Abstract
This article focuses on the articulations of migration and gender, from the vantage point of women whose feminist experiences have been both enriched and challenged by migration and vice versa. It presents the results of a qualitative research study of five Latin American women who migrated to Barcelona and felt close to feminisms. The author draws on feminist and postcolonial approaches to migration studies that highlight the active role women play in migratory processes as well as how intersectional variables of ethnic origin, socioeconomic class, education and family contexts are articulated, configuring different power relations and resources in specific sociohistorical contexts. The results challenge widespread stereotypes about migrant women by revealing a rich diversity of profiles, motivations and migratory pathways, as well as how informants’ experiences of social activism across national borders have transformed their subject formation processes and re-positioned them as active subjects of political action.
Feminist knowledge has started off from women’s lives, but it has started off from many different women’s lives. (Harding, 1993: 63)
Introduction
In diverse discursive fields, such as the mass media and political and academic discourse, migrant women have been rendered either invisible or misrepresented as just another disadvantaged, stigmatized or oppressed social group. In Spain, the analysis of mainstream print media has revealed that migrant women appear in the news much less frequently than migrant men and that they are portrayed in relation to social problems such as violence, underdevelopment and marginality (Gregorio Gil, 2004; Román et al., 2011). This negative portrayal of migrant women echoes conservative political discourses blaming immigrants more generally as victims or perpetrators of diverse crimes: from trafficking and terrorism to the economic crisis (Bañón, 2002; Nash, 2005; Van Dijk, 1993). Not only are these stereotypes degrading, but they are also inaccurate, since static and totalizing constructions cannot grasp the always changing, diverse and evasive nature of experience.
Without dismissing the multiple situations of economic, political and cultural oppression many migrant women usually face throughout their lives, this article seeks to offer a different, feminist approach to migrant women’s realities. This involves using feminist theories, epistemologies and methodologies, but also feminist migrant informants as the main source of knowledge to look at the articulations of migration and gender. I argue that this knowledge is constructed from the vantage point of women with both consciousness of women’s rights and embodied experiences of becoming migrants themselves that have enriched – but also challenged – their feminist worldviews. Paraphrasing Mirjana Morokvasic (1984), some female birds of passage are also feminists. Thus I wanted to explore how five Latin American-born women living in Barcelona have experienced feminism and migration as two influential and intertwined processes of subject formation.
Theoretically framed by the intersection of feminist, postcolonial and migration studies, the article starts by offering an interdisciplinary location to tackle a complex but quite unexplored topic in the academic literature. In particular, it draws on intersectionality as an ‘analytical tool to capture and engage contextual dynamics of power’ (Cho et al., 2013: 788) and black US feminist Patricia Hill Collins’s conceptualization of the outsider within. The methodological notes that follow provide details on the qualitative data collection and analysis, as well as on the context and profile of the five informants who collaborated in the study. The empirical analysis in the third section is presented according to three interrelated thematic threads: becoming feminist, becoming migrant and becoming feminist migrants. Finally, I discuss the results and suggest future lines of research.
Feminist and postcolonial approaches to migration
Increasingly, contemporary debates about migration in Europe advocate ‘a gender- and migration-critical perspective’ (Gatt et al., 2016) in order to overcome the shortcomings of migration policies and theories – including gender blindness, Eurocentrism, racism, heteronormativity, the objectification of migrants and methodological nationalism, among others – that do not pay justice to the complexity, diversity and mobility inherent in migration processes.
For a long time, academic discourses on migration have invisibilized and misrepresented migrant women, perpetuating a ‘dominant model of migration’ (Kofman, 1999: 279) according to which men are the leaders of the migratory project and the breadwinners of the transnational family, while women occupy a secondary and passive role.
