Mystery solved: What is an expat?

There is an entire subgenre of Cuenca literature devoted to determining when a foreigner has finally arrived. You have really arrived when you stop complaining about the buses. You have really arrived when you stop converting every price into dollars, although that is admittedly difficult in a country where the prices already are in dollars. You have really arrived when you understand that the waiter is not ignoring you but merely allowing you to enjoy your lunch, and you have really arrived when you stop asking why Ecuadorians don’t do things the way they are done back home.

These articles favor a recurring device. A wise long-term resident possesses an almost supernatural ability to overhear exactly the conversation necessary to illustrate whatever point the author wished to make. For example, newly arrived retirees in Cuenca may be discussing why their water has been cut off, while the Ecuadorians next door have already filled buckets with water stored in the washing machine tub, washed their dishes, flushed their toilets, and carried on with their day.

Expats in Paris, 1926.

There is a serious point hidden inside the joke. Sometimes something unpleasant happening or a disaster in the country where you live is not an opportunity for cultural enlightenment. Sometimes pumice stones are falling from the sky, like in Pompeii in 79AD, and it is not unreasonable to complain about that even if you are an immigrant.

Perhaps one sign that you have really arrived is that you stop asking whether every irritating thing that happens to you has something to do with Ecuador and Ecuadorians.

My first vacation in the United States began in Bermuda, where I was then living. A friend and I had bought one of those package holidays that joined together three different destinations:  a couple of nights in New York City, a few days at the Marriott in New Orleans, followed by a few more at the Holiday Inn in the city of Mérida, on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.

We arrived in New Orleans during the afternoon of Friday, July 9, 1982. Rain was pouring down in buckets as we left the airport and took a taxi into the steaming city. Once we had checked into the hotel, we flopped on the bed, turned on the television and found the CBS news channel.

The breaking story was about a terrible air disaster. Pan American Flight 759, a Boeing 727 bound from Miami to San Diego by way of New Orleans and Las Vegas, had taken off from New Orleans International Airport at about 4:08 that afternoon. Almost immediately it encountered a powerful microburst — a violent downdraft accompanied by rapidly changing winds—and was driven into a residential neighborhood in Kenner, less than a mile beyond the runway.

The aircraft tore through trees and houses before exploding into flames. All 145 people aboard were killed, together with eight people on the ground. At the time, its death toll of 153 made it one of the worst aviation disasters in American history.

We watched the pictures of burning houses and scattered wreckage, and then the geography of the story began to register. This had not happened at some distant airport somewhere in America. It had happened at the very airport we had left only a short time earlier, in the same torrential weather through which our taxi had carried us to the Marriott.

My instinctive thought was: “Is it always like this in the United States?”

In retrospect, the question was absurd. New Orleans did not habitually welcome visitors with a catastrophic plane crash. But when you arrive somewhere for the first time, you possess no ordinary days against which to measure the extraordinary one. Everything you see seems not merely to be happening there, but somehow to reveal what the place is permanently like. A freak disaster becomes part of the local character; an exceptional afternoon thunderstorm becomes your first definition of an entire city and of a country.

Somehow I got the impression that air crashes were fairly common in the US, but you would not hear about them unless you were right there on the scene and had access to local news that most people would never know about.

But, returning to Ecuador, there is another possibility. Perhaps you have really arrived when you stop calling yourself an expat.

The word deserves a closer look than it usually gets. “Expatriate” comes from the Latin ex, meaning out of, and patria, meaning one’s native country. In its literal sense, an expatriate is simply someone living outside his native country, which would make an American in Cuenca an expatriate, an Ecuadorian in Miami an expatriate, and a Venezuelan in Cuenca an expatriate too. Yet English speakers rarely use the word that way in practice.

During the many years I lived in the United States, I do not recall foreigners who had settled there being routinely described as expatriates. They were immigrants, so a Mexican who moved to Texas was an immigrant and a Cuban who settled in Miami was an immigrant. A Brit who moved to Florida was an immigrant, and the United States proudly called itself a nation of immigrants. Send the traffic in the opposite direction, though, and something curious happens: an American who moves to Ecuador becomes an “expat.”

Some of this has a reasonable explanation. The words describe overlapping but slightly different perspectives, so a single person can be an emigrant from Britain, an immigrant in Ecuador, and a British expatriate all at once. “Expat” also traditionally implies temporary residence. A British banker posted to Hong Kong for three years by his employer is naturally an expatriate, since his permanent home remains elsewhere and he expects to go back eventually.

