Belizean migrant women: Recasting and reenforcing ​transnational social reproduction


Melanie Smith, Dalhousie University

Belize, like many global-south countries exprience the feminization of labour migration (Parreñas, 2005; Kofman, 2014; Kofman and Ranguram, 2015). Many Belizean women are following long-standing migration streams towards the United States (Smith and Hendrix, 2013). Once there, they instert themselves in various sectors of the care economy. Since social reproduction is usually organized by gender, women are the ones who dominate the care dimension of social reproduction (Laslett and Brenner, 1989; Kofman, 2014). However, caring is more than affective tasks, it includes a host of economic activities meant to create and maintain people and communities (Bakker, 2003). Care is embedded in many actions and processes. It entails paid and unpaid activities that promote and maintain the wellbeing of people (Folbre, 2014). It includes visible activities such as the daily upkeep of the household as well as intangible ones such as emotional support. Thus, it can be argued that Belizean migrant women in the U.S., through their care labour, are contributing to social reproduction of several people in multiple domains. As migrant women, they often become engaged in domiciliary care work as nannies, caring for the infirm and elderly especially when they lack proper documentation or academic preparation. During the neoliberal era of global capitalism where care in all its variations has been commodified, racialized women from the global south feature prominently (Ferguson and McNally, 2014; LaFleur and Romero, 2018). This is because global south women often migrate to maximize household incomes, thus, tend to insert themselves in jobs that easily absorb them. They are often willing to accept wages below market value. Since the care economy generally devalues what they consider women’s work’, this type of labor is often underpaid. In addition, they arrive ‘job ready’. Considering that they have already been trained to do this work in their country of origin because of the traditional gendered division of labor and cultural ideas regarding women’s caring nature (Barber, 2008). Added to this, the isolated nature of domiciliary work allows them to remain hidden, avoiding spaces where they lack social citizenship until they can regularize their status. This isolation also places them in conditions of vulnerabilities and precarious working arrangements. This multi-sited ethnographical research incorporates the perspective of forty-eight participants. The multi-method study involved data collection in Belize and the United States. Respondents included current migrants in the U.S as well as retired and returned migrant women and members of their traditional households and beneficiaries of remittances. Findings show that despite precarity, these women contribute to the social reproduction of the employers household and simultaneouly thier own. Thier wages, converted into remittances, subsidize reproductive needs of thier own household, thier family and extended kin. Findings also demonstrate that money is not the only resource being exchange. Care is resource and labour intensive. It involves the exchange of financial, material, emotional and moral support (Baldassar, Kilkey, Merla and Wilding, 2016). Caregiving strategies such as ‘childminding’ which are powered by cultural norms can be tapped into before and after migration (Fog Olwig, 2012). Kinship obligations and cultural norms such as reciprocity allows them to mobilize resources for parents or family members back home (Baldassar and Merla, 2014). These same norms can be utilized to facilitate the migration or settlement of others in the community of destination. Transnational social reproduction entails a range of strategies to give, receive, and exchange care. These strategies are also contested and reconfigured as resources and ideas move across transnational social fields. Since transnational studies analyses objects, persons and symbols moving beyond the borders of nation-states (Glick-Shiller, 2007 it becomes evident that Belizean migrants are contributing to national develoment as well. Through collective remittances, they mobilize resources to meet care needs of people in thier communities of origin. Thus, releasing the state from a range of socail protections and welfare investments. In all these domains, gendered expectations at the household, family, community, market, and state levels, plus views held by these women themselves compel them to contribute to the reproductive needs of people in multiple domains.

This paper will be presented at the following session: