.”
When I visited an Ecuadorian town called Guamote, the courier Corporaciones Unidas was one of only a few businesses open on a Monday, a non-market day. Women with babies strapped to their backs grilled chicken feet on a nearby corner. I recalled having passed the offices of Corporaciones Unidas along Roosevelt Avenue, in Queens. A sign outside the Guamote outpost displayed a detailed list of the places in New York where Ecuadorians have settled widely: not just neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx but also suburbs like Spring Valley, Ossining, Patchogue, Peekskill, Port Chester, Tarrytown, and White Plains. Inside, an older woman stood at the counter. She was sending a traditional skirt and blouse to her daughter, who needed it by that Friday for a party in Spring Valley. For a while, the older woman video-chatted with her daughter in a mixture of Kichwa and Spanish, figuring out the details. Her two granddaughters, who were born in the U.S. and have never met their grandmother in person, kept interrupting the call in Spanish. The older woman didn’t speak Spanish well, so she answered them in Kichwa. “All of my four children are in Spring Valley now, my grandchildren, too,” the older woman told me afterward. Only she and her husband were still living in their small farming community, near Guamote, and they were thinking about leaving. “After all, what’s left for me here?” she said.
I continued through the town, past an empty plaza, an empty basketball court, a nearly empty municipal office. A nearby clothing store sold hoodies and tracksuits alongside dark anaco skirts and white embroidered blouses. Displayed most prominently were clothes representing specific places in the Midwest: shirts that said “Chicago,” varsity-football jackets stitched with the yellow “M” of the University of Michigan. A saleswoman told me that her cousin had recently migrated to Indianapolis. “Just like a celebrity might wear certain clothes and then we all want that brand, that’s what’s happening here, including with relatives,” she said.
A strong culture of rootedness and family ties among Indigenous communities adds to this dynamic, Berg, the anthropologist, told me. “It is a social norm in the Andes, in terms of kinship and expectations, that you will take care of your relatives and you will be in contact with them no matter what,” she said. These values do not fade easily, even if someone is thousands of miles away. “How do you perform your role as a dutiful daughter or a considerate son when you’re abroad?” Berg said. “By performing these emotions and saying, ‘I’m missing my mother. My mother is the most important.’ ”
Berg added that, though migrants from other backgrounds have traditionally sent letters home to loved ones, writing has never been a preferred mode of emotional expression for Indigenous people from the Andes. The legacy of Spanish colonial rule in the region left a strong negative cultural perception of the written word, linking it to powerful bureaucratic authorities; moreover, Kichwa is historically an oral language, written down only in recent centuries, using the Latin alphabet. As a result, migrants have long gravitated toward other kinds of communication. “When I started my research in Peru, in the nineteen-nineties, people were sending VHS tapes,” Berg said. The tapes, not unlike posts on social media today, showed mostly happy occasions, like patron-saint festivals and other celebrations. “The technologies have been changing, but the need to be in contact, and the expectations that people will continue to be part of these social groups and families, continue no matter what,” she said.
In the central highlands, I noticed that adults and young people alike used TikTok constantly: taxi-drivers opened the app when they stopped at red lights, and farmers scrolled through it while trying to fall asleep. Clips of chicha music drifted out of storefronts and homes, changing every few seconds, after a swipe. Older women coming from the fields carried heavy loads of alfalfa on their backs and wore “Brooklyn” sweaters under their ponchos. They kept their phones with them. It felt like a place that mostly lived vicariously through the experiences of those who were elsewhere.
María, June 17, 2024
“🇪🇨Dad😭 . . . 💔😭I’ll always take care of you, even though I’m far away. 😭😭”
Mercedes, July 31, 2024
🇱🇷🇪🇨🇱🇷🇪🇨🇱🇷🇪🇨🇱🇷🇪🇨🇱🇷🇪🇨
(Video: Unboxing a courier package sent by her mother from Colta, filled with hand sanitizer and medicine; a toddler-size blouse, poncho, and anaco; and a roasted cuy wrapped in foil, which her baby samples with delight.)
“😭 Mamita thank you for your infinite love ❤️”
#migrantes_latinos🇪🇨 #mamita
The sisters arrived in New York late in the summer of 2023, and, like many Andean migrants, they headed for a place in the U.S. where they already had relatives. Two cousins were living in the South Bronx, as was Mercedes’s husband, who had arrived there five months earlier.
