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Introduction

Luz María was nineteen when I met her. When she was in the last months of her second pregnancy, she would invite me to visit in the afternoon in her cramped, windowless room. She would apologize for the lack of seating and offer me cups of herbal tea, boiling water on the stove attached to a gas cylinder in the open-air communal courtyard surrounded by rooms like hers. As she talked, she would conjure for me images of a verdant place far away from that run-down Santiago tenement housing. What she enjoyed most was to tell me in intricate detail about the little rituals of this green, back-home place, of the food and decorations she would prepare with her mother, sisters, and aunties for birthdays, christenings, Christmas, and All Saints’ Day. Yet through the cracks in the narrative I also caught glimpses of what had often been a life of poverty, hardship, and frustration at the thwarting of her aspirations. This is what had compelled her to move from Bolivia to Chile. Luz María longed for the sacrifices she had made by migrating to enable her to return, with her new baby, to a nostalgic future. Here, her parents and in-laws would be in good health, her possibility of continuing with education would be secure, and she would not have to worry about where the next meal and the next rent payment were coming from.

She had come to Santiago in April 2013 with her partner, Wilson. They were both from the tropical lowland departamento of Santa Cruz, Bolivia; Luz María’s family lived in Plan 3000, a poor, peri-urban neighborhood on the outskirts of the city of Santa Cruz. Wilson, who was twenty-two, was originally from Mairana, a small town on the edge of the densely forested Amboró National Park, but had moved to Plan 3000 in his late teens because there was little work to be had in Mairana. They met when Luz María was in secondary school and had a child shortly afterward, in 2012. They both had ambitions; Wilson wanted to start a moto-taxi business, and Luz María wished to complete the vocational studies that she started when their little boy was a few months old.

But by early 2013 they were in debt to informal lenders after borrowing money to cover health-care costs for Wilson’s chronically ill mother and to pay for a motorbike so Wilson could start his business. In April that year they discovered that Luz María was pregnant again. Very worried about the debt, as well as about telling their families they were going to have another child, they felt compelled to leave Bolivia for somewhere with greater economic opportunities. They hoped to pay off the loan and make enough money to support their young family. Without telling anyone about the pregnancy, they left their one-year-old in the care of Luz María’s mother and embarked on the fifty-hour bus journey to Santiago, Chile. They had heard rumors that things were good there; you could earn a decent salary and send money home.

Once in Santiago, both started working for contractors: Luz María as a cleaner, and Wilson in construction. The hours were long, and the pay was less than the minimum wage. Luz María spent much of her day bending and lifting, breathing in the fumes of powerful cleaning fluids. Both she and Wilson were in the country on tourist visas and therefore working unauthorized, which gave their employers leverage to exploit them. The couple were shocked by the cost of living in Santiago and could barely afford the rent for the unfurnished room that they found downtown. When Luz María was dismissed from her job after her pregnancy began to show, the situation became critical. Any money they managed to save was sent back to support their young son in Bolivia and to keep the debt collectors at bay. Even living on just rice and vegetables, they could not afford to pay for the MERCOSUR temporary resident visa (MTRV) that would allow them to work legally and in better conditions. Scared of the authorities, they did not know where to turn for help. Luz María spent the first five months of her pregnancy too afraid to seek medical care, unsure where she would give birth. And yet despite all this insecurity, they still found moments of joy in the everyday—sharing the rare treat of a fizzy drink with their neighbors in the evening, visiting Santiago’s parks on Wilson’s day off—and drew on all their resources to doggedly pursue their goals.

UNCERTAIN CITIZENSHIP

Eating as little as they could, sleeping in a room with a bare concrete floor and no heating through the cold Santiago winter, working in precarious employment, and without legal status, in Chile Luz María and Wilson were living outside the bounds of some of the most basic conditions for inclusion in society. In Bolivia, too, they had experienced multiple exclusions, which had eventually led to their migration. Throughout this book I offer an understanding of why and how the manifold, overlapping exclusions experienced by migrants like Luz María and Wilson are occurring within and across nation-state borders in this global South context. I also explore how migrants—sometimes with the support of migrant rights advocates—seek and aspire to greater inclusion, as Luz María and Wilson did.

