Introduction
A microcosm of global migration processes, the Azores islands have cultivated transnational ties, especially with North America, over decades. The archipelago indeed represents a distinctive frontier for retirement migration flows connecting Europe, the Americas and Africa, and an important point of contact and interaction for a diversity of cultures (Williams and Fonseca, Reference Williams, Fonseca, King and Connell1999; Rocha et al., Reference Rocha, Ferreira and Mendes2011). Emigration to and return from North America, in particular, have historically shaped this Atlantic archipelago, with thousands of Azoreans, now in older age, returning to the islands over the years.
Field research conducted in the Azores between 2014 and 2016 revealed the significance of a transnational dimension to the ageing experiences of Azorean returnees. Developing an understanding of the data collected calls for cross-fertilisation of two related but distinct strands of literature – on cultures of ageing and transnationalism. Such a combined approach can fruitfully help investigate articulations of cultures of ageing through a transnational lens and rethink the transformative nature of ageing experiences shaped by migration and return. Conceptually, then, the paper builds on the strength of work on the cultural dimensions of ageing (Bernard et al., Reference Bernard, Phillips, Machin and Harding Davies2000; Gilleard and Higgs, Reference Gilleard and Higgs2000, 2011; Cruikshank, Reference Cruikshank2003; Katz, Reference Katz2005; Näre et al., Reference Näre, Walsh and Baldassar2017), and transnationalism and transnational exchange (Levitt, Reference Levitt1998, Reference Levitt2001; Vertovec, Reference Vertovec2001; Jackson et al., Reference Jackson, Crang and Dwyer2004; Glick Schiller, Reference Glick Schiller, Nugent and Vincent2007; Dahinden, Reference Dahinden2009) to illuminate intersections between the two in the data collected.
The article argues that sustained emigration and return to the Azores have contributed to the formation of hybrid cultural understandings of (later) life. Such hybrid cultures of ageing are shown to be produced in tension with transnational and local contexts by Azorean returnees. Return migrants’ accounts of ageing emphasise intersecting themes of health and the ageing body, ageing and care, and mindset and work ethic in later life, which demonstrate a cultural shift towards forms of active ageing. Such articulations of ageing are communicated through practices and languages of othering and negotiating that involve both foreign social fields and the context of the homeland and its local non-migrants. By focusing on the narrated experiences of older return migrants, the article, therefore, provides useful insights into the cultural meanings of ageing as a product of exchange and interaction across transnational social fields.
Methodologically, the paper suggests that understanding cultures of ageing in the context of return requires a broader field of enquiry that considers the transnational and local settings in which ageing identities are created, reshaped and enacted. Such an approach enables the building of a more comprehensive understanding of how the experiences of transnational mobility and return affect meanings of ageing and later life identities and how new, hybrid cultures of ageing are produced and (trans)formed within transnational fields where migrants and non-migrants interact.
The paper first lays out the conceptual underpinnings of the research with reference to relevant debates on cultures of ageing, and on transnationalism and transnational cultural exchange. It does so to show how bringing these two strands of scholarly work together can be mutually productive. The second and third sections describe the research location and research methods, respectively, setting the backdrop for the empirical discussion. The fourth section examines the return migrants’ narratives, to demonstrate how ageing subjectivities unfold in the context of return migration and transnational and local exchange. The findings foreground the utility of a transnational lens to advance the study of cultures of ageing, one that more comprehensively captures the transnational arena(s) and actors involved in the production of hybrid cultures of ageing.
Transnational exchange and the formation of hybrid cultures of ageing
Debates on transnationalism and cultures of ageing are burgeoning areas of scholarship that have yet to enter into a dialogue on how transnational mobilities and return trans(form) ageing subjectivities. This section discusses the literature on ageing as a cultural construct and on transnationalism and transnational exchange to help to build conceptual and methodological bridges between these two strands of work and better understand how return migrants produce, reshape and articulate transnational cultures of ageing. In so doing, it responds to Gilleard and Higgs’ (Reference Gilleard and Higgs2000) invitation to think more critically about the transformative nature of the ageing experience. It does so by thinking about ageing within a transnational framework.
The ‘cultural turn’ in the social sciences has transformed the ways in which the ageing process is approached and understood. It has placed an explicit focus on the cultural dimensions and expressions of ageing and has critically assessed positivist epistemologies that tended to adopt a functional and structural approach to growing older (Bernard et al., Reference Bernard, Phillips, Machin and Harding Davies2000; Gilleard and Higgs, Reference Gilleard and Higgs2000; Cruikshank, Reference Cruikshank2003; Daatland and Biggs, Reference Daatland and Biggs2006). The subjectivities of ageing gained importance as studies moved beyond a central focus on social and care policies, and the primary role of the state in providing for a decent older age (Gilleard and Higgs, Reference Gilleard and Higgs2000). The study of how symbolic elements such as actions, objects and other expressions are produced, transmitted and received by individuals, and how, in turn, these representational aspects shape practices and experiences of ageing, has become central to understanding the experience of growing older. Consequently, experiences of ageing are now widely understood as socially constructed and as an outcome of the interplay of society, culture and subjectivity. Social and cultural contexts and related systems of values and beliefs and existing social relationships such as family, friendships and romantic relationships, too, have been shown to play a role in the constitution of embodied ageing subjectivities (Hockey and James, Reference Hockey and James1993; Fox, Reference Fox2005; Enßle and Helbrecht, Reference Enßle and Helbrechtin press).
Scholars of ageing (and migration) have acknowledged the fluid and fragmented nature of ageing identities and the growing disparities in the experience of growing older. These have been shown to differ significantly along the lines of culture, class, race,ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion and systems of belief, generation and disability (Warnes et al., Reference Warnes, Friedrich, Kellaher and Torres2004; Daatland and Biggs, Reference Daatland and Biggs2006; Warnes and Williams, Reference Warnes and Williams2006; King et al., Reference King, Lulle, Sampaio and Vullnetari2017; Sampaio et al., Reference Sampaio, King and Walsh2018). Ageing identities have also been defined as malleable and shifting, that can be claimed, reworked, contested and legitimised. They thus emerge, circulate and are reproduced across space and time, generating embodied subjectivities through which cultures of ageing are discursively operated and take shape (Andrucki and Dickinson, Reference Andrucki and Dickinson2015).
In this regard, work on performativity represents another productive entry point for the debates on adult ageing, for that it reveals that identities are fluid and subject to enactment and identity management (Biggs, Reference Biggs1997). As gender, age(ing) can also be viewed as a performative act. Performing age and ageing implies that age is not only a state of being, but it is also enacted through acts of doing and processes of (un)becoming. Theories of performativity suggest that age identities are formed and sustained through the reiteration of ‘behavioral scripts connected to chronological ages and life stages’ (Swinnen and Port, Reference Swinnen and Port2012: 12). As a result, and as Gilleard and Higgs (Reference Gilleard and Higgs2000: 14) have persuasively argued, the gradual fragmentation of the cultural texts and practices that constitute the ageing experience made it much harder to draw a universally accepted cultural position of what represents ‘ageing’. Such recognition in contemporary and increasingly mobile societies indicates the significance of considering transnational experiences to interrogate further and gain a better understanding of the changing nature and cultural lexicon of ageing experiences and identities. Increased transnational mobility, including return mobilities and transnational exchange, call for further investigation on how (ageing) identities are produced, negotiated and enacted within a transnational landscape.
The literature on transnationalism, on the other hand, has tended to overlook the experience of growing older and its transnational component. Peggy Levitt's influential book The Transnational Villagers (Levitt, Reference Levitt2001), for instance, remarkably documents how regular interactions between migrants and non-migrants result in the emergence of new attitudes about gender, race and intergenerational relations in a transnational Dominican village, but it overlooks the specificity of ageing transnationally. Similarly, other useful works – to mention just a few – on ‘transnational social spaces’ (Faist, Reference Faist1998), ‘spaces of transnationality’ (Jackson et al., Reference Jackson, Crang and Dwyer2004) and ‘network transnationalism’ (Dahinden, Reference Dahinden2009), for all their insightful contributions, have remained somewhat disconnected from and paid little consideration to how transnational experiences shape experiences and lexicons of growing older. Drawing on these debates, I approach transnationalism as an unbound ‘social field’ consisting of multiple interconnections stretched out across space (Levitt, Reference Levitt2001; Glick Schiller, Reference Glick Schiller, Nugent and Vincent2007). Such a comprehensive understanding of transnational social fields allows for considering the diversity of transnational exchanges and mobilities, namely in contexts of return migration.
Despite the main focus on experiences of immigration and back and forth movements within the literature on transnationalism, a smaller number of studies have called attention to the importance of examining transnationalism and transnational exchange in contexts of return migration. In this regard, this article echoes King and Christou's (Reference King and Christou2011) claim that return migration has the potential to shape identities as individuals ‘float’ between two (or more) worlds and borrow from different social and cultural fields (see also Vertovec, Reference Vertovec2001). Return migration is thus constituted in the interplay between individual trajectories and the transnational social and cultural fields and relationships in which these are embedded (Carling and Erdal, Reference Carling and Erdal2014). By cross-fertilising ageing and transnationalism literature, this article seeks to build an understanding of how ageing as a cultural construct unfolds across transnational fields and how transnational networks inform and shape ideas about later life.
Critical examinations of the transnational nature of the ageing process have yet to address cultures of ageing as such, particularly in contexts of return migration. Existing scholarly work has been instructive in showing how different systems of meanings and cultures, in which migrants have been immersed, challenge and (trans)form their understandings, experiences and expressions of older age and ageing identities, and the multiple place attachments and affiliations they have created (Warnes and Williams, Reference Warnes and Williams2006; Horn et al., Reference Horn, Schweppe and Seong-Gee2013; Horn and Schweppe, Reference Horn and Schweppe2015, Reference Horn and Schweppe2017; Walsh and Näre, Reference Walsh and Näre2016; Ciobanu and Hunter, Reference Ciobanu and Hunter2017; Ciobanu et al., Reference Ciobanu, Fokkema and Nedelcu2017; Näre et al., Reference Näre, Walsh and Baldassar2017). These studies have been important for demonstrating that cultural elements of a place travel with the migrant, informing and shaping their positioning in relation to others (Andrews and Phillips, Reference Andrews and Phillips2005; Andrucki and Dickinson, Reference Andrucki and Dickinson2015). In a particularly relevant manner to this article, existing work shows that cultural values, economic resources and social capital acquired through the migration experience shape migrants’ ideas about growing older and their experiences of active ageing, ‘ageing well’ or ‘ageing successfully’ (Karl and Torres, Reference Karl and Torres2016; Ciobanu et al., Reference Ciobanu, Fokkema and Nedelcu2017; King et al., Reference King, Lulle, Sampaio and Vullnetari2017). When return takes place, these notions are applied and re-moulded in the place of origin (Ralph, Reference Ralph2012; Percival, Reference Percival2013). Temporary and permanent return, visits and other interactions enable social and cultural remittances – meaning the transmission of ideas, behaviours and social capital from receiving to sending communities – to be transferred and reshaped, and these transfers have the potential to actively transform the social and cultural life in the migrant-sending communities (Levitt, Reference Levitt1998, Reference Levitt2001; Levitt and Lamba-Nieves, Reference Levitt and Lamba-Nieves2011).
