Tanja Bastia

From Mining to Garment Workshops: Bolivian Migrants in Buenos Aires

Based on case-study material from Bolivian migration to Argentina, this article analyses the ways in which gender and ethnicity influence niche formation by exploring the role of social networks. It starts by making the link between niche formation and social networks, before analysing the ways in which migrants’ labour market insertion in Argentina is gendered. Migrants’ life stories and a survey of a community of ex-miners show that a higher proportion of women than men work in the Argentine garment sector. The data also show that migrant women and men do not have equal access to social networks. However, this unequal access does not, in itself, fully explain womens greater clustering in garment work. Rather, the article suggests that labour market segregation and the articulation of gender, class and ethnicity, as well as migration status, provide women with few alternatives.

Intersectionality, migration and development

Since the 1970s feminist theories have made considerable contributions to development theories and practice, challenged the androcentrism of much development thinking, the normative assumptions about how households behave, and the taking of heterosexuality as the norm. However, despite the uptake of feminist contributions to development, how gender based inequalities are often compounded or intersected by inequalities based on class, race and ethnicity remains largely under-theorized in mainstream development studies. This paper discusses the relevance of intersectionality in the context of development theory and practice, particularly by reviewing how intersectionality has been used in the area of migration studies.

Migration as Protest? Negotiating Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Urban Bolivia

Feminist geographies of migration are often based on the assumption that migration brings about social change, potentially disrupting patriarchal structures and bringing about new spaces where gender relations can be renegotiated and reconfigured. On the basis of multisited research conducted with migrants from the same community of origin in Bolivia, I analyse how gender, class, and ethnicity are renegotiated through internal and cross-border migration. A transnational, multi-scalar, multisited, and intersectional approach is applied to the study of social change through migration, with the aim of investigating whether labour migration provides avenues for greater gender equality. At the individual level there are certainly indications that women achieve greater independence through migration. However, the multiscalar and intersectional analysis suggests that women trade ‘gender gains’ for upward social mobility in the class hierarchy. By doing so, they also contribute to the reproduction of patriarchal social relations.

'I am going, with or without you': autonomy in Bolivian transnational migrations

Autonomy has often been seen as a precondition for achieving gender equality, yet feminist scholarship has been rather ambivalent towards it. In this article, I explore this ambivalence by drawing on the experiences of migrant women, particularly mothers, focusing on the ways in which they negotiated their mobility with their partners. By analysing womens experiences of migration within a context of multi-sited and longitudinal, itinerant ethnography, I historicise their life accounts and place them within a broader framework of social and economic structural changes. On this basis I explore the concept of autonomy, particularly in relation to the exercise of womens agency within a context of market-oriented neoliberal reforms. I also question the potential of womens autonomy for gender equality and argue that there are at least two reasons for feminist scholars to continue being ambivalent towards autonomy.

Migration, Race and Nationhood in Argentina

Argentina has been a country of immigration since the Republican period. Moreover migration has played a key role in the construction of Argentinian nationhood. This paper traces migration policies and official accounts of migration from the nineteenth century to the present day in order to analyse the role of migration in nation-making. We argue that migration policies and official accounts of migration have changed significantly over the last 150 years. Yet, at least until the most recent migration policy reforms, these changing representations of migrants indicated major continuities of nationhood—namely, the persistent construction of Argentina as a white nation of European descendants. By tracing changes in migration policies and discourses then and now, this article addresses the relative absence of comparative works linking ‘new’ and ‘old’ migrations in Argentina. The article also shows how a historical perspective on migration continues to be relevant for understanding the experiences of contemporary migrants. The final section identifies recent changes in migration policy and discusses whether they indicate a radical departure from previous understandings of nationhood.

Transnational migration and urban informality: : Ethnicity in Buenos Aires’ informal settlements

Ethnicity is playing an increasingly important role in the ways in which informality is governed and regulated across cities in the global south. This raises concerns regarding the ensuing exclusion experienced by some groups of people living in informal settlements. In this paper I use the example of Buenos Aires, Argentina, to explore the extent to which ethnicity plays a role in the informal settlement. There is significant evidence that Argentina has gone through a process of de-ethnicisation, particularly at the national level. However, it is unclear whether this process is also evident at the level of the informal settlement. Drawing on a range of interviews, the paper finds that while grassroots organisations are de-ethnicising, the formal leadership of the informal settlement and to some extent also migrants reproduce ethnic divisions. The de-ethnicisation led by the state has therefore unequally percolated to the micro level.

Between a guest and an okupa: Migration and the making of insurgent citizenship in Buenos Aires’ informal settlements

In this paper, we explore initiatives for the construction of substantive citizenship by transnational migrants in Buenos Aires. In looking at migrants’ political participation across the city, we found that the spatiality of citizenship practices is important. At the city level, there are migrant organisations representing specific nationalities. However, in informal settlements, where many migrants reside, we found that migrants engage in political practices across nationality and ethnic lines by coming together with their neighbours in grassroots organisations. These different forms of organising embody critically different views of migrants in their relationship with rights. While the former promote practices linked to ethnic belonging and see migrants as ‘guests’ in a foreign country, unable to make claims to the local or national governments, the latter see them as rights-bearing individuals with power to claim their right to the city. We argue that activism at the scale of the neighbourhood proves to hold more potential for the building of substantive citizenship than actions by organisations active at the city level. This is because migrant organisations active at the city level organise on the basis of nationality, while those at the neighbourhood level bring migrants and non-migrants together on the basis of their class-based interests.