ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses shifts in gender relations, practices and discourses within transnational family and friendship networks spanning Bolivia and Spain. After 2001, Bolivian migration to Spain became one of the most feminised international migration flows. This chapter focuses on Bolivian women’s labour migration into Spain’s ‘low-skilled’ and precarious economic sectors – mainly domestic and care work, and the retail sector. It explores how women’s mobility affected their role within transnational family hierarchies, their self-understanding and available discourses on, and ways of being for, women. Multi-sited fieldwork between 2010 and 2013 included interviews with Bolivian women residing in Spain or recently returned to Bolivia and their non-migrant family members. Findings suggest the dialogical nature of processes of social exchange between migrants and non-migrants, and migration’s ambivalent, unintended, even contradictory outcomes in the realms of gender discourses and family practices. The act of leaving itself became an expression of autonomy and agency, and migration experiences expanded the range of self-understandings, aspirations and social roles available to Bolivian women. Further, access to higher wage levels in Spain increased women’s influence and status within transnational hierarchies. Yet incorporation into a highly gendered labour market in Spain in many ways also reinforced narrow patriarchal gender conceptualisations and norms. Contrary to usual assumptions, non-migrants played active roles in transnational exchanges, power negotiations and meaning-making processes. Ultimately, new transnational experiences provided spaces for the reshuffling of ideas, practices and identities. The underlying processes of social exchange were dialogic, rather than unidirectional, and outcomes ambiguous, even contradictory, rather than simply progressive.
