Uncertain Citizenship. Megan Ryburn

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СКАЧАТЬ fabric of another family’s social life that disallowed her own. Naturalized and normalized by generations of gendered and racialized labor relations within the homes of the upper social classes, this contribution was barely recognized. Indeed Magdalena, like many other nanas puertas adentro, faced the constant worry of losing her job without notice and having nowhere to go. Insecurity becomes a feature of the daily lives of nanas puerta adentro, as does the cloak of invisibility from the outside world that such a role confers.

      BODEGAS, SANTIAGO AND ARICA

      In October 2013 I interviewed the Bolivian consul in Santiago, pressing him to tell me what he knew about the labor conditions of his compatriots in the capital city. In response to my queries, he recommended I visit the wholesale clothes shopping arcades along Santiago’s main avenue, La Alameda, where it traverses the comuna of Estación Central. The day after our interview I did just that. In the very first arcade I entered, in a shop toward the back, I met a young Bolivian woman who was prepared to chat with me. She was looking tired and disconsolate, leaning on the shop counter, with her straight black hair nearly sweeping its surface.

      Her name was Cata; she was twenty-five and from El Alto. It transpired that she was working twelve to sixteen hours a day, six days a week, and had not been paid for five months. Moreover, she had been lured to Santiago on false pretenses. She was living with several other people in what she referred to as a bodega (warehouse, storage space) near the clothes shop where she worked. The ease with which I found Cata, and subsequent interviews and conversations with other migrants, made it clear that this area of the city abounded with such places of marginality and exploitation. It is potentially comparable, though on a smaller scale, to the sweatshops of São Paulo and Buenos Aires in which Bolivian migrants labor (see chapter 1).

      Kinberley, age twenty-six, from La Paz, whom I interviewed soon after meeting Cata, had previously been working and living in similar circumstances in an arcade almost adjacent to the one where Cata was. Kinberley’s “room” was provided for “free,” and she was required to live there as one of the conditions of her employment. She described the experience of first arriving at her new sleeping quarters:

      It was a room and beside it was the warehouse. But there were some people who slept in the warehouse, they slept like that.

      “Ooh,” I said, “What should I do?” Because the first time I arrived and entered the house, the house was dirty, and I said to myself, “Where have I ended up?”

      I went upstairs. I don’t know, I didn’t like it. Now, “What should I do?” Like that. I’m here but I can’t go back.

      This was a place that made her fearful, but she felt she could not leave. Cata and her fellow worker, Marta, age thirty-five, from a rural community in the departamento of Oruro, also described feeling trapped; they were generally only able to leave the building where they were living on Sundays. Moreover, there was a sense of danger and clandestine activity in the area. Like the facades of the migrant cités, the shopping arcade and house fronts along La Alameda in this part of the city hid the reality within. In the small shopping arcade where Cata and Marta worked, most of the shops sold clothing at wholesale prices. Cata informed me—and I could verify—that nearly all the shops were staffed by migrant workers. She told me that most of them lived and worked in conditions like her own.

      Furthermore, in the same arcade there was a café con piernas (literally, café with legs), a euphemism for a café where the waitstaff are women wearing minimal clothing. In the mildest of these cafés, the women wear blouses and very short skirts. At the other end of the spectrum, such establishments are essentially strip clubs. Cafés con piernas are a fairly accepted and normalized part of Santiago culture, and most are openly advertised. There are, however, some that are not openly advertised and that may be fronts for brothels, which are illegal in Chile. The café con piernas in the arcade where Cata and Marta worked seemed highly likely to be one of the latter. It was hidden away at the back of the arcade, and the door and windows were blacked out. Cata and Marta said that the women working there were mainly Colombian migrants, and they thought that they were involved in sex work.

      There are clear gendered, racialized stereotypes of different nationalities at work in Chile, which have an impact on migrants.²⁴ Colombian and Central American women in particular can be seen as an exotic and sexualized Other; the continuation of a long history of racist, gendered stereotyping of Afro-descendant and mestiza women as sexually available, which can increase their vulnerability to sexual exploitation in Chile.²⁵ While the women in the café con piernas in the arcade where Cata and Marta worked may have been there voluntarily, given the circumstances in which others in the arcade were working, there was a distinct possibility that they were being sexually exploited. Overall, within the arcade there was a sense of a sordid twilight world in which migrant workers were effectively trapped, day and night.

      In Arica, sisters Isabela, age twenty, and Antonia, age twenty-five, were also hidden in plain sight in similar conditions. The flower stall where they worked in El Agro, Arica’s main market, was an enchanting mass of colors, scents, and neat, orderly displays (much like that in figure 3). However, Isabela and Antonia labored there up to sixteen hours a day, six days a week, and then went to sleep in a room off one of the warehouses behind the market. Just as for the women in Santiago, the room was provided as part of the job. There they slept three to a mattress, with no cooking facilities and a rudimentary bathroom. There was no lock on the door, leading to a profound sense of unease for the women; they had been robbed on more than one occasion. Yet the commercial bustle of shops and markets camouflages these places in both Arica and Santiago, ensuring that they remain unregulated and unnoticed.

FIGURE 3. Flower stall, El Agro, Arica, 2014. Photo by author.

      PARCELAS, ARICA

      The fertile Valle de Azapa, which spreads out to the southeast of Arica, provides much of the produce that is sold in El Agro, where people like Isabela and Antonia work. The Valle de Azapa itself is also home to places of uncertain citizenship and has a long history of being so. Arica and the Valle de Azapa were part of Peru prior to the War of the Pacific, after which they became Chilean territory. For many centuries before the conflict, the Valle de Azapa and parts of what is now southern Peru were agricultural heartlands of the Viceroyalty and then the Republic of Peru. Until abolition in 1854, much of the agricultural work was performed by African slaves.

      The history of slavery in the area is today memorialized in the “The Slave Route,” a thirty-kilometer trail through Arica and the Valle de Azapa established by Afro-descendants in the region, officially recognized by the Chilean Ministerio de Bienes Nacionales (Ministry of National Heritage) in 2009. Viviana Briones Valentín explains that, rather than the large plantations and haciendas of other areas of southern Peru, the Valle de Azapa was characterized by smaller units of production worked by fewer slaves than on the large plantations. Of the slave population in the region, she says: “Attempts to marginalize them from all social, official and economic recognition, from cultural and religious duties, had an immediate and everyday effect (Mellafe, 1964). But, on the other hand, we know that in spite of these measures, the black community managed to reinvent itself time and time again from this ‘no place’.”²⁶ Today in the Valle de Azapa, the ghost of the colonial slavery regime seems to linger on in more than just the memorial sites along trail. So too does the legacy of racism that was a product of the “Chileanization” of the region following the War of the Pacific.

      The model of small units of production as opposed to large-scale industrial operations continues to predominate on what are known as parcelas in Azapa. Here some of the crops СКАЧАТЬ