During the sisters’ first few weekends in the city, they tried to see the places that everyone had told them about. María filmed in Times Square on a day when the sky was a cloudless blue. She recorded the autumn colors of the trees along a stretch of Morrison Avenue near the Bruckner Expressway. Once, before the babies were born, she and Mercedes and Jhuliana went all the way to Flushing Meadows Corona Park, where hundreds of Ecuadorian migrants gather every Sunday to play soccer and eat street food such as choclo mote—potatoes, corn, and fried pork. The park was about an hour and a half by public transit from their Soundview neighborhood, which is hemmed in on all sides by roaring highways. The Ecuadorian leagues in Flushing Meadows are so popular that many highland towns have teams, including Colta; sometimes the teams have to be divided even further when too many new players from one area have recently crossed the border. If, in Ecuadorian-highland hamlets such as Laime Capulispungo and Palacio, it almost seems like only grandparents remain—older farmers living in tiny clusters of adobe homes above blustery plots of potatoes, beans, and grains—all one has to do is go to Flushing Meadows on a Sunday afternoon to see where many of their children and grandchildren have ended up. The young men played on the dusty grass, wearing jerseys with American and Ecuadorian flags on their sleeves. The young women socialized along the sidelines in Spanish, toddlers tugging at their leggings or the occasional anaco skirt; switching to Kichwa, they joked about the elderly Chinese ladies who came to collect the empty plastic water bottles that the teams left on the ground.
Weekdays were consumed by the search for work in a post-pandemic economy saturated with informal migrant workers. María was seven months pregnant when she landed at LaGuardia, and she wasn’t physically able to do much. The only job that she could manage was babysitting another woman’s child, which she did nearly every day until she gave birth, in November. Two weeks after her daughter was born, María started working at the cookie factory, a more physically demanding job. “Usually, the mother stays in bed for at least a month or two,” she told me. “I didn’t have any money for milk, diapers, nothing, so I had to go back out.”
The debt that María faced was overwhelming. Since the moment she arrived, she could think of nothing else. “My husband and I each have our own debts with different banks in Ecuador,” María told me. “Including interest, I still owe around thirty thousand dollars.” Mercedes’s debts were also high. Debt of this scale is common among Indigenous migrants from rural Ecuador, where banks and other creditors regularly lend individuals tens of thousands of dollars so that they can pay coyotes to arrange their passage north. (Migrants who try to make the journey without the guidance of smugglers run a much higher risk of being kidnapped for ransom by trafficking syndicates, which control checkpoints along the way north, especially in Mexico.) A relative staying in Ecuador usually co-signs a loan, and is therefore responsible if the migrant does not wire enough money to cover the loan payments each month. The creditors can be aggressive: family homes can be subjected to foreclosure, and plots of land are sometimes turned over as collateral. When a payment is late, representatives of the creditors send ominous WhatsApp voice messages to migrants’ relatives to pressure them to pay: “What happened to the deposit? It’s the end of the month. You told me you were about to get the deposit. Confirm it for me. . . . You made a commitment to pay, and then nothing.” On the main road through Colta, right in the town center, a large billboard displayed the red-and-white logo of Daquilema, one of the most popular financial coöperatives offering loans in the area.
“A dog is a big responsibility—are you prepared for the guilt you’ll feel when I’m the one who ends up taking care of it?”
Cartoon by Zachary Kanin
In New York, both María and Mercedes carried their newborns in shawls strapped to their backs. This was the most common way that Indigenous people in Ecuador and elsewhere in the Andes carried their children; it was what the sisters had seen all their lives. One day, Mercedes came home from selling coffee on the street and announced that she would no longer carry her baby like that, because it marked her as a recent migrant. “People told me that the police would give me more tickets,” Mercedes said. After that, the sisters mostly wheeled their babies around in black strollers.
“My husband is already in the United States,” a twenty-two-year-old woman named Manuela told me one afternoon as we stood by the tomb of her grandparents in the hamlet of Guaylla Grande. The cemetery sat on the edge of a cliff, overlooking a long valley filled with swift-moving clouds. “He left three months ago. Soon I’ll follow him.”
“How soon?” I asked.
