Sondra Cuban

About

My research explores contemporary migration and reverse migration patterns of Mongolian women between the countryside and capital city of Ulaanbaatar as well as reasons why Mongolian women have moved to South Korea, the strategies they employed, and the contributions and sacrifices they have made in that migration process. I have presented my work at the XVI Annual Mongolian Studies Conference and The American University of Paris and have a forthcoming article in Mobility Humanities (July 2025). My book The Gendered Migrations of Mongolian Women, published by ACL Press in its Economic Exposures in Asia series, is due out in 2026. I have served on the ACMS Board of Directors since 2024.

More About My Research

Summary

At its coldest, and when everyone was staying put, in December 2023 I set off on a three-week research trip to Mongolia to learn about reverse migration from a gendered perspective. I investigated why women leave the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, for the countryside and about their livelihoods in rural Mongolia. Rural-to-urban migration of Mongolians has captured the attention of so many government and non-governmental organizations. The reverse course is important to highlight, given that it is not well known. 

Visiting rural provinces in both the north and south was critical to understanding the diverse economies and rural development happening in Mongolia. I focused on Mongolia’s northernmost region, Khövsgöl Province, and the small village of Khatgal known for both logging and tourism; the central zone and provincial center of Tsetserleg, in Arkhangai Province, where animal husbandry, sports, and government infrastructure are important; and Mongolia’s southernmost region near the Chinese border, Khanbogd in Ömnögovi Province, which is a sprawling mining town in the desert and includes cottage industries surrounding the mines.

Getting to these sites was not easy in the wintertime due to gas shortages, severe temperatures, dangerous road conditions, and plane delays; however, it was advantageous to be in Mongolia at this time, as there appeared to be more interest among participants to meet and talk with me. Through a translator who had excellent rapport with the participants, I spoke to a total of twenty women of various ages, mostly in their twenties and thirties who were married and with children. All of them had lived in Ulaanbaatar for at least a year and made the decision to return to the countryside, coming back to the same places or nearby where they grew up. I learned that while they had wanted their initial migrations to Ulaanbaatar to be successful because they invested quite a bit into moving there, they turned back to the countryside as the result of experiencing crises, or they had already planned to return. Many of the participants desired to move back to Ulaanbaatar eventually, especially when their children reached college/university age. The capital city symbolized a place of opportunity and was not perceived for the most part in a negative light.

Background

In 2022, I traveled to Mongolia to study rural-to-urban migration, especially the effects of climate change on population movement, as well as intraregional migration (the ways that Mongolians used their social and human capital abroad). At that time, I interviewed sixty Mongolian women. Thirty of the participants were originally from the countryside and were living in Ulaanbaatar (internal migrants), and thirty were temporary or settled migrants who lived and worked in the Seoul metropolitan area. I wanted to know more about the reasons women migrated to the capital city and to another country like South Korea, which has the world’s largest Mongolian diaspora.

My 2023 fieldwork focused on citizens moving from cities to rural regions. I was interested in learning about reverse migration in part because several participants in my 2022 study wanted to relocate back to the countryside with aspirations to use their skills to develop craft making, businesses, government functions, and herding in and around their original home. Their decisions were complicated by economics, and they didn’t know how to take the first step. Approximately 3 percent of the population reverse migrate to the countryside. That settled urban migrants in Ulaanbaatar were wondering if they could return to the countryside permanently was a clue that I should research the small but growing trickle of migrants who did return.

Although Ulaanbaatar’s education and employment opportunities exceed those of provincial centers and outlying regions, there is intense competition, overcrowding in ger districts, expensive and out-of-reach services, and pollution and transportation problems in a rapidly growing city that far exceeds the infrastructure meant to support its residents. Since women are the main decision-makers in migration — and certainly were so in my rural-to-urban study — I wanted to use a gender-sensitized approach to research their motivations, trajectories, experiences, and adaptations in returning to the countryside. I wondered if they would have the same opportunities as men in returning and what their return to the countryside was like. I hoped that this small case study of twenty women in three different regions of Mongolia known for prospering industries in tourism, animal husbandry, and mining would illuminate those factors.

