The Third Age in the Third World: Outsourcing and Outrunning Old Age to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

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The Third Age in the Third World
Outsourcing and Outrunning Old Age
to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Amanda Ciafone
When the proprietor of the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the Elderly and Beau-
tiful, Sonny Kapoor, hyperbolizes his goal “to create a home for the elderly so
wonderful that they will simply refuse to die” immediately after the death of
one of his residents, he is a comical Third World tout selling his care home
through fantasy. But the fantasy of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (BEMH)
is more powerful, as the movie presents a vision of distributing the Global
North’s presumed burden of caring for older people to other parts of the world;
in the process, it reimagines those older people as being able to take care of
themselves. The radical dierence of the Indian care home portrayed in the
film sets the stage for a comparative normalization of its elderly British protag-
onists and an opportunity for them to demonstrate characteristics most cele-
brated in contemporary societies and economies through their encounter with
otherness.
These films are not alone in representing old age abroad; indeed, “old-age
migration” appears to be i ncreasing, both in medi a representations and in ac tual
practice. With the popular press reporting on an impending demographic and
economic crisis in the developed world, as they often frame the increasing
population over the age of 65 and the strains on health care, social welfare,
and long-term care systems as well as national economies, there are increasing
mentions of older people moving abroad for old age and its associated care.
1 | Thank you to Jonothan Lewis for his research assistance for this chapter. In addition
to BEMH and its sequel, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2ndBEMH), other texts
tell similar stories about the adaptability, resourcefulness, and vitality of older people
as they con struct a Thir d Age through an enc ounter with dif ference in the Third World. On
the small screen, reality TV – including a BBC miniseries inspired by the films, The Real
Marigold Hotel (2016–present), and House Hunters International (2006–present) in
North America (internationally on the Travel Channel), – has presented such narratives.

Amanda Ciafone
156
These decisions seem to be motivated by economic concerns–concerns that
private and public pensions, national health-care plans and personal savings
will be underfunded or insucient to support an established standard of living
or, at the least, a decent old age. Persistent inequality between regions of the
world means that older people’s purses of pounds, euros, yen, won or dollars
may feel strai ned in their home countries but have impressive purchasing power
in developing economies. Communications and transportation technologies
allow greater interconnection across distance, while the legacies of colonialism
and contemporary transnational consumption (of international goods, tourism,
etc.), discourses of global cosmopolitanism, and assumptions of the free flow
across borders for the privileged empower Global North citizens to imagine an
old age abroad. As a result, a significant number of people are moving from the
Global North– thus becoming “old-age migrants”– to warmer, more aordable
locations for retirement and care in old age (Ackers and Dwyer; Banks; Casa-
do-Díaz et al.; Croucher; Gustafson; O’Reilly; Huber and O’Reilly; Warnes and
Patterson; King et al.; O. Morales; Dixon et al.; Ibarra; Toyota and Xiang; Horn
et al.; Horn and Schweppe).
As aging studies scholars and critical gerontologists point out, in a time
when Global North countries frame aging as a crisis, with concern about social
security, health care, and long-term care systems collapsing under the weight
of a large aging population, other social, cultural, and academic discourses
have reconceived the non-frail old in an “active aging” paradigm, constituting
them as the “new elderly” and the “young-old” in the “Third Age” and hailing
them as active and productive contributors to society and economy (van Dyk,
“Appraisal” 93). Active aging principles attempt to acknowledge and empower
older people, but they also reproduce classist, racist, sexist, ableist, and even
ageist assumptions in the definition of who and what is deemed appropriately
“active.” Active aging logics also serve an ideological function in the context of
neoliberalism, enabling the restructuring and retreat of the welfare state and
the privatization and outsourcing of the maintenance of old age onto old people
themselves, who are reimagined as resourceful, flexible, creative, and econom-
ically generative in terms acceptable to contemporary capitalism (Cruikshank;
Holstein and Minkler; Katz and Calasanti; Katz, “Growing”; Katz, “Busy”;
Laliberte Rudman; Marshall; van Dyk, “Appraisal”).
2 | T his chapter focuses specifically on old-age migrants f rom developed countries who
have had little previous interaction (touristic or brief ) with the less-developed count ries
to which they are relocating. There are growing bodies of literature studying immigrants
to developed countries returning to their countries of bir th for old age as well as the
transnational migration of older people to the Global North to serve as care providers
themselves (for grandchildren, etc.).