“Sometime in July,” Manuela said. It was June 26th. “I’ll go with my daughter through the jungle. They say it costs two hundred dollars to book a bus ticket to Colombia.” Some people paid more than a thousand dollars to fly to El Salvador or Nicaragua, skipping the Darién Gap, but she did not have enough money. She said this nonchalantly, as though she were merely choosing to take side roads instead of a highway. (Since 2014, hundreds of migrants have drowned or otherwise perished attempting to traverse the Darién Gap.) Manuela had seen plenty of TikTok videos posted by smugglers promoting the journey and promising success.
The deluge of content from other Ecuadorians had clearly shaped her understanding of life in the U.S. When I asked her where her husband was living, she said, “La 103.” Many people I spoke with in the highlands seemed to know the area around 103rd Street in Corona, Queens—home to thousands of Ecuadorians—as well as “La Jonson” and “La Rusbel,” the neighborhood’s noisy, chaotic thoroughfares. Official place-names such as Corona or Soundview or Brooklyn were less familiar to people in Ecuador; more famous now were the landmarks and other emblems of the city which migrants posted about, like subway lines, parks, the place with the screens. Soledad Chango, a graduate student in linguistics at M.I.T. who is from Salasaka, Ecuador, told me that this is a matter of cultural norms. “In our Kichwa language, places are not described in the same way as in many Western cultures and languages,” she explained. “We won’t say, ‘Go to this address.’ It’s more like ‘Next to that four-story red building, there’s a white house, and across the street . . .’ ” A place, she said, is defined less by its name and more by how to get there.
Manuela, who has a two-year-old named Nicole, wore jeans and a long-sleeved shirt and spoke in Spanish; her mother and father stood beside her in traditional clothing and spoke in Kichwa. Manuela’s parents were born in Guaylla Grande, as were her grandparents and her great-grandparents, along with everyone else in her family tree for as long as anyone could remember. When Manuela was around ten years old, her parents had decided to move the family to Alausí, the district seat, in a humid valley an hour down the mountain, so that she and her siblings could attend secondary school. (Countless other families have left their ancestral villages in recent years for the same reason, including Doña Elvira’s, who moved to Colta from a similarly remote community when María and Mercedes were young.)
“Sorry I’m late—I was trying to throw a string of dental floss in the garbage.”
Cartoon by Tom Chitty
Manuela’s maternal grandparents followed them to Alausí. But then tragedy struck. On March 26, 2023, after months of heavy rain, a landslide swept away their home, destroying all their possessions and killing Manuela’s grandparents. A year later, the family was penniless and desperate, renting a small house in town that they could not afford.
A few of Manuela’s cousins were, like her husband, already in New York, and she followed them on social media. I’d come to know one of her relatives living in Queens, who sold candy and soft drinks on the subway—a gruelling way of life that is rarely highlighted on TikTok. To Manuela and her husband, migrating to New York had seemed like the only decent option that remained. “If God allows me to get there safely, I hope I might find a job, rent a place with my husband, and be able to send some money back to help my family,” she said, crying. “And then, eventually, I’ll come back to Ecuador.”
We stood in silence in the cemetery for a few minutes. Manuela and her youngest sister picked yellow wildflowers and placed them on the tombstones. Manuela’s mother sat on the ground nearby, and her father paced a bit farther away. I imagined the funeral procession that had arrived here more than two months after the landslide, when the bodies of Manuela’s grandparents were finally pulled from the rubble—the family moving slowly up the mountain, first by car to Guaylla Grande and then silently on foot to this cliff above the clouds. The wind made an eerie noise as it rustled through the graveyard grass. Later, I learned that there was a saying in Kichwa for that sound. Wayra wakashpa rishpa, shamun y rin. The wind, crying, comes and goes.
Returning along the road that led to the cemetery, we stopped in front of a cluster of homes. Manuela’s mother, Olimpia, called out in Kichwa. A few moments later, a very old man hobbled out of one of the houses and offered me a hard and scratchy hand. His voice was feeble and high-pitched, and he spoke with whistles through the spaces in his teeth.
Before I’d left New York, one of Manuela’s cousins in the city, Aidita, asked me to visit her paternal grandfather, who was still alive. This was him. His name was Jesús. “This is a friend of Aidita’s in the United States,” Olimpia told Jesús. “He came to visit my parents’ tomb and to meet you.”
“Ah, qué bonito.” Jesús didn’t say much more than that—“how nice”—in our short conversation. I told him that I knew his granddaughter and great-grandchildren in New York. Because Guaylla Grande is a place where cell signals don’t reach reliably, I asked him if he wanted to send them a voice message. He said yes. I held my phone out and pressed Record.
