Expectations and Experiences of Exchange : Migrancy in the Global Market of Care between Spain and Bolivia

Abstract: Spain has in recent years become an important destination for care work related migration, particularly for women from Latin America. In order to fill the care gap generated by Spanish women’s participation in the remunerated labor market and insufficient public welfare services, paid care work is becoming more prominent. This thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork among Bolivian care workers in Bilbao in the Basque Country of Spain and their kin in different localities in Bolivia, as well as on analysis of Spanish legal texts. It is a story about what goes on in the encounter between people and global structures of inequality, particularly in the encounter between women who have migrated from Bolivia in order to fill a gap in the Spanish quest for a functioning welfare state, and the structural components that (re)produce their migrancy. Concepts from economic anthropology are used to analyze the research material as part of a global market of care, rather than of so-called care chains. This means discussing dynamics of gift and commodity exchange within this market, and how the ‘spirit of the gift’ figures in the relationships the market entails. By focusing on practices of exchange, and the expectations and experiences tied to these, rather than on preconceived social ties, a better understanding is gained not only of complex webs of social relationships, but also of what the ‘laws of the market’ are, and of how these are connected to different structures of power and social differentiation, such as ‘race’, gender, and class. The story presented here shows how these forms of social differentiation produce particular forms of exchange in a globalized economy of care, and how people negotiate their own becoming on account of these exchanges.