The elementary structuring of patriarchy: Bolivian women and transborder mobilities in the Andes

Based on an ethnographic study on the Andean Tri-border (between Chile, Peru, and Bolivia), this volume addresses the experience of Aymara cross-border women from Bolivia employed in the rural valleys on the outskirts of Arica (Chile’s northernmost city). As protagonists of transborder mobility circuits, these women are intersectionally impacted by different forms of social vulnerability. With a feminist anthropological perspective, the book investigates how the boundaries of gender are constructed in the (multi)situated experience of these transborder women. By building a bridge between classical anthropological studies on kinship and contemporary debates on transnational and transborder mobility, the book invites us to rethink structuralist theoretical assertions on the elementary character of family alliances.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781526176523

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The elementary structuring of patriarchy

WOMEN ON THE MOVE

Women on the Move is a transdisciplinary book series that focuses on unveiling the presence and multiplicity of experiences of women in migration processes. The series bridges the gap between historical and contemporary approaches, its objective being to publish books on women’s migration from a wide variety of perspectives, time frames and geographical outlooks, with a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. The books published in the series seek to deconstruct the sexist stereotypes that have marked the history of migration by revealing both women migrants’ agency and resources, as well as their vulnerabilities and the challenges faced in past and present experiences of migration. The interplay between gender and migration at the core of the series invites authors to develop multifactorial perspectives of women’s migration and to disclose how gender shapes migration and how migration shapes gender.

https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/women-on-the-move/

Series editors

Marie Ruiz, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, France

Sónia Ferreira, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

Immanuel Ness, City University of New York, USA

Editorial board

Emma Bond, University of St Andrews, UK

Gabor Egry, Institute of Political History, Hungary

Umut Erel, The Open University, UK

Stellamarina Donato, LUMSA, Rome University, Italy

Heike Drotbohm, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany

Carol Farbotko, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Australia

Eric Fong, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Monash University Malaysia

Cecilia Menjivar, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Elaine Moriarty, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Irudaya Rajan, Centre for Development Studies, India

Uzma Rashid, United Nations mandated University for Peace, Costa Rica

Victoria Souliman, University of New England, Australia

Inga K. Thiemann, University of Exeter, UK

The elementary structuring of patriarchy

Bolivian women and transborder mobilities in the Andes

Edited by

Menara Guizardi

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2024

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL

Manchester University Press

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 7653 0 hardback

First published 2024

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: An Aymara woman working for daily wages in Azapa. Photographer: Claudio Casparrino, 2019.

Typeset

by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Map

Part I: The volume and its theoretical approaches

Introduction – Menara Guizardi and Herminia Gonzálvez

1 The elemental triad – Menara Guizardi

2 (Re)thinking complementarity – Menara Guizardi, Herminia Gonzálvez, Esteban Nazal, and Lina Magalhães

Part II: The Chilean and Bolivian sides of the Andean Tri-border

3 The interstices of history – Menara Guizardi, Felipe Valdebenito, and Pablo Mardones

4 The context through images – Menara Guizardi, Claudio Casparrino, and Felipe Valdebenito

5 Gendered mobility – Menara Guizardi, Esteban Nazal, and Lina Magalhães

Part III: Migratory insertion and transborder violence

6 Care across gender boundaries – Menara Guizardi, Herminia Gonzálvez, and Eleonora López

7 On gifts and multiple presence – Menara Guizardi, Isabel Araya, and Lina Magalhães

8 Borderization is gendered – Menara Guizardi, Carolina Stefoni, and Eleonora López

9 The hidden sites of violence – Menara Guizardi, Carolina Stefoni, Isabel Araya, Lina Magalhães, and Eleonora López

Epilogue – Menara Guizardi

Index

Figures

Table

Contributors

Isabel Araya holds a B.A. in Social Anthropology from the University Academy of Christian Humanism (Chile), an expert diploma in Gender, Culture, and Power from the Interdisciplinary School of Higher Social Studies of the National University of San Martín (Argentina), and an M.A. in Social Anthropology from the University of Tarapacá (Chile). She is part of the Chilean Network of Afro-descendant Studies and the Kuriche Nucleus on Afro-descendant Research and Cultural Manifestations. Her research interests are the processes of racialization, Afro-descendants, migrations, gender studies, and borders. Her most recent article, co-authored with Nicole Chávez, is Metodologías colaborativas: etnografía feminista con afrodescendientes e indígenas en Arica (Chile), published by the journal Antropologías del Sur (Chile) in 2022.

