Between a guest and an okupa: Migration and the making of insurgent citizenship in Buenos Aires’ informal settlements

Abstract

In this paper, we explore initiatives for the construction of substantive citizenship by transnational migrants in Buenos Aires. In looking at migrants’ political participation across the city, we found that the spatiality of citizenship practices is important. At the city level, there are migrant organisations representing specific nationalities. However, in informal settlements, where many migrants reside, we found that migrants engage in political practices across nationality and ethnic lines by coming together with their neighbours in grassroots organisations. These different forms of organising embody critically different views of migrants in their relationship with rights. While the former promote practices linked to ethnic belonging and see migrants as ‘guests’ in a foreign country, unable to make claims to the local or national governments, the latter see them as rights-bearing individuals with power to claim their right to the city. We argue that activism at the scale of the neighbourhood proves to hold more potential for the building of substantive citizenship than actions by organisations active at the city level. This is because migrant organisations active at the city level organise on the basis of nationality, while those at the neighbourhood level bring migrants and non-migrants together on the basis of their class-based interests.

How do Migrant Workers Respond to Labour Abuses in “Local Sweatshops”?

“…In Buenos Aires, previous research (Bastia and Montero Bressán ) and the experiences of the organisations La Alameda and Simbiosis Cultural point at the existence of some community leaders who create their own organisations and their own radio stations and newspapers broadly known among Bolivians. These powerful community leaders have developed a discourse and a series of strategies aimed at naturalising sweatshop labour and keeping workers away from collective organising.…”

“…Similarly, in Buenos Aires, sometimes using the figure of “mutuales” (social enterprises), organisations provide services to their associates, who pay only a symbolic amount of money to get every kind of help, for instance legal assistance, help with their papers, food stuff, etc. Their leaders also take part in solving all kinds of conflicts—like gender violence and crime—within the community (Bastia and Montero Bressán ). In other words, they become referents of the community.…”

Multiplying Labour, Multiplying Resistance: Class Composition in Buenos Aires’ Clandestine Textile Workshops

“…This has a clear impact on Bolivian workers’ political compositions, many of whom, in the face of exogenous animosity, feel increasingly beholden to talleristas, and “fall back on ethnic identities that empower … bourgeois leadership of migrant associations” (Kabat et al :60). This has been described as a “visitor’s consciousness” that talleristas actively cultivate (Simbiosis Cultural and Colectivo Situaciones ), using the vulnerability that comes from labour heterogenisation to promote a docile workforce (see also Bastia and Montero Bressán ). Linking to the slave labour discourse, Luis elaborated:

We can’t annoy, we can’t organise ourselves, we can’t bring up other problems.

…”

“…In this sense Rivera Cusicanqui herself has described migrants as “patient Leninists”, strategising and biding their time, tolerating exploitation as they build new lives (see Simbiosis Cultural and Colectivo Situaciones :20–22). The temporality of this process is reflected by the types of refusals described above: recompositional potential increased as migrants settled, their lives became less reliant on the talleristas , and their “visitor’s consciousness” waned (Bastia and Montero Bressán ). This is seen most visibly in Argentina’s first migrant strike, when over two million migrants took to the streets of Buenos Aires on 30 March 2017 (TeleSur ).…”

Comparing Urban Citizenship, Sanctuary Cities, Local Bureaucratic Membership, and Regularizations

“…This article has described and compared distinct but interdependent urban immigration and citizenship policies that support irregular migrants. The literature discussed is rather U.S.‐centric; however, these ideas and policies are likely to travel to cities worldwide, as studies from Nairobi (Kassa ) and Buenos Aires (Bastia and Bressán ) reveal. The detailed content and configurations of these policies are context specific.…”