Famílias transnacionais bolivianas em Barcelona: configurações institucionais e arranjos de cuidado

The transnationalization of families has often been conceived as a rational strategy for maximizing opportunities or as a direct effect of structural constraints to migration. Our effort is to contribute to set up an alternative standpoint, that emphasizes the moral dimension of the contemporary international mobility. In this sense, we conceive the transnational families as morally motivated strategies of resilience to face social, legal and economic deprivations, and the care arrangements that they promote as a kind of moral economy. We emphasized that the arrangement of care in transnational families is a permanent effort of conjugation of partial rights, unstable social statuses and multisited family responsibilities, in order to struggle for the achievement of families’ conceptions of good life. Therefore, we focus on how the obstacles imposed by welfare and citizenship regimes, and by modes of labor organization, both in origin and destination, interact with the care configurations within the transnational families. In a broad sense, our proposition is to explain the crossing points, through different social scales, between the legal, the productive and the reproductive migrants’ worlds. This article presents the partial results of the doctoral project “Bolivian transnational families in Barcelona and São Paulo: institutional configurations and migrant autonomy”. Based on family life history interviews performed in Barcelona, we tried to understand the interfaces between access / deprivation of rights and the different means of labor integration, both in Bolivia and in Spain, and the care arrangements through the families’ history.