“I Was that Dream”

Abstract

This chapter presents a case study on Paraguayan women’s experiences in the Paraná Tri-Border Area (TBA) (between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay), based on the analysis of their life history interviews. Its main objective is to describe these women’s access to education, showing how it influenced their first incursions into the labor market and the difficulties they faced in carrying out their productive activities in the TBA. Furthermore, the chapter seeks to explain how, in their efforts to reconcile productive and reproductive activities, they (dialectically) confront and reproduce the dynamics of gender inequality: they have first-hand experience of subordination and exploitation; however, they also develop strategies to deal with these issues. In addition, by analyzing the expectations of transgenerational education transformation that our protagonists project in their children, it shows how these circumstances imply a contradiction between the abuses the women suffer and the autonomy they gain.