“Last year I hosted the celebration with my [emigrant] son’s support. He supported the mass [and the celebrations that follow] to Saint Isidro, because he helped him on his way to the United States. We paid for 40 horses for the escaramuzas (an equestrian performance) and prepared three head of cattle for the guests.” It seems that San Fernando emigrants maintain some kind of reciprocity that protects their public reputation. Emigrants are not discriminated against in this region; on the contrary, they are presented as role models for youth because of their success. Nonetheless, social differences can create a hostile environment where neighbors and relatives in formerly equal situations perceive the emergence of a hierarchy in their society. At the same time, however, this does not mean that there is explicit discrimination. A different situation prevails in Cuenca. As the media content analysis shows, urban inhabitants have developed a very well-defined discourse against rural inhabitants who emigrate abroad and their families who stay in the country. This discourse is characterized by a stigmatization that reinforces their exclusion despite emigrants’ economic improvement. In fact, this seems to be the cause of such discrimination: urban elites are constructing a discourse to legitimize (peasant) emigrants’ differentiation, because emigrant incomes can compete with their interests and place emigrants (and their families) in the same social spaces (schools, universities, neighborhoods, enterprises, etc). In this sense, Cuenca-San Fernando discrimination represents a very interesting case to analyze, because a condition (emigration) valuable in one context (the homeland of emigrants, San Fernando) implies discrimination in the other (the city, Cuenca). How do we approach this apparently paradoxical phenomenon? Our qualitative data have been useful in identifying San Fernando’s emigration perceptions, which suggest emigration is not a discriminatory category, although it creates differences between emigrant and non-emigrant families in regard to economic income, access to education and health care, and cultural capital (goods, music, food, etc). Media analysis provides another perspective on this phenomenon, showing how emigration has become a category of discrimination against rural emigrants and their families in Cuenca.
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