Feminist approaches to the study of migration have challenged such views (Morokvasic, 1984), acknowledging the active role women play as pioneers of various migratory flows, their diverse profiles, motivations and specific challenges. However, this important contribution of feminist theories to migration studies has been sometimes overshadowed by mainstream feminisms speaking in the name of all women but ignoring the inherent diversity in cultures, ethnicities, nationalities, ages, socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. In turn, this leads to essentializing, victimizing and orientalizing other women, a critique raised by non-white, non-Western and non-middle-class feminists – especially black feminists in the US (Hill Collins, 1986; Smith, 1979), but also transnational feminists born in the so-called Third World: Latin America, Asia and Africa (Anzaldúa, 1987; Mohanty, 2003; Spivak, 2006). Their vindication inspired and was inspired by postcolonial theories that emerged as a reaction to racism and ethnocentrism derived from Western colonial empires. In turn, postcolonial feminisms highlighted the ‘double colonization’ (Petersen and Rutherford, 1986) at work when women from colonized countries face both colonialism and patriarchy.
The diversification in feminist thinking led to the concept of intersectionality, which highlights the multiple subject positions different women occupy according to their class, gender, ethnicity and other variables, and the consequent power relations they embody in diverse sociohistorical contexts (Crenshaw, 1989; Yuval-Davis, 2006). In this line of thinking, Hill Collins analysed the multiple oppressions faced by black women in the US and proposed the category ‘outsider within’ to conceptualize a vantage point resulting from ‘the tension experienced by any group of less powerful outsiders encountering the paradigmatic thought of a more powerful insider community’ (Hill Collins, 1986: S30). She defined three key issues in the configuration of the outsider within that I found useful to guide my own empirical analysis of Latin American migrant feminists in Barcelona: (a) self-definition and self-valuation allow outsiders to ‘reject definitions of themselves as the objectified other’ (1986: S24); (b) personal and cultural experiences are ‘valid sources of knowledge’ (1986: S30); and (c) activism ‘can take several forms’ (1986: S23) beyond traditional ways such as participating in institutional spaces, demonstrations or national elections.
The current research work echoes Cho, Crenshaw and McHill’s (2013) approach to intersectionality, ‘conceiving of categories not as distinct but as always permeated by other categories, fluid and changing, always in the process of creating and being created by dynamics of power’ (Cho et al., 2013: 795). Thus identities are understood as multiple, unstable and changing, far from the essentializing definitions of structuralism and close to poststructuralist definitions of becoming.
Becoming is a theoretically loaded concept that has been included in feminist research from diverse disciplinary locations: from psychological analysis of ‘feminist identity development’ (Marine and Lewis, 2014: 12), to poststructuralist philosophical conceptualizations that counter the unified subject with a fixed identity conceived by modernism.
Marine and Lewis (2014) analysed how US and UK young women became feminists, in the sense of embracing ‘a feminist identity’. Their study identified the diverse and gradual pathways available towards feminisms, the positive influence of other feminists and university in contraposition to the stigma of feminism among non-feminist peers. They concluded that ‘feminist becoming is interwoven with other aspects of identity development – including race, class and sexuality – … Participants’ identities are more winding than linear … more layered than stepwise … and more redolent of a tapestry, with its past woven into the present, than a wave’ (2014: 20).
In turn, poststructuralist feminisms have criticized definitions of identity as the expression of ‘being’: that it is too limited a concept to grasp the richness and dynamics of subject formation in terms of unfinished, changing and overlapped processes, human and non-human connections, which are better delivered by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s conceptualizations of ‘becoming’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987).
This article neither discusses Deleuze’s rich conceptual landscape nor his appropriation by feminist theories (see Braidotti, 1996; Buchanan and Colebrook, 2000); it uses ‘becoming’ in a broad sense to refer to the unfinished and contested character of subject formation processes in the making, as a leitmotif to present informants’ experiences.
Methodological notes
Although Spanish immigration rates have sharply decreased since the economic crisis in 2007, they still remain high. By 2015, there were 5 million foreigners: 11% of the whole population (OECD, 2015). Almost half of them were registered as Europeans (with a high proportion of Romanians), while 26% are Latin Americans, 19.2% Africans, 6.4% Asians, 1% North Americans and 0.5% from Oceania (Ayuso and Pinyol, 2010: 28).