The Third Age in the Third World 157
In this context, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel, The Second
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, present fantasies of simultaneously outsourcing the
costs of economic, physical, and emotional care to other societies and, for older
people, outrunning the limitations of aging conceived in the Global North by
encountering dierence in order to prove the older characters’ mobility, adapt-
ability, risk-taking behaviour, and entrepreneurial productivity, the very quali-
ties that define their neoliberal subjectivity and justify potential cuts to govern-
mental support. Texts like the BEMH films thus help construct a Third Age
through an encounter with dierence in the Third World.
“ou t s our c Ing o l d ag e . It’s a b rIllI a n t I de a .”
BEMH’s primarily North American and European audiences need little reason
to take seriously the prospect of British characters moving halfway around
the world to a care home in India, so accustomed is the audience to the many
arguments that Global North societies are facing a demographic “crisis” that
requires solutions both on the scale of the individual retiree and society more
broadly. Similarly, the idea that enterprising young businessman Sonny would
see these population shifts and the various societal failures to meet their chal-
lenges and attempt to capitalize on his country’s lower cost of living by creating
a care home to “outsource old age” to India seems to make good global capitalist
sense to viewers trained in accepting the worthiness of profit maximization.
Sonny markets not only the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’s postcolonial aord-
ability but also its “proud tradition of the Raj,” in an orientalist appeal to white
Brits of a certain age. Therefore, within the first minutes of the film, each of
the British protagonists’ reasons for setting o have been presented in quick
succession, and they are arriving at the airport and embarking upon the fanta-
sies of their new lives in India.
“Outsourcing” is the overarching conceit of BEMH, and the resulting chal-
lenges and possibilities of connecting across cultural dierence are the main
drivers of character development and plot. In the very first moments of the film,
before we even see Evelyn (Judi Dench), we sense her frustrated disconnection
as she tries to make sense of her Internet connection and have a phone conver-
sation with a presumably outsourced Indian call-center worker who speaks
from a script rather than empathetically engage with her over the death of her
husband. Moments later, as the film introduces Muriel (Maggie Smith), it also
paints Global North social-welfare systems as overburdened and expensive,
and those not able to adapt to international capitalist fixes as antiquated and
racist. The British National Health Service oers Muriel a painful six-month
wait for costly hip surgery, or the alternative of becoming a medical tourist
“outsource[d]… to another hospital where they can perform the surgery almost

Amanda Ciafone
158
immediately and at a fraction of the cost.” It is not, as xenophobic Muriel fears,
“local.”
But the clearest statement of the outsourcing fantasy of the film comes from
the comical but loveable proprietor of the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the
Elderly and Beautiful, the young Sonny (Dev Patel), who states his business
plan plainly, explaining to his mother how he will make his “fortune”: “I have a
dream, Mummyji. A most brilliant one. To outsource old age. And it is not just
for the British. There are many other countries where they don’t like old people
too.” This is a moment of levity, but the piquant laughter comes from conveying
a painful kernel of truth. By the film’s sequel, not only has the original film’s
conceit been proven (extradiegetically) successful enough to financially justify
the production of a second film, but also, within the world of the film, Sonny’s
business plan has been vindicated, with both Indian and foreign investors
interested in capitalizing on the transnational old-age market. As his rival
Kushal (Shazad Latif) says of the need not only to continue but also to expand:
“Outsourcing old age. It’s a brilliant idea. It’s brilliant and it’s working, but to
keep growing, you’ve got to have somewhere to grow into.”
2ndBEMH thus goes even further than BEMH, which portrays old-age
migration to India as an economic solution for its older English characters
to live well on meager retirement savings, by representing old-age migration
to India as an economic solution for transnational capital as well. The sequel
positions viewers not only to root for transnational capital as the future of the
hotel but also to be in awe of it, as it displays an almost metaphysical power
in the lives of the film’s characters. The film opens with scenes of Sonny,
accompanied by assistant manager Muriel, selling their business plan to an
American multinational senior-living corporation in an attempt to become
its first Indian franchise and receive an infusion of foreign capital to support
their proposed expansion. The film’s plot then revolves around unmasking the
corporation’s secret reviewer, with the film asserting the imperative that he or
she be impressed upon to recommend investment. This representative of US
capital turns out to be Guy (Richard Gere), who finds not only a match for his
corporation’s interests but also, in melodramatic style, a love match for himself
in Sonny’s widowed mother. As the film closes, it is none other than the CEO
of the multinational senior-living corporation (David Strathairn) who suddenly
materializes as the audience contemplates Muriel’s foreshadowed impending
death. With a calm, omniscient presence, he explains he is there “to pay [his]
respects,” revealing he somehow knows she will soon die, as she questions him
with both deep trepidation and deference, “What are you doing here? ... Why,
why did you come here really?” He is a reassuring angel of death whose gaze
lingers on Muriel as the scene cuts to the next morning when she, separate
again from her English compatriots now each paired o in their romantic
couples riding into the future, looks out onto her own fateful next moments.