Highlights of the Trip

There was no replacement for conducting fieldwork in Mongolia!  My use of ethnographic methods while staying in three different places in the wintertime enabled me to learn about the contexts for the women’s experiences beyond merely interviewing them. I met various informants in each town where my translator and I stayed. The driver, translator, and local informants helped us recruit participants, provided insider accounts of problems, and offered some historical explanations for the socio-economic issues affecting residents. In Khatgal, we learned through the guesthouse owner (who was a leader in his village) about problems facing the tourism industry, pollution around the lake, the effects of climate change, and economic pressures on residents. In Khanbogd, where few people other than miners and their families go, our local driver recruited participants for us and introduced us to residents, including a camel breeding family. The family discussed the effects of climate change on the desert and the camels — especially the lack of water — and the ways they had to adjust to more severe conditions in winter and summers. While it might have been possible to conduct all twenty interviews on Zoom with local interpreters, in going there I was able to better understand the environment the participants inhabit. I was grateful visit some of the women’s homes and workplaces, government offices and a boarding school, and to see the conditions surrounding them. I made some side trips in these places, talked to many people, tasted different foods, and saw the beautiful terrain in ways I had missed during my 2022 fieldwork. I took lots of photographs and videos as a record of the visits. I also was able to meet and talk with experts in Ulaanbaatar after the interviews were over and to receive feedback and good ideas for moving forward.

The women I interviewed told me stories of their resilience, revealing their ingenuity in adapting to both the city and countryside. Many of them were creative in the ways they survived in the countryside with few resources other than their surrounding family. Several participants formed collectives for the purpose of saving and borrowing money to build their business. Others, who had infants, started side businesses to survive the two-year period of isolation when family members expected them to stay home with the baby. After women returned to the countryside, it was often up to them alone to eke out a living and locate jobs, all the while supporting children and other family members — including unemployed husbands.  They used their skills from the city to benefit the rural economy. One informant, who left Mongolia to South Korea to pay off debts, returned to manage a local bank and support her child so that her elderly parents no longer had to perform that parenting role. A mother with two children received a university education in Ulaanbaatar and returned to the countryside to help her family with herding and to start a much-needed NGO.

Signficants of my Research

My research sheds new light on different dimensions of internal migration. Although the most conventional trajectory is a one-way trip from the countryside to the city, there are multiple routes in which Mongolians move. The city to the countryside is the more veiled direction.  Much of the reverse migration research has captured the stories of amenity migrants (those who are urban and highly skilled moving to rural regions for the purpose of development or to be a “digital nomad”), but few of the participants in my study fit this model. This might be because none of the participants in my study were originally from Ulaanbaatar. On the other hand, many of those rural-born participants didn’t fit the image of the “failed migrant” either — that is someone who returned to their home environment due to being unsuccessful in the big city. Because cities are often symbolized as aspirational sites and many young Mongolian women see a life in Ulaanbaatar as a fait accompli, participants who left Ulaanbaatar often felt a sense of shame or of being a quitter. Their original trajectory had changed, and my interviews captured the turning points in their decision to make to reverse course. The new understanding I gleaned about “reverse” migration is that the detour women often undergo when they come back to the countryside is a story of embracing that which is familiar and familial. The network of support for Mongolians returning to the countryside appears to strengthen rural development in these areas because of the unique contributions born of migration and women’s need to survive in a new environment.

By studying the effects of reverse migration and documenting participants’ mobile trajectories, I came to understand that urban-to-rural migration in Mongolia is about return migration. That is, many participants left their hometowns in the countryside and tried their hand at living in the city, either to go university or college or to achieve another goal for themselves. But eventually they turned around, returning to their families and places where they had grown up. They felt safer and more secure there. I also better understand return migration as a gendered phenomenon, especially in cases where young women were expected to move to Ulaanbaatar for a higher education. When they ran into problems and needed help, however, the city and its residents let them down. By collectively supporting and organizing resources among immediate and extended family in rural Mongolia, these women could survive better than they would alone in the city. Many of these women embraced the countryside as a place to resettle and raise a family, even as they saw their children moving to the capital city someday and saving for the day they too would come back. The prevalence of return migration reveals that policymakers cannot contain people in boxes and that both rural and urban development need attention. Furthermore they need to understand why women migrate in the first place, what supports and barriers they experience, and how to manage these for better livelihoods.