After the US, Spain has become a favourite destination for recent Latin American immigrants, from political exiles in the 1970s, to economic migrants in the 1990s. In the 2000s, the booming Spanish economy attracted numerous immigrant workers to join the service sector, often in low-skilled positions of informal economic regimes, highly segregated by sex. In the global context of the ‘feminization of migration’ (Castles and Miller, 2003) and the international division of ‘reproductive labour’ (Parreñas, 2001), Latin American women migrating to Spain often outnumbered men, especially from Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador (Vicente Torrado, 2005). Most of them settled in the provinces of Madrid (25%) and Catalonia (21%), mainly in their capital cities (Benitez Burgos, 2015).
Many of these women pioneered migrant flows from their regions of origin to Spain as part of transnational family strategies and responding to global market demands for female labour. Others migrated to Spain with individual projects and diverse motivations, as was the case of many of the informants participating in this study. Increasingly, research on diverse migration experiences has started to acknowledge the differentiation as well as the multiple, overlapping and complex motivations behind migrants’ decisions to move.
Between November and December 2015, I invited 12 Latin American women settled in Barcelona to share their experiences as feminist migrants through semi-structured, in-depth interviews. I drew on a snowball sampling criteria based on my personal network as well as academic and social organizations based in Barcelona working on migrant women’s rights and feminist agendas, with a focus on women of Latin American origin. The final sample, composed of five women, was purposively selected according to participants’ availability and their diversity of profiles (places of origin, occupation and experiences of activism). The small sample in this qualitative study is not representative of the Latin American-born feminist women in Barcelona, but it offers a close look at some of their common experiences.
The interviews focused on the political, economic and sociocultural challenges and opportunities informants experienced as both feminists and migrants. Questions covered informants’ social and political participation in both societies of origin and destination in order to map how their feminist ideas, agendas and practices have influenced and been influenced by different migratory pathways. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and analysed with Atlas.ti, according to a bottom-up codification process. Participants’ demographic profiles are summarized in Table 1. 1
Description of participants.
Inspired by ethical principles of respect and horizontality towards research participants (Harding, 1993; Olesen, 2011), I sent the transcriptions of the interviews back to informants, inviting them to read, add and/or change the texts. Only one of the five informants edited her interview thoroughly and gave me feedback on a second encounter, where I shared my ongoing process of analysis with her. Not only was this exchange a mechanism (though partial) of qualitative research validation, but it was also an enriching way of learning from each other’s experience and of creating a more equal space for the interaction between feminist researcher and researched.
Feminist migrant becomings
Experiences of feminism and migration can be similarly considered as non-linear, complex and multiple processes of subject formation at the margins of broader structures of power, such as patriarchy and nationalism. In the following subsections, I draw on Hill Collins’s key ideas on the outsider within category – (a) self-valuation and self-identity, (b) building knowledge through personal experience and (c) diverse forms of activism – as the analytical framework to look at the intertwining of migration and feminism in informants’ accounts.
‘You do not realize it, until you do’: Becoming feminist
The process of self-identification with feminism was not straightforward or equally experienced by all informants. Some of them questioned whether they were ‘feminist enough’ to participate in a study about ‘Latin American migrant women doing feminism in Barcelona’. This attitude coincided with Marine and Lewis’s (2014) findings among young women in US and UK universities and evidences the different intensities and nuances involved in the process of approaching feminism.
In all cases, however, feminism led to mechanisms of self-valuation in which recognizing oneself as a woman facing oppression and injustice despite having rights opened new possibilities of contesting the world. Feminism was embodied in very intimate experiences, sometimes difficult to verbalize for being more related to body practices and feelings than to abstract statements, as Zulma, explained:
Well, it’s really hard for me to tell you [what feminism is]. I mean, I couldn’t tell you something like ‘it’s a, b, c and d’ … It’s more like things that I don’t allow to happen … ’cause wherever you stand up: ‘oh, you are a woman!’ so that’s always a point against you … There are very clear things that you live through and there’s no need to analyse much or to read too much. It’s like wherever you stand up, they give you a slap in the face and they trample you all the time so then it’s like … I’m sorry, but I’m not gonna tolerate it!