There is also a glamorous literary tradition behind the word. Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were American expatriates in Paris, and nobody feels much urge to call Hemingway an American immigrant living in France. “Expatriate” suggests cafés, novels, and absinthe, while “immigrant” suggests standing in line at an immigration office holding a folder full of photocopies.

But the distinction has also acquired an unmistakable economic dimension, and this is where the word stops being merely quaint.

An economic migrant is someone who moves to another country primarily in search of better work, income or economic opportunity, rather than because of persecution.

Perhaps there should also be an unofficial category of retired economic refugee: someone who moves abroad because a pension that provides a rather meager existence back home will support a comfortable retirement somewhere else. The term has no legal meaning and is partly humorous, but perhaps only partly.

The Venezuelan who comes to Ecuador because his wages will go further or because he can find work here is readily called an economic migrant; the American who comes because his Social Security check will go further is usually called an expat. The economic circumstances may be very different in degree, but the underlying calculation—crossing a border in search of a better life on the money available—is not entirely different.

One reader made exactly this point in response to a recent CHL article: Venezuelans fleeing hardship are called migrants, while North Americans arriving with pensions and money to buy property are also migrants, and the real difference is not necessarily what people have done but the vocabulary we have grown used to attaching to different kinds of people.

This is not a new observation, and it is not confined to armchair complaints about semantics. In 2015 the Togolese-born writer Mawuna Koutonin published a piece for the Guardian titled “Why are white people expats when the rest of us are immigrants?” The article argued that the label handed to a person crossing a border tends to track that person’s passport and skin color rather than the actual circumstances of the move, and it was shared widely enough to push the question into mainstream conversation, where it has stayed ever since.

The International Organization for Migration takes a more clinical approach, defining a migrant simply as anyone who has moved across a border or within a country, away from a habitual place of residence, regardless of legal status, motive, or length of stay. By that standard, the retired schoolteacher from Ohio and the laborer from Caracas are the same kind of person doing the same kind of thing. English usage disagrees, and it disagrees in a way that is not hard to decode.

Cuenca supplies its own small case study. Nobody keeps an exact count, but the city’s mayor has previously put the number of Americans living here at around four thousand, most of them drawn by the climate, the healthcare, and a cost of living that stretches a fixed income considerably further than it would at home.

Almost none of them fill out paperwork that describes them as immigrants, even if they have Permanent Residency visas, and almost all of them are, by any definition that would be applied to somebody moving in the other direction. Meanwhile, roughly ninety thousand Ecuadorians live in the New York City borough of Queens alone, sending home remittances that run into the billions of dollars every year, and English-language newspapers do not tend to profile them as expats enjoying an adventure abroad.

There is nothing inherently offensive about “expat.” I use the word myself. It is convenient, everybody knows what it means, and sometimes it is exactly the right word. But it does contain an interesting psychological distinction. An immigrant has moved here. An expatriate is living away from home. Those are not quite the same idea, because the immigrant’s identity is defined partly by the country he has entered, while the expatriate’s identity remains defined by the country he left behind, and that difference may explain some of the endless discussion about when foreigners finally “belong” in Cuenca.

If you have lived here for years, hold a permanent residency visa, pay your bills here, shop here, ride the Tranvía, argue with the bank, complain about the weather, and know exactly which supermarket is best for tomatoes, there does not need to be a ceremony at which you are declared to have arrived. You live here and this is your home.

That does not mean you have to become Ecuadorian, and it does not mean approving of everything Ecuadorian either, since immigrants everywhere keep parts of the countries they came from. Ecuadorians living in New York do not suddenly stop liking Ecuadorian food, speaking Spanish, or following Ecuadorian football because somebody decides they have been in Queens long enough. Nor does belonging require silence. An immigrant is perfectly entitled to complain about his adopted country, and complaining about the place where you live may be one of the surest signs that you regard it as home. Native-born Ecuadorians certainly complain about Ecuador, lots of Americans complain about America, and the British have turned complaining about Britain into something approaching a national art form.

Perhaps the mistake is imagining that every inconvenience requires an anthropological explanation. The cashier who annoyed you this morning may not have behaved that way because Ecuador holds a different concept of time, personal space, or customer service. She may simply have been having a bad morning, and after enough years that becomes wonderfully ordinary. You stop observing Ecuador and start living in it. You stop treating every encounter as another chapter in your continuing education about “the Ecuadorian way,” and eventually you may stop wondering when you will finally qualify as someone who belongs.

So here is one more test for the collection. When have you really arrived in Cuenca? Maybe it is the day somebody asks whether you are an expat, and you find yourself saying: “Not really. I’m an immigrant.”