Of humiliation and respectability. Labor trajectories and political experiences of migrant women in the city of Córdoba, Argentina

Abstract

The main aim of this article is to explore, simultaneously, the labor trajectories and the political experiences of migrant women in contemporary Argentina. Throughout almost ten years of research, I have discovered that collective organization and political participation have a fundamental ontological value for many Peruvian women who live in the peripheries of Argentinian cities. To fully understand the dimension of that value, I argue here, it is necessary to make the effort of analyzing both their political practices and their labor trajectories at the same time. Thus, in this article I explore the experiences of humiliation that my interlocutors suffer in their work environments and I replace the threads that unite these experiences with the place of dignification that they find in their political trajectories. The methodology used is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in three popular neighborhoods in the city of Córdoba, which combines participant observation with in-depth interviews.