This chapter analyzes the labor insertion of Bolivian Aymara women showing that their migratory experiences are constructed through transborder ethnic networks and resources. In addition to describing the labor niches of the interviewees, it states that their productive functions are doubly configured as ethnicized cultural and social capitals and as a gender mandate. This implies that these women exercise not only a “double” but rather a “multiple presence” related to the productive and reproductive overloads they must sustain. In doing this, they articulate their own mechanisms of resistance, developing forms of gendered knowledge that, on occasion, enhance some degree of female autonomy. This chapter also shows that the insertion of migrant women in commerce integrates a gift circulation system: it is structured around the specific way in which they incorporate the obligations to give, receive, and reciprocate. In performing their productive daily tasks, the women expand the practices of care they embody as a “gift” in their Aymara kinship networks

This chapter complements the theoretical debates revisiting the anthropological studies on kinship among Aymara groups in the territories of the Andean Tri-border. Several worldviews that will appear in the ethnographic chapters of the volume are described and explained. First, the logics of Aymara symbolic complementarity are addressed. Their relationships to the patterns of kinship, mobility, and territorial occupation in different orographic platforms of the Atacama Desert are also discussed. Then, Aymara marriage (chachawarmi) and its connections with patterns of gender conflict are addressed, thus explaining the persistence of hierarchical forms of masculine domination. By exploring these debates, the chapter retrieves the current political debate of Indigenous women leaders in Bolivia, which makes visible the inequities reproduced when idyllic visions of gender equality in Aymara communities become mainstream political ideas.

This chapter analyzes the testimonies of Bolivian Aymara women about the relationship between the unequal constitution of gender divisions of labor in their families of origin, the productive and reproductive overloads faced by them and their female relatives, and the articulation of transborder chains of care that sustain these women’s mobilities. The chapter starts with an overview of the application of the concept of care in the study of transnational and transborder mobility. Then, the female testimonies are analyzed to show the contradictions the gender mandate implies for the migrant women. The chapter also deepens in the patterns of overload that the interviewees experience and the feminine chains of mutual support that they articulate to respond to gender inequalities. Finally, it resizes some key concepts applied in the studies of transnational female migration to provide them with analytical precision in contexts where mobilities are articulated from the ethnic structuring of kinship.

This chapter reviews Lévi-Strauss’s Alliance Theory, drawing on feminist critiques from the seventies and current archaeological findings to clarify the analytical frameworks of the book. It argues that Lévi-Strauss’s arguments are linked to a specific form of masculine domination that became hegemonic from the nineteenth century onwards (as a scientific, colonial, and Eurocentric discourse). The second section offers a brief glossary of terms on kinship (which will be useful for reading the whole volume), while the third indicates some interpretative reservations to be considered when reviewing the “classics” works of this anthropological subfield. With this background, Lévi-Strauss’s proposals on kinship are retrieved in section four. In the fifth section, the current archaeological findings on Paleolithic human groups are synthesized, providing scientific evidence that endorses a deconstruction of several of Lévi-Strauss’s maxims. In the conclusions, the definition of patriarchy as hegemony is proposed.

This chapter addresses the episodes of gender violence narrated by the Bolivian Aymara women interviewed in Arica (Chile). Its objective is to analyze specifically those female experiences that take place in “the hidden sites of violence”. That is, the aggressions suffered by women in their family environment, where these facts remain hidden, although they often take place in plain sight and with notorious consequences. The chapter returns to the narratives of the thirty interviewed women to describe the aggressions perpetrated by the male figures of their families of origin (fathers, brothers, stepfathers), but also by their mothers. In addition, it analyses how these abuses are repeated in the relationships these migrant women build with their own partners and their children. It shows a difference in the intensity of violence and the protection mechanisms found against it on the Chilean and Bolivian sides of the border. Indeed, the recognition of this difference motivates female transborder mobility.

This chapter analyzes Bolivian women’s relations with the Chilean state through its agencies and local officials. Three thematic axes delimit its main discussions: (1) the processes of migratory documentary regularization; (2) access to public health; and (3) access to housing. The main objective of the chapter is to show how borderization processes led by the Bolivian and Chilean states have a particular impact on the women due to the intersectionality of their migratory, gender, and ethnic status. The ethnographic findings reveal an intimate relationship between the violations operated by the Chilean state by denying basic rights to these women, and their mobilities and the development of female agency. Furthermore, these data show that transborder displacements are strategies performed by women to solve everyday family problems.

This chapter invites our readers on a visual journey through the Azapa Valley and the Agromarket, spaces that articulate Indigenous Bolivian migration in Arica (Chile). The chapter seeks to contrast the visual records and ethnographic field diaries with the information about these spaces detailed in the previous literature. First, it outlines Arica’s current social and economic configurations, providing demographic data on international migration in the city. Second, the profiles of the thirty women interviewed are examined in-depth, providing key information to situate their trajectories and testimonies (which will be taken up in the following chapters of the volume). Third, the Azapa Valley will be described, showing how its farmland has been transformed into one of the most important agricultural enclaves in the Atacama Desert. The chapter also presents the Bolivian women’s working spaces in the Agromarket of the city.

Citizenship, perhaps more than any other political concept, was traditionally understood as 'just something for the boys'. This chapter starts by outlining briefly the feminist critique of traditional formulations of citizenship in the 'malestream'. This critique has led to a rich feminist literature, which has, in differing ways, attempted to 're-gender' citizenship so that it better fits the 'girls'. This re-gendering raises a number of dilemmas. The chapter focuses on two central ones: whether a woman-friendly model should be ostensibly gender-neutral or explicitly gender-differentiated; and the status of the private sphere in relation to citizenship. In terms of the impact of feminist analysis, the chapter concludes by arguing first, that it has contributed to a conceptualisation of citizenship that is more sensitive to difference and diversity; and second that, with some exceptions, it has influenced the mainstream debate.

This chapter focuses on democratisation, grounding this in an initial discussion of democratic theory. It begins by examining some key assumptions of democratic theory, albeit in a necessarily cursory fashion given the extensiveness of the field, and some of the now well-established feminist critiques of these assumptions. The chapter finds that although feminism has had some influence on democratic theory, this influence remains patchy and has not extended to the literature on democratisation. Despite the prolific nature of the democratisation literature, the dominant explanatory paradigms have virtually ignored the role of women in democratisation. The chapter redresses this balance by exploring what a feminist analysis of democratisation would entail. It argues that the voluntarist and positivist nature of the mainstream democratisation literature is not accidental but denotes a particular ontological foundation that tends at best to marginalise women's activism and, at worst, simply ignores it.

This chapter traces the notion of 'agency' through a series of transformations: from its roots in the dominant ideology of early European capitalism and imperialism, through its appropriation by feminists in countering constructions of gender and race which denied women's ability to act, to the contemporary re-appropriation of women's 'agency' into neoliberal discourses of development. Moving beyond notions of 'equality' with men, socialist feminists sought to understand agency in relation to power and ideology, exploring the nature of the material structures of patriarchy and the construction of masculinity and femininity in the context of a commitment to social transformation. It can be argued that there is a basic contradiction in the notions of agency and 'empowerment' as they are applied within the context of development. On the one hand, empowerment is supposed to be achieved by women themselves through the exercise of agency.