“Aidita, your grandmother is very sick,” he said into the phone. “We’re fucked here. I’m just by myself.” He paused, waiting for a response.
“Say, ‘We’re fine,’ ” Olimpia whispered to him while I tried to explain that we were making a recording, not a phone call.
But Jesús had nothing more to say. “Thank you, Aidita, for sending the visitor,” he finished.
María, October 9, 2024
Song: Solmary Tixi, “Mi Valiente Migrante”
[Photograph: María holding her daughter Ale and smiling on a sunny day in Times Square]
Lyrics: “To leave home means to leave with your feet but never with your heart. For my family, for my mom, for my siblings, I find myself far away, working day and night. . . . A call or a message is not the same. . . . Don’t cry. Don’t cry.”
Fall turned to winter, and things were not getting easier for María. “It’s all work, all the time,” she told me when we met up one weekday evening in early October, in Parque de los Niños. The sun was setting, and she was shivering in a light zip-up jacket. She was exhausted from another day on the job, her hands covered in blisters. “I’m learning how to do the packaging for the cookies, and it’s really hard,” she said. “But I got a cleaning shift at the factory on Saturdays, so now I’m working then as well.”
Saturday used to be María’s time to relax—it was the only day she could go out and have fun with baby Ale. Sunday was filled with laundry and errands. She and Ale had been happiest on Saturdays, when they would go with Mercedes and her children to the park and record TikTok videos of themselves dancing. “The videos are for anyone who wants to watch,” María told me, when I asked her if her posts were meant for anyone in particular. “But mostly I make them to have fun and make myself feel better. It takes away some of the stress of what I’m going through.”
Her husband still hadn’t found regular work, and some months she had to take on his share of the rent. Too often, she felt completely alone in this challenging new life. It didn’t help that the people around María seemed to have it all together. Her friends at work asked why she didn’t buy more clothes, why she didn’t paint her nails. “They say, ‘You’re in America now,’ ” she told me. It felt to her like only she and Mercedes were struggling. “I tell my parents, ‘I’m O.K., I’m O.K.,’ but the truth is I’m not.” María wiped tears from her eyes. “I have debt with two different banks. And everything I make goes to pay rent and debt. Rent, debt. Rent, debt.” She opened her jacket to show me a white T-shirt underneath that read “New York,” in black script. “This is the only thing I’ve bought since I got here,” she said. “Everything else”—she pointed at her jacket, her leggings, the baby stroller that had replaced her shawl—“is donated.”
Nearly all the Ecuadorian migrants I spoke to lived with the shame of feeling that they were sinking, but they didn’t communicate this to one another, either because they didn’t want their relatives to worry or because they didn’t want it to seem like they had failed. The few migrants whom I’ve seen share a pessimistic post tend to do so at a distance, as part of a smaller trend of TikTok videos that claim to present “the truth about life here in the United States” in more general terms, usually without much detail about the creators’ personal situations. In one video, which has received more than four hundred thousand views, a TikTok comedian named Tío Ainy, who satirizes the Indigenous Ecuadorian migrant experience in New York, wanders through the streets of Corona, searching unsuccessfully for a meal that he can afford. “Damn, life is so expensive here,” he complains, in a mixture of Spanish and Kichwa, while sitting on a street corner. “So much ‘sueño americano,’ ‘sueño americano.’ . . . Now I better think about the sueño ecuatoriano! ” He says, crying, that he may have to go back home.
“He came with the windowsill.”
Cartoon by P. C. Vey
In Colta, Doña Elvira sensed that all wasn’t well with her daughters. She knew it from the few details they shared with her on their WhatsApp calls, no matter how often they posted mantras like “Rendirse no es una opción” (“Giving up is not an option”). Once, when Mercedes hadn’t sent back enough money to cover a debt payment, her mother sold off some of the family’s animals—calves, chickens, pigs—to make up the difference. “I miss them so much it feels like someone has died,” Doña Elvira told me as she dug up potatoes on someone else’s land, on the slopes above her home. After filling a large white sack, she descended past rainbow-colored fields of quinoa to her door, where her youngest daughter, Julisa, was waiting. Discarded junk and dirty clothes covered the muddy floor. “I want them to come back,” Julisa said of her sisters.
