Mapping Southern Routes of Migrant Women: A Case Study of Chile

Group Submission Type: Book Launch

Description of Session

Description:
This book offers a fascinating account of migrating women within the Latin American & Caribbean region (LAC) and their journeys and adaptations. It is based on a Fulbright Study conducted in 2017 of the experiences, aspirations, and struggles of women who migrate to new destinations like Chile. Chile is a new place of settlement for migrants, often women from this region. It attracts them with its reputation as a safe country, with a stable economy as well as support structures for developing opportunities. Many migrant women arrive to Chile with the expectation that they will be integrated into its society and the labor market. Yet they experience myriad barriers to building new lives there. Cuban illuminates the unexpected issues encountered by these women, particularly the gender and racial discrimination that leaves them invisible, unsettled, and, immobile. The women’s stories reveal a growing phenomenon of South-South Migration (SSM), a long history of feminized migration (especially in this region), and domestic work circuits, that under a neoliberal economy, spur migrant women’s migratory movements but slow their social progress. Yet migrant women express their agency through their paid labor, their home-making practices and the support networks they form among their compatriots and within their transnational families. This contemporary and close-up exploration of migration that draws on mobilities theory and trans-ethnographic methods (such as visual mapping), focused specifically on LAC women and their southern migration routes, is little known. The main themes and objectives of the book are:
1) To show the ways mobilities and immobilities operate within the LAC region where little research has been conducted in the Mobilities field; most mobilities research on the LAC region focuses on amenity/lifestyle migration from the North or migration at the Mexico-U.S. border
2) To represent burgeoning Global South trends and new migration corridors, such as Chile with Haiti, including the ways that intraregional migration is important to the new migration
3) To highlight new receiving countries like Chile and superdiverse cities and regions like Temuco, in La Araucanía---known for the indigenous Mapuche, but which has growing migrant communities like in many new mid-sized cities around the world
4) To illuminate how domestic work and care labor for migrant women is pervasive throughout the region. Little is known about social reproductive circuits within the LAC region and the Global South in conjunction with the ways neoliberal market economies consolidate migrant women’s segmentation in 3c jobs (cleaning, caring, cooking)

Sub Unit

• Pre-Conference Workshops, Book launches, and Visual Art Exhibits / Book Launch

Chair

• sondra cuban, western washington university

Book Launch Presenter

• sondra cuban, western washington university