Zulma (25) is a Mexican anthropology student who has been living in Barcelona for six years, where she arrived as a Spanish citizen thanks to her family’s Catalan origins. In her testimony, there are at least three key ideas about becoming feminist that are repeated across other informants’ accounts: the central role of experience, a critical view of women’s disadvantaged situation in society (including their exposure to violence and discrimination just for being women) and the need to take action against it.
Women’s personal experience as a fundamental source of knowledge was highlighted by Hill Collins in her conceptualization of outsiders within and it has become a cherished, long-standing and contested feminist claim more generally (Haraway, 1988). When asked about significant moments in their lives as feminists, many recalled unpleasant experiences they had – usually as teenagers – for feeling different to and uncomfortable with family, friends and colleagues’ attitudes, comments or behaviours.
Paula (37), who migrated to Barcelona to join her partner and look for better professional opportunities, remembered being marked as different by peers in her native Chile: ‘I was the president of the History students’ association [at university] and I’ve always had a very respectful discourse and practice towards women, using non-sexist language and respecting our bodies. Then I was stereotyped as the dyke.’
Isabel (53), who migrated from Honduras after a failed marriage in order to look for a job, remembered her own episodes of discomfort with gender expectations:
The truth is that since childhood I have always been like a little bit different … I didn’t really know what it meant to be a feminist … It was like an insult, like ‘weird’ … something derogatory … Then there were [male] workmates criticizing me for being ‘too feminist’ because somehow I wanted to put myself at their level in work tasks and [the] rights men have.
Since feminism is not usually present in early formal education, mass media or other social spaces, personal experiences and networks constitute the main source of feminist knowledge and are basic to understand informants’ progressive engagement with feminist values. Fabiana (32, Argentina) remembered her volunteer work at one of the many indigenous slums in her native Salta, where she was shocked by indigenous women’s experiences of violence and poverty: ‘together with my own experiences of harassment and abuse and all this, you realize that something is going on’. Her non-traditional form of activism as a volunteer allowed her to witness the intersectional oppression of ethnicity and class operating in indigenous women’s lives and in turn, to reflect on her own places of privilege (as a white, well-educated, middle-class urban Argentinean) and oppression (as a young woman in a patriarchal society).
In the process of becoming feminist, informants mentioned various persons and spaces that were inspiring to them. Zulma and Paula mentioned their mothers as their main feminist references. Paula explained: ‘My mother always told us “you must never depend on a man, one must be autonomous. Don’t let anyone mistreat you; men and women are equal.” ’
Zulma’s mother had a group of female friends who usually discussed gender role differences, especially regarding domestic chores: ‘Although my mother did not have a clearly articulated discourse about feminism, she did have things very clear about what she didn’t allow or like.’
Feminism was lived as a self-taught learning process in which women got involved through different paths, looking for and sharing knowledge and activities. María (55), whose feminist identity and activism was forged by her experiences as a worker union leader in Uruguay, emphasized the need to get more formal feminist training and how feminists in her own family inspired her own feminist becoming:
I had a great aunt who worked at GRECMU, the Study Group on the Status of Women [in Uruguay] … Since my childhood, I’ve always lived close to that [feminist] discourse somehow because my aunt was a woman with a very strong presence in my family.
Informants’ diverse paths towards feminism shared a critical standpoint on broad political, economic and cultural power structures organizing society, but also on everyday relationships with their partners, friends and colleagues. Moreover, they were critical of themselves as well as of other feminists. Isabel felt close to feminism but did not fully embrace the word ‘feminist’ as part of her self-definition. She criticized feminists for reproducing sexist values when ‘struggling for power on the same level as men’ and she missed ‘more solidarity among women’. In turn, Fabiana confessed that her initial idealization of feminism was soon substituted by disappointment and then, acceptance of feminisms’ diversity: ‘At first, I felt angry: I expected that feminism would fit my own idea of social struggle or transformation. Now I coexist with many ideas of feminism.’
