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This article examines the relationships between international migration, natural resources, and the environment. Rather than looking at environmental change as a cause of population movements, the article reveals how migration affects the environment in sending countries. Empirically, we rely on a case study in Guatemala. Although migrants and cash remittances make significant contributions to Guatemala's changing economy, little is known about the relationships between migration and the environment in this Central American country-a country, which continues to have a large rural population and that relies heavily on its natural resources. Drawing on ethnographic research and household surveys in a Maya community, we reveal how migrants and their earnings, as well as their ideas, behavior and attitudes, affect land use, land cover, and firewood use. We reveal, for example, how in addition to investments in land for home building and pick-up trucks to help improve agricultural production, some migrant households purchase more land and often dedicate it to the cultivation of vegetable crops for local and foreign markets. Cultural practices and beliefs directly linked to land and the environment, particularly maize cultivation, also alter due to migration processes. And, despite the ability of migrant households to transition to more efficient fuels like liquid propane gas (LPG), we show how they continue to use firewood. In all, the study contributes important insights into the environmental implications of migration.

Many migration studies emphasize the settlement process and more recently transnational attachments and identities, but less consideration is given to the idea of return. This article focuses on first‐generation Guatemalans and Salvadorans in the United States and examines the varying degrees of migrants' desires to return home versus actual return. Specifically, the paper highlights the persistence among these migrants, who live and work in Phoenix, Arizona, of a “diasporic” or “transnational” tendency to think of home. This emphasis is important because we do not assume that migrants have clear‐cut options about their migration movements. Additionally, it allows us to consider migrants' social imaginary ‐ the divergent ways in which men and women in our study imagine their return and express their intents to return, which in turn, may influence their responses toward migration. For heuristic reasons, we identify three distinct conceptual categories of longings to return ‐ assertive, ambivalent, and no desire to return. Drawing from narratives of Guatemalan and Salvadoran migrants' experiences in Phoenix gathered through in‐depth interviews, the paper reveals that all three kinds of expressions outlined demonstrate the significance that the location of immediate family, particularly children, seems to have in ultimately shaping longings to return back home. These considerations highlight the fundamentally social nature of immigrants' seemingly most individual motivations and desires ‐ to return or to stay.

A substantial portion of Guatemala's population—about 10—15 percent of a population of 12 million—emigrates to the United States. Although this northward movement has produced significant social change, few studies have examined it from the perspective of the increasing involvement of household structures in transnational migration processes. Ethnographic research focused on transnational families reveals the social relationships that develop between caregivers and children and between parents and caregivers because of the necessity for transnational migration and identifies the emotional costs of these arrangements.

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