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Places of Uncertain Citizenship

In the room where my niece lives you can fit a double bed and a single, and nothing else. And we all squashed in there, and we lived four grown-ups and a little girl. Five people…. In the single bed, there was my husband, me, and we put a soft toy or something alongside so that if we rolled off, we’d fall on that. I mean, it’s not a bed, it’s a mattress on the floor. We were like that for March, April, May, about two months while we looked for another room. April was when my sister arrived. Then in that same room it was my niece, her husband, my husband and me, my sister, and two children. There were seven of us.

—DIANA, AGE TWENTY-EIGHT, FROM SANTA CRUZ, BOLIVIA

As the late, great Doreen Massey contended, “If space is … a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space.”¹ That is to say, places do not preexist but rather are formed and reformed through social interactions and interventions by institutions.² They are not abstract. They are made manifest through embodiment, understood and created through the physical, experiential, and emotional.³ Places are consequently comprehended in a variety of ways by different people, but they also have shared meaning.

For Diana and many others, there were certainly particular places—like the inner-city tenement housing she describes in this chapter’s opening quotation—that were tangible expressions of their collected migration stories-so-far. It is imperative to grasp a sense of these places in order to comprehend how uncertain citizenship affects migrants in their daily lives. So prior to embarking on a discussion in the rest of the book of the construction of and interactions between the “wider power geometries” of spaces of citizenship, this chapter provides a grounding in the lived reality of uncertain citizenship.

Combining migrants’ accounts with my own participant observation through an iterative process, I slowly began to map the connections among what I came to understand as “places of uncertain citizenship,” six of which I discuss here.⁴ All, to borrow from Rob Shields, are places on the margins—in some cases literally on the geographic periphery, such as on the border at Lago Chungará, and in other cases figuratively peripheral to the center of society, as with the migrant cités (tenement housing) located in the heart of the capital city.⁵ They are places that perform a clever trompe l’oeil, being at once invisibilized and yet highly visible. And thus they are places of liminality, full of “ambiguity and paradox.”⁶

THE BOLIVIAN-CHILEAN BORDER

AT LAGO CHUNGARÁ

The physical geography of Lago Chungará marks it as somewhere outside normal paradigms. One of the highest lakes in the world, it sits at forty-five hundred meters above sea level. The altiplano landscape that surrounds it is splendidly dramatic, covered in pampa and snowy peaks; grazed by llama, alpaca, and vicuña; and a feeding ground for flamingo. I approached the Chungará–Tambo Quemado border crossing on my first journey there for this research in a fog of dizziness after briefly passing out on the bus due to our rapid ascent from sea level in Arica. My altitude sickness on that journey contributed to the sense of almost surreality engendered by the contrast between the dark green militarization of the border guards and the impossible blueness of the sky and the beauty of the place. Chungará seemed a shimmering mirage perched in the cordillera, yet it also was a place where weighty decisions regarding the movement of people were being enforced every day.

As a nexus point on the triple frontera (triple frontier) joining Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, its present is imbued with a history of conflict and unease. It is part of a borderland that holds deep importance in the national imaginaries of these three neighbors. The boundaries of Chile, Peru, and Bolivia were drastically redrawn following the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), and the consequences have been far-reaching. The war was a product of tensions among the three nations that evolved in conjunction with the discovery around the 1840s of rich guano deposits and salitre (sodium nitrate) on the Pacific coast and in the Atacama Desert in what was then southern Peru, Bolivia’s littoral territory, and the top of northern Chile (see map 2). Tensions escalated to crisis point in February 1879. The Chilean government occupied the port of Antofagasta—at that point part of Bolivia—with the ironclad vessel Blanco Encalada in response to a fierce dispute over Bolivian taxation of a Chilean nitrate exploitation company operating in Bolivian territory. Shortly thereafter Bolivia declared war on Chile. As a result of signing a “secret” pact with Bolivia in 1873, Peru became embroiled in the conflict on the Bolivian side following a failed attempt to mediate, and in April 1879 war was declared on Bolivia and Peru by the Chilean congress.