In any case, feminism was described as an omnipresent force. María said: ‘Feminism is not a pose: for me the feminist being lives inside you, right? So you can’t be who you are if you’re not a feminist.’ In turn, Fabiana stated: ‘Feminism is everywhere, in all my life, it’s something that transcends me. Whatever space I’m in, I add feminism to it. This causes many problems.’
Becoming a feminist involves a direct confrontation with widespread habits and traditions long embedded in culture and social organization. When asked about how she managed to add feminism to everything she does, Fabiana’s answer was forceful: ‘Well, by fighting with everybody and by feeling a bad person [laughs]. It’s a struggle.’
The pathways towards feminism were not even among informants but included vital moments of self-definition and self-valuation in which they found legitimate ways to express feelings, discomforts and affinities that were not available to them before. During the interviews, they interpreted and gave meaning to past experiences with their present feminist lenses. This process had started in their country of origin with different intensities and continued across national borders long after they arrived in Spain.
‘Go back to your country!’ Becoming migrant
Too often, international migration involves a downgrading of basic human rights, when immigrants increasingly face mechanisms of economic, social and political exclusion based on national borders. Fabiana described it as unavoidable: ‘you change an upper position in society to suddenly arrive in a city, in a country where you are in a lower position, no matter who you are’. This generates anxieties, emotional strains and feelings of being lost that affect people differently, but always intensely.
Motivations to migrate are usually complex, multiple and overlapped. María (55) left Uruguay 13 years ago to join her Uruguayan partner already living in Barcelona: ‘because we feminist also fall in love’, she said. Isabel (53) lived with her husband and two children in Honduras, but her marriage was in crisis and after she lost her job, he encouraged her to migrate: ‘Behind a difficult economic situation, there is usually an emotional situation that makes you move’, she reflected. Emotional motivations to migrate are also exemplified by Zulma’s wish to know her Catalan grandparents’ land of origin. She inherited Spanish citizenship and went to live in Barcelona at 19 years old.
The other informants had arrived in Barcelona as tourists, overstayed their three-month visas and lived undocumented for various months. They gradually regularized their legal status through various strategies: Fabiana and Isabel got employment contracts, Paula got married to a European friend and María got Italian citizenship. In all cases, the regularization process was recalled as long, tiring and stressful. As undocumented migrant women, they underwent several experiences that made them aware of the new disadvantaged position they occupied as foreigners in the new society, from labour discrimination to racism.
Labour exploitation and abuse occurred both before and after the economic crisis that has affected Spain since 2007, leaving in its wake rampant unemployment rates and shrinking social, political and cultural rights. When she arrived in Barcelona, during the economic boom years, María remembered the hostile, unfair and informal labour market of care and cleaning services she faced: ‘they super exploited us, because if the wage was €10 per hour, we, the women without papers, were paid €5’.
Economic problems also increased feelings of xenophobia and racism. When Zulma arrived in 2010 from Mexico, she had to listen to unpleasant answers to her job requests: ‘Wherever I went, they would tell me (sometimes literally and sometimes in an implicit way) “go back to your country, we are in crisis here and there are no jobs for everyone”.’
Institutions also reproduced racist practices towards immigrants, organizing police raids or arbitrary control practices based on people’s skin colour or national origin. María remembered an experience on coming out of a metro station:
If you didn’t have the papers, [police] automatically put you inside an armoured police truck and repatriated you. I’m talking about 2003, 2004, because it happened to me twice … Since I’m blond with blue eyes, they didn’t ask [for my ID]. I was illegal [then] so otherwise they would have repatriated me … Those of us who looked European could continue our way and those who looked Africans, brownish, Bolivians, Paraguayans … couldn’t.
Her testimony evidences how categories of difference intersect to position subjects in situations of vulnerability or safety. Under Eurocentric eyes, white people were not suspicious of being undocumented migrants, while other ethnicities were marked by the shadow of doubt.