Claudio Casparrino holds a B.A. in Economy from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and an M.A. in Political Economy from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (Argentina). Currently, he is carrying out his PhD in Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina). He is also a documentary photographer dedicated to rural problems, specializing in classic analog techniques. He has researched and published on economic and social development issues. His forthcoming book, La relación entre economía y derechos humanos. Acumulación, sujeto y hegemonía, will be published in 2022 in Argentina.

Herminia Gonzálvez holds a B.A. in Social Work from the University of Alicante (Spain) and a B.A. in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the Miguel Hernández University (Spain). She also holds an M.A. in Migration, Refuge, and Intercommunity Relations from the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain) and a PhD in Social Anthropology and Cultural Diversity from the University of Granada (Spain). She currently works as a professor at the Central University of Chile. Her main research topics are gender, kinship, social inequalities, migration, and the organization of care in the aging process. Her latest book is Las trincheras de los cuidados comunitarios. Una etnografía sobre mujeres mayores en Santiago de Chile, co-edited with Menara Guizardi and published in 2021 by University Alberto Hurtado (Chile) Editions.

Menara Guizardi holds a B.A. in Social Sciences (2004) and a postgraduate degree in Human Sciences and Regional Development (2005) from the Federal University of Espírito Santo (Brazil). She has an M.A. in Latin American Studies (2007) and a PhD in Social Anthropology (2011), both from the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain). Between 2016 and 2018, she carried out her first post-doctoral project in Social Anthropology with a scholarship from the Doctoral College of the National University of San Martín (Buenos Aires, Argentina). Between 2018 and 2020, she carried out her second post-doctoral project with a grant from the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina. She is currently an adjunct researcher of that same organization, linked to the Interdisciplinary School of Higher Social Studies of the National University of San Martín (Argentina). She is also an associate researcher at the University of Tarapacá (Chile). Her main study topics are migration, borders, gender and feminism, aging, violence, class, and racial and ethnic discrimination. She edited the volume The Migration Crisis in the American Southern Cone. Hate Speech and Its Social Consequences (Springer, 2021).

Eleonora López holds a B.A. in Social Sciences and an expert diploma in Sociology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She also holds an M.A. in Social Sciences from the University of Chile. Currently, she is carrying out her PhD studies in Sociology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, supported by a scholarship from the National Agency for Research and Development of Chile. Her main research interests are migrant children, social suffering, racism, and human rights. Her most recent publication is the article co-authored with Menara Guizardi and Herminia Gonzálvez, Los estudios sobre experiencias femeninas y violencias de género en la frontera México-Estados Unidos, published in 2021 by the journal Tempo (Brazil).

Lina Magalhães holds a B.A. in Law from the Fluminense Federal University (Brazil) and an M.A. in Urban Studies from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (Ecuador). She is currently a doctoral student in the Postgraduate Program in Territorial Planning and Socio-environmental Development at the University of the State of Santa Catarina (Brazil). In addition, she is a fellow of the State of Santa Catarina Migration Observatory (Brazil) and an associate researcher at the Institute of International Studies of Arturo Prat University (Chile). Her main research topics are the rights to city and territory, gender, migration, and borders. Her latest book is Fronteras y cuerpos contra el Capital. Insurgencias feministas y populares en Abya Yala, published in 2021 by El Colectivo and Bajo Tierra (Argentina).

