Sarah Abel, Lauren Harris, and Rachel Randall were there when this all started with our fantastic MPhil year at the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge and have been there ever since. And without Diana Crossan, those initial postgraduate studies would not have happened. Helen Lyttelton, my partner in crime and fellow writer, read this manuscript in its entirety in an early iteration. “Coach” Kirsten Mander has unflaggingly cheered me on. Many other dear friends across four continents have also been an important part of this, and I am sorry not to be able to do justice to you all.
I am indebted to all those who shared their homes with me in Chile and Bolivia, in particular Daniela Jadue, Katherine Despot, Juan Despot, Patricia Ulloa, María Rosa Garcia, and Álvaro Zapata. And of course thank-you to Nora Núñez and Basilio Torres, Alejandra Torres, Adelmo, Rocío, Camilo, Joaquín, and Catalina Muñoz for welcoming me always with open arms and delicious vegetarian asados. On the other side of the world, Lizzie Jones and Philip Greenstone; Rodrigo Torres and Alexandra Tzirkoti; Ruth, Paul, Jess, and Maya Denyer; and Helen Wensley have put me up and put up with me in London over the past six years. Along with Sue, Robin, and Ben Wensley, and Irene Horner, they have played an enormous role in making England feel like home again and enabling me to complete this endeavor.
To my brother and sister, Finlay and Caitlin Ryburn, your courage and humor on our family’s own migration journey helps keep me going. Thank-you. And my deepest thanks to my husband Pablo Torres for his support throughout all that this has entailed. It would take many more pages to fully acknowledge the magnitude of your contribution. But perhaps it is somewhat encapsulated in that verse from Mario Benedetti’s poem: “si te quiero es porque sos / mi amor mi cómplice y todo / y en la calle codo a codo / somos mucho más que dos.” Finally, to my mum, Liz Ryburn, and my dad, Murray Ryburn, who instilled in me through actions and conversations a concern with social justice: Dad, how I wish you were here to see this published and to shed a proud fatherly tear, as no doubt you would. Mum, there aren’t words to express how present you have been through all of this. Suffice it to say, this is dedicated to you both.
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