Thinking in terms of migrants’ citizenship allows for exploration of these complex patterns of exclusion and inclusion, given that citizenship is one of the most powerful mechanisms for indicating belonging. Citizenship has increasingly been understood as encompassing both possession of formal, legal status and the ability to access substantive rights (such as the rights to shelter and health care). By examining migrants’ access to legal status and the degree to which they are able to exercise substantive rights on a day-to-day basis, it is possible to build a picture of how and why they may experience marginalization transnationally, and of how this may be challenged.

Some important work that examines migration and citizenship together in order to map these patterns of inclusion and exclusion has already been done (see chapter 1). It has, however, been overwhelmingly centered on contexts of migration from the global South to the global North. This book responds to an urgent need to further examine migration outside the context of flows from South to North. The predominant focus to date on South-North migration prevents full understanding of the intricate global processes shaping the movement of people in today’s world. What is particularly concerning is that many migrants in the global South, like Luz María and Wilson, are subject to human rights abuses that remain largely concealed because of the lack of attention paid to the topic. By contrast, in South-North contexts—and especially regarding Latin American migration to the United States—significant strides have been taken toward uncovering such abuses in the everyday, although certainly much more remains to be done.¹

Following in this vein, Uncertain Citizenship exposes the empirical reality of migrants’ lives in an underexplored South-South context. It also does broader conceptual work. I suggest that it is necessary to find new modes of thinking about the shifting and uneven ways that migrants in different parts of the world live citizenship in the everyday. To date, migrants’ citizenship has often been parsed in binary terms; they are either citizens or they are noncitizens. And if not in binary terms, then their citizenship has been characterized as falling somewhere within a triadic formation; that is to say, they can be categorized as citizens, as noncitizens, or as fitting into a third space in between. Neither of these approaches, however, quite seems to convey the cross-border entanglement of fluctuating, multiple, and simultaneous exclusions from some aspects of citizenship but inclusion in others that many migrants live. This book proposes that one way in which migrants’ citizenship can be comprehended is by considering their relationships to different transnational spaces of citizenship: legal, economic, social, and political. In what ways are migrants—simultaneously and multiply—excluded from or included in these spaces across borders? How are exclusions produced? How do migrants pursue greater inclusion?

In many cases the complex array of shifting inclusions and exclusions from citizenship experienced by the migrants with whom I worked could best be captured by viewing them through the lens of uncertainty. It is the notion of uncertainty that encapsulates the sense of past and present instability, as well as future possibility, that Luz María expressed in the long conversations we had. Uncertainty indicates the temporal and spatial mind-set triggered by migration, particularly when that migration has been compelled. It is the mind-set of being here and not-here, of constantly “going,” constantly “becoming,” of the present as a means to the future. Uncertainty also articulates the emotional timbre of migration: the jumble of fears, anxieties, and hopes that it generates. Uncertainty, however, does more than just capture something of the psychology of migration. In both Bolivia and Chile, Luz María had so often been living on a knife-edge, poised between slipping further into marginalization and reaching for greater security. This is the balancing act in which many migrants and potential migrants engage daily. Excluded from some dimensions, included in others, and in a constant state of flux, their everyday citizenship becomes characterized by uncertainty.

SITES AND METHODS FOR MAPPING UNCERTAINTY

The stories of uncertain citizenship that this book tells have been gathered over an extended time across different sites. They have their foundations in the part-time voluntary work I undertook in Santiago de Chile from 2010 to 2011 with the organization that I refer to here by a pseudonym as the Asociación para Migrantes, or simply the Asociación. This organization offers a range of free support services, such as legal advice, for vulnerable migrants, and also engages in wider advocacy campaigns for migrants’ rights. With its members I learned a great deal about the low-wage work and xenophobia that were the daily reality for many migrants in Chile. I also realized that, although there were notable exceptions, there was a scarcity of research that drew together reflections on these daily realities. There was a particular paucity of work addressing the experiences of Bolivian migrants, even though they were the third or fourth largest group of migrants in the country and had been identified as potentially the most marginalized.²

Trying to uncover something more about the lived realities of low-wage Bolivian migrants, and specifically their transnational experiences of citizenship, was my guiding motivation when I returned to carry out fieldwork in 2013 and 2014. I realized that it was necessary to take a methodological approach that was responsive and agile; it was difficult to gain access to a population who often suffered discrimination and labor exploitation in Chile, which understandably made them wary of the new and untested. Some migrants had irregular legal status as well, and naturally this too made them reluctant to speak to me. In addition, the places in which they lived and worked were often isolated and hard to get to (see chapter 2).