MAP 2. Territorial boundaries of Chile, Peru, and Bolivia before the War of the Pacific. Credit: Bill Nelson, 2017.

The war was long and protracted, with neither the Chilean side nor the Peruvian-Bolivian alliance willing to back down. While Bolivia had effectively exited the war by 1881, Peru continued fighting until 1883. Peru negotiated the Treaty of Ancón with Chile that same year, following extended Chilean occupation of Lima. In 1884 Bolivia and Chile reached an official truce, and they signed the Treaty of Peace and Friendship in 1904, essentially confirming the conditions of that truce. Under these agreements Chile took possession of Bolivian and Peruvian territory up to and including Arica and Tacna, thus leaving Bolivia landlocked and increasing the size of Chile by one-third (see map 3). In the Treaty of Peace and Friendship it was agreed that Bolivia would have access to the now Chilean ports of Arica and Antofagasta, that Bolivian imports through these ports would not be taxed, and that Bolivia could establish its own customs houses there. A railroad would also be built by Chile to link Arica to La Paz; this was completed in 1913.⁷

MAP 3. Contemporary map of Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. Credit: Bill Nelson, 2017.

Part of the agreement laid out in the Treaty of Ancón was that a plebiscite would be held in 1893 to decide the future of Arica and Tacna, according to the wishes of those residing there. This date came and went, however, with no attempt made at a vote. After years of discussion, in 1925 plans were finally made for a plebiscite, to be overseen by representatives from the United States. This was canceled in 1926 by the US representatives after what was described by plebiscitary commissioner general William Lassiter as a “state of terrorism” descended on the region in the period preceding the planned vote.⁸ While violent acts were committed by both Peru and Chile as they sought to establish their national identity in the area, much of the violence was perpetrated by Chile. Effectively since the signing of the Treaty of Ancón, but increasingly during the period from 1910 onward, Chile had begun a process of “Chileanization” in the region.

The Chilean national identity that such actions sought to affirm promoted the homogeneity of Chile based on the “whiteness” of Chileans as opposed to the “Indian” or “mestizo” Peruvians, who were cast as an inferior Other. Peruvian schools, churches, and press outlets were closed; the Chilean military presence was augmented; approximately forty thousand Peruvians were deported; and a policy of colonization by Chileans from farther south was established. Physical assaults, rapes, and murders were not uncommon, carried out by Chilean vigilante groups but also by police. Violence increased in the period directly before the vote was due to be held, and thus a free and fair plebiscite was deemed impossible by the US representatives.⁹

The Tacna-Arica issue was finally resolved in 1929, following arbitration by the United States. Tacna passed back into Peruvian control, and Arica remained in Chilean control, with no plebiscite ever held. Nevertheless, this solution was only partial. Xenophobic antagonism between Chile and Peru had become deeply entrenched during the previous fifty years, and racism toward indigenous peoples had been reinforced. The specter of the War of the Pacific continued to rear its head throughout the rest of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first through repeated displays of this antagonism.¹⁰ A similar animosity came to exist between Chile and Bolivia, and its repercussions likewise can still be felt.

Most notably, the issue of Bolivian sea access was, and still is, a serious bone of contention between the two countries, and they have not maintained full diplomatic relations since 1962. Regaining sea access is a matter of national pride in Bolivia, and the country commemorates the Day of the Sea every March 23 with parades, chants, and songs, led by its navy. In 2013 Bolivia brought a case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) requesting that the court order Chile to negotiate the issue of Bolivian sovereign access to the sea (as opposed to the more limited access it currently has via the ports of Arica and Antofagasta). Much to Chile’s chagrin, the ICJ ruled in 2015 that it would hear the case, and it is likely that a judgment will be issued in 2018 or 2019.

