Transnational Care Webs: Understanding Latina Migrant Experiences Navigating Exclusion and Challenging Oppressions

• In Event: 40267 - Towards an Unruly Latinx Sociology

Abstract

Scholarship on Latinx migrants' gendered and racialized experiences with care have long focused on how Latina migrants provide care for other people’s children and the caregiving efforts they exert subsidizing white-middle-class American households; all while navigating exclusion to mobilize resources and care for their own families (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2007; Menjívar and Abrego 2012). Others examine how those left behind in Latina migrants’ countries of origin survive with their care and support across borders, through transnational caregiving (Dreby 2010; Parreñas 2008). Focusing only on caregiving limits our understanding of how migrant women actively construct care webs (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018), a concept coined by disability justice scholars, to illustrate collective care networks built as alternatives to traditional and institutional support systems. Care webs, modeled after chosen families, a term queer scholars and activists utilize, best capture radical configurations of care in praxis. In this paper, I center on Latina migrants’ survival through interpersonal and structural exclusions once in the U.S. and how they construct what I call, transnational care webs, to care for themselves and others amidst exclusions and oppression. I employ and expand the concept of care webs, connecting the work of disability scholars with migration and care research, allowing me to conceptualize migrant experiences with care holistically. I innovatively map Latina migrant transnational care webs by interviewing Latina migrants and individuals comprising their care web. I argue that transnational care webs provide a novel methodological and theoretical approach for understanding radical configurations of care (those aiming to replace exclusionary/exploitative care) and experiences of people migrants leave behind, which remain less understood in migration and care research.

Author

• Alejandra Guadalupe Lemus, University of New Mexico-Albuquerque