Encounters and Displacements: Migrant labour, racism, and the state in Chile

Since the turn of the century, Latin America has witnessed the displacement of millions of its inhabitants due to ongoing political instability, economic crises, violence, land scarcity, rapid urbanisation, and poverty in different countries of the region. In this context, much of the literature has focused on the movement of Latin American migrants to the Global North, paying less attention to the effects of global displacement within the continent (or South-South migration). This research project expands emergent themes explored in my PhD, which investigated the lives of migrant Haitian women living and working in Chile. Based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I argued that Haitian women's efforts to transform their lives in a new country revealed the responsibility of state institutions and economic rationales in producing gendered and racialised forms of dispossession based on the legacies of the country's past military dictatorship.

My proposed research seeks to consolidate my PhD findings through publications and presentations. I will analyse the experience of migrant Haitian women in Chile to explore the formation of new identities, of both migrant and host populations, and its relation to political institutions and economic arrangements in the region. Based on fieldwork with migrant Haitian women, Chilean state agents, policymakers, private employers, and pro-migrant advocate groups in Santiago, I will depart from my previous doctoral research to analyse the effects of displacement on people's forms of agency, personhood, and senses of belonging. To this end, this project seeks to contribute to anthropological understandings of states and bureaucracies, economic practices, identity, difference, and their effects on people's lives from a postcolonial and intersectional perspective.

My main goal is to develop my academic career by working on different writing projects based on data collected during my doctoral training. During the ESRC Fellowship, I will further develop emergent themes in my doctoral research through the drafting of one book manuscript based on the thesis, and the completion of three peer-reviewed articles. Moreover, I will present my work and the findings of these new research developments in academic seminar presentations and conferences in the UK and abroad. I will also present my research findings to non-governmental, public, and international organisations that elaborate public policies toward the improvement of the lives of Latin American migrant women in Chile, Latin America, and the Caribbean. I will also write a new postdoctoral research proposal that seeks to deepen the anthropological understanding of the mutual construction of state institutions and labour markets in Chile, through the study of its privatised social security system and its effects on the lives of older women, and present it to different funding bodies throughout the year.