Whatever the conclusions that might be drawn about the causes of the sea access dispute and how it might be resolved, matters have not been helped by the aggressive public acts and comments of certain politicians on both sides. As a recent example, Evo Morales has insisted on playing Bolivia’s “Naval March” in the presence of Chilean delegations to the country. Among other things, the lyrics contain a line indicating that Antofagasta, as well as other Chilean cities, will be returned once again to Bolivia (otra vez a la patria volverá). Bolivian minister of defense Reimy Ferreira has also recently compared former president Michelle Bachelet’s government with that of General Augusto Pinochet. Bachelet was a victim of torture under the Pinochet regime. On another recent occasion, following a spat over a border infringement by Bolivian public officials, former and now again incumbent Chilean president Sebastián Piñera tweeted that President Evo Morales should “shut up stop lying and comply with the 1904 Treaty” (mejor que se calle deje de mentir y cumpla Tratado de 1904).¹¹

At the border crossing at Lago Chungará, the ongoing tensions of the past century and a half can at times make themselves felt. This was revealed to me through the responses to a questionnaire survey that I assisted the Asociación in conducting with forty-six Bolivian truck drivers in the port of Arica. Employed by Bolivian companies, these drivers come largely from the departamentos of Cochabamba, Oruro, and Potosí, crossing into Chile at Lago Chungará to deliver their goods to the port before reloading and making the return journey. The drivers never had a good sense of how long a return journey would take them because there were often delays with the loading and unloading of cargo and at the border crossing, which the drivers attributed to the geopolitical tension between the two countries. Thus the journey could take them anywhere between two weeks and a month, with delays resulting in lost wages because of the high cost of accommodations and food in Arica. A member of staff at the port confirmed that proceedings were sometimes less than efficient and that the underlying cause was at least in part the fraught relations between the two countries.

Moreover, application of the law on the Chilean side of the border as individuals cross over from Bolivia can be arbitrary and discriminatory. Here Bolivians’ right to freedom of movement and to migrate may be questioned, although there is often no basis for such questioning under Chilean law. Under the MERCOSUR visa agreement among Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, since 2009 Bolivians should be able to cross freely with only their identity cards and enter Chile as tourists (see chapter 3).¹² The MTRV to allow migrants to work is acquired once in Chile. Other than their identity cards, Bolivians crossing into Chile may be required at the border to show “proof of solvency,” a concept for which I have struggled to find a clear definition. What is notable with regard to this point is that questioning about funds often appears to be arbitrary, and it seems that those crossing the border may be asked about their financial situation—or not—on the basis of their appearance. Those who appear to be indigenous are more likely to be questioned, as well as searched.

On my journey back across the border from La Paz to Arica, the woman in front of me in the customs queue, who was dressed de pollera (wearing Aymara or Quechua indigenous dress), was made to unpack all of the belongings she was carrying in her aguayo (woven cloth used to carry items) and zippered, blue-and-white-striped plastic bag. My equally large backpack passed unremarked. Of course this could have been an anomaly, the whim of the customs officer on that particular day. This seems unlikely, however, given that many participants in my research, particularly those in Arica and especially those who identified as indigenous and had lower levels of education, had experienced discrimination at the border. Sometimes this was relatively low-key—such as being subjected to more searches—but sometimes it resulted in being prohibited entry into Chile. Migrant organizations in the region confirmed that this type of discrimination and arbitrary decision making is a reality at the Chungará border, and at times people become stranded as they try to cross into Chile, sometimes struggling to cope with the altitude and relative lack of services.

Kevin, age forty-eight, an Aymara Bolivian who has lived in Arica for twenty-three years and has Chilean permanent residency, narrated to me a recent experience of crossing the border:

Of the forty-five or so who were on the bus, at least ten to fifteen returned. They said to you, “Well, and where are you going?”

“Arica,” you replied.

“To do what?” It was enough to hesitate about something, turn around, and they made you go back, even if you had money [i.e., could prove financial solvency].