The Third Age in the Third World 159
the th Ird age In t h e thIr d Wo rld
Aging studies scholars, applying postcolonial studies approaches to aging,
have argued that in the developed world the elderly have been treated cultur-
ally, socially, and politically as “others,” even “subalterns” (Kunow; van Dyk,
“Othering”). As Kunow argues, old people have been “selectively identif[ied as]
a group of people whose age made them dierent from the rest of the popu-
lation and positioned them as an object of government policies” (104). While
public pension, health-care, and welfare systems cared for aged bodies and
protected older people from poverty, they also constructed old people as objects
of governance, acted upon but disempowered to act, thus subalterns removed
from social, cultural, and political participation. But in the recent decades of
neoliberal politics, the governance of old people itself has come under threat,
such that the “subalternity of senior citizens has by now become increasingly
precarious,” citing Estes and Phillipson: ‘If welfare and social security provi-
sion created […] a new identity for old age, it is precisely the transformation
of these institutions that has posed a major challenge to the position of old
people’” (281, qtd. in Kunow 104; ellipsis in original). Elderly populations are
perceived as a public burden, living longer, growing in demographic size, using
more public resources, and not contributing to the economic productivity of
the new economy, with neoliberal politics framing an intergenerational conflict
over resources, motivating proposed cuts to social-welfare systems. Further
enabling the reduced support and governance, older people are being culturally
reframed and remade as neoliberal agents rather than others.
BEMH challenges the othering of old age by asserting the similarity of its
older protagonists with younger generations and the qualities of neoliberal
citizenship celebrated by contemporary societies and economies. As Madge
(Celia Imrie) humorously and didactically states, “I don’t want to grow older.
I don’t want to be condescended to. To become marginalized and ignored by
society. I don’t want to be the first person they let o the plane in a hostage
crisis.” BEMH does this normalization work by setting old age in comparison
to a people, culture, and locale represented as even more foreign and peripheral
to the experience of the assumed viewers– actual postcolonial subalternity –
thus making old age relatable and comparatively central or “normal.” Beyond
this comparative frame, the old people in BEMH shed their otherness through
their encounter with India and “the unsettling experience of exposure to other-
ness” (Gilroy 69). As life in India is presented as an “assault on the senses”
and a challenge for the characters to overcome, the older characters demon-
strate their potential personal development in later life, arming the logic
of “active aging,” in this case by actively aging by engaging with dierence.
BEMH thus assumes a white, Western, and multigenerational audience whose
ethnographic gaze is “fixed on the edge of a space looking in and/or down upon

Amanda Ciafone
160
what is other” (Pratt 32), both Indians and old people, in the hopes that they
can be impressed by both the radical dierence of the Indian context to provide
challenges for the older main characters and their ability to overcome those
challenges by demonstrating characteristics generally associated with youth
and the neoliberal economy, such as mobility, flexibility, resourcefulness, and
risk-taking.
In celebrating the assertion of the active aging paradigm that old age is best
lived by facing new challenges the film validates the global mobility of the white
British principals who move across borders to be empowered by the challenges
they face in India. But this mobility is rooted in geopolitical privilege; even if
they are economically strapped in the context of their British native home, they
have the comparative cultural, financial, and racial capital to choose to migrate
and succeed in reestablishing themselves in India. Karan Mahajan, one of the
few Indian writers to review the first film, tersely entitled it “Eat Pray Die,”
drawing attention to the orientalist, touristic pretense of the British charac-
ters’ appropriation of India for their senior identity remaking and adventures.
India is coded as an exotic, liminal contact zone where British protagonists can
construct their identities in relation to the encounter with the other in a process
that is mutual but dramatically imbalanced in power (Said; Pratt).
Donning dupattas, riding in rickshaws, doing yoga at daybreak, the English
characters demonstrate their adoption of Indian cultural life and their worthi-
ness through ad aptation, their ability to be fle xible, mobile citizens with yout hful
openness to change and risk taking. BEMH celebrates the cultural adaptation
of most of its main characters and denigrates those who resist embracing their
Indian existence. Evelyn proves her independence after years of relying on her
now-deceased husband, braving unknown streets and communicating across
linguistic and cultural dierence, even sparking a professional life for the first
time by teaching a group of sales-focused call-center workers how to speak
humanely to elderly British customers. Douglas (Bill Nighy) develops new
interests in Indian history, exploring sites around the area, and demonstrates
unknown resourcefulness in fixing up his broken-down Indian motorbike
and hotel-room tap. Madge and Norman (Ronald Pickup) find a new terrain
of Indian dignitaries and descendants of British colonial society to conquer
sexually. And, most dramatically and pedagogically, Muriel is able to change
from a virulent racist – fearful, resentful, and hateful toward the Indians around
her − into a permanent resident who loves and is loved by her Indian caregivers
and eventual co-workers. As Evelyn concludes in her voiceover reading of her
blog, which narrates the first film and is itself a technological demonstration
of her adaptability since at the start of the film she was not even clear about
how to get online: “the person who risks nothing ... does nothing, has nothing.
All we know about the future is that it will be dierent. But perhaps what we
fear is that it will be the same. So we must celebrate the changes.” The social-