The process of social remitting has been described as ‘translation’ (Bender et al., Reference Bender, Hollstein, Horn, Huber and Schweppe2014), whereby practices, ideas, behaviours and institutions circulate between different transnational social spaces, becoming, as a result, culturally transmuted. In this respect, the experience of being a migrant has been shown to hold a transformative power in older age in that ‘being in-between cultures prompts exposure to “foreign” ideas regarding what constitutes a good old age’ (Torres, Reference Torres and Phellas2013: 274). Here, I argue that the concept of hybridity can be a useful conceptual tool to think productively about cultures of ageing that draw on several transnational cultural fields. I suggest that hybrid formulations of ageing can result from cultural exposure and exchange in the context of return migration. Migration and transnational experiences prompt embodiment of values and moral and cultural codes that contribute to the creation of syncretic ageing identities. Cultural production generated through cross-border exchange thus influences and extends migrants’ repertoire of cultural codes. This is not to imply that hybrid cultures of ageing are defined in contrast with a previous stage of cultural production untarnished by diffusion (see Glick Schiller, Reference Glick Schiller, Nugent and Vincent2007: 450). Instead, I draw on the conceptual power of hybridity for allowing the capture of ‘syncretic cultural forms’ and articulation of the pluralism, ambivalence and non-fixity of cultural formations that resist essentialising narratives (Mitchell, Reference Mitchell1997: 535; see also Kraidy, Reference Kraidy2005).
In addressing the question of ageing as a hybrid cultural concept wrought by transnational exchange, a lifecourse approach that focuses on the historical and contextual forces that shape individuals’ living experiences proves essential. Such an approach taps into a valuable source of information about how ageing and older age are experienced and understood, and helps to illuminate how ageing identities are created and negotiated across the lifespan and the spaces, places and cultures inhabited (Torres, Reference Torres and Phellas2013: 279). Time-related factors such as age at the time of emigration, length of time spent abroad, age at the time of return and stage of the lifecycle have been shown to affect meanings, experiences and aspirations of later life for return migrants (Ralph, Reference Ralph2012; Percival, Reference Percival2013; King et al., Reference King, Lulle, Sampaio and Vullnetari2017). While it has been suggested that an initial cultural shock upon return tends to be followed by acculturation and adjustment to life in the home country (Ní Laoire, Reference Ní Laoire2008; Barrett and Mosca, Reference Barrett and Mosca2013), re-embedding into the ‘home’ culture upon return should not be presumed in an unproblematic manner (Ní Laoire, Reference Ní Laoire2007; Ralph, Reference Ralph2012). In fact, studies have indicated that returnees often undergo episodes of cultural ‘deauthentication’ and ‘delegitimisation’ and that feelings of loneliness, social isolation, estrangement, ambivalence and non-belonging can be particularly acute in later life (Chen, Reference Chen2008).
Indeed, returning means rethinking oneself and one's role and positioning in a familiar, yet new, cultural context, and the decision to return is often charged with ‘relational ambivalence’ resulting from individuals’ own experiences in tension with other relationships built along the way (Palmberger, Reference Palmberger2019). Upon return, migrants physically, psychologically and emotionally re-engage with their ‘original’ environment and culture as they construct their ageing identities (Wray, Reference Wray2003; Fox, Reference Fox2005). In this process, they negotiate new and arguably more intricate meanings of ageing and older age, which incorporate more than one place. The experience of return and interactions with those who stayed put can be unsettling in some instances. This identity ambivalence stems from the fact that although return migrants are often perceived as somehow ‘different’, they are generally seen by the local population as the ‘same’ based on a shared socio-cultural background (Ralph, Reference Ralph2012). This raises the question of hetero-identification and how it affects returnees’ self-perceptions and their perceptions of the locals (Cassarino, Reference Cassarino2004). As a result, return migrants find themselves both internalising and reproducing the local norms, and contesting established social practices, hence fluctuating between feelings of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’, supporting and challenging customary cultural values and norms (Ralph, Reference Ralph2012). Questioning and challenging traditional values about ageing return migrants can, I argue, actively contribute to rethinking and diversifying the lexicon for ageing. They can thus generate hybrid, transnationally produced, cultures of ageing. In the next section, I turn to the case of the Azores, where dynamics of transnational ageing can be observed.
Atlantic connections: or what makes the case of the Azores distinctive
The history and geography of the Azores, an autonomous region of Portuguese settlement located in the North Atlantic, spread well beyond the limits of its nine islands. The Azores archipelago – a territory on the margins of Europe and a distinctive Atlantic frontier for intersecting types of retirement migration (including of return, lifestyle and ‘ageing in place’ older migrants) – has been historically and geographically distant from mainland Portugal. From the second half of the 18th century and the 19th century, the Azores became a place of emigration westward, with the United States of America (USA) listing as a preferred destination for Azorean emigrants. Rocha's (Reference Rocha, Matos, Meneses and Leite2008: 288) claim that ‘the history of the Azores is also its history of emigration’ is not an overstatement. A microcosm for intercontinental exchange, the transnational ties of the islands, especially with North America, uphold their global relevance.