And you know that those who speak Aymara, most of us are from the countryside, and, how can I say this, sometimes they don’t express themselves well. They don’t explain themselves properly…. And well, last week I was crossing and they say, they ask me, “Where are you going?”

“To Arica,” I replied.

“To do what?”

“My family’s there.”

“How long have you lived there?”

They start to ask you things.

The prickly relations between Chile and Bolivia—the product of the old and still unhealed wounds of the War of the Pacific—impact the lives of ordinary people who set out to cross the border at Chungará. Deeply engrained discrimination toward indigenous peoples means that greater barriers to entry may be faced by some than by others. This literal borderland in the upper reaches of the Andes is, then, a place of tensions and exclusions, a place of uncertainty. The places subsequently discussed are in many ways figurative borderlands. They are there and not-there, hidden in plain sight, on the margins; they too are pervaded by tensions and exclusions, which at least in part are the product of histories of discrimination.

THE MIGRANT CITÉ, SANTIAGO

The term cité has more than one meaning in modern Santiago. When it first came into use in the late nineteenth century, it referred to the housing created for the urban working class, generally by the philanthropic arm of a business for its workers or through Catholic Church funding.¹³ A cité typically consisted of two rows of small, terraced houses facing each other across a narrow passageway, which served as a communal outdoor space for the inhabitants of the houses. Each house had its own toilet, washing, and cooking facilities. This was in contrast to the conventillos, which were simply rooms off an outdoor passageway or courtyard with shared facilities.¹⁴

There is now a certain romanticizing of the old cité and the notion of community life that it seemed to promote. Indeed, in parts of downtown Santiago, such as Barrios Yungay and Brasil, the old cités—which were constructed up until about the 1950s—are undergoing a process of gentrification, with campaigns to save and restore them. The conventillos, on the other hand, have been to a considerable degree expunged from public memory. The places in which the migrants with whom I worked were living have far more in common with the old conventillos than with the cités. In popular parlance, however, these migrant dwellings are also referred to as cités, perhaps to veil their unhappy reality.

To be consistent with the language of home and housing used in Santiago but also recognize the stark contrast between the traditional cité and the residences discussed here, I refer to the latter as migrant cités. Almost half of the forty migrants whom I interviewed in-depth in Santiago lived in such places, compelled to do so by the multiple difficulties migrants face when trying to rent on the private market, not least discrimination by landlords (see chapter 5). They were men and women from various departamentos of Bolivia. A few identified as Quechua or Aymara, and others referred to having Quechua- or Aymara-speaking family. The majority had finished secondary school but had no further education.

A typical migrant cité consists of several rooms—around ten—off a central passageway, which is sometimes covered by a roof but quite often exposed. The façades of the houses look bare but reasonably maintained, and from the street their size gives the impression that each house must be occupied by one family. However, this belies the reality in whole blocks in downtown Santiago comunas. The rooms in these migrant cités are not normally single occupant; rather, they are shared among couples, families, or sometimes nonfamily groups. There is often serious overcrowding, as well as constant movement of people, as the extract from the interview with Diana at the beginning of this chapter indicates.¹⁵ She had already moved through various similar places, including the sweatshops and villas miserias of Buenos Aires. Diana eloquently sketched how it felt to live in a place like that: it was to be “amontonados, como ratitas” (“piled on top of each other, like little rats”). Her most dearly held dream was to be able to one day build a little house on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, where she was from, and finally have space and security.

Not only are conditions crowded in migrant cités; basic needs go largely unmet. Diego, age twenty-one, also from Santa Cruz and working in construction, shared with three other men a room that was two by three meters square. When he first arrived, he wore all his clothes while sleeping and lay on several sheets of cardboard, as he could not afford bedding or a mattress. For Rosa, twenty-nine and from Sucre, one of the worst aspects of living in a migrant cité was sharing a bathroom with ten other people and having no hot water. This was especially difficult as she tried to care for her newborn baby.