Pablo Mardones holds a B.A. in Social Anthropology from the University of Chile. He also holds an M.A. in International Migration Policies and a Ph.D. in Anthropological Sciences from the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina). From 2018 to 2020, he carried out his first postdoctoral fellowship with a grant from the National Agency for Research and Development of Chile. Since 2020, he has been developing his second postdoctoral project with a fellowship from the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research of Argentina at the University of Buenos Aires. He is also an external researcher at the University of Tarapacá (Chile). His main research topics are migrations, indigenous peoples, borders, and audiovisual anthropology. His latest book is Buenos Aires Jacha Marka. Migrantes aymara y quechua en los umbrales de un Nuevo Pachakutik, published in 2021 by Ril Editores (Chile).

Esteban Nazal holds a B.A. in Social Anthropology from the University of Chile. He is a teacher in the Department of Anthropology at Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Chile). His main research topics are migration, borders, violence, and audiovisual productions. His latest publication is the article Relaciones de género y movilidades transfronterizas de las bolivianas aymara del Valle de Azapa (Arica y Parinacota, Chile), co-authored with Menara Guizardi and Lina Magalhães and published in 2021 by the journal Corpus (Argentina).

Carolina Stefoni holds a B.A. in Sociology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, an M.A. in Cultural Studies and Sociology from the University of Birmingham (England), and a PhD in Sociology from the University Alberto Hurtado (Chile). She is a full professor at the University of Tarapacá (Chile), where she directs the PhD in Social Sciences. In addition, she is an associate researcher at the Center for the Study of Conflict and Social Cohesion (Chile). Her main research topics are migratory movements in Chile and Latin America, migration policy, migrant women, borders, and migration control. Her latest publication is the article co-authored with Esteban Nazal and Menara Guizardi, La frontera chileno-peruana: Estados, localidades y políticas migratorias (1883–2019), published by the journal Universum (Chile).

Felipe Valdebenito holds a B.A. in Social Anthropology from the University of Tarapacá (Chile) and an M.A. in Anthropology from the Catholic University of Northern Chile. He is currently carrying out his PhD co-supervision between the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 (France) and the Catholic University of Northern Chile. He is also a teacher in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tarapacá (Chile). He researches mining in northern Chile, migration, border studies, and urban planning. His latest article, co-authored with Menara Guizardi and Eleonora López, is Articulaciones transfronterizas de la violencia: relatos femeninos en la Triple Frontera del Paraná, published by the journal Secuencia (Mexico).

Acknowledgments

Words fall short of expressing our gratitude to the Aymara women who shared with us their lives and experiences on the Andean Tri-border. With kindness and camaraderie, they allowed us to accompany them and record their routines in our fieldwork diaries, interviews, and photographs. They are the protagonists of this study and the people to whom we dedicate this work, sincerely hoping that we have done justice to the beauty of their stories and the strength of their trajectories.

Another special thank you goes to Alejandro Grimson, whose anthropological advice was key to various debates developed here. His trust in our work and his ever-lucid accompaniment were also crucial: many of the book’s findings benefited from Grimson’s careful listening and wise recommendations.

This book’s production was developed thanks to institutions and public research agencies that provided resources for the authors’ teamwork. In Chile, we thank the National Research and Development Agency (ANID, its Spanish acronym) and the University of Tarapacá (Arica, Chile), which financed our research through the Fondecyt Project 1190056, The Boundaries of Gender Violence: Migrant Women’s Experiences in South American Border Territories, which I direct together with Herminia Gonzálvez, Carolina Stefoni, and Pablo Mardones. In Argentina, we are grateful to the Interdisciplinary School of Higher Social Studies of the National University of San Martín (Buenos Aires, Argentina).

A team of professionals contributed to this book. I would especially like to thank Edison Pérez, who reviewed the grammar, style, and formal aspects of the Spanish version of the manuscript. His meticulousness saved us from misunderstandings and improved the entire volume. Esteban Nazal and Isabel Araya assisted me in formatting the images and chapters: thanks to their professionalism and well-established aesthetic sense, we could make the most of the fieldwork images. I also thank Christine Ann Hills for translating several chapters and for her meticulous proofreading of the entire English manuscript, a task she tackled with incredible speed, patience, and professionalism.

In Arica (Chile), the humanitarian work carried out by Migrant Pastoral Care (run by the Scalabrine Order) and the Jesuit Migrant Service, both of the Catholic Church, represents the main network for the defense of human rights in the border towns. We are extremely grateful for the support they gave us to develop our research, allowing us to see their work in different areas of the border.