The Third Age in the Third World 161
climbing snob Jean (Penelope Wilton) becomes the closest to a villain in the
first film, shown to be frozen by concern about food safety, cruel to children
on the street in response to their persistent attention, and uninterested in the
history, culture, and people of India. Overwhelmed by “the climate, the squalor,
the poverty”– “this country’s driving me mad,” she explains– she holes herself
up in the hotel, before fleeing the country at her first opportunity (the film
makes her especially worthy of the audience’s disdain to excuse the budding
aair between her husband, Douglas, and Evelyn).
Even as the films critique those characters who are unable to adapt to life
in India, their narrative centers are firmly English, repeatedly turning to the
dierence between India and its people, who often serve as mere devices to
forward the development of the white characters into ideal active agers. As
reviewer Mahajan pointed out, when Evelyn teaches a group of “fawning call-
center workers how to speak politely to British customers,” or Muriel is the first
person to treat an untouchable sweeper woman humanely, “the film relies on
scenarios where foreigners get to civilize the willing natives in return for a little
emotional catharsis.” In the second film, some secondary Indian characters
are armatively othered as classically orientalist “noble savages” and “magical
neg roes,” oering the British characters special insight into their personal
dilemmas. The representation of Evelyn’s uplift of her new business partner
Hari (Shubhrajyoti Barat) is merited by his almost prescient plan to use ageism
to negotiate a price with a textile producer and his simple intervention into
Evelyn’s dawdling at beginning a romance with Douglas. Gold-digger Madge’s
relationship with her driver (Rajesh Tailang) is straight out of a colonial melo-
drama; he is her quiet but faithful guide through both the streets of Jaipur and
her romantic life, deferentially calling her “my lady” as he chaueurs her in
his vintage Ambassador. His pithy aphorisms, delivered with the understated
charm of a modern guru – “there is no present like the time” – win Madge’s
heart, although the film feels no need to suggest he was after it or that he would
do anything other than accept her advances. Wordlessly, Madge’s smile barely
intimates that she wants to sleep with him, and he, knowing as he is, needs no
further cue.
The otherness of India – its risks and challenges – make it a foreign place
of possibility for the British characters’ plots and personal growth. The postco-
lonial threat of a speeding motorbike on the dark web of streets of old Jaipur
drives Douglas and Evelyn into their first physical embrace, facilitating new
amorous life in old age. Fear of having accidentally hired a hit on his girlfriend
from an eager Tuk-Tuk driver propels Norman’s plot through the second film,
3 | These films thus continue a long tradition in Western culture of characters of color
in stereotypical, supporting roles, defined as idealized others and portrayed as having
innate goodness, mystical insight or power put to the service of the white protagonists.

Amanda Ciafone
162
lubricating even polyamorous life in old age. The successful adaptation of the
protagonists to their postcolonial setting, their emotional vivaciousness (not to
mention virility), and youthful risk taking is confirmed by having the second
film conclude with each of the main characters riding through the Jaipur
streets on Indian motorbikes, successfully paired o romantically, just like the
young Indian couple of Sonny and Sunaina.
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel for the Elderly and Beautiful itself is the
physical embodiment of Indian otherness that sets o the older characters’
assertion of active aging and personal qualities generally celebrated among
younger populations. A decaying building, unkempt rooms, pest infestations,
barely functioning utilities, as well as the hotel’s ongoing construction– these
all construct a setting of risk rather than safety and sterility, the typically touted
attributes of care homes. The films mock such organizing logics of care homes:
the English independent living community that Douglas and Jean consider at
the beginning of the first film is represented as grim and lifeless and marketed
by a patronizing salesman focused on the features that attempt to keep them
safe as their bodies progressively age. The irony of that “beige bloody bungalow
with a sodding panic button in the… sodding corner” is that it is only helpful
if you happen to fall in that one location, Jean points out, a critique of care
homes’ promotion of safety in an age of intrinsic risk. The hotel, in contrast, is
full of challenges and risks: an unregulated space of slippery outdoor showers
(Norman falls in one without injury), multiple stairways to balconies without
handrails, and a kitchen that serves up Indian dishes that overwhelm British
palates and digestive systems. The stang by non-professionals, embodied by
Sonny, who is not only unprepared for his residents but also comically lacking
in a basic understanding of old age, results in frequent ridiculous intergen-
erational behavior that not only provides moments in which ageism can be
laughed at but also necessitates self-reliance on the part of the residents. India’s
dierence becomes the proving ground of the sameness of the older characters.
entre P reneu r I al ag Ing
The residents of the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel prove themselves not only
culturally adaptive and not risk-averse but also self-starting and entrepre-
neurial in their new postcolonial context. By the second film, all of the English
residents are gainfully employed in India. In fact, the move to the Indian care
home seems to launch them into new careers and enterprises rather than
enable rest and retirement. Douglas is a tour guide, creatively overcoming his
memory loss through technology and a young Indian assistant who reads the
script into his earpiece. Norman and Madge manage the bar at the Viceroy
social club, hustling to keep it economically viable by watering down the wine.