Temperatures in Santiago can drop to several degrees below zero in the winter, making a lack of hot water even more unpleasant at this time of year. Furthermore, migrant cités are unheated and frequently have ill-fitting roofs that let in wind and rain. Cristina, age thirty-seven, who like Diana had lived in other marginal places, including on the streets in Cochabamba, Bolivia, described the winter conditions in her migrant cité (see the bathroom and kitchen facilities in figures 1 and 2):

FIGURE 1. Bathroom, Cristina’s migrant cité, Recoleta, Santiago, 2013. Photo by author.

FIGURE 2. Cooking facilities, Cristina’s migrant cite, Recoleta, Santiago, 2013. Photo by author.

Megan:	And are there leaks?
Cristina:	Water, yes. Actually, the roof fell in and ever since, every year I’ve been saying [to the landlord], “Don Guillermo, please fix the roof because it’s letting in water.”
Megan:	Of course. [Indicating ceiling] Well, there are also exposed cables, so it could be dangerous.
Cristina:	“Yes,” he says, “let’s just cover it with some bin bags,” and, well, that’s it. The water really flows in badly here. No, here it fills up with water.
Megan:	And is it cold in the winter?
Cristina:	Yes, it’s cold. Ugh, in the winter you truly get cold. It’s horrible, we walk around numb from cold.

As I noticed in the passageway outside Cristina’s room, exposed electric cables hanging in the passageways are another common feature of many migrant cités. This is because rather than being officially connected, it is common for the residents to colgar de la luz (hang off the mains), circumnavigating the system in order to pirate electricity. These cables, drooping slightly above head height, can pose a serious fire hazard, not only because they may get wet but also because inhabitants must cook over open gas flames in their rooms or in the passageway and hang up their clothes to dry here as well. These multiple hardships—cramped conditions, lack of the most basic facilities, intense cold, and the potential for flooding or fire—become the daily bread of many migrants who live uncertain citizenship in Santiago. But these are places of quiet deprivation, unknown to the average passerby because they blend so seamlessly into the scruffy but respectable downtown streetscapes.

WORKING PUERTAS ADENTRO, SANTIAGO

Nana puertas adentro (live-in maid/nanny) is a job description set out in a turn of phrase that seems to be peculiar to Chile. While of course the concept of domestic workers “living in” is widespread throughout Latin America and much of the rest of the world, it appears that the term nana puertas adentro is a Chileanism. Nana is the word generally used in Chile to refer to female domestic workers. There is a less demeaning term—asesora de hogar (loosely, female household employee)—but I use nana here deliberately because of the connotations of gendered and racialized power relations that it conveys. Moreover, the sense of “behind closed doors” implied by puertas adentro makes the phrase unwittingly appropriate given the exploitative labor and living conditions to which many women working as nanas are subjected.

As has been discussed more extensively in a US context, in crucial ways women (it is almost invariably women) in these roles “have been denied full citizenship —that is, they have not been recognized as fully independent and responsible members of the community, entitled to civil, political, and social rights,” as Evelyn Glenn writes.¹⁶ Gender, race, and class have all played a central role in constructing and enabling these exclusions, which are rooted in a history of slavery and servitude. In the colonial era and on into the period of independence prior to the abolition of slavery, in many countries in the Americas the role of domestic workers was commonly filled by African and Afro-descendant slaves. Indigenous women in conditions of servitude, who were frequently unpaid, also performed these roles.¹⁷ The long shadow of this oppression has been cast into the twenty-first century. Women of indigenous or African descent still predominate in domestic work in many contexts in the Americas. Many of these women are migrants—both internal and transnational—from low-income backgrounds. Labor exploitation and discrimination continue to characterize this type of work.¹⁸