It was true, María told me, that sometimes she thought about returning to Ecuador. But then she did the math. If she wasn’t working in America, she could never pay off her thirty-thousand-dollar debt. When Trump won the election in November, the possibility of deportation became terrifyingly real for the two sisters. “Trump says that he’s going to send us back to our country,” Mercedes wrote to me in a WhatsApp message shortly after the election. She had applied for asylum, on the basis of her Indigenous identity, and she was scrambling to find a lawyer before her next hearing at an immigration court. María’s situation was worse: she had also applied for asylum, but she had never received confirmation from U.S. authorities that her mailed application had been received. The thought of the worst-case scenario was too difficult to bear: If María were apprehended during a raid at the cookie factory, or if Mercedes were detained while selling coffee on the street without a permit, what would happen to their babies, who were American citizens by birth? What would happen to eleven-year-old Jhuliana, who was not? (Trump has said that he will press for the wholesale removal of such families.)
The migrant community—enormous, heterogeneous, and decentralized—is difficult to track collectively, and, despite the repeated threats from the incoming Administration, nobody knows for certain what’s ahead. “Researchers that work on deportation know that this is not the end of the migration story,” Berg, the anthropologist, told me. “A lot of people who undergo deportation will try to come back to the United States, knowing the risks.” Rumors about coming crackdowns have been circulating on social media, in shared homes, and in immigrant neighborhoods, causing widespread fear. But although a few satirical videos on TikTok have begun to parody what it might look like to pack up and leave now that Trump has won—one video shows a man walking down the street with a bicycle on his back, wheeling two suitcases behind him—most of the ordinary people on my feed are still posting publicly as if nothing has changed. Indeed, social media indicates that the exodus from the Andes has only continued. “ ‘Get in now while you can’ is the general sentiment,” Berg said. A severe drought has devastated the central highlands this year; harvests are poor, food prices are high, and animals don’t have enough grass to feed on. And so people keep pushing north, even as many migrants in New York become disillusioned with the American Dream. “I feel empty inside,” María said. “Now you start to value the little things that you had before—my mom’s little plot of land, the sheep. They’re worth so much more.”
María, October 17, 2024
“Forgive me, MOM, if I haven’t valued your company, now I realize how Difficult 😔 it is to have you far away 😭🇪🇨🇱🇷”
On the ride down the mountain back to Alausí, the clouds were so thick that we could see only about five feet ahead of the pickup truck we were riding in. “It’s normal for the road to be foggy,” Manuela’s mother, Olimpia, told us as her husband took the blind curves quickly, at times grabbing the steering wheel hard with both hands to maintain control on the narrow washboard roads. Every few minutes, cows and burros and their poncho-clad guardians suddenly appeared in the fog, like ghosts.
“What do people do when the clouds come and they can’t see?” I asked.
Manuela said, “We just keep walking.”
Olimpia said, “All you see is what’s right in front of you. For a long time, it’s like that. But it will clear up.” It sounded as if she were reassuring herself, as the car lurched and swerved in the dense whiteness. “It always does, doesn’t it?”
An hour later, we made it to Alausí and said goodbye. I told Manuela to stay in touch, and said that I would see her in New York once she got there. She left Ecuador less than a month later, at the end of July.
I heard from her on WhatsApp intermittently in the weeks that followed. From Peru: “Do you know how much is ten soles in dollars?” From Guatemala: “I’m not quite sure where I am.” ^^ From Mexico: She and her daughter were locked without food in a hotel room for a day, where smugglers were demanding an additional thousand dollars before the two of them would be allowed to continue to the border. Her husband was looking for more loans to get them out. “Nada bien pero Aii boii así mismo es el sueño americano,” she wrote. “I’m not good at all but I’m keeping on—that’s exactly the American Dream.”
For nearly two weeks after that, I heard nothing. At the end of August, Manuela wrote only to say that she’d arrived in New York, and was still getting used to the city. Then, on September 7th, she posted a video to her TikTok account. The soundtrack was a version of “Te Regalo,” a sad and lovely piano ballad by the Mexican singer-songwriter Carla Morrison about giving oneself entirely to another. “I’ll love you until I die,” Morrison sings. Manuela’s TikTok was a montage of photographs of her with her daughter and her husband—the three of them reunited at last, posing by a Coca-Cola billboard in Times Square. I understood that this was her way of announcing to the world that she had made it. And for a moment I found myself believing that she was O.K. ♦