Gender, Migration and Social Transformation

Intersectionality in Bolivian Itinerant Migrations

Tanja Bastia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317024873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geografia

Intersectionality can be used to analyse whether migration leads to changes in gender relations. This book finds out how migrants from a peri-urban neighbourhood on the outskirts of Cochabamba, Bolivia, make sense of the migration journeys they have undertaken.

Migration is intrinsically related to social transformation. Through life stories and community surveys, the author explores how gender, class, and ethnicity intersect in people's attempts to make the most of the opportunities presented to them in distant labour markets. While aiming to improve their economic and material conditions, migrants have created a new transnational community that has undergone significant changes in the ways in which gender relations are organised. Women went from being mainly housewives to taking on the role of the family's breadwinner in a matter of just one decade.

This book asks and addresses important questions such as: what does this mean for gender equality and women's empowerment? Can we talk of migration being emancipatory? Does intersectionality shed light in the analysis of everyday social transformations in contexts of transnational migrations? This book will be useful to researchers and students of human geography, development studies and Latin America area studies.

1 Introduction

Feminist geographies

Feminist geographies of migration suggest that migration brings about social change, potentially disrupting patriarchal structures and bringing about new spaces where gender relations can be renegotiated and reconfigured. However, traditionally most studies have focused on changes that take place at destination, predominantly in the Global North. More recently, with the rise of interest in the so-called migration-development nexus, there has been greater attention paid to places of origin. However, there continues to be a bias towards studying migration from the Global South to the Global North. This book adopts a transnational lens and combines an analysis of regional, South-South migration with the more traditional South-North migration, undertaken by the same group of migrants. My aim is to analyse how gender, class, and ethnicity are renegotiated through internal and cross-border migrations. I do this through multi-sited itinerant ethnography conducted in two continents, three countries and five cities, and effectively across space with Bolivian migrants from the same community of origin. The analytical approach encompasses a multi-scalar and multi-sited intersectional approach to the study of social change through migration with the aim of investigating whether labour migration provides avenues for greater gender equality. In what ways do gender relations change through migration? What form does this change take? Can we define it as ‘emancipatory’? And if so, for whom?

Bolivia has the highest poverty indices in Latin America and is increasingly dependent on remittances, which represented 5.4 per cent of Gross National Product (GNP) and 240 per cent of its Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). Furthermore, over a fifth of its population lives abroad (Banco Central de Bolivia 2007). Bolivia has received attention in relation to the socialist and pro-indigenous policies enacted by its first indigenous president, but most studies on mobility within and across its national borders are only available to Spanish speakers (Hinojosa 2008a, 2008b; Hinojosa 2009a, 2009b; de la Torre Avila 2006; de la Torre Avila and Alfaro Aramayo 2007; Román 2009; Solé et al. 2014; Cortes 2004) – for some exceptions see (Ryburn 2016, 2018; Rockefeller 2010). Yet the history of Bolivian geographic mobility represents a fascinating case study for better understanding the global process of feminisation of migration and the consequences this has for migrants and their communities of origin.

The feminisation of international migration flows has been linked to globalisation, the greater demand for women migrant workers, the ageing population in Europe and the US, and increased native women’s labour market participation. Latin America is the first continent to achieve gender parity in its cross-border migration flows (Cortés Cartellanos 2005). Bolivian migration has been an exception to this regional trend, given that men have led its historic cross-border migrations. However, here too, there have been some significant changes and Bolivian migration has experienced a gradual process of feminisation since the 1980s. This book documents this change in a detailed analysis of life stories by both migrant men and women. The qualitative data is complemented by community surveys and census data to better understand how people’s everyday choices and changed perceptions of mobility contributed to this gradual change as well as to how this change was lived at the personal level. The guiding questions therefore include the following: in what ways do gender relations change through migration? What form does this change take? Can we define this change as ‘emancipatory’? And if so, for whom? Do changes associated with migration, such as greater labour market participation by women and restructuring of childcare through transnational social fields, lead to a fundamental change in feminine and masculine identities? Moreover, does migration lead to a structural change in gender relations and broader social transformation?

The methodology included multi-sited semi-participatory itinerant ethnography strongly influenced by feminist methodologies, global ethnography, and the extended case method (Burawoy 2000). Since 2000, I have visited Cochabamba ten times, Buenos Aires five times, and cities in Spain twice (Madrid, Algeciras, and Cadiz, see Map 1.1). During these visits, I recorded over one hundred interviews, mostly life testimonies with migrants and returnees, but also informal interviews with some family members, teachers, and community leaders. In addition, I also carried out two statistically representative neighbourhood surveys in 2002 and 2008 to gather quantitative data on socio-economic indicators and migration patterns. During fieldwork, I lived with key informants and shared their daily tasks. My analysis is therefore also based on extensive fieldwork notes.

