Migration Configurations in the American Southern Cone (1970-2020)

Abstract

In 2007, Gonzálvez was studying transnational Colombian families and Guizardi African-Brazilian migration networks in Madrid. In those years, experts argued that transnational relations characterized most of the large Latin American community in Spain, confrming the variety, visibility, and importance of the ties migrants cultivate to connect them to their places of origin (Bettio et al. 2006; Cavalcanti and Parella 2006; Paerregaard 2006; Parella 2007). Gonzálvez and Guizardi considered that the popularity of transnationalism among researchers led to fetishistic uses of the category. However, as they advanced in their research, they observed that the word transnationalism indeed described faithfully the migration processes revealed by their ethnographic research in the Spanish capital (Gonzálvez 2007; Guizardi 2017; Rivas and Gonzálvez Torralbo 2010). Meanwhile, in Chile, Stefoni was investigating the Latin American intra-regional migration found in Santiago, which had been increasing in the national capital since 1995 (Martínez 2003a; Navarrete 2007; Schiappacasse 2008). This phenomenon prompted the attention of researchers and gained media notoriety given the political use of the discourse of an alleged “invasion” of Peruvians (Póo 2009). That intraregional migration has left transnational marks on Santiago (Stefoni 2002), bringing into the city center Peruvian habits regarding food, clothing, rest, and care (Stefoni 2002, 2005). Peruvian-run restaurants, grocery stores, and locutorios (call shops), proliferated. Migrant communities revitalized public spaces with their gatherings, products, religious processions, and dances. Transnational employment niches were defned by gender, with men working in construction (Stefoni 2016) and women in domestic and care professions (Stefoni 2009). While the term “transnationalism” had been in use to describe these phenomena in English-language studies since the early nineties (Glick-Schiller et al. 1992), it was novel for Chilean social sciences; few researchers thought in terms of transnationalism until the end of the frst decade of the new century. By 2015, the category “transnationalism” had been fully incorporated into studies carried out in Chile. Indeed, a criticism of its explanatory limits had been developed (Garcés 2014, 2015; Grimson and Guizardi 2015; Imilan 2014).During the same period, Mardones began studying the migration of Indigenous people, born in Bolivia and Peru, to Buenos Aires. The frst decade of the twenty frst century saw the study of migrant transnationalism in Argentina trigger discussions among several different researchers (Benencia 2005; Magliano 2007). The numerous Bolivian migrations to the Argentine capital prompted a questioning of some classical theories (Courtis et al. 2010; Sassone 2009). A new generation of researchers began to investigate how communities linked (socially, culturally, politically and economically) their places of origin to their migratory destinations (Cerrutti et al. 2010; Gavazzo and Canevarro 2009), thus producing novel narratives of difference and sameness which connected both locations (Grimson 1999).2At the same time, community articulation dynamics began emerging in Aymara and Quechua migrant communities in Buenos Aires. Their collectives appropriated public spaces with artistic-cultural practices that reinforced their political identities (Mardones 2016, 2020) (Fig. 2.1). Some of the research on this topic assumed that those migrant communities cohered around their respective Nation-state identities (Mardones 2015). These emerging Indigenous identities reconfgured those assumptions regarding the centrality of Nation-state transnationalisms, producing ethnic specifcities that had not been considered by the researchers in Argentina before (Mardones and Fernández Droguett 2017).By 2016, when Guizardi began studying cross-border migration in Argentina, researchers had already accepted that auto-criticism, and assumed the heterogeneous identities inherent to migrant transnationalisms (see Merenson 2012). The concern at that time was to understand the emergence and development of a “new” political narrative (Canelo 2016). Early in his administration, Mauricio Macri, president of Argentina from 2015 to 2019, conveyed a pessimistic image of migration bringing back racist imaginaries from the country’s past that the media helped spread (Canelo 2018; Canelo et al. 2018). He also supported the questioning of the people’s right to transnational mobility in the Southern Cone (Domenech and Pereira 2017). In this context, social sciences began to analyze the role that the postglobalization rhetoric (Grimson 2018) played in criminalizing migration and in justifying the deployment of war technology to control human mobility (Grimson and Renoldi 2019).