The Third Age in the Third World 163
Presumably having left her call-center consulting gig, Evelyn has leveraged her
hobby of shopping for textiles into a position as a buyer for an import company.
And Muriel now manages the hotel with Sonny, serving not just as a figure of
sensible steadfastness to Sonny’s flights of fancy but also as the blunt, plucky
spokesperson for the hotel’s expansion that ultimately sells the plan to a US
corporate investor.
This focus on work and enterprise demonstrates these characters’ worth
and merit through their performance of sameness with the middle aged who
are defined by their work lives, and negates potential dierence as non-pro-
ductive elderly (van Dyk, “Othering” 2). Through their flexibility, mobility,
creativity, resourcefulness, and the construction of “entrepreneurial selves,”
these characters prove themselves worthy subjects of neoliberal capitalism
(van Dyk, “Othering” 3; Bröckling; Ouellette and Hay) and thus perhaps no
longer necessary objects of governmental support and social-welfare systems.
Contemporary popular culture and political discourse associate such qualities
with youth, who are seen as drivers of the new economy, whereas the elderly
are celebrated, in comparison and often patronizingly, for their wisdom, expe-
rience, courtesy, and loyalty, attributes deemed less attractive by neoliberal
societies (van Dyk, “Othering” 3). BEMH redeems the dierence of its aged
characters by asserting their value similar to those most celebrated by the new
economy.
This assertion was made explicit in the 2ndBEMH’s partnership with the
organization Senior Entrepreneurship Works. The film’s production company
co-sponsored a series of summits on “Senior& Multi-Generational Entrepre-
neurship” in a dozen world cities in 2015, which, in addition to discussions
on ways to “pivot corporate and government cultures, policies and legislation
to embrace and leverage the valuable expertise of the Experienced Economy
(50+ workers) in new business startups and multi-generational workforces,”
included pre-release screenings of the new film. The film’s closing credits end
with the statement, “At any age, life can be an adventure,” directing viewers to a
website with information on the film’s “alliance” with Senior Entrepreneurship
Works. In a direct statement of the link between the positive promotion of old
age and capitalist economics, the organization states on the site: “Changing
the negative paradigm of aging and amplifying the economic vitality of people
50 and older is not just a social issue; it’s an unprecedented global economic
opportunity,” shifting old people “from burden to benefit,” as the organization’s
home page continues (Participant Media; Global Institute for Experienced
Entrepreneurship). Old people are marketed to corporations and governments
through their positively valenced dierence– their experience, their wisdom,
and their assumed dormant productivity in retirement– as well as the asser-
tion of their similarity to younger generations, by “unleashing the potential” of
entrepreneurship with experience in the Third Age, a combination the group