Multi-sited ethnography provided the flexible approach that I needed. Like “classic” ethnography, in which the researcher works in one site, multi-sited ethnography is grounded in participant observation. A concern with what people are actually doing makes participant observation a method that, as Mike Crang and Ian Cook put it, is able to effectively “engage … with ‘real world’ messiness.”³ As a consequence, participant observation is particularly appropriate for researching people’s everyday engagement with citizenship. Moreover, its emphasis on spending extended periods of time in the research context enables the building of relationships of trust, which is especially important when working with marginalized groups. Ethnography also allows, however, for the incorporation of methods other than participant observation, most commonly interviews. Interviews are particularly useful for understanding why people might engage in the practices that they do, offering an opportunity to learn more about people’s personal narratives and identities.

While both approaches use the same methods, the difference between single-sited and multi-sited ethnography is that the latter is especially concerned with acknowledging the multitudinous connections of places across space and time. First developed by anthropologist George Marcus, it is an approach “designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites.”⁴ This can be established by “following” people, things, or ideas, and thus it is a methodology that permits (and requires) a degree of flexibility.⁵ Consequently, multi-sited ethnography is well suited to studies of migration. It reflects a transnational social spaces perspective on migration because it understands space as socially constructed and not necessarily bound to the nation-state (see chapter 2). As Anna Amelina and Thomas Faist contend, multi-sited ethnography therefore allows for a more holistic understanding of the different cultures, contexts, and identities that influence migrants’ daily lives.⁶ It also provided me with the tools for mapping uncertainty as I pieced together what I realized was the defining logic linking together migrants’ experiences of the places I spent time in (see chapter 2).

I began my research in Chile’s capital, Santiago, before heading to Arica in the very North of the country on the border with Bolivia and Peru (see map 1 for an indication of my field sites). There are large numbers of Bolivian migrants in both Santiago and Arica. From Arica, I traveled twice to Bolivia to get a better sense of the places of origin of the migrants I was meeting in Chile and of their lived experiences of citizenship. I met some of their family members and friends in La Paz, El Alto, and Santa Cruz, and in Oruro I discovered a great deal about how claims to citizenship may be expressed through carnival dance, a practice of citizenship that Bolivians take with them across borders. In addition to participant observation in these sites and the everyday engagement with migrants that this entailed, I carried out sixty formal interviews with migrants in Chile: twenty in Arica and twenty in Santiago.

MAP 1. Fieldwork sites in Chile and Bolivia. Credit: Edward Oliver, Queen Mary University of London, 2015.

I also worked closely with the Asociación throughout this time, volunteering for about twenty hours a week in the group’s offices in Santiago, Arica, and El Alto, doing whatever I could to be useful. In Santiago I also rehearsed and performed with the Bolivian migrant dance fraternity Corazón de Tinkus (a pseudonym). Finally, I conducted interviews and had many informal conversations with representatives of various migrant organizations, local government, and the Bolivian consulate, among other institutions. In this book I have given pseudonyms to all of the people whom I interviewed and spoke with, as well as to the migrant organizations with which I had contact. I have also been deliberately vague in providing geographic identifiers of some of the places to which I refer, to further protect the identity of those who participated in this research. Quotes and observations are based on taped audiorecordings and my typed and handwritten notes. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

It is important to note that throughout this book I try to pay attention to the specific, context-dependent ways in which participants referred to their social identities (e.g., class) and to the ways in which they spoke about experiences of discrimination, when this was relevant. Overlapping hierarchies of race, class, and gender remain deeply embedded in both Chile and Bolivia. While race, class, and gender are socially constructed systems that are the product of particular histories, the consequences of their construction are real and material.⁷ By reflecting the language of identity that participants used, I hope to better capture the complexities of how people understand and present their social identities and what this means in relation to stratified systems of race, class, and gender. Therefore, for example, if someone actively self-identified as Aymara, or as being de clase media (middle class), I state this. If, however, people expressed their identity through describing themselves as speaking some Aymara and having Aymara parents, or as coming from a family de bajos recursos (with limited resources), I note that fact.

