As with most contexts of South-South migration, the Bolivian-Chilean case remains severely under-researched. Responding to this paucity of research, this paper addresses Bolivian migrants' inclusions in and exclusions from economic citizenship in Chile. Conceptually, the paper calls for a holistic and spatially aware approach to comprehending migration and citizenship, proposing the overarching conceptual framework of interacting transnational social spaces of citizenship representing its legal, political, social, and economic dimensions. It then focuses particularly on the transnational social space of economic citizenship, using this conceptual approach as a means to bring into better dialogue research on the migrant division of labour, precarious employment, lab our exploitation, financial exclusion, and migrant citizenship practices. The analytical potential of the conceptual framework is explored through examining the specific geographies of the Bolivian-Chilean space of economic citizenship to reveal the reality of what is increasingly being referred to as the 'Chilean dream'. Drawing on nine months of multisited ethnography and 76 semi-structured interviews, the paper addresses migrants' economic situation in Bolivia before examining their changes in circumstances following migration to Chile, looking particular at the migrant labour niches of wholesale clothing retail, agriculture, and domestic labour. It explores the structural factors leading to economic marginalisation in Bolivia and labour exploitation in Chile. Additionally, it analyses the practices in which migrants may engage to challenge their exclusion from economic citizenship, and the role that migrant organisations play in encouraging, and at times constraining, such practices.

This chapter explores the nature of transnational urban labour markets from the perspective of migrant labour with a specific focus on low-paid exploitative work in both global North and South. Conceptually, the chapter assesses the utility of some core conceptual tools in understanding transnational urban labour markets with an explicit focus on learning from the global South as a key element of this process. In doing so, we analyse the nature of transnational migrant divisions of labour, precarity and precarious employment in relation to a continuum of labour exploitation, as well as deskilling and occupational mobilities among migrants. While much research on these theorisations of metropolitan mobilities has focused on cities of the global North, we suggest that these play across North and South in transnational ways. This is linked with the global nature of the transnational movement of goods, capital and people, the volume of international migrants moving from cities in the South to those in the North, and the importance of South-South flows of migrant workers.The chapter draws empirically on analyses of migrant workers in London, especially Latin Americans, and makes reference to Bolivian migrants residing in Santiago, Chile to highlight how 'metropolitan mobilities' are deeply imbued by global, transnational and intersectional inequalities and exploitative labour relations but also that migrant workers also exercise their agency as they move.

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Chapter 2 moves from more theoretical discussion to focus on lived experiences of uncertain citizenship. Detailed ethnographic accounts are constructed of six “places of uncertain citizenship” inhabited by and passed through by the migrants whose stories form the center of the book. These are the Chile-Bolivia border crossing at Lago Chungará; inner-city migrant tenement housing in Santiago, Chile; warehouses where migrant workers live in Santiago and Arica, Chile; agricultural smallholdings in Arica, Chile; and the peri-urban area of Plan 3000 in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. These places are nodal points within overlapping transnational spaces of citizenship; they are physical manifestations of what it means to live uncertain citizenship.