In Bolivia many of the women working as live-in domestic workers have been, and continue to be, of indigenous descent. As indicated above, many have migrated from rural communities to cities like La Paz to engage in such work. Lesley Gill provides a powerful indictment of the racism and classism that permeated labor relations between Aymara female domestic workers and their employers (who are generally white-mestizo, although sometimes wealthy urban Aymara) in La Paz over the course of the twentieth century. As Gill argues, the “most enduring feature” of domestic work is that workers “are drawn from groups considered inferior by those in power…. [T]he women who carry out paid household labour invariably represent a subordinate race, class, ethnic group, or nationality.”¹⁹ Although Gill was writing in the mid-1990s, her analysis continues to resonate. In spite of the progress that Bolivia has made in indigenous rights (see chapter 1), within private homes domestic workers continue to face gender and racial discrimination.²⁰

There are strong parallels with the Chilean case, as documented by Carolina Stefoni and Rosario Fernández in their analysis of domestic worker and employer relations in Santiago historically and in the present.²¹ In the past in Chile, women in these roles in Santiago were likely to be internal migrants from the South, and they were of indigenous descent (mainly Mapuche) or mestiza. In the present, Chilean women who are employed as domestic workers are still largely mestiza or of indigenous descent. But in the past two decades the Chilean women who carry out domestic work have been joined by growing numbers of transnational migrant domestic workers, initially predominantly from Peru but increasingly from countries such as Bolivia and Colombia as well. Indeed, 12.3 percent of the total foreign-born population in Chile is employed in domestic work, compared with 6.1 percent of the Chilean-born population.²² Migrant women from other Latin American countries have proven to be a “natural fit” in a labor niche that, as Gill and Stefoni and Fernández indicate, serves to reproduce a hierarchical social order because it is filled by those considered to be of lower social standing based on gender, race, and/or nationality. Those who fill these roles are excluded from full citizenship, in both symbolic and substantive terms.

As in the migrant cités, in the houses where women work puertas adentro, migrants’ multiple exclusions from spaces of citizenship become articulated in place. Of course the big houses—typically in the wealthy eastern suburbs of Santiago—where women employed as nanas work and live are vastly different from the migrant cités in terms of the material comfort they offer. Nonetheless, as in the migrant cités, the very private sphere of the family home in which nanas work and live is hidden from public view. Nanas in these places are cut off from family, social networks, and normal, everyday social life. Although all work in Chile, caring work included, is nominally subject to public sphere regulations (see chapter 4), in the houses where migrant women work as nanas a liminal borderland is created as private and public, work and life are blurred. This was made starkly apparent to me when I interviewed Magdalena, age thirty-eight, from El Alto, near the house where she worked and lived.

Like Magdalena and the vast majority of migrants who participated in this research, I did not have a car and was dependent on public transportation. To travel from the center of Santiago to the house where Magdalena was a nana puertas adentro, I had to take the metro and then two buses, the second of which ran only once every sixty minutes. The journey by public transportation took an hour, not including time spent waiting for the bus, after which I walked for fifteen minutes to reach the house in Alto Macul, in the foothills of the Andes in the southeast part of the city. The house was in a gated community with a small plaza. The properties had high walls and fences, and many were guarded by large dogs that growled at me from within the confines of manicured gardens.

In the plaza I sat on a bench with Magdalena while we talked. She couldn’t invite me into the house and wouldn’t, in any case, have wanted to host me in her small bedroom off the kitchen. The position of her bedroom within the home was typical of the floor plan of houses in Chile’s upper-middle- and upper-class neighborhoods. They continue to be built with a dormitorio y baño de servicio (domestic worker’s bedroom and bathroom) next to the kitchen and laundry, which speaks strongly to the position occupied by nanas puertas adentro within the household and wider society. One can easily connect the dots backward in time to the location of the servants’ or slaves’ quarters in colonial houses.²³

Such comparisons do not end with the layout of houses in contemporary Chilean condominiums. Magdalena only had forty minutes for our interview because, although it was 7:00 p.m. and she had started her working day at 8:00 a.m., her employer required her to finish cooking the evening meal and then clear up. She worked Monday to Saturday but thought she might look for a job in another house on Sundays because of living and working in such an isolated place. As she had little chance of forming a social life in her time off, she thought she might as well spend it working.