My own social identities, of course, had an impact on my interactions with participants and therefore ultimately on the knowledge produced in the course of the research. A white woman of New Zealand and British nationality, how I identified myself, and the ways in which my identities were categorized by others, affected the relationships I could build with organizations and participants in multiple ways. The most straightforward relationships I built, and built on, were those with the Asociación. Having been a volunteer in the Santiago office, I already knew several of the people who worked there, and they were quick to introduce me to others and connect me with those in Arica and in the Bolivia office in El Alto. Moreover, the staff and volunteers shared progressive values and a commitment to research-led, reflexive, and multiscalar practice that focused on directly supporting individual migrants; advocating for migrants’ rights at the highest levels of government; and working with public officials, health-care workers, and teachers who interacted with migrants daily. The relationships we built were ones of learning and mutual respect, and the practical and intellectual support that so many members of the Asociación across all three offices offered me was invaluable.

The relationships I could build with other organizations and individuals were more varied. It is difficult to comprehend and convey the multifaceted ways in which one is perceived by others. Nevertheless, there were certain responses from people associated with other migrant organizations, from those in government and relevant institutions, and from employers of migrant workers, as well as in other everyday encounters, that were particularly salient. First, my whiteness and foreign nationality afforded me privileged access to certain people and spaces, most notably the offices of government or municipal workers, both in Chile and Bolivia. This was apparent when, having had no success contacting the Bolivian consulate in Santiago by e-mail or telephone, I went in person to try to arrange an appointment to speak to someone. Upon entering the building, I was ushered straight to the reception desk, even though there were other people—mainly Bolivian—waiting to be seen. After I introduced myself and explained the purpose of my visit, one of the consuls cleared time to speak to me then and there. I felt very discomforted by this obvious indication of the power of white, foreign privilege; looking sheepishly at the people waiting in the queue, I asked, “But, are you sure? If you’re busy, I can come another day, no problem.” The motive behind my question was not understood by the consul or the receptionist, however, and resulted in confusion about my availability, leading me to hurriedly say, “No, no, it’s fine, let’s talk now,” and follow the consul to his spacious, wood-paneled office.

On other occasions, when speaking to male representatives of some organizations or to some male employers of migrants—as well as in ordinary exchanges in my day-to-day life—I was assessed as naive and in need of assistance. This reflected certain attitudes toward women more generally but seemed to be made more acute by the fact that I was foreign and by my slightly accented Spanish, with the occasional misspoken word. I was commonly referred to as “gringa” or even “rubiecita” (little blonde) by such interlocutors. Being thus perceived as ingenuous and perhaps malleable meant that I was exposed in an especially overt way to the discriminatory discourses and stereotypes that shape hierarchies of race, gender, and class. I learned that when a sentence began with “Mira, yo te cuento la verdad” (“Look, I’ll tell you the truth”) in a tone that dropped below the normal conversational register, what followed would often expose ugly prejudices. In Chile I would be told, for example, that Bolivians are “sumisivos” (submissive) or “un poquito más lento” (“a little bit slower”), which is why “les cuesta integrarse” (“it is hard for them to integrate”).

In addition to the perceptions of gendered näiveté that invited this kind of comment, it also clearly had to do with perceptions of my race and class, whereby my whiteness, and the way in which this situated me in relation to my own countries’ legacies of colonialism, racism, and oppression, was interpreted as a sign that I would be willingly complicit in such confidences.⁸ It is worth noting that there were occasions on which women as well as men expressed such sentiments to me, but this was not as common—which isn’t to say that some women did not hold these prejudices, just that they were not as forthcoming in expressing themselves to me in this way. I found these attitudes and comments deeply offensive, as they flew totally in the face of my personal antiracist and feminist beliefs, and I struggled with how to respond. This was particularly challenging in an interview situation because I was grateful for the time taken to speak to me, and it was also important for my research to comprehend the attitudes of the representatives of organizations, institutions, and employers of migrant workers, even when these were offensive to me. I would try hard not to acquiesce with nods or murmurs to views I found reprehensible, maintaining a neutral expression when I could, although I was never comfortable doing this, feeling as though I were compromising my values.

