The redefinition of gender roles in immigrant women: the importance of local spaces in global processes

ABSTRACT

In today’s complex, intercultural, transnational, glocalized world, linking conceptual analyses and theoretical representations to the empirical study of female migration also requires, among other aspects, acknowledging the importance of the arrival context in the redefinition of gender roles, since it operates as an area of opportunity or containment mainly due to a number of specific features, which interacts with women’s economic, cultural and social capital, to produce different results in the situation of migrant women. The context of arrival and the subjects, conceived of as actors inserted in social structures where they have scope for action, is the focus of our analysis. This article addresses this issue through the study of two cases of migrant women in different contexts. One of the women is a Mexican migrant who settled in Sonoma County California in the US, and the other a Bulgarian who arrived in Ribera del Duero in the Autonomous Community of Castile and León in Spain. The research used mixed methods, which included the review of various censuses and documentary sources, ethnographic fieldwork and the qualitative technique of the life story to undertake the case studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant women
• glocalization
• changes in gender roles
• Ribera del Duero
• Sonoma

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Martha Judith Sánchez, PhD Social Sciences, El Colegio de México, Mexico. Master in Anthropology, Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México. Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, UNAM. Fulbright Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Center for Latin American Studies (1997–1999), Visiting Scholar at Universidad de Valencia (2009–2010) and Universidad de Burgos, Spain (2013). Tenured Professor at the the posgraduate Program Social and Political Sciences and Anthropology, at UNAM. Recent publications: Martha Judith Sánchez and Inmaculada Serra, forthcoming 2017, ‘Migración y reemplazo étnico en la viticultura: rumanos y búlgaros en Ribera de Duero’, Migraciones Internacionales, 33 (9); Martha Judith Sánchez Gómez and Sara María Lara Flores, coords, 2015, Los programas de trabajadores agrícolas temporales ¿una solución a los retos de las migraciones en la globalización? México: IISUNAM; Sara Ma. Lara Flores, Jorge Pantaleón and Martha J. Sánchez Gómez, coords, 2015, Hacia el otro norte. Mexicanos en Canadá, Buenos Aires: CLACSO; Martha Judith Sánchez and Raquel Ofelia Barceló Quintal Gracias a la Virgen de Juquila y a la Coyota llegamos bien. Prácticas religiosas en comunidades migrantes oaxaqueñas y en los lugares de asentamiento. In: Elaine Levineed, ed., Experiencias de migrantes indígenas mexicanos y guatemaltecos en Estados Unidos, México, CISAN-UNAM, 2015; Martha Judith Sánchez Gómez, 2014, Reflexiones sobre la movilidad de la población indígena en México: desde la integración hasta la globalización, Amérique Latine Histoire et Mémoire. Les Cahiers ALHIM, 27, http://alhim.revues.org/4923; ISSN electrónico 1777–5175; Martha Judith Sánchez and Inmaculada Serra Yoldi, cords, 2013, Ellas se van. Mujeres migrantes en Estados Unidos y España, IIS-UNAM, México.

Inmaculada Serra Yoldi, PhD Political Science and Sociology from the Complutense University of Madrid. Degree in Political Science and Sociology at the same university. Professor of the Department of Sociology at the University of Valencia and Research Institute of University Women’s Studies at the University of Valencia. Professor of the Master ‘Gender and Equality Policies’ and Master ‘Sociology and Anthropology of Public Policy’ of this university. Visiting Scholar University of Firenze and La Sapienza in Rome. Member of Migration Observatory at the University of Lecce (Italy). Member of the editorial board of the journal Sociological Critique of Italy. Latest publications: 2010, The Chicago School of Sociology, Siglo XXI; 2010, ‘The economic value of volunteer work: methodological analysis and application to Spain’, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 40 (5) 873–895; 2012, Maghrebi immigrant women: new profiles, new identities, Editorial Comares; 2013, ‘Work immigrant and wine production. The case of the Ribera del Duero’, Methaodos, 1 (1) digital format, 96–113, http://dx.doi.org/10.17502/m.rcs.v1i1.27; 2013, They leave, migrant women in the US and Spain, Ed. IIS, UNAM, Mexico; 2013, Gender violence in the population of immigrant women, Editorial Tirant Lo Blanch; 2014, ‘From family work to contracting workers. Ethnic segmentation of the labor market: the case of Ribera de Duero’. I n: Acts of VII Andalusian Congress of Sociology. Cities imagined. Livable Cities Spain: Málaga University; forthcoming 2017, ‘Migration and ethnic replacement in viticulture: Romanians and Bulgarians in Ribera de Duero’, RevistaMigraciones Internacionales, 9 (2).

ORCID

Martha Judith Sánchez Gómez http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7389-9542

Inmaculada Serra Yoldi http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7002-6247

Notes

1. A first version of this section in Sánchez and Serra 2013a, pp. 3–5.

2. Index/Ratio of femininity of the population, defined as the number of women per 100 men belonging to a given area on January 1 of each year (INE, Demographic indicators).

3. The National Institute of Statistics does not present disaggregated data for all the countries in South America for 1996. It only presents disaggregated data for Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela but not for Colombia, Ecuador and other countries, which we assume are included in a epigraph entitled Resto de nacionalidades de América del Sur.

4. On January 1 2007, Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU and since then, the new EU citizens have been able to enter and reside in Spain like the nationals of any European Union state.

5. The Employment Service of the Junta de Castilla y León provides information on the number of contracts rather than the staff employed. A single person may be given several employment contracts in the same season.

6. Not the respondent’s real name.

7. The Agreement between the Kingdom of Spain and the Republic of Bulgaria on the regulation and management of labor migration flows between the two countries was signed in December 2003. BOE, no. 299 (Viruela 2008).

8. Data from INE, Estadísticas de las Migraciones, first half of 2015.

9. The text excerpts correspond to ‘Tatyana’s’ life story. For this reason, her name will not be given in successive excerpts.

10. Data from the Encuesta de Población Activa (EPA), published by the National Statistics Institute (INE) 2009.

11. Taken from the website http://sonomawine.com/learn/history/ [Accessed 13 August 2015].

12. Department of Finance, State of California.

13. Not the respondent’s real name.

14. We thank ‘Laura’ for all her support, confidence and interviews over the years.

15. The life story was compiled as part of the project ‘Process of recreation and creation of new identities among the grape farm workers of the Napa and Sonoma Counties’ UC-MEXUS- Conacyt project, and successive meetings and talks about her life have been taken up in recent years as part of the ‘A personal story as a window to understanding migration’ project funded by PAPIIT 2015–2017.

16. Entregos is the name given to food orders that have already been agreed on and have to made and taken to the place where they were requested.

17. The text excerpts correspond to ‘Laura’s’ life story. For this reason, we will not indicate the author’s name in successive excerpts.

18. Traque is the name given by Mexicans to the laying of railroads in the United States.

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported by CONACYT (Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología) ‘CB 182648 The expansion of wine growing areas and immigrant labor. A comparative study of three countries: United States, Spain and