We worked on this volume during the COVID-19 pandemic, at a time when the continuity of our vital and professional processes was disrupted in ways that no one could ever have imagined. It is hard to express in words my gratitude to the book’s authors for their commitment to carrying this project forward in such a challenging context.

Map 0.1 The Andean Tri-border and the valleys of Azapa and Lluta accompanying the basins of the San José and Lluta Rivers respectively (Arica, Chile). Source: Created by Paulo Contreras Osses for the Fondecyt Project 1190056.

Part I

The volume and its theoretical approaches

Introduction

Menara Guizardi and Herminia Gonzálvez

The adventure

In 2019, we began an ethnographic study on the outskirts of Arica, the Chilean city closest to the Andean Tri-border where Chile, Peru, and Bolivia meet and located in the ecosystem of the Atacama Desert. With a team of about thirteen professionals from different disciplines (anthropology, sociology, photography, law), we undertook field trips to the productive valleys (Azapa and Lluta) surrounding this Chilean city (Map 0.1). There we approached female Aymara migrants, originally from Bolivia, who were employed in agriculture or the trade of agricultural production.

The main characters of this book, namely Indigenous, rural workers, migrant, and transborder women, defiantly live the continuous intersection of different forms of limits (symbolic, social, political, and economic). However, we found that they have developed a particular way of overcoming the dilemmas that these limits pose: movement. Crossing national borders is only one of the mobility strategies that our protagonists employed to lighten the load of the limits. That said, it would be wrong to assume that this mobility represents a liberating agency for them. Caught between possibilities and restrictions, prescriptions and preferences, care and violence, our protagonists situate their possibilities of action in this tenuous dialectical space where rupture and continuity constitute a provisional (unstable, precarious) synthesis.

The pages of this book are dedicated to the life histories of the thirty women with whom we had an in-depth dialogue. The conversations took place in these border territories. Most of the women self-identified as Aymara. They were born and grew up in rural Indigenous villages in Bolivia, where they had little access to formal education, public health services, and social protection. Under their mothers’ wings, they were introduced to rural chores or trade at a very early age. With the female figures in their families, they also learned that the overload of care work (toward people, animals, objects, and environments) and domestic work is a mandate that women sustain with significant consequences for their life and health. They were Aymara speakers: Spanish was the second language for most of them. They had spent their childhood in community contexts where male violence was a daily occurrence to which they were prematurely socialized. As they got older, they saw these violent relationships establish themselves in their own experiences as a couple. Their migration to Arica is connected to their personal and family history, which is difficult to understand without referring to the Aymara worldviews on kinship.

Our reading of all these elements is framed by a feminist anthropological perspective, in dialogue with studies on gender and kinship in Aymara groups, transnational migration, and transborder mobilities. The volume’s main exercise is to rethink certain structuralist assertions about the elemental character of family alliances and their function in the construction of gender in patriarchal systems framed by patrilineal and patrilocal patterns.

The book draws on the women’s testimonies regarding their family relationships in their villages of origin in Bolivia, in their mobilities and labor processes, and in the families that they have formed. It investigates how the limits of gender are constructed by the concrete (multi)situated experience of these women. In anthropological terms, the concept of gender explains that the way in which human groups understand the sexes alludes to sociocultural constructions that endow differences with a historical and contextual character. Such constructions (con)form symbolisms, personalities, and bodies and also permeate power and relational hierarchies (Lamas 2003). In this volume, the gender perspective centralizes the meaning that communities and societies give to these differences to understand the connections and conflicts in human institutions and interactions (Lamas 2003). This framework led us to question the theoretical limitations of migration studies in addressing the relationship between sexuality, health, education, work, and family alliances in transborder contexts marked by patterns of intense female mobility.