The case of the Azores is noteworthy for the magnitude and direction of its emigration flows. Unlike the mainland Portuguese, out-migration from the Azores took shape early on and was mainly directed towards North America rather than North-West Europe. The large-scale exodus from the islands was prompted by generalised poverty and inequality, with land ownership and wealth concentrated in a small number of families (who tended to remain on the islands) but it was also instigated by a ruling dictatorship in the mainland until 1974, as well as by natural disasters such as the volcanic eruptions and earthquakes in Faial island in 1957 and São Jorge in 1964. Once abroad, Azorean migrants engaged mainly in labour-intensive jobs such as farming, fishing, construction, cleaning jobs and factory work (Rocha et al., Reference Rocha, Ferreira and Mendes2011).
Whilst returning Azoreans have generally acquired material goods and reached a more comfortable financial situation through migration, non-migrating locals tend to emphasise returnees’ lack of education and cultural capital. Locals, particularly the bourgeois families who remained on the islands, tend to refer to returnees as ‘novos ricos’ (nouveau riche) who, despite their economic achievements, tend to lack the cultural assets and lineage that would grant them a higher position in the islands’ social hierarchy.
Authors have argued that Portuguese emigration, and Azorean emigration, in particular, is characterised by a deep-rooted sense of nostalgic longing and yearning for the homeland, a feeling described in Portuguese as saudade (Klimt, Reference Klimt2000; Teixeira, Reference Teixeira and Fonseca2010).Footnote 1 The fact that the Azorean migration normally comprised entire families and the settlement tended to be within the Portuguese (often Azorean) community, helped maintain, and sometimes even reinforce, a strong sense of belonging to the homeland. On the other hand, an often fragmented or failed integration into the host country marked by economic, social and legal challenges abroad ensured that the desire to return to the islands never disappeared. ‘Traditional’ values of family, religion (Roman Catholicism) and attachment to the homeland feature centrally in the Portuguese-Azorean cultural identity. Attachment to place is indeed one of the most important reasons driving the Azorean return, especially upon, or as a long-term plan for retirement. The presence of (extended) family in the Azores is another important trigger for return (Rocha et al., Reference Rocha, Ferreira and Mendes2011).
Despite the lack of accurate statistics and the added complexity of ‘back and forth’ movements (and even re-emigration in some cases), one of the most compreheensive studies of return migration to the Azores, conducted by Rocha et al. (Reference Rocha, Ferreira and Mendes2011), estimates that in recent times the highest figures of return were registered between 1986 and 1991 when approximately 4,730 individuals returned from North America – 65 per cent from the USA and the rest from Canada. Even if at a slower rate presently, return to the Azores has not ceased. For most returnees, the desire to return was rooted in the migration project right from the outset, and the longing for the homeland tended to be more pronounced among men. According to Rocha et al. (Reference Rocha, Ferreira and Mendes2011), the population of returnees in the Azores, at the time of their study, was composed of 60 per cent of individuals over the age of 60 and 80 per cent over the age of 50 years old; this population is expected to grow older ‘in place’. Whereas most return migrants questioned in the study by Rocha et al. (Reference Rocha, Ferreira and Mendes2011) stated that they did not face significant re-adjustment challenges upon return, those who did highlighted different lifestyles as the main obstacle for re-adaptation.
Research methods
The field research supporting this article was conducted between 2014 and 2016, in urban and rural settlements of the four most populated Azores islands of São Miguel, Terceira, Faial and Pico, which also concentrate large numbers of Azorean returnees.Footnote 2 The findings derive from qualitative research comprising 31 semi-structured interviews with Azorean return migrants from North America – the USA and Canada.Footnote 3 The group was aged 50 years old or older at the time of the interview. Such an age threshold was specified in order to gauge social and cultural constructions of age and ageing from a relational and age-comparative perspective (Hopkins and Pain, Reference Hopkins and Pain2007). Day-to-day field observations, participation in several local initiatives, informal conversations, focus groups and interviews with key local actors also informed the analysis and discussion.
During the interviews, which followed a life story and lifecourse approach, I asked questions that invited migrants’ views on their own ageing identities and broader reflections on how they considered these experiences back in the Azores, including their interactions with and perceptions of the Azoreans who stayed put. The interviewees were selected through a variety of entry points, thereby ensuring the diversity of the sample collected. This included contacts facilitated by the Regional Directorate for Communities of the Regional Government of the Azores and other locally based associations, the author's own network of contacts and snowballing. The interviews took place mostly at the interviewees’ homes, often extending to light refreshments or a meal. These moments of sociability, no longer in the presence of a recorder, often prompted insightful reflections. The interviews varied in length, ranging from one to four hours, and were all conducted – by myself – in Portuguese.
The largest number of migrants interviewed emigrated from the Azores in the 1960s and 1970s mainly to the USA, followed by Canada. Return migration took place mostly throughout the 1980s and 1990s after a period of 25 years, on average, had been spent abroad. The research participants formed a gender-balanced group, including both individuals and couples, and were mostly in their sixties and seventies at the time of the interviews (average age of 68 years old). They returned to the Azores mainly in their fifties, once they had amassed enough savings and/or in preparation for retirement. They had mostly manual jobs during their time abroad – factory and farm work, cleaning and restaurant work – and were mostly retired at the time of the interview. They had been living back in the Azores on average for 20 years, with return dates ranging from the 1980s to 2013.