Drawing on personal life stories to address the main questions identified above, the book contributes three main findings to our understanding of the relationship between gender, power, and space. First, the book shows how a focus on gender alone is insufficient. The book makes the case for the use of intersectionality given the interrelated nature of gender, class, and ethnicity. While this has already been argued elsewhere in feminist theory, the book shows with empirical data how gender, class, and ethnicity need to be considered within the same framework in order to understand the outcomes of processes of social change. In fact, it argues that women trade ‘gender gains’ for upward social mobility, a strategy that can only be understood by using an intersectional approach.

Second, by analysing change across space and time, the book also contributes to our understanding of how unequal social structures, such as the patriarchal family, are reproduced, albeit in a different form, through the migration strategies adopted by those interviewed. In this sense, the book contributes to a key question in the feminist geography literature – that of whether migration brings about opportunities for greater gender equality. However, it also makes a wider contribution to our understanding of how and why unequal power structures persist.

Third, the research also pushes the methodological barrier further by showing how longitudinal and multi-sited research brings about new understandings and new perspectives on issues, which have long been of interest, such as international migration. The methodology employed challenges the methodological nationalism prevalent in much migration research. This study highlights the interconnections of internal and cross-border migration, but also shows how those interviewed began considering cross-border migration because of their ‘failed’ internal migration and the unavailability of decent jobs in local labour markets. As a result, migrants invest the financial and symbolic resources they have accumulated through migration in consolidating their hold on the city, to finally belong to the city and live ‘like people’.

While I have addressed some of these questions in single articles, this book opens up the opportunity to give greater prominence to migrants’ life stories. At the same time, it also allows greater space to write the history of this neighbourhood and thereby analyse how this transnational community was created. The research project traced the creation of a transnational community from a mining town to Cochabamba, through internal migration and then to various regional and global migration destinations. My interest is in understanding how social inequalities, particularly gender and ethnicity, are challenged, created, and reproduced through the process of migration.

How crises created a transnational community

The barrio, the peri-urban neighbourhood where I began this research, used to be a milk farm located some nine kilometres from Cochabamba city centre. In the 1980s, a cooperative of miners bought this farm with the idea of using it to supplement the poor diets they had in the mining town. Malnutrition was rife, especially among children. Being situated over 3,000 metres above sea level, the mining town was too high for the production of vegetables or growing fruit trees. The intention was to improve access to a cheap source of milk from the valleys to improve the diet of the cooperative members and their families. However, during the mid-1980s, Bolivia faced an increasing number of challenges that led to the IMF-imposed Structural Adjustment Programme. The price of tin plummeted in international markets. Miners were one of the groups that were worst affected by the combination of the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) and the related privatisation of the state-owned mining company, Comibol, and lower mineral prices. Many lost their jobs and could not continue making a livelihood in the mining town. They therefore converted the milk farm into individual plots and these were given to cooperative members to help them make the transition to the city. Cochabamba was at the time the third largest city in Bolivia and the miners thought that they would be able to make a livelihood by moving to the city.

This is how the barrio came to be, through internal migration from a mining town. Cooperative members who had made enough contributions to the cooperative, in terms of selling the mineral they mined through the cooperative, received an individual plot and began moving to Cochabamba. This is where I first came to know of this community, in the early 1990s. I was working as a volunteer with a religious community that had a house and a school right next to where the old milk farm used to be. At the time, the neighbourhood still looked like a farm and consisted of large fields, eucalyptus trees and only a scattering of adobe houses on the small 150 square metre plots. There was no access to electricity or running water and there were no roads, but there was a very strong sense of community.

I returned to the neighbourhood in 2000 when I was starting my doctoral research. As I was looking for my friend, trying to locate her house, two things became immediately clear. First, the neighbourhood had changed substantially in a very short period. Many more people had relocated to the neighbourhood. They had built new houses. However, people still knew where everyone lived. Second, many of the people I had known in the early 1990s were now in Argentina. My doctoral research project grew out of these observations and reignited my long-held interest in migration.