‘Feeling upside down’: Becoming both migrant and feminist
If feminism has sooner or later come to stay in the lives of the five women interviewed, migration brought about deep transformations in their personalities, beliefs and expectations, including their feminist ideas, practices and concerns altogether. These transformations occurred in different ways, directions and intensities. In this section, I continue to analyse the main issues defining the outsider within: self-definition and self-valuation, experience as knowledge and alternative forms of activism, regarding the intertwinings of feminism and migration. In particular, I focus on how the process of migration affected interviewees’ experiences of feminism, following three topics that emerged in their accounts: feelings of disorientation, personal growth and the development of a vantage point.
Disorientation occurred especially during the first period of settlement in Barcelona, as an emotional jetlag after taking difficult decisions, making long journeys and disrupting routines. It affected informants’ self-identification and self-valuation because it challenged them to occupy new and marginal subject positions in the new society (e.g. the non-European/non-middle-class/underemployed/foreigner/feminist). This was caused and intensified by multiple factors, including situations of legal and economic difficulties as well as the lack of social networks of support on arrival.
Paula and María did have their partners already living in the city, but this emotional anchorage proved insufficient to feel at ease. Paula recalled the tough time she had while being undocumented, without the possibility of having a job, living in a squat, recycling food and carefully administrating the savings she brought from Chile: ‘I was blocked and isolated and I did not look for social spaces to support me.’
In turn, María’s testimony illustrates her initial disorientation and how the migration process drastically changed her feminist activism, originally rooted in the intersections of gender and class as a union leader in Uruguay:
I always say that I felt turned upside down, in the sense that you start from zero here … I could no longer worry about labour exploitation or that women cannot [have or do] certain things. Of course you will always be worried about it, but you must enter the labour market.
Her feminist political and social concerns have never disappeared due to migration, but it was only after she could overcome the initial difficulties posed by settlement, that she was able to reconstruct her social activism. In this context, her feminist activism of origin was completely diversified and transformed: besides joining feminist or women-only groups (including a women’s choir), she joined mixed groups with multiple agendas, including Uruguayan diasporic cultural associations, the 15-M movement 2 and a community urban garden in her neighbourhood. Her feminism of origin intertwined with her recently occupied space as a migrant so that this hybrid position resulted in new forms of political consciousness and practice.
Zulma also expressed her disorientation during the period after her arrival in Barcelona, where she also faced difficulties to find a proper job and to situate herself in the new city. After some time, she volunteered in a neighbours’ association. ‘I’ve never belonged to a feminist organization but I’ve always been, let’s say, a satellite: entering, leaving, attending some assembly, going to all the demonstrations I can.’ This intermittent participation in feminist activities illustrates the varied, dynamic and changing nature of activism, which can occupy diverse spaces and take several forms and intensities across a feminist’s life. Her housemate invited her to a big feminist demonstration soon after she arrived in the city:
I’d never been on a women-only demonstration and for me it was like super amazing: all the slogans, the whole discourse at the demonstration … The opposite of where I came from in Mexico, where there is a super clear discomfort but where some [women] can express it better than others.
As a young Latin American woman becoming a migrant feminist in Europe, Zulma faced contradictory situations according to intersectional locations of power: she experienced discrimination as a migrant worker – an ethnically marked outsider within a Eurocentric Spain in crisis – but she also experienced acceptance as a foreign woman identified with the vindication of the local women’s movement.
Two interrelated issues that emerged in informants’ testimonies were the development of a vantage point that enabled them to compare the diverse realities between their societies of origin and destination, leading them to personal growth: from very intimate changes in ways of understanding one’s self and relationships, to accessing new educational opportunities.
For Isabel, the experience of migration deeply transformed her perspectives on crucial issues in her personal life, including faithfulness in marriage, independence and sexuality, as well as how to raise her children. She reflected that in Honduras she was a submissive, patient and economically dependent wife, a strong believer of romantic love who stoically tolerated her husband’s absences and deceptions. She had really hard times after arriving in Barcelona, leaving behind two small children and realizing that her marriage had failed. Fortunately she could reunite with her children in Barcelona a few years later.