Upon data collection, interviews were transcribed verbatim, thematically coded in NVivo 10.0 and analysed. The analysis and interpretation of the data collected were aided by theories from ageing, migration and transnationalism scholarship. My ongoing engagement with the field allowed sharing and discussion of findings in local forums, thus providing useful insights into the data collected and helping to validate the analysis. In the empirical account which follows, participants are given pseudonyms to protect their identity.
Transnational cultures of ageing in the context of return to the Azores
Health and the ageing body
People here don't look after their health. It is bad among women, but it is even worse among men. For men is the smoking, alcoholism and over-eating… they eat, eat, eat … can't you see those bellies? In the United States, you see people in their seventies and eighties all healthy and fit because of their eating habits. Here they say in the United States is all fast food, hot dogs, junk food, but Americans are much healthier.
So says Fernando (in his late fifties at the time of the interview), back from the USA in the early 2000s, where he worked as a fisherman and factory worker. Observations such as Fernando's, focusing on health and the ageing body, came out in the accounts of several returnees. Comments like these were recurrently formulated in a comparative manner, suggesting a fundamental difference between themselves and their counterparts who remained on the islands. The comparative, binary and othering nature of these statements seemed to imply a desire to establish a certain sense of ‘superiority’ conferred by their lived experience abroad, heightened by a ‘migrant optimism lens’ that deemed the practices in the country of emigration better.
For some, Fernando's narrative may come across almost as a satire. As he narrates the over-eating habits of the non-migrants, he seems, at the same time, eager to ascertain his own healthy outlook on life. This is further substantiated by the way he continues by describing his exercise routine which he initiated abroad when, after leaving work late in the evening, he would go and work out at the gym. In this case more explicitly, but also in more implicit ways in other accounts, the role played by different codes of social and cultural capital acquired in a foreign social field seems to be deployed in a way that grants return migrants certain advantages and puts them in a place of ‘difference’ in relation to those who stayed.
…and then I came back but always kept this habit of exercising. I'm always moving. Washing my car, washing my boat, mowing the grass … I wake up 9 in the morning, brush my teeth, eat a piece of fruit, take my gym bag and go exercise. I usually stay until 12 … that's how I keep fit, my back is straight, no fat belly. Men of my age here should think about their health and start doing the same.
Fernando's account seems to embody what Paulson (Reference Paulson2005) identifies as a ‘culture of fitness’, suggesting a subjective experience of the ageing body based on specific understandings and discourses on health and wellbeing. Furthermore, it reveals ideas about disciplining the (ageing) body and indicates practices of identity management and self-care that are operated through the lifecourse (see Gilleard and Higgs, Reference Gilleard, Higgs, Carr and Komp2011). By choosing to focus specifically on men, Fernando's narrative seems to disclose a gendered understanding of a healthy and muscular body, and its importance as a marker of masculinity and dominance.
Augusta and Lurdes, too, reflect on their exercising habits later in life by comparison with non-migrating islanders. Siblings, and in their early seventies and late sixties at the time of the interview, their respective accounts focus on ideas about ageing well as a woman. According to them – Augusta, a long-time returnee and Lurdes, a recent arrival – progressive views about the role of women in the household and the need to incorporate self-care practices in one's daily routine are still not fully incorporated or understood by locals on the island:
A: I think people here should be more concerned about their health. For example, going to fitness classes here is just 20 euros per month, that's nothing. I am always the first in class, I don't care if there are children there, youth … I'm the oldest and I'm fine with that. I religiously go twice a week.
L: Yeah, people here don't really look after themselves…
A: I find it strange. Why don't they go [to fitness classes]? It's so good for your health. Even if you can't do the exercises at a faster pace, you do it slowly.
The sisters’ views on healthy living and exercising can be connected to Western ideals that celebrate older women as active and wise (Oliver, Reference Oliver2008). Indeed, aesthetics, attractiveness and bodily appearance can become sensitive issues for women as they grow older. Several studies have shown that disruptions of identity, changes in bodily image, societal pressures to ‘age well’ and fluctuating self-esteem can be particularly acute for middle-aged and older women (Bernard et al., Reference Bernard, Phillips, Machin and Harding Davies2000; Wray, Reference Wray2003; Segal, Reference Segal2013). Female return migrants tend to agree that Azorean women who stayed put tend more often to neglect their appearance, especially in older age. As Francisca, early seventies, back from the USA, confided as we sat down in a local café, ‘my friends who went to school with me are all old. I find them old, and some of them are even younger than me’.
As a general pattern, narrations about physical appearance and aesthetics in older age tend to focus mainly on the female body. This seems to suggest gendered expectations, social pressures and social judgements that more frequently affect women across the lifecourse (Segal, Reference Segal2013). The next account, from Vasco, in his late sixties at the time of the interview, does indeed allude not only to his experience of health and the ageing body but mostly to his wife, who only joined us at the end of the interview:
I feel 50 (laughs). I'm 68 but I feel younger when I see people of my age. Let me tell you something, my wife was raised in a poor family, but she always liked to present herself nicely. When we used to live in Canada and would come to visit, I was distraught when I saw women of her age. Some missing teeth, varicose veins in their legs. Sure, these are health problems, but there are ways to treat these things … swollen legs, their hair dishevelled, that would stick with me.
