THE TIKTOK TRAIL

Andean migrants draw others to the U.S. with videos depicting themselves as living the American Dream.

- JORDAN SALAMA

Doña Elvira, who lives eleven thousand feet above sea level in Ecuador, wakes up before dawn. These days, the first thing she does is check her phone. Her home is in the Colta Valley, at the base of the Chimborazo volcano, and in the early morning the thin air is cold. Elvira’s hands hurt when she brought them out from under the layers of her wool blankets to open TikTok. The previous day, her twenty-five-year-old daughter, María, who lives in New York City, had posted a video of herself sitting in a patch of grass, smiling. Ecuadorian- and American-flag emojis floated up the screen. “From Ecuador,” a singer on a background track declared. “¡Oye, corazón! This one’s for you.”

Elvira, a forty-nine-year-old mother of eight and grandmother of five, didn’t use social media before María and another daughter, Mercedes, left home. She didn’t even have a smartphone until the pandemic, when Ecuador switched to virtual schooling, bringing widespread Internet service to her impoverished area, in the mountainous center of the country. She doesn’t post comments on TikTok; she hardly knows how to write. Nor does she read or speak much Spanish—her native tongue is Kichwa, an Indigenous language spoken widely in the upper Andes. Nonetheless, whenever one of her daughters posts a video, Elvira watches it over and over.