Now she defines herself as a strong, critical woman, enjoying her sexuality in a new relationship and being economically independent. In Barcelona, she took the initiative of setting up a migrant women’s group. She got a space from the municipality to organize monthly gatherings with friends, neighbours and acquaintances. Despite her efforts, the group dissolved due to lack of interest and engagement, but she wanted to set up a new group soon because she was convinced that it is important for migrant women to have a space of their own to share experiences and give support to each other. Her initiative constituted one kind of activism based on community building and women’s solidarity. Although it did not succeed, it offers a good example of her involvement as a political subject in the new society and how the desire to improve migrant women’s lives can resonate in non-institutionalized agendas.
Besides personal experiences and women of reference, another important source of feminist knowledge for informants was education. In particular, Fabiana and Paula highlighted the importance of university studies in their feminist migrant trajectories. At the time of the interview, they were both PhD candidates working on topics related to migrant and ethnic minority women. Their feminist self-definitions and self-valuation were based on anticapitalist and anticolonial principles. Paula expressed it as a matter of incompatibilities: ‘Not only does capitalism produce a sexual division of labour, but it also generates violence against women, therefore you can’t be a feminist and a capitalist. It’s like being a feminist and believing in patriarchy.’ She came across decolonial epistemologies to better understand the intersections between gender, class and ethnicity:
It allowed me to situate the migration of Latin American men and women in a sociohistorical context, a more structural analysis of why they migrate. Ok, it’s because we are poor, but why are we poor? What are the historical conditions that have caused that poverty? … I realized that I was in the margins myself and that others in the margins like me should have thought and reflected about the situation of those of us who are … let’s say … outside the frame.
Her marginal self-positioning echoes Hill Collins’s ‘outsider within’ regarding mainstream configurations of power structuring knowledge and society. In Barcelona, Paula found herself at the margins in diverse situations, intersected by power inequalities at multiple levels. Besides her initial economic difficulties and feeling discriminated at the airport for her Latin American origin, she felt ‘other’ among feminists in Barcelona, when she approached an anarcho-feminist group in a squat social centre. It was mainly formed by native women and as a feminist migrant she felt out of place, both for her personal appearance (‘not punk enough’) and for her priorities in the feminist agenda, more related to decolonial intersections. She finally felt more comfortable with other Chilean feminists based in Barcelona who lobby for the full right to abortion in Chile.
Becoming both migrant and feminist involved facing new challenges related to the intersections of culture, physical appearance, ethnic origin and gender operating simultaneously. In this sense, Fabiana reflected:
I do think that the fact of not being born here, of origin, puts you in a situation of inferiority … well, of being from a colonized country in the colonizing country: if you’re Latin American or African or from elsewhere deemed less developed, you are more exposed, there is another kind of violence that is less direct and subtler.
She recognized the importance of both experience and theoretical elements in her feminist migrant transformations:
As a university student, I have tools that help me to process situations differently from other women who don’t have those tools or possibilities … I think you can do a more complete reading of what happens … Are you going to feel bad because this super racist person tells you ‘sudaca de mierda’?
3
Then you take some distance and say ‘the problem is his, not mine’.
Fabiana said she had gained ‘a wider perspective’ from the combination of university education and her experience of living abroad. This kind of personal capital that migrant women acquired offered the possibility of developing a vantage point composed of the sum of experiences in diverse cultural contexts. Most of these experiences included participating in feminist events in their countries of origin, but mostly in person, when women travelled back to visit their families. Digital media helped them to keep up to date on diverse issues of interests, but it was not the main resource for transnational feminist and/or migrant activism, except for Paula’s participation in Chilean women’s sexual and reproductive rights movement that involved online presence.
Some reflections informants shared evidenced a transnational understanding of reality nurtured by the ability to compare destination and origin societies, offering them the possibility to occupy a unique position as political subjects with multiple concerns and the agency to operate across national borders. A major concern for informants was the violence and insecurity women faced in their countries of origin, especially mentioned in the cases of Mexico and Honduras. Zulma put it bluntly: ‘You go out in the street [in Mexico] and you might not return [home], or you go back dismembered. These issues are so shocking that I don’t feel entitled to talk about them.’ Violence against women is not the main reason to leave, but a good reason not to return, as reflected in Isabel’s account regarding Honduras:
It’s not that I will never return to my country, but not so far. I think of my children … here they have peace: they leave any time, whoever they want with. My daughter dresses as she likes and nobody bothers her. In my country, this is unthinkable! Girls can’t stay alone, it’s normal to kill anyone for a mobile phone or simply because she didn’t allow somebody to touch her or be her boyfriend. Then of course, I now say ‘I’ve brought my children [here] just in time, because my country is unliveable.’
