In this article, I engage the ways in which migrants' experiences are socially constructed and situated in particular political-economic and cultural contexts in meaningful ways. Drawing on migrants' own stories, I examine the ways in which social relations of gender and ethnicity shape their experiences. The analysis examines the interplay of desires, identities and subjectives in multiple sites in order to understand processes of belonging, exclusion and affiliation that are produced through migration. Secondly, I examine the ways in which migrants' social positionings allow them to question dominant narratives of neoliberal development. Thirdly, I take seriously the idea that questions about mobility only take on meaning in particular political-economic contexts which have produced those migrations and discourses. I suggest that these complex questions about identity, subjectivity and context call for critical ethnographies of migration, and I explore the potential of this approach for a case study of urban-bound migrants in Ecuador.
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