The great irony, of course, is that it was Magdalena’s vital participation in the 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 of colonial times are still produced: olives and cotton, to give just two examples. Tomatoes, peppers, sweet corn, cucumbers, avocados, and mangoes, among other fruit and vegetables, are also cultivated. Many parcelas are chiefly worked by migrant laborers. In general, those who work there also live there. As with the bodegas or working puertas adentro, the provision of accommodation is part of the work agreement. Each parcela is run by one owner, referred to by the workers as the patrón, a term of address with its roots firmly planted in colonial times. Beneath them are overseers. On the parcelas, workers I spoke to labored for nine to twelve hours per day and often had only one half-day off per week. They earned less than the minimum wage, did not have contracts, and were encouraged by their employers to remain on tourist visas, which exacerbated their job insecurity. The very long hours worked meant that they were cut off from society and had few means of accessing information about labor rights, health services, or education. The living conditions were also extremely poor.

One evening in March 2014 I went to interview Luisa, age twenty-five, from rural Oruro, on the parcela where she lived. We walked down a long driveway shaded by mango trees to get to the shelter occupied by Luisa, her husband, their two boys, aged six and five, and Luisa’s sister. It was built of plywood and corrugated iron and had a dirt floor. There was a bedsheet separating the two “rooms,” where they slept on mattresses on the floor. A covered area outside served as a kitchen, where Luisa did the cooking squatting beside a small camping stove. They shared a bathroom, a fifty-meter walk from their shelter, with the twenty other workers on the parcela, using buckets of cold water to wash.

Curious about this stranger talking to their mamá, Luisa’s boys peered at me around the corner of the entrance to the shelter. Egged on by his elder brother, the youngest, barefoot, eventually ran over to where Luisa and I were sitting on a low bench. He reached his hand out to stroke my face and looked straight into my eyes. Luisa laughingly explained to me that he was intrigued “porque tienes los ojos muy claros y eres tan blanquita” (“because your eyes are very clear [blue or green] and you are so white”). Rarely have I felt so acutely the many power imbalances in my relationship with the migrants with whom I work or such an emotional response to the injustices to which I was bearing witness.

In addition to awareness of my own positionality, I was deeply cognizant of the ways in which migrant workers’ positions within racialized hierarchies of power played a fundamental role in their exclusion from spaces and places of citizenship. Nearly all the workers on the parcelas were of Aymara or sometimes Quechua descent. Some, particularly the women, spoke limited Spanish and had not finished their schooling. Nearly all who lived on parcelas were originally from rural communities in the departments of Oruro and La Paz, which they said were very poor. Racial and class-based discrimination certainly seemed to contribute to making participants more vulnerable to living and working in such harsh conditions, as an overt example of racist talk indicated. The patrón on one of the parcelas that I visited—who, according to the Asociación, was one of the more responsible employers in the Valle de Azapa—told me about his trials and tribulations employing migrant workers. He explained that Aymara Bolivians were “medio lentos, y nunca toman la initiativa” (“pretty slow and they never take initiative”). Perpetuated by centuries of discrimination, places of uncertain citizenship remain a hidden feature of the Valle de Azapa.

PLAN 3000, SANTA CRUZ DE LA SIERRA, BOLIVIA

Uncertain citizenship is embodied in place not only on the Chilean side of Lago Chungará, but also on the Bolivian side. Roughly a thirty-hour bus ride east from Chungará is Plan 3000, in the city of Santa Cruz. Many cruceño (resident of Santa Cruz) migrants I interviewed had originally come from here. When the Amazonian River Piraí, on the northwest side of Santa Cruz, burst its banks in 1983, three thousand people were left homeless. They were relocated to the southeast of the concentric circles that form the center of Santa Cruz, and Plan 3000 was born. This peri-urban area is now home to around 300,000 people, the vast majority of whom are first- or second-generation internal migrants from other areas of Bolivia. Most identify as indigenous, principally Aymara, Quechua, and Guaraní.