Outside of an interview context, in an “everyday” setting, I did try to challenge the discriminatory views I encountered as far as I could, but again, this was always tinged with a sense of insufficiency. One weekday afternoon, I was putting up posters on behalf of the Asociación on lampposts and fences outside the bus terminal in Arica, having checked with the terminal authorities that I was allowed to do this. The posters advertised the support services available through the Asociación and expressed a positive message about migration. One of the fences I had selected was next to a taxi rank, where there were five male drivers leaning on their cars, waiting for passengers. There was no one else around. They watched me intently as I set to putting up the posters, and one finally said loudly to the other, “¿Qué hace esa gringa poniendo posters sobre los inmigrantes?” (“What’s that gringa doing putting up posters about immigrants?”). Then another turned and addressed this question to me, before he and two of the others let rip with a tirade of antimigrant vitriol.

Shocked, I gave a stuttering explanation of the services the Asociación offered and why it offered them, stating that the terminal authorities were supportive of the posters. Then I turned around and continued putting up the poster I had been pinning. The most aggressive driver taunted me, saying, “We’ll just rip them down.” Trying not to show I was affected, I finished what I was doing and walked into the bus terminal without turning around. Shaken and tearful, I also felt impotent and inadequate. I knew that no matter how unpleasant this incident had been, it was nothing compared to the everyday racism to which many of the migrants I worked with were subjected, which I could never comprehend, given my white privilege. I felt I should have done a better job of defending my antiracist principles and given a less tongue-tied response.

A very different response generated by perceptions of my race, class, and gender, and of the research I was doing, was wariness, particularly on the part of some migrant organization representatives. This was the case during my initial encounters with Corazón de Tinkus, the migrant dance fraternity with which I ultimately rehearsed and performed. The group leader, Antony, was extremely troubled by the difficulties and discrimination faced by Bolivian migrants in Chile and was unwilling to engage with me on the issue of Bolivian migration to Chile until he was certain that I shared his views on and sensitivity to the issues migrants faced. He also questioned whether my project would be beneficial to me but not to those I worked with. I thought, and still think, that this was an admirable and valid concern, one that I must continually try to address. At the time—and in general in my conversations with those who were involved in the research—I explained that realistically the short-term, direct benefits would be small, and that I hoped that there might be longer-term (if still limited) outcomes through the eventual sharing of the results of the project with academics, migrant organizations, and policy makers. I also told Antony about my connection to the Asociación, explaining that I always passed on information about it to migrant participants who did not know about its services. In this way, I tried to ensure that my encounters with migrant participants would have some direct potential benefit for them if they were in need of legal or other assistance.

In terms of the relationships I formed with migrant participants more broadly, above all these were colored by the great kindness, openness, and trust with which I was received, once any first concerns about confidentiality and anonymity had been addressed. We would laugh and joke together, and I would share experiences of my life, too. The terms of address in initially reserved relationships would move from the formal Usted to the informal tú, and women who had started off calling me señorita came to refer to me instead by the affectionate amiga or mamita. Nevertheless, there were still moments that served as important reminders of the differences between our life situations. I remember drawing in a sharp breath at the end of one exchange with Magdalena, who worked as a live-in nana (maid). A serious conversation had evolved into kidding around about managing relationships and juggling commitments, and we were both laughing when suddenly she said, touching my arm, “Hey, I know! I could come and work as your nana and look after your children [when you have them]!” Struck by how easily she said this, I laughed awkwardly and made a mumbled comment about how I wouldn’t have a nana, and the conversation moved on. The truth inherent in her observation about our vastly different circumstances stayed with me, however.

I feel very fortunate to have been invited to glimpse the lives of the migrants I worked with and to have been trusted to share the stories told to me. These stories, and the living and working conditions I witnessed, often moved me profoundly and certainly stood in stark contrast to my own privilege. I do not see either this emotional response, or awareness of the power implications of my own positionality, as things to be written out of these pages in a mythical pursuit of “objectivity.” Rather, my analysis is led by my sense of how wrong it is that these imbalances and injustices can exist.

ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK

I structure this analysis primarily around the four spaces of transnational citizenship I identified in the research: legal, economic, social, and political. I consider migrants’ relationships to each through the lens of uncertainty and take into account the overlaps among them. Prior to this, however, chapter 1, “Citizenship, Migration, and Uncertainty,” expands on the conceptual framing of the book, bringing together literature from political philosophy, on citizenship in Latin America, and from migration studies. In doing so, it also sketches histories of citizenship and migration in Chile and Bolivia. This is complemented by chapter 2, “Places of Uncertain Citizenship,” which moves from this more theoretical discussion to focus on lived experiences of uncertain citizenship. In it, I construct detailed ethnographic accounts of six “places of uncertain citizenship” inhabited and passed through by the migrants whose stories form the center of this book. These places were nodal points within overlapping transnational spaces of citizenship; they were physical manifestations of what it means to live uncertain citizenship. This embodied understanding of the lived reality of uncertain citizenship, articulated through particular places, provides the jumping-off point for exploration of migrants’ relationships to transnational spaces of citizenship.

Chapter 3, “Papeleo,” begins this exploration by examining migrants’ multiple transitions between (ir)regular legal statuses as they are excluded from, and seek inclusion within, the transnational space of legal citizenship. Centered around the motif of papeleo (paperwork/red tape), the chapter examines how this transnational space of legal citizenship and migrants’ positions within it are constructed. It suggests that this occurs through interactions between legislation as it exists “on paper,” its (often discriminatory) application by officials “through paper,” and the practices of “presenting papers” in which migrants engage, sometimes with the support of a migrant organization.

Leading on from this, chapter 4, “¿El Sueño Chileno?,” is concerned with economic citizenship and the quest for el sueño chileno (the Chilean dream).⁹ Taking a transnational perspective on economic citizenship and comprehending it as more than just access to decent work, it seeks first to capture the economic marginalization in Bolivia that often acted as a catalyst for pursuing el sueño chileno. The latter part of the chapter reflects on the degree to which el sueño chileno was realized after migrants crossed the border. It has a particular focus on employment experiences in wholesale garment retail, agriculture, and domestic work and includes reflections on a case of trafficking for labor exploitation uncovered in the course of my fieldwork. The chapter considers the ways in which both structural processes and the agentic practices of migrants contribute to their ability to access the space of economic citizenship across borders, and thus to their experiences of uncertainty.

The emphasis on both structure and agency carries over into chapter 5, “Solidaridad,” which uncovers the degree to which those with whom I worked are often excluded transnationally from social citizenship. The transnational space of social citizenship is defined in terms of tangible rights to shelter, education, and health care, but also encompasses the less tangible right to family life and the necessity of having “social support.” Migrants’ experiences in relation to each of these domains are discussed, highlighting the worrying tendency toward a lack of solidaridad (solidarity) from Chilean service providers; a case study of six migrant women’s experiences of pregnancy and birth in Chile attests to this particularly.

Chapter 6, “¿De Dónde Somos? ¡De Bolivia!,” provides a rather different angle on migration and political citizenship. Emphasis has often been placed on migrants’ formal political practices (e.g., voting) or on informal political practices that fall more within global North concepts of “the political” (e.g., union participation). The Bolivian migrants in Chile whom I encountered did not generally engage in these kinds of practices, as this chapter outlines. Through an account of my time with Corazón de Tinkus I reveal, however, the ways in which performing Bolivian carnival dances in public spaces in Chile can be read as a transnational citizenship practice within the realm of the political. So, while migrants were excluded from political citizenship in the sense in which it is often understood, dancing in public spaces, accompanied by the cry “¿De dónde somos? ¡De Bolivia!” (“Where’re we from? From Bolivia!”), allowed them a politicized means of expressing their hope of greater future inclusion across borders. This use of dance is indicative of the germ of possibility contained within the notion of uncertainty, the proposition that animates the conclusion. It widens the scope of the book, suggesting that living uncertain citizenship is not uncommon for many migrants globally. It finds, however, that this analytic allows for both recognition and promotion of incremental steps that can be taken toward increased inclusion in transnational spaces of citizenship.