Caring for a Responsible Self: Migrant Motherhood and the Politics of Reproduction

Abstract

For Haitian women who live and work in Santiago, expecting a baby entitled to Chilean nationality involves recognizing their maternal bodies at different institutional levels and transforming who they are and how they care for themselves and others as migrants, workers, and mothers in a new country. Based on ethnographic research, this article examines how the pregnant body’s moral legitimacy generates a form of agency among racialized migrant workers who become mothers. Pregnant migrants’ sense of self as working mothers and migrant workers emerges from their embodiment of institutional discourses of self-responsibility and self-care as they navigate contradictory forms of recognition and belonging to the global economy and the nation’s reproduction. The experience of migrant motherhood exposes the lived contradictions inherent in the gendered politics of reproduction. By grounding the meanings of care and social reproduction in migrant selfhood, this analysis expands on the scholarship of gendered migration, and reproductive and care labor, across unequal registers of migrant and nonmigrant livelihoods.