Gender, Migration and Social Transformation

Tanja Bastia is a Senior Lecturer at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester, UK.

"Bastia provides an invaluable contribution to the gender and migration literature by combining a transnational multi-scalar south-south perspective on migration with a nuanced reading of the intersectionality of gender, class, and ethnicity. By tracing Bolivian migrants’ personal networks across borders and continents, this book fruitfully expands queries about the relationships between gender and structures of unequal power. Gender, Migration and Social Transformation is a significant addition to our understanding of the complex diversity and fluidity of "transnational communities," migrant neighborhoods and urban citizenship in the face of ongoing economic and political restructuring."- Nina Glick Schiller, Senior Research Associate at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany"This is a compelling account of social transformation and the nature of gendered migrations in Bolivia. Drawing on extensive and valuable ethnographic fieldwork over a period of over two decades and spanning continents, this volume offers a rich understanding of how gender, class and ethnicity intersect in shifting contexts to produce migration. Organised around key thematics like care, intimacy and work Bastia draws us into the lives of her participants with rare empirical acuity and analytical insight. The book is a wonderful read!"- Parvati Raghuram, Professor of Geography and Migration at the Open University, United Kingdom"Bastia’s book begins with a classic inquiry of how gender is renegotiated through migration, but several key innovations—bringing a transnational and intersectional lens, and comparing South to South migration with a South to North migration flow from the same point of origin in Bolivia—complicate the answer. With multi-sited ethnography conducted in Bolivia, Argentina and Spain, the author concludes that gender inequality remains constant, while modest class mobility is the primary transformation. An important contribution to the study of diverse Latin American transnational migrations."- Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Florence Everline Professor of Sociology, University of Southern California, USA

• 1. Introduction 2. Gender, Migration and Social Transformation 3. Origins 4. Mobility and Social Networks 5. Work 6. Care7. Intimacy 8. Conclusion