‘I Need to Work to Be Legal, I Need to Be Legal to Work.’ Migrant Encounters, Haitian Women, and the Chilean State
type: CreativeWork
description: This dissertation explores the lives of Haitian women in Santiago, the capital of Chile, with a focus on their everyday encounters with Chilean state agents and private employers. It analyses the experiences of Haitian women as they navigate bureaucratic institutions and practices, negotiate their working conditions with employers and public defendants, train as care and domestic workers, seek modes of subsistence as street vendors, and understand themselves as migrant workers and working mothers. I argue that Haitian women’s efforts to transform their lives in a new country reveal the nature of state institutions in Chile, in the context of the legacies of its military dictatorship and the experience of an immigration boom not seen in its recent history. My account is based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Haitian women and their families living in Santiago, state agents involved in migration management and control, and employers of Haitian women. The dissertation uses migration as a case study to contribute to anthropological understandings of states and bureaucracies, work and markets, sameness and difference, and their effects on people’s lives. I begin with an overview of the project’s main themes of migration, states, bureaucracy, legality, and formality, and I reflect on encounters as a critical site through which anthropology can make sense of difference and social change. Chapter two draws on historical and statistical data to show how the relationships between Haitian women and the Chilean state are underpinned by the country’s history of migration, the configuration of racial hierarchies, and the neoliberal foundations of market democracy. Chapter three uses processes of visa application to analyse how Haitian women devise different strategies to ensure residence and labour formality through bureaucratic practices of speculative legality. Chapter four then draws on job-seeking encounters to analyse the consequences of these processes, revealing…
abstract: This dissertation explores the lives of Haitian women in Santiago, the capital of Chile, with a focus on their everyday encounters with Chilean state agents and private employers. It analyses the experiences of Haitian women as they navigate bureaucratic institutions and practices, negotiate their working conditions with employers and public defendants, train as care and domestic workers, seek modes of subsistence as street vendors, and understand themselves as migrant workers and working mothers. I argue that Haitian women’s efforts to transform their lives in a new country reveal the nature of state institutions in Chile, in the context of the legacies of its military dictatorship and the experience of an immigration boom not seen in its recent history. My account is based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Haitian women and their families living in Santiago, state agents involved in migration management and control, and employers of Haitian women. The dissertation uses migration as a case study to contribute to anthropological understandings of states and bureaucracies, work and markets, sameness and difference, and their effects on people’s lives. I begin with an overview of the project’s main themes of migration, states, bureaucracy, legality, and formality, and I reflect on encounters as a critical site through which anthropology can make sense of difference and social change. Chapter two draws on historical and statistical data to show how the relationships between Haitian women and the Chilean state are underpinned by the country’s history of migration, the configuration of racial hierarchies, and the neoliberal foundations of market democracy. Chapter three uses processes of visa application to analyse how Haitian women devise different strategies to ensure residence and labour formality through bureaucratic practices of speculative legality. Chapter four then draws on job-seeking encounters to analyse the consequences of these processes, revealing…
author: Ugarte Pfingsthorn, Ana Sofía
language: eng
keywords: Chile, Labour migration, Racism, Gender, Haiti
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/4925388e-4e03-423b-ac2d-1245ee7b2fdc/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2020-03-16
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:33:13Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.53123