Abstract
This thesis is part of a geographical reflection on rural recompositions at work in Nicaragua. It examines the impact of spatial mobility on the socio-economic practices, strategies and reproduction of families. More generally, it questions the future of agriculture and rural societies. Through the concept of a multi-localized family system, the thesis analyses how family living spaces are constructed in geographical dispersion from the maintenance of social ties in distance and time. The objective is to understand how these links, and the set of arrangements that are played out at the level of the nuclear or extended family, are a resource in rural livelihood strategies and trajectories. The study area is the Río Negro valley in northern Nicaragua, located on the periphery of the country's development axes. In this rural region subject to strong agro-climatic constraints, populations diversify their system of activity, by practicing circular local and border mobility, or by migrating to more distant destinations in Europe or the Americas. To document these dynamics, the research is based on a plural methodology of data collection combining interviews, life stories, participating observations, reconstructions of family trajectories in the context of multi-sited surveys, aimed at following families in their places of residence and activity across several countries (Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Spain, United States). The thesis finally proposes a bottom geography, which gives a primordial place to practices and representations, to lived experiences and life trajectories, as well as the strategies and intentionalities of individuals and their families in their relationship to space. The dynamics of the original local space are thus thought in their links to the elsewhere. The thesis reveals the strength of the remote family link in the daily strategies of populations, the flexibility of family organizations with shifting contours and, ultimately, the central role of the social resource. At the same time, it highlights a differentiation of families in their ways of dealing with space, due to unequal access to different resources (migratory, economic, physical, social) and an asymmetry in intra-family social relations. The thesis also raises the crucial question of the high social cost of multi-localized family systems, linked to the challenge of crossing borders, the difficult conditions of employment at destination, or the separation and absence that dispersion induces in today's world.