Introduction

Arguably, all migration is about improving one's life in some way and the women featured here moved to Spain to enjoy a new lifestyle in retirement. For them, a ‘better life’ involved regaining community and a sense of belonging which had been lost in the UK. Community has been identified as a factor that influences the quality of later life (Conway, 2003) and lamenting the loss of community is a key theme underpinning studies of older people (see Blaikie, 1999; Blokland, 2003; and Savage and Bennett, 2005). In this way, a romantic and utopian discourse around community (Calhoun, 1991) constructs the past as representing a better time and place than the present. Migration involves movement across divides, and for these women, this represents spanning boundaries relating to both space and time in their quest for community. Importantly, boundary markers are key in discourses of belonging and non-belonging (Yuval-Davis et al, 2006), and boundaries are constructed and imposed (Anthias, 2008), shifting and contingent and can be symbolically reconstituted to mark the beginning and end of communities (Cohen, 1985). Boundaries are evident in all types of community, and have been theorised in terms of place, networks and identity. For place communities, there is geographical demarcation, indicating who is from and of somewhere; for networks, exclusion operates in terms of who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’; and for identity (or positionality) there are real and imagined attributes which signify belonging and non-belonging, operating both in terms of identification and ascription (Ahmed, 2011). I premise that women's quest for belonging and community through retirement migration can be understood as both spanning and reconstituting boundaries in relation to place(s) and networks, shaped by their multiple and overlapping social locations or positionalities across space and time through nostalgia.

In this chapter, my focus is on community, and how focusing on people's experiences of belonging illuminates processes of social change and continuity. I identify retirement migration as a form and consequence of social change which can be understood through multiple and shifting constructions of community.