The way in which this book researches the limits of gender presupposes a dialectical perspective. It is assumed that these limits not only restrict the conditions of existence of things and subjects but also constitute the horizons of possibility of what can be created in relational terms. As a sociocultural construction, gender hierarchizes the dispositions of persons, bodies, and relations. However, it also defines the possibilities (and intensities) of adequacy and, with it, subversion, deviation, eccentricity, and rupture. Thus, in asking about the limits of gender, this work is inquiring into the contradictory relationship between coming and going, following and leading, and giving and having. Therefore, this volume delves into the dialectic between agency and structure. It emphasizes the nuances beyond dichotomous perspectives on women’s capacity – in situations of intense economic, social, and gender inequality – to create and sustain processes of change.

By compiling and analyzing these female narratives and ethnographic data, this book comparatively reconstructs the trajectories of the women interviewed, seeking to contrast the processes experienced in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. This careful exercise of genealogical listening shows that, in the heterogeneities of their life histories, the limits of gender are configured based on the link between violence, kinship, and female mobility. The multidimensional analysis of this triadic configuration is the theoretical heart of this book, and this exploration invites a review of the classical theories of anthropological kinship.

In other words, the volume proposes an ambitious undertaking: it puts into dialogue the classic anthropological studies on kinship of the twentieth century (especially the Lévi-Straussian arguments) and the theories of the twenty-first century on the experiences of transnational and/or transborder migrant families. Therefore, this work aims to enrich the arguments of both fields by complementing each other from a critical, situated, and contextual feminist perspective. This contributes to denaturalizing both the androcentrism of the classic arguments on kinship and the emphasis on the experiences of circulation of contemporary theories. Furthermore, this volume makes visible the contradiction between the social, symbolic, economic, and political restrictions that transborder Indigenous women face and their ability to change (even if only slightly) their contexts and realities. This latter point includes the resources they gather and the possibilities they create to transform the gender relationships in their bordering communities. Consequently, this book also contributes to the field of border studies by overcoming the insistent invisibility of the role of women in border regions through a model of analysis that privileges female discourses, experiences, affections, and practices. The book’s focus on the reproductive tasks performed by the women allows a rethinking of the relationship between gender violence and female care as a key element to the survival of Indigenous groups in border areas.

To carry out this ambitious adventure, we have relied on Latin American feminist authors with whom we established the main theoretical dialogues of the book. An example of the above is Rita Segato, whose works have been the starting point of our critique of Lévi-Strauss and our central hypothesis of the book. The dialogue with feminist Latin American literature on South-South migration and female transborder mobilities also appears throughout the entire volume. For example, in Chapter 2, we discuss anthropological, feminist works (and/or with a gender-critical perspective) on Andean kinship produced in South America and the Global North. Chapter 3 also draws on historiographical works with a gender perspective produced in these regions. In Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8, we retrieve feminist works on border mobilities (including those on Indigenous displacements on the Mexican borders) and South American transnational migrations. We also use many key authors of Bolivian Indigenous feminism, such as Rivera-Cusicanqui and María Eugenia Choque Quispe, to cite just two examples. However, we are particularly inspired throughout the book by South American female authors that investigate Bolivian women’s migration. For the Argentine case, we cite the works of María José Magliano, Cynthia Pizarro, Soraya Ataide, Myriam González, Susana Sassone, Marta Silvia Moreno, María Victoria Martínez Espínola, and Gabriela Karasik. The works of Tanja Bastia, who has published in English on the subject, also back our hypothesis. In the Chilean case, our analysis relies on the works of Marcela Tapia, Sandra Leiva, Andrea Comelin, Nannete Liberona, Romina Ramos, Carolina Garcés-Estrada, Elaine Acosta, Irma Arriagada, Rosalba Todaro, Miriam Roque Gutiérrez, Fernanda Chacón, and Mileska Romero. Moreover, we also cite English-speaking authors, such as Megan Ryburn. Likewise, we dialogue with studies produced by feminist authors who work in the Ecuadorian Andean region, such as Gioconda Herrera.¹

It is from this careful dialogue with all this previous feminist literature that we propose to rethink the centrality of female agency in the social and community experience that transborder Indigenous women have of kinship.

Revisiting kinship

Our ethnographic process demonstrated that the most common theoretical tools used in migration and border studies were not sufficient to understand the ethnic-parental links in the mobility experience of these Indigenous women. Thus, it compelled the authors of this book to overcome this apparent lack of dialogue between the feminist critique of kinship anthropology and studies on transnational and transborder female mobilities.

In the 1970s, the gender turn in anthropology reopened debates on the role of families in the (re)production of social inequalities (Gonzálvez 2016). Critiques made by Schneider (1968, 1981) and Needham (1971) problematized the classical consideration of kinship as a social identity given at birth and guaranteed by the structural positions occupied by people in a society or community (Rivas 2009). Schneider’s thesis pointed out that kinship was not an autonomous analytical domain, supposedly universal and the object of cross-cultural comparison. On the contrary, it was constituted by singularized configurations (Rivas 2009).

Criticism of the ethnocentric assumptions reproduced in anthropological kinship studies prompted the shift from the classical or standard model, in its naturalistic conception, to the constructivist one. This latter came to criticize the understanding of consanguinity as an internal relationship, derived from reproduction (Bestard 2009, p. 85). This perspective questioned, for example, some of the anthropological theorizations that highlighted ties of consanguinity alone and the physical similarities that these ties supposedly produced. Such similarities were interpreted as non-transformable, indelible aspects, originally constitutive of the identity of the person (Bestard 2009, p. 85). Therefore, the constructivist perspective stressed the existence of a relationship of interdependence (dialectic, we would say) between the biological continuity of these ties and the social relations that are perceived as external and normative as acquired forms (Bestard 2009, p. 85).

Following these leads, feminist anthropological studies revisited the relationship between consanguinity and alliance, resituating the arguments of Lévi-Strauss (1971 [1949]). Their questions broadened the consideration of kinship relations as a social construction, focusing on processes and interactions (Sendón 2012). Contextual expressions of the differences attributed to men and women began to be thematized as one aspect of a much broader system of inequalities, in which gender was a key dimension (Collier & Rosaldo 1981, Ortner & Whitehead 1981, Yanagisako & Delaney 1995). Thus emerged a critical interpretation of the universal/particular dialectic of masculine domination as the system widely adopted in different societies but presented in each one in terms of contextuality and singularity (Acker 1989). The anthropological approach to this tension took up a foundational concept of philosophical feminism from De Beauvoir (2018 [1958]): it turned the ethnographic and analytical focus to understanding female submission in its situational embodiments. This, in turn, led to an anthropological revision of the central role of violence in articulating these situated expressions of patriarchy (Nelson 2021).

Within the framework of these debates, Collier & Yanagisako (2007) showed that anthropological theories were based on the bipolar (reductionist) distinction between the domestic (as a feminine and inferior space) and the public (as a masculine locus, morally, socially, and politically elevated). In doing so, these theories naturalized the inequality of power between men and women, tacitly assuming it resulted from their location in the social structure (Del Valle 2010). In seeking to overcome these reductionisms, feminist debates focused on the everyday experiences, understandings, and representations of gender in kinship as factories of otherness (Del Valle 2010). Thus, they distanced themselves from the conceptualization of the family as a harmonious unit. Instead, they considered it a system of power relations linked to forms of organization of social production and reproduction that generally oppress women, but one that acquired different contextual expressions (León 1994).

These formulations made it possible to question the essentialist visions that described the domestic sphere as articulated by affective and moral constraints resulting from the mother-child bond (often conceived in a biologistic way) (Gonzálvez 2016). In addition, they allowed to denounce the systematic invisibilization of the economic and political roles played by women in the daily exercise of reproductive and care work (Gonzálvez 2016).

Since the 1990s, applying some of these discussions to international migration studies has led to new analytical outcomes. One of the main ones questions the sedentary-centrism of anthropological perspectives on kinship. For most migrants, family relationships are not delimited (or contained) by a fictional cultural area, as assumed by many classical anthropologists (Alicea 1997, Aranda 2003, Bryceson & Vuorela 2002, Hondagneu-Sotelo & Avila 1997).² They are configured, rather, from mobilities, in a multisite way, crossing national borders (Baldassar et al. 2007, Baldassar & Merla 2014, Fresnozat-Flot 2009, Merla 2012, Poeze & Mazzucato 2014, Reynolds & Zontini 2013).