Amanda Ciafone
164
awkwardly calls “experieneurship.” Such organizations mobilize the assump-
tion of a demographic and economic crisis of a large aging population without
guarantees of social-welfare commitments by the state or corporations. Rather
than fighting for such support, they oer such neoliberal market solutions as
empowering individualized risk taking and flexibilized self-exploitation in the
discourse of active aging, framing their work as “creating systems to boost
economic self-reliance, vitality and growth.”
The representation of BEMH’s characters as the prototype of the neolib-
eral free-agent aged romanticizes a global aging empowered by free flows of
people across national borders, enterprisingly creating wealth for themselves
in the service and cultural industries characteristic of the new economy.
But India, like most Global South and Global North countries, has an immi-
gration policy and visa process that restrict non-citizens’ employment. In
reality, cross-border employment is complicated by national regulations and
oversight, and is not one characterized by older people falling into or exper-
imenting with new professions. BEMH’s retiree migrant characters may be
working in informal arrangements, paid “under the table” without any ocial
certification, parlaying their English-language skills and expatriate cultural
capital into service and retail work for foreign consumers in the era of a global-
ized, free-market India. The films emphasize the romantic dimensions of
embarking on these endeavors but pay little attention to the precarity of the
work: the lack of job security, poor and irregular pay, lack of benefits, and in
many cases the illegality of these jobs for the types of visas these characters
would actually be eligible for.
The precarity of the employment with which retirement migrants finance
their aging abroad, as well as their creativity in the face of economic pressures,
is evidenced by the wealth of online writing about old-age migration itself.
Much of it is produced by older people who moved abroad for their retirement
and now fund themselves through freelance employment, advising others on
how to “Retire Better – For Less – Overseas,” “Retire in Comfort with Panama’s
Pensionado Visa” or “Fund Your New Life Overseas With These 6 Portable
Careers” in subscription newsletters and magazines promoting retirement
abroad such as International Living. (Not surprisingly, advertising-supported
blogging about the locale, photography of local sites, English-language instruc-
tion, opening a tourist B&B, and import-export endeavors are some of the
proposed “portable careers.”) These old-age migrants supplement their own
retirement finances with income generated from being local experts as anchor
retirees in informal and often precarious cultural work that bolsters the trans-
national retirement industry itself.

The Third Age in the Third World 165
the de v el o Pm e nt oF ol d ag e
While in BEMH the residents are celebrated for their employment and produc-
tivity, in the development policies and discourses of Global South countries
trying to attract old-age migrants they are valued instead for their consumptive
power. At the time of the 2011 filming of BEMH, there were no Indian care
homes catering specifically to foreign nationals, as anthropologist of Indian
care homes Sarah Lamb notes (192), but the business model of “outsourcing
old age,” as Sonny proclaims it, is not merely speculative fiction, as many coun-
tries had already established policies to attract old-age migrants to profit from
the movement of older Global Northerners and their capital. Attracting senior
migrants by constructing “transnational corporate care markets” has become
a development strategy for several countries, although there has been scant
scholarly attention paid to it (Yeates, “Going Global” 1116; Toyota and Xiang).
Older migrants who can demonstrate stable incomes, savings accounts with
local banks, investment in real estate, or portable health insurance are seen
as sources of foreign reserves of dollars, pounds, and Euros and as consumers
who will stimulate economies with their purchasing and employment of local
medical, service, and eventually care providers. A nexus of state and industrial
forces work to target “quality” old-age migrants, as an ocial with Thailand’s
Long-Stay Tourism Management agency described those expected “to become
sustained high-power consumers in residence” (Toyota and Xiang 714).
A number of states around the world have established policies to attract
retirees, encouraged by real estate, health care, and other service industries
hoping to profit from a potential “retirement tsunami” of old age migrants on
their shores, as the Philippine Retirement Authority celebrated it (Toyota and
Xiang 712), evocatively and ironically with reference to a destructive natural
disaster. In the Global North the term has frequently been deployed in phrases
such as “gray tsunami” and “silver tsunami” as a negative, alarmist metaphor
for an impending demographic “crisis” of aging populations (Charise 1–2). But
for Global South countries hoping to profit from old-age migration, the tsunami
is remade as a powerful resource, co-constructed by Northern societal percep-
tions and priorities. These countries have promoted themselves as old-age
havens for prospective waves of foreign nationals, billing themselves as warm
locales oering a low cost of living, long-term residency, retiree discounts, and
even tax protections. The Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Panama, Ecuador,
and Belize are exemplary, oering programs that compete with each other to
attract people of a certain age and income with benefits such as multiple-entry
visas to allow for long-term residency, tax-free pensions and annuities remitted
to the country, exemptions from customs duties on the importation of personal
eects and from taxes on the purchase of some goods, and generous discounts
on services like utility bills, public transportation, airline tickets, hospital