Conclusions
This article has sought to approach the articulations of migration and gender through the eyes of five Latin American-born women settled in Barcelona, who felt close to feminist ideas, values and practices. It aimed to understand the emergence, development and mutual influence of two vital processes in these women’s lives: their migrant experiences as feminists, and their feminist experiences as migrants. The poststructuralist framing of identity as a continuous ‘becoming’ proved useful to approach these two unfinished, changing and dynamic subject formation processes and to acknowledge their multiple transformations across geopolitical and emotional locations.
Theoretically located at the intersection of migration, feminist and postcolonial studies, the analysis tracked diverse women’s vital experiences that, however, shared substantial similarities. Each of them came from different countries – Chile, Mexico, Honduras, Argentina and Uruguay – and cultural traditions which located them as ‘outsiders within’ (Hill Collins, 1986) on a multiple basis: as women, feminists and foreigners in a patriarchal and Eurocentric Spanish society immersed in a deep economic crisis.
Intersectional analysis evidenced different articulations of power at play. In their processes of becoming feminists, they all shared early experiences of discomfort as girls who did not behave in the way it was expected, especially in key socializing spaces in their places of origin, such as the family, school and the workplace. Years later they encountered, through diverse pathways, feminist tools to make sense of discomfort and turn it into practices of social change. Beyond personal differences and intensities of engagement, feminisms were experienced as plural, ongoing learning processes, often inspired by other women, self-taught, critical and omnipresent in interviewees’ lives. Two informants with postgraduate studies also praised formal education as an enriching resource for both their feminist and migrant becomings.
Informants’ accounts evidenced how migration is a multiply motivated decision process, challenging the traditional stereotypes of migrant women as passive, reunified or, in the best of cases, economically driven migrants. In turn, physical movement reconfigured multiple aspects of their lives, including gender relationships, professional expectations, family organization, political participation and social activism. These changes did not occur due to migration only and were often embedded in broader social, political and cultural structural changes.
In any case, migration was often experienced as a downgrading of rights with severe emotional, economic and legal difficulties involved when settling in the new society, including episodes of racism and xenophobia inherited from colonial legacies and updated by increasingly restrictive migration policies in Europe and beyond. Difficulties on arrival resulted in initial disorientation, aggravated by the lack of social networks of support that gave rise to paralysing feelings of isolation and distress. However, informants were able to rebuild their social, economic and political well-being, transforming their feminist sensitivities in multiple directions: further developing and intensifying them (Isabel and Zulma), refocusing them under the light of decolonial reflections (Paola and Fabiana) and redirecting them to other social struggles (María). To some extent, migration also contributed to their personal growth and the possibility of developing a vantage point composed of the sum of experiences in diverse cultural contexts.
The results presented here constitute a very partial account of Latin American feminist migrant women’s lives but hopefully one that highlights the complexity of their experiences and their key role in the production of feminist knowledge in the field of gender and migration studies. This small-scale and exploratory study did not cover important variables – such as sexual orientation, disability and other ethnic origins – which an intersectional analysis would enrich with new perspectives in the field. Future research is needed on the intricacies of becoming migrant from the vantage point of diverse and critically thinking women’s bodies as active subjects of political action concerned with social justice and gender equity.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This research was possible thanks to the Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility, United Nations University (UNU-GCM). I am grateful to director Dr Parvati Nair, Dr Megha Amrith, Dr Valeria Bello and Dr Aishih Wehbe-Herrera for their support and inspiration. I also thank the anonymous reviewers whose wise suggestions helped me to improve the manuscript.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.