Preconceiving the need to break with biologizing definitions, and also those that circumscribe the family experience to physical proximity of the contingency of shared material space, these debates emphasized the spatially decentered character of kinship networks (Coe 2011, Parella 2007, Sørensen & Vammen 2014). The term transnational³ was used for those families that build and sustain long-distance relationships, whose members spend some or all of their time apart, yet hold together and create something that can be seen as a feeling of collective welfare and unity, i.e. ‘familyhood’, even across national borders (Bryceson & Vuorela 2002, p. 3).

Anthropological analysis of transnational migrant families has focused particularly on the articulation of domestic groups or households (with production and reproduction activities) within a kinship system (Gonzálvez 2007). This system, in turn, has been described as articulated by diverse links – horizontal and vertical, created by alliances of affinity (for example, conjugal dyad or couple) and consanguinity – but with the particularity that they are established across the borders of a nation-state (Gonzálvez 2007).

Moreover, this research agenda demonstrated that the multisituational character of transnational migrant families is gendered. Since the 1990s, international migration has increasingly been carried out by women from the Global South, at great cost for them (Baldassar et al. 2007, Gonzálvez 2016, Gregorio & Gonzálvez 2012). They frequently sustain family life between countries through care work exercised at a distance (Hochschild 2000), constituting, for example, experiences of transnational motherhood (Gregorio & Gonzálvez 2012, Parreñas 2001, Pyle 2006). Thus, research on migrant families has shown the importance of the articulated analysis between kinship and gender to understand yet another dialectic: between female subordination and agency in internationalized mobility processes (Guizardi et al. 2019).

Many studies on transnational migrant families have been criticized in the present century for reproducing synchronic views of the kinship experience (Coe 2011). It is also questionable that the transnational family constitutes a vehicle of human development (Sørensen & Vammen 2014, p. 93). Among feminist researchers, during much of the 1990s, it was thought that the displacement of migrant women would facilitate their economic empowerment and rupture gender inequalities in family relationships and labor insertion. However, these assumptions turned out to be utopian in the face of the realization that transnational family exponentially increases female overload in productive, reproductive, and emotional terms (Aranda 2003, Hondagneu-Sotelo 2000).

Applying these debates to border territories brought new anthropological theoretical outcomes. Studies in these areas observe that transborder families cannot be analyzed with the same categories and interpretative axes applied to transnational migration (López 2020, Nájera-Aguirre 2017, Ojeda 2009, Ojeda & López 1994).

Border areas are spaces where multiscale conflicts condense. Their communities are traversed by contradictions, paradoxes, and asymmetries of power between economic corporations, nation-states, political forces, civil society, and ordinary citizens (Kearney 1991). Consequently, local practices and relations configure a disruptive sui generis web of inequalities (Álvarez 1995). Stephen (2012) states that these particularities endow transborder communities with characteristics that are qualitatively different from those found among transnational migrants.

First, very complex historical and current trajectories are observed in transborder families (Stephen 2012). The historicity – of the national, regional, and local – is contextually configured in these families in a very dynamic way, demanding a refined vision of the heterogeneities (social, cultural, identity, political, economic) constitutive of social groups and their environments (Grimson 2011). For example, it is common for different nationalities to be combined within a single family: affiliations to countries change between generations. Studying these transformations requires the interconnected use of various analytical tools (involving an interdisciplinary effort between ethnography, demography, and history).

Second, transnational studies emphasize the action of individuals connected to each other through migration to distant spaces and the reproduction of forms of long-distance nationalism (Stephen 2012, p. 473). However, in transborder areas, very different ways of building connections between subjects, communities, and nationalisms occur. People cross borders daily or weekly, and the relationships between places of origin, work, and leisure involve much more intense levels of connection between national territories. Thus, transborder families experience simultaneity between countries in a much more radical way than in long- or medium-distance transnational migration. This activates specific conflicts and sensitivities (Stephens 2012). However, these logics are not an isolated eccentricity of this or that family nucleus: they are