This paper [attached] expands on prior research that focuses on housing and home as infrastructures of care. This current work employs a care infrastructures framework to explore the migratory strategies and experiences of Latin American women and mothers who are forced to migrate, in order to be able to take care of themselves and their families. Through this approach, infrastructure is considered in its multiple iterations to understand how it is representative of the experience of migration and motherhood. Specifically, I consider how infrastructure failures, understood as a form of slow violence, force women and mothers to migrate, and the ways that migration becomes an infrastructure in itself, that women employ in order to be able to “mother” and care for themselves, their children, and families over time. The literature on the “infrastructure turn” identifies these practices as alternate or lively forms of infrastructure (Amin, 2014; Alam and Houston, 2020), often produced by those traditionally on the margins of more formalized, state-run infrastructure regimes. I draw on these and other conceptualizations to imagine the ways that women and mothers employ migration and infrastructures to (re)produce practices of mothering and care from afar and/or from and in multiple spaces. This research aims to answer the following research questions: 1) How does an “infrastructure” framework help to understand the processes of migration, motherhood and care? 2) How do infrastructure failures impact women and mothers? 3) How do women use migration as a form of infrastructures of care? 4) What are these infrastructures of care? By using an infrastructure-based approach to migration, motherhood, and care, focus is on the dynamic, every-day experiences and practices of care and motherhood.
About the Speaker
I [Dr. Muñoz, Solange] am an urban and cultural geographer and a Latin Americanist with long-standing interests in the political, economic, and socio-spatial processes of inequality, marginalization and contestation in the urban landscapes of Latin America and the U.S. My professional training, experiences and research are inherently interdisciplinary and broadly grounded in qualitative approaches, which include ethnographic and participatory methods. My research engages with current debates on the social and spatial consequences of globalization, neoliberal urban development and gentrification for traditionally marginalized urban communities with focus on the social and spatial significance of housing, home and infrastructures in the urban landscape. I am most interested in the microscale and focus on the emotional and material impacts of housing precarity, and the threat of eviction and displacement on immigrant and traditionally marginalized communities. My research explores the livelihood strategies that individuals and communities develop to counteract the often-negative impacts of neoliberal processes on their lives, and how these practices and forms of resistance provide alternative models for making neighborhoods, communities and cities more inclusive and sustainable in the long-term. Recently, much of my research has focused on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown and the ‘bottom-up’ infrastructural practices that have emerged in response to state failures. Today’s presentation draws on this infrastructural framework to consider how individuals and communities -specifically migrant women and mothers- develop “alternative” infrastructures in order to care for their children and family members.