Amanda Ciafone
166
bills, and closing costs for home loans. Panama, for example, combines a visa
program with generous benefits and discounts on services to retirees, low tax
rates, and incentives for real-estate investment, establishing what International
Living named “the world’s best retirement incentive program.” It has become
one of the fastest-growing destinations for international retirees, “reaching
what one called a ‘frenzy’ in Panama” (“Panama Visa and Residency Informa-
tion”; Dixon et al. 1). Similarly, the Philippines, whose nursing schools served
as metaphorical “export processing zones,” producing large numbers of nurses
and care workers who labor in care industries around the world, undertook a
strategy of encouraging the retirement industry in the country to put that care
labor to work locally. The Philippine Retirement Authority (PRA), together with
the business association Philippine Retirement Inc., lobbied the government
for favorable policies toward the retirement industry, including the recognition
of retirement developments as literal Special Economic Zones, entitling them
to income-tax deduction from 5 to 35 per cent (Toyota and Xiang 714; Philip-
pine Retirement Authority). By early 2016, 42,511 foreigners were enrolled in
the Philippine retirement plan, and the PRA aims to more than double that
number to 100,000 by 2020 (N. Morales). The PRA estimated that the retire-
ment industry, which it identifies as “housing, healthcare and lifestyle” busi-
nesses, yielded revenue of US$ 2.4 billion in 2011 and was then expected to have
doubled by 2016 (Toyota and Xiang 710).
The decision to relocate in old age may be motivated by economic consider-
ations, but the determination of location takes into account practical concerns
of health care, safety, and quality and availability of services, as well as consid-
erations of climate, geographic and cultural proximity and familiarity (often
derived from histories of colonial and neocolonial power), language, foreign
investment, even ocial foreign currencies, producing certain locales as
appealingly foreign but familiar to old-age migrants (Dixon et al.; Warnes and
Patterson). Many of the destinations for old-age migrants do not have a history
of care homes, as older people have traditionally lived with younger family
members or brought in domestic workers to provide assistance and care in their
own homes. But multiple transnational economic, social, and cultural forces
are driving demand. Younger generations have migrated to other national and
international locales, some to work in care industries themselves, setting o
a “global care chain” for dependent children and parents who have remained
at home (Hochschild; Parreñas, Servants and Force; Yeates, Globalising). Their
absence as caregivers is filled through the financial support they provide for
parents to live in care homes. The concept and business model of the care home
has also globalized, as Lamb argues, with owners modifying and adapting the
form to appeal to dierent cultural and social settings, such that it is not simply
a Western transplant but takes root in an altered form depending on local
understanding of aging, care, and dependence. At the same time, Global North

The Third Age in the Third World 167
old-age migrants moving to warmer, more aordable locations are aging in
these new places and looking to move into care homes that fit their conception
of aging but now in a foreign place.
Most of those moving abroad for retirement could be called “young-old,”
those who are deemed the most desirable age demographic by these old-age
migration programs. The Philippine Retirement Authority’s General Manager
Valentino Cabansag has described the agency’s strategy: “Right now, it’s the
ambulatory and fun-loving retirees that we are targeting” (N. Morales). But
with the large numbers of young-old expatriates living in these locales, even if
a large number of them return to their home countries, there will be significant
demand for care homes for the remaining foreign seniors, which hospital and
care-home developers are beginning to meet in some locations. In Mexico, for
example, Roberto Ibarra’s 2011 study noted that there were roughly 40,000 to
80,000 North American retirees in just the central Mexican communities of
Lake Chapala and San Miguel de Allende, resulting in “growing demand for
assisted-living facilities” in Mexico, especially around expatriate communities
(“Health Care in Mexico”). Care homes in Mexico cost half of what one would
pay in the United States, with a range of amenities, including 24/7 nursing
care, serviced by a more aordable workforce. Abbeyfield, an independent living
facility in the Lake Chapala area, oers one-bedroom casitas beside lap-pools
and lush gardens for a little more than $ 1,000 a month, including three home-
cooked meals a day, all utilities including TV and internet, and on-call 24-hour
emergency assistance; in contrast, independent living in the United States
costs an average of $ 2,500 a month (McCleery). Assisted-living and nursing
homes in Lake Chapala, like Lakeside Care, cost between $ 1,400 and $ 2,000
a month for full spectrum care (the only additional costs to the resident are for
medicine and doctor visits); in the United States, such a care home would be
$ 3,800 a month for assisted living to upwards of $ 7,000 at a nursing home.
In 2016 there are at least nine care homes in the Lake Chapala area, two in San
Miguel de Allende, and two in Puerto Vallarta catering to English-speaking
residents (Carrel). The English-language website of the Mexican Association
of Retirement Assistance (AMAR), which promotes the development of the
Mexican retirement migration industry and lobbies government for investment
in and rationalization of the sector, includes advertisements for a dozen more
care homes, ranging from independent living to Alzheimer’s/dementia care
facilities. Few data are available on how many foreign nationals live in care
homes in Mexico, but it is clear that the private health-care industry plans to
expand its reach to North Americans, building on growing medical tourism to
develop more assisted-living facilities, care homes, and in-home nursing-care
programs (Ibarra 98).
Clearly, outsourcing old age is an economic strategy considered by both
people and states, the latter not just in the Global South but also in the Global