From 2000 onward, I returned to this neighbourhood on a regular basis and began tracing some of its people in Buenos Aires and later on in Spain. As my research project grew and diversified to include a generational perspective, so did my involvement with the community. Some ten years later, when I started participating in the annual dance for the neighbourhood saint’s festivities around the 1^st May celebrations (see Image 1.1), the neighbourhood was unrecognisable from the one I had first known in the early 1990s. Most houses were made of brick, often multi-stories, with tiled roofs, indoor kitchens and toilets, running water and electricity (see Image 1.2). Another significant change was that many people did not necessarily know their neighbours. People who had come from the mining town still recognised each other, but other residents had moved to this neighbourhood. Was this still a ‘community’?

Image 1.1 Dancing the diablada at the annual neighbourhood festivity, Cochabamba

Image 1.2 View of the neighbourhood, Cochabamba

In the interviews and the informal conversations I held with residents, it was clear that the identity of being somebody from the mining town was still strong, even among those who had only been born there and then grew up in the city. Indeed, feelings related to their identity as miners are still strong and many supported the mobilisations of cooperative miners organised by FENCOMIN in July and August 2016. However, I had some doubts about whether we could still talk about the neighbourhood as a community.

This move to Cochabamba was, however, fraught with problems, from high levels of unemployment to the stereotyping of miners as dangerous, violent drunks. At one point during fieldwork, for example, somebody living in the city centre challenged me for living in a zona roja or red zone, a neighbourhood perceived as dangerous by those who do not live in it. However, I have never felt exposed or in danger, except for the dogs that roam around the neighbourhood after dusk. Failing to secure their livelihoods in Cochabamba meant that many started looking for work elsewhere, particularly in Buenos Aires, but also the Chapare and Santa Cruz (in Bolivia), Israel, or Guatemala. Buenos Aires was an attractive destination during the 1990s because of the convertibility plan, which pegged the Argentinian peso to the US dollar. However, Bolivians, Paraguayans and Peruvians in Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, experienced high levels of racism and xenophobia (Grimson 1999; Hinojosa forthcoming; Bastia and vom Hau 2014). National public discourse blamed migrants from neighbouring countries for high levels of unemployment, crime, and a cholera epidemic, in an attempt to exonerate the public authorities from their responsibilities for solving structural problems in the economy and political culture. When the 2001 crisis struck, migration streams reversed momentarily and diversified again with newer opportunities opening up in Spain and Italy, for example, but Argentina remained an attraction pole for regional migrations. Following the financial downturn in Europe, many Bolivian migrants returned to Bolivia or to their historical destination, Argentina, but other opportunities also opened up in Brazil and Chile, diversifying regional migration streams (Baby-Collin and Cortes 2014).

When looked at from the Bolivian or a Southern perspective, crises are not exceptional. They occur with regularity. They bring additional suffering, the need to readjust, and in this process migration is instrumental, for those who can afford it, in helping people diversify their livelihoods and increase the chances of survival. Given the many resources needed to undertake migration, ‘survival’ does not necessarily refer to just physical survival but the maintenance of a way of being, which might also include projected upward social mobility. For many of the migrants I spoke to, migration was less about physical survival and more about their wish to achieve some status and dignity through their migration projects. In particular, they wanted to be accepted as gente, or people. This word has strong urban and class connotations, more closely associated with what we might term ‘urban citizens’ (Tapias and Escandell 2011). The wish to be accepted as people can be understood to be a reaction to the stigmatisation my interviewees experienced as miners when they first arrived in Cochabamba.

Gender and itinerant migrations

Amid this general picture of change in the neighbourhood, I was particularly interested in gender relations. From an initial question of how gender relations influence migration flows, the research project evolved to address changes in gender relations brought about by migration. This is clearly a circular question experiencing a constant process of change as well as multiple causes. Some changes may be brought about by migration while others might be the result of wider socio-economic change, lobbying by women’s movements, and greater awareness of gender inequality as a result of participating in local women’s grassroots movements that are not necessarily linked to migration. This relationship is further complicated given that migration itself generally results from wider processes of socio-economic change. As is clear from the above, internal migration from the mining town to the city was caused by wider changes in socio-economic and political structures, such as the Structural Adjustment Programmes, changing prices in minerals, and the decreasing importance that mining played in the restructured Bolivian economy. Yet it is possible to identify specific changes that are brought about through migration. Pratt and Yeoh (2003), for example, talk about migration potentially opening up new spaces for the creation of more equal gender relations:

there tends to be both a deep utopic hope that transnationalism may offer opportunities to realign and equalise gender relations, and a knowing scepticism that patriarchal relations return in different ...