Uncertain Citizenship. Megan Ryburn
the old cités—which were constructed up until about the 1950s—are undergoing a process of gentrification, with campaigns to save and restore them. The conventillos, on the other hand, have been to a considerable degree expunged from public memory. The places in which the migrants with whom I worked were living have far more in common with the old conventillos than with the cités. In popular parlance, however, these migrant dwellings are also referred to as cités, perhaps to veil their unhappy reality.
To be consistent with the language of home and housing used in Santiago but also recognize the stark contrast between the traditional cité and the residences discussed here, I refer to the latter as migrant cités. Almost half of the forty migrants whom I interviewed in-depth in Santiago lived in such places, compelled to do so by the multiple difficulties migrants face when trying to rent on the private market, not least discrimination by landlords (see chapter 5). They were men and women from various departamentos of Bolivia. A few identified as Quechua or Aymara, and others referred to having Quechua- or Aymara-speaking family. The majority had finished secondary school but had no further education.
A typical migrant cité consists of several rooms—around ten—off a central passageway, which is sometimes covered by a roof but quite often exposed. The façades of the houses look bare but reasonably maintained, and from the street their size gives the impression that each house must be occupied by one family. However, this belies the reality in whole blocks in downtown Santiago comunas. The rooms in these migrant cités are not normally single occupant; rather, they are shared among couples, families, or sometimes nonfamily groups. There is often serious overcrowding, as well as constant movement of people, as the extract from the interview with Diana at the beginning of this chapter indicates.15 She had already moved through various similar places, including the sweatshops and villas miserias of Buenos Aires. Diana eloquently sketched how it felt to live in a place like that: it was to be “amontonados, como ratitas” (“piled on top of each other, like little rats”). Her most dearly held dream was to be able to one day build a little house on the outskirts of Santa Cruz, where she was from, and finally have space and security.
Not only are conditions crowded in migrant cités; basic needs go largely unmet. Diego, age twenty-one, also from Santa Cruz and working in construction, shared with three other men a room that was two by three meters square. When he first arrived, he wore all his clothes while sleeping and lay on several sheets of cardboard, as he could not afford bedding or a mattress. For Rosa, twenty-nine and from Sucre, one of the worst aspects of living in a migrant cité was sharing a bathroom with ten other people and having no hot water. This was especially difficult as she tried to care for her newborn baby.
Temperatures in Santiago can drop to several degrees below zero in the winter, making a lack of hot water even more unpleasant at this time of year. Furthermore, migrant cités are unheated and frequently have ill-fitting roofs that let in wind and rain. Cristina, age thirty-seven, who like Diana had lived in other marginal places, including on the streets in Cochabamba, Bolivia, described the winter conditions in her migrant cité (see the bathroom and kitchen facilities in figures 1 and 2):
FIGURE 1. Bathroom, Cristina’s migrant cité, Recoleta, Santiago, 2013. Photo by author.
FIGURE 2. Cooking facilities, Cristina’s migrant cite, Recoleta, Santiago, 2013. Photo by author.
| Megan: | And are there leaks? |
| Cristina: | Water, yes. Actually, the roof fell in and ever since, every year I’ve been saying [to the landlord], “Don Guillermo, please fix the roof because it’s letting in water.” |
| Megan: | Of course. [Indicating ceiling] Well, there are also exposed cables, so it could be dangerous. |
| Cristina: | “Yes,” he says, “let’s just cover it with some bin bags,” and, well, that’s it. The water really flows in badly here. No, here it fills up with water. |
| Megan: | And is it cold in the winter? |
| Cristina: | Yes, it’s cold. Ugh, in the winter you truly get cold. It’s horrible, we walk around numb from cold. |
As I noticed in the passageway outside Cristina’s room, exposed electric cables hanging in the passageways are another common feature of many migrant cités. This is because rather than being officially connected, it is common for the residents to colgar de la luz (hang off the mains), circumnavigating the system in order to pirate electricity. These cables, drooping slightly above head height, can pose a serious fire hazard, not only because they may get wet but also because inhabitants must cook over open gas flames in their rooms or in the passageway and hang up their clothes to dry here as well. These multiple hardships—cramped conditions, lack of the most basic facilities, intense cold, and the potential for flooding or fire—become the daily bread of many migrants who live uncertain citizenship in Santiago. But these are places of quiet deprivation, unknown to the average passerby because they blend so seamlessly into the scruffy but respectable downtown streetscapes.
WORKING PUERTAS ADENTRO, SANTIAGO
Nana puertas adentro (live-in maid/nanny) is a job description set out in a turn of phrase that seems to be peculiar to Chile. While of course the concept of domestic workers “living in” is widespread throughout Latin America and much of the rest of the world, it appears that the term nana puertas adentro is a Chileanism. Nana is the word generally used in Chile to refer to female domestic workers. There is a less demeaning term—asesora de hogar (loosely, female household employee)—but I use nana here deliberately because of the connotations of gendered and racialized power relations that it conveys. Moreover, the sense of “behind closed doors” implied by puertas adentro makes the phrase unwittingly appropriate given the exploitative labor and living conditions to which many women working as nanas are subjected.
As has been discussed more extensively in a US context, in crucial ways women (it is almost invariably women) in these roles “have been denied full citizenship —that is, they have not been recognized as fully independent and responsible members of the community, entitled to civil, political, and social rights,” as Evelyn Glenn writes.16 Gender, race, and class have all played a central role in constructing and enabling these exclusions, which are rooted in a history of slavery and servitude. In the colonial era and on into the period of independence prior to the abolition of slavery, in many countries in the Americas the role of domestic workers was commonly filled by African and Afro-descendant slaves. Indigenous women in conditions of servitude, who were frequently unpaid, also performed these roles.17 The long shadow of this oppression has been cast into the twenty-first century. Women of indigenous or African descent still predominate in domestic work in many contexts in the Americas. Many of these women are migrants—both internal and transnational—from low-income backgrounds. Labor exploitation and discrimination continue to characterize this type of work.18
In Bolivia many of the women working as live-in domestic workers have been, and continue to be, of indigenous descent. As indicated above, many have migrated from rural communities to cities like La Paz to engage in such work. Lesley Gill provides a powerful indictment of the racism and classism that permeated labor relations between Aymara female domestic workers and their employers (who are generally white-mestizo, although sometimes wealthy urban Aymara) in La Paz over the course of the twentieth century. As Gill argues, the “most enduring feature” of domestic work is that workers “are drawn from groups considered inferior by those in power…. [T]he women who carry out paid household labour invariably represent a subordinate race, class, ethnic group, or nationality.”19 Although Gill was writing in the mid-1990s, her analysis continues to resonate. In spite of the progress that Bolivia has made in indigenous rights (see chapter 1), within