Transnationalism, Gender and Migration Policies: Latin American Migration to Spain

GIL ARAUJO, SANDRA

Manchester

Workshop; Workshop Feminization of Labour: Domestic Work and Affect in a Transnational Context,; 2010

Universidad de Manchester

Almost 200 million people are currently estimated to live away from their place of birth. This represents almost 3% of total population, a percentage that resembles the international migrations of the 1960. As a reflection of the expansion process of the capitalist economy and of the changes undergone by the international division of labor, there was an accentuated growth in migration flows of diverse national origins from developing to developed countries during the 1990s and this was reinforced between then and 2005, generating a “phase of transition towards a South-North migration pattern”.Latin American countries have not been exempt from these dynamics; on the contrary, as it was well acknowledged in the title of an article published in the newspaper El País on October 12, 2005, Latin America is also an Emigrant factory. Over the past decades, the Spanish territory has become the second destination for Latin American migration flows after the USA, consolidating its role as an immigration-receiving country. Migrations between the Latin American region and Spain must be interpreted in the light of two processes that have defined a history of encounters and conflicts between these two territories: the colonization of Latin America and the populous migration flows from Spain to Latin American countries. A migration system connecting different points of the Latin American continent and the South of Europe was constituted as a result of the massive European migrations that occurred between the last quarter of the 19th century and the mid-20th century. Once this migration system was established, the direction, the volume and the composition of population movements were conditioned by specific economic, political and social circumstances. Currently, the transatlantic system involves, on one side, a growing number of Latin American countries and, on the other, Spain and -to a lesser extent- Italy and Portugal. Unlike the migrations of the 19th and 20th centuries, displacements now are mainly Northbound, from Central and South America to Europe.