The above excerpts challenge what is often referred to in the literature as the ‘salmon bias’ or ‘unhealthy return migration effect’, according to which it is the less-healthy migrants who tend to return to the country of origin (Razum et al., Reference Razum, Zeeb, Akgün and Yilmaz1998; Diaz et al., Reference Diaz, Koning and Martinez-Donate2016). In their challenge, these accounts resonate with Baykara-Krumme and Platt's (Reference Baykara-Krumme and Platt2018: 740) findings that return migrants show higher life satisfaction in older age and that return is not exclusively concerned with declining health (see also Wong and Gonzalez-Gonzalez, Reference Wong and Gonzalez-Gonzalez2010).
Admittedly, the accounts presented in this section depict return migrants in a particularly positive light, which may result from a desire to express and perform ‘success’ by articulating narratives that other local non-migrants. The broad themes highlighted in the passages above – practices of self-care, exercising and healthy eating in later life – are overall key constituents of a culture of active ageing or ‘ageing well’ (Katz, Reference Katz2000). Such practices are, in some cases, facilitated by economic resources acquired abroad that are vital to engage in specific ageing lifestyles, often tied up with post-modern consumer practices (e.g. cosmetics, exercising, leisure, travel, etc.) and neoliberal framings of ‘successful ageing’ (for a critical appraisal, see Katz, Reference Katz2005). But these accounts must also be considered within the specific patterns of emigration and return of Azorean migrants. Indeed, as previously noted, Azoreans tended to return as ‘young old’ adults (on average in their fifties), once they had acquired enough savings and as a way to ease into retirement. In this regard, the option for an earlier return is suggestive of potential health gains and improved wellbeing. In their combination of ideas about self-care and keeping bodily active with more ‘traditional’ Azorean views that see older age and retirement as a period of relaxation, the narratives above are indicative of a process of identity management and negotiation that generates hybrid formulations of ageing subjectivities.
Ageing and care
The stories elicited also demonstrate the influence of the migration project on returnees’ views about care in later life. As migrants grow older abroad and return takes place, two paths seem to be the most recurrent – either returning to the Azores to receive care from relatives back home or returning in order to benefit from more affordable health-care options. The latter tends to be a particularly attractive option for those without children or those concerned about freeing their children or other family members from care-providing responsibilities.
While Azoreans tend to ascribe great importance to familial forms of care, return migrants tended to express more independent views on ageing and care, making frequent references to a culture of self-reliance in older age. Silvina, in her mid-eighties at the time of our first meeting, had returned from the USA in the mid-2000s. One of the main reasons for her return was to free her only son from the burden of supporting her, which she felt would eventually come. In the USA, her son was married, had a daughter and granddaughter, and a frantic pace of life, and Silvina felt that it was no longer ‘her place to be’. She did not want to become an obligation for her son. Adamant about the idea of not spending her last years in a nursing home abroad, Silvina finally decided to return to the Azores, a familiar place and ‘safe port’ where she knew she could still find a ‘social anchor’ in later life (Corcoran, Reference Corcoran2002):
At my age it is better to be here because everything is close by, while in America you have to have a car to go anywhere … here I can talk to my sister, I can just go and sit in the park in the afternoon when it gets cooler, and the neighbours are kind too. If I was young, if I was working, if I still had my husband with me it would be different, but alone all these years … I feel better here, that's how it's best for me, and here I don't feel scared of going outside.
This proved to be a good decision for Silvina, as I learnt in 2016 when I tried to re-connect with her. Silvina's health had deteriorated, and she had moved to her sister's home for care. In cases like Silvina's, the emotional comfort attached to returning home generates feelings of life satisfaction and improves mental health among returnees, especially those at a more advanced age (Percival, Reference Percival2013). Silvina's narrative, as well as similar accounts, reveals attachments to more ‘traditional’ familial forms of care, an important feature of the home (Azorean) culture. They also raise questions about the extent to which older returnees’ narrations about an independent later life result from the return migrants’ transformed understandings of the ageing process or are rather a response to the absence of their children who remained abroad and their changed mindsets and cultural matrices. Put differently, such embodied affirmations of self-reliance in later life can be suggestive of new internalised concepts and ways of seeing and experiencing the ageing process, but they can also be construed as performative and enacted in response to neoliberal framings of older age that describe dependency as failure (see Katz, Reference Katz2005).
Valter and Regina, a couple in their early eighties and late seventies at the time of the interview, who had returned from the USA in the early 1990s, also expressed their preference for an independent later life. For this couple, too, there was a concern about not becoming a burden for their daughter. Regina, who had to return to care for her sick mother during her last years, confided that she was ‘well aware of the sacrifices that caring for an older parent entails’. In prompting reflections that necessarily go beyond the ageing migrants themselves, the narratives draw attention to an intergenerational dimension that proves fundamental in understanding transnational cultures of ageing:
I can tell you one thing, taking care of an older person is a lot of work. Your children want to go out, they want to enjoy life, they are young. My daughter is 50-something, she is still young, and God forbid me from becoming a burden for her. I'm mentally prepared to go to a nursing home if need be. If I get to a point when I need it, if I'm unable to care for myself anymore … I don't want to be a burden for my children and stop them from living their lives.
For Jorge (and Matilde, his wife), late-sixties, no children, the option was clear – quality medical care and a good nursing home. When I first met this couple, they immediately told me that the main reason for their return was having access to less-expensive, but still high-quality, health care. After having done some research, the couple had settled on the idea of moving to Lisbon, if necessary, for a nursing home of superior quality offering specialised options of care and a focus on patients’ wellbeing:
You get to a certain age when you cannot work, and it is good to have some comfort in life. Now we [Jorge and his wife] are here, this is our life … But the thing that is really lacking here is health care. I have been going to Lisbon, from my own pocket, to have surgery […] We have no family, no children. In Lisbon, there are good nursing homes, really good ones, where you pay €3,000 or 4,000 per month with doctor and everything … In case I need it, I would prefer to pay €3,000 or 4,000 for a nursing home where I can have my own little space. Now, what is available here, the nursing homes of Santa Casa [da Misericórdia; Portuguese charity] (frowning) … after all I have worked I don't want to go to that. I see people here confined to that nursing home because there's nothing better. But who has the possibility of going for one of those good ones.
Although focused on care, the narratives above also reveal an important economic dimension. For Azorean returnees who were able to save for retirement, or create a long-term retirement plan (a much more elusive concept for Azoreans who never left the islands), aspiring, conceptualising and operationalising an independent later life, where the family is relieved of care responsibilities, is more attainable. In this section, too, the data collected show how migrants draw on discourses of ageing and care developed in other cultural fields – in this instance, the North American – in order to build new subjectivities in their home culture. These accounts indicate how different cultural understandings of ageing – deemed ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ – unfold and blend together through transnational exchange, thereby producing new, hybrid lexicons of ageing.
Mindset and work ethic in later life
Another recurring strand of narrative among return migrants to the Azores emphasises different mindsets, morals and demeanours between migrants and non-migrant Azoreans. Miguel and Florbela, a couple in their mid-fifties at the time of the interview, who relocated from the USA at the end of the 1990s, also summarise the views of other returnees interviewed, who struggle to find common interests and topics of conversation with the non-migrant islanders. Florbela, in particular, was forthright in her words:
I feel different, I don't feel I have anything in common with the people here of my age. All they do is talk about how many pills they take a day, and about how sick they are. They don't have anything else to talk about, and then they end up talking about everybody else's lives. I don't deal with that so, no, I don't have anything to talk about with them.
Although more contained in his narrative, Miguel also acknowledged the very different mindset of the local islanders from those who lived abroad and returned. He also confessed to finding more similarities with the people who spent some time abroad and ‘were exposed to other cultures, other ways of thinking’. Similarly, Lucília, a woman in her mid-seventies who returned from the USA, focused on the locals’ narrow-mindedness and lack of openness to change. She formulates the main distinction with the non-migrant islanders by contrasting mindsets and different feelings towards age and ageing:
Of course I feel the difference … It's a shame, because people here like to cling to their own ideas. One used to say ‘discussion brings enlightenment’, you don't see that here. Here it's more: ‘it's like this because I think it's like this, and it will continue to be like this regardless’ … I'm 74 years old and I don't feel the age I have. I don't want to feel old. People here, not by nature, but because they have fixed ideas, they grow older early. They feel old. I don't think age should rule our lives, age cannot stop us from learning, from living the life we want to live.
The narratives above reveal a common pattern: that women are usually the ones finding (ageing) differences back home particularly acute and difficult to navigate. This pattern is identified in other settings, where it has been shown that female migrants tend to experience further emotional benefits from the migration experience, through processes of emancipation and economic self-sufficiency, and face a stronger cultural shock upon return (Ní Laoire, Reference Ní Laoire2007, Reference Ní Laoire2008).
My conversations with return migrants about their ageing process and experiences of growing older in the Azores frequently elicited references to keeping active and maintaining a busy working life in older age or upon retirement. In their narratives, Azorean returnees allude to the figure of the ‘return migrant’ as ‘hard working’, ‘daring’ and ‘persistent’. This is often pitched against the ‘non-ambitious’, ‘lazy’ and ‘day-by-day’ local non-migrant. Albertino, a man in his late sixties at the time of our first meeting, had returned from Canada in the late 1980s. One of the most remarkable features of his story was the multiple references to keeping active in older age. In fact, one of his first statements was to tell me his life motto: ‘to work is to live; to stop is to die’. Simultaneously, he frequently commented on the languid habits of the local non-migrants:
There are people here with my age that live just day-by-day, they don't care much … I see so many people like this here in the village … I don't know how they live … it is very sad.
Likewise, Dinis, in his early sixties, recently arrived from Canada when I met him, had a similar perspective. In this narrative, he mainly focused on how the opportunity to learn a profession abroad allowed him to gain new experiences and develop a more ambitious approach to life. The networks of relationships and cultural capital and knowledge gained abroad are portrayed here as a crucial part of a more aspiring life continued upon return. Country of emigration and return are pitched against one another: the first described as a place of opportunities and the second as a site of limited access to information and resources. The lack of opportunities in the Azores translates, according to Dinis, into a more apathetic way of life among the non-migrating islanders:
The foreigner, even if he didn't study much, has a knowledge associated with his profession. When I left the islands, I didn't have much more than primary school. Being lucky enough to emigrate, to live in a country like Canada, you are exposed to new things, you want to advance in life. The people of my age here, they didn't strive as I did, they aren't open-minded as I am.
Joaquim and Alexandra, a couple in their early seventies, who returned from the USA thirty years ago, also imparted a narrative featuring active ageing, stressing that retirement should not represent the ‘end of the line’, but rather a phase of life leading to further achievements:
When it comes down to ageing, I think we [Azorean returnees and locals] are different. People here once they get retired they think ‘oh, I've worked enough, I don't want to work anymore’. We, on the other hand, we always want more. Not because we need more money to live or other things, it's not about that. It's about not staying at home all day. I don't want to spend my days doing nothing.
On the whole, these accounts seem to suggest an extension of certain cultural values related to time-management and time-discipline to older age, thus impelling people to keep a productive use of time well beyond paid productivity goals (Oliver, Reference Oliver2008: 67). These migrants’ narratives seem to carry negative moral judgements about wasting time in idleness and indicate the importance of carrying a ‘busy ethic’ and ‘busy bodies’ into later life (Ekerdt, Reference Ekerdt1986; Katz, Reference Katz2000, Reference Katz2005). In this, they are evocative of the capitalist discipline and ethic of resilience under which their identities were produced, sanctioning individual social action and individual responsibility for one's ‘successful ageing’. Being economically self-sufficient and ‘suitably ambitious’ is equated here as a synonym of ‘independence’ and ‘success’. But these accounts also prompt further interrogation about age performativity and internalised social pressures, through migration and transnational exchange, to perform ‘active ageing’ as symbolic of individual attainment.
Notably, these accounts are articulated through comparisons that capture a prevailing language of othering and seek to establish a relation of ‘authority’ – on the grounds of transnational lived experiences and economic resources accrued through migration – in regard to local non-migrating islanders. Put differently, it is through reference to the non-migrants’ ‘idleness’ or ‘lack of ambition’ that return migrants seem to ascertain their own path for ‘active ageing’ and an ‘accomplished and productive later life’. In so doing, and by borrowing from transnational cultural fields, Azorean returnees self-define as subjects of a ‘different’ type of ageing experience. They concoct a narrative of othering in which they depict local non-migrants as ‘backward’ (versus themselves as ‘advanced’) on account of their transnational borrowings and belonging to a ‘North American cultural space’ deemed ‘ahead’. In producing such narratives, they tend to marginalise the experiences and views of non-migrants that are discursively fixed in the marginal space of the islands.Footnote 4 But these narratives are also a product of deep-rooted identity ambivalence and a complex process of negotiation, whereby return migrants’ own Azorean identity blends in together, and comes in tension with, new values and norms thus generating hybrid, and sometimes challenging to navigate, cultures of ageing.
Conclusion
This article has brought into dialogue studies of transnationalism and cultures of ageing so as to illuminate the transformative effect of migration on ageing experiences. In particular, it shows that return migrants’ transnational experiences inform their cultures of ageing and engender syncretic understandings of later life that draw both on foreign cultural codes and elements retained from their home culture. These hybrid cultures of ageing are articulated through practices and languages of othering and negotiating that are unsettling and changing social relations and economic contexts in the homeland. Hybrid cultures of ageing are thus revealed as diverse and shifting cultural categories discursively produced, reworked and enacted in relation to, and in tension with, transnational and local settings.
Return migrants’ lexicons of ageing emphasise interconnecting themes of health and the ageing body, ageing and care, and mindset and work ethic in later life, which demonstrate a cultural shift towards forms of active ageing. These themes draw attention to (a) practices of self-care, exercising and healthy eating in later life and their gendered patterns; (b) views of older age as a more self-reliant process, less constrained by care expectations from children and younger generations; and (c) understandings of later life as an active phase still guided by principles of productivity. In their accounts of the ageing process, return migrants implicitly or explicitly deploy binary codes to distinguish between ‘good’ ageing and ‘bad’ or less successful forms of ageing. On account of their migration experience, they assign themselves ‘authority’ on matters of ageing and draw a contrast with local non-migrants. To that end, they avail of moral and cultural codes from a North American social space, and economic resources accrued abroad.
Transnational cultures of ageing in the context of return to the Azores are shaped in and across space, in relation to generations, and in tension with issues of class and gender. Hybrid ageing subjectivities are constituted and re-inscribed in place through practices of contestation, juxtaposition and negotiative acceptance. The transnational migration experience becomes, in this context, symbolic of successful ageing. Local non-migrants, on the other hand, are discursively constructed as the ‘other’ and become both a source of validation and ambivalence.
This paper therefore contributes to and prompts further inquiry on cultures of ageing and their transnational patterns, positing that hybridity can be a useful concept to advance such debates. In doing so, it evinces the importance of a transnational lens to illuminate how cultures of ageing and hybrid ageing identities are formed, reworked and enacted in social fields that traverse multiple spaces and scales, as do the bodies that embody them. Building a dialogue between transnationalism and ageing scholarship allows for a more comprehensive understanding of ageing identities as hybrid formulations crystallised across transnational social fields. Considering the specific context of return enables one to see how such identities continue to be reshaped through both transnational resources and networks and the local contexts of the homeland. A further point of note is that foregrounding the significance of ageing bodies within transnational social fields challenges and advances current approaches to transnationalism that too often remain fixated on those perceived as youthful, able-bodied and mobile.
In focusing mainly on the ageing identities and experiences of return migrants, this article does not wish, however, to underplay the role of globalising forces and technologies in facilitating and generating access to new ageing lifestyles; nor do I want to overlook the ageing identities of those who did not migrate, a topic that compels further investigation. Equally beyond the scope of this paper, but inviting further examination, is the need to understand migration and ageing narratives through a classed, gendered and generational lens and the role of such categories in affecting and producing hybrid formulations of cultures of ageing.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the special issue editors, anonymous reviewers, Yavuz Tuyloglu and Matthew Hayes for their helpful and critical readings of earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful to the participants in this study for their openness and generosity in sharing their stories.
Financial support
This work was supported by the Fundação Portuguesa para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (SFRH/BD/87963/2012).
Conflict of interest
The author declares no conflicts of interest.
Ethical standards
A Statement of Ethical Approval was issued by the University of Sussex, where the research was conducted (ER/DS360/1).