Amanda Ciafone
168
North, as intimated by Muriel’s experience in BEMH. From the early 1990s
there have been sustained calls to extend Medicare (the US national health
insurance program for people over 65, as well as for younger people with
disability status) to recipients residing outside the country. American retirees
abroad have been backed by lobbying from corporate interests – including
Mexican real estate developers and the private health-care industry dominated
by large, US-based corporations– who see the migration of Medicare-eligible
populations as “a globalization process that transforms Medicare trust funds,
and indeed health, into mobile transnational capital,” encouraging the privat-
ization and profitability of health-care systems abroad (Ibarra 104). In the
United States, the proposal has been pitched to politicians as a strategy to cut
costs for taxpayers, potentially reducing Medicare spending by 35 to 70 per cent
by paying for cheaper medical services in locations like Mexico (Ibarra 97).
In this emerging transnational care market, Global South care homes
project themselves as alternatives responding to discontent with care homes
in the North (Horn et al. 169, 172). Whereas care homes in the developed world
are understood as relatively safe, sanitary, managed and regulated, they are also
perceived as rule-bound, impersonal, routinized, and understaed institutions
(Baines and Daly; Banerjee and Armstrong; Daly et al.; Lopez; Commission on
Dignity in Care). In contrast, there is little government regulation or quality
oversight over care homes in most Global South locations, but they represent
themselves as having a comparative care advantage attributed to economic
and cultural conditions producing more aordable, plentiful, and intrinsically
caring sta who oer more individualized and aectionate attention to resi-
dents, even if that care is less trained, professional, and accountable. Marketing
materials and press reporting often suggest that care and respect for the elderly
are culturally essential – even natural – to populations in the Global South,
oering oversimplified explanations of the prevalence of multigenerational
households and relying heavily on stereotypes of eager and accommodating
women of color as caregivers. Horn et al. quote the website of a Thai care home
catering to German residents: “Frail, elderly people are held in high regard in
Thai society and deserve respect and good aect ionate care… As a result, people
in Thailand are highly motivated to care for elderly people… One outstanding
quality of the care provided by the Thai sta is the warm-hearted, tender
way they deal with elderly, dependent people: they are physically close and
respectful” (170). As Lamb points out, the assumption that “Asians” are more
natural caregivers or have a culture of looking after the elderly is belied by the
fact that most of the foreign residents in Thai, Philippine, and Malaysian care
homes are Asian themselves, but from wealthier countries. Similar portrayals
of Latin American caregivers and care homes abound. As the owner of Mexican
Lakeside Care insists, “they have great respect for the elderly and they will go
out of their way to help an elderly person,” with a resident arming, “people

The Third Age in the Third World 169
here have compassion written into their DNA, they do it before they know it.
The caring is just like being in an extended family” (McCleery). This emphasis
on individualized care and essentialized cultural character over professional-
ization, regulation or oversight results in practices and popular representations
of care relationships as intimate (more hands-on), familial (framed as treating
people as members of their family), and informal (less skilled and routinized),
with both positive and negative repercussions for caregivers and care receivers
alike (Horn et al.). And, importantly, these attributes are framed in compar-
ison with Global North care systems in a globalized care market, as one expat
writing from Mexico arms: “The warmth and level of genuine caring is
surprising to many foreigners who are accustomed to perfunctory treatment
dispensed within institutional settings” (Paxson).
Muriel and Anokhi’s (Seema Azmi) relationship in BEMH characterizes
this logic. Anokhi’s care, dutiful and deferential in the face of Muriel’s disre-
gard and even hostility as she recuperates from hip surgery, is inscrutable in
orientalist fashion. The audience is forced to assume that she is an intrinsic
caregiver, while the film oers the reasoning that she is culturally naturalized
to service due to her lot in life as a Dalit, or “untouchable,” in the Indian caste
system. Anokhi invites Muriel to her family’s home, because she is “the only
one that acknowledges her,” regardless of evidence in the previous scenes to the
contrary. In the second film Anokhi plays little role in the plot; she has already
performed her larger narrative service of helping Muriel to become less racist
and is now relegated back to being virtually invisible, if not literally untouch-
able. But she is there, dotingly, in the film’s last scene as Muriel faces perhaps
the final moments of her life, representing the closest thing she has to family.
The BEMH films thus conclude their work of constructing a Third Age defined
by neoliberal mobility, adaptability, resourcefulness, and risk taking through
an encounter with the challenges and dierence of the Third World. For when
these characters inevitably progress to the Fourth Age, these films tell us, they
will have people essentially qualified by their challenges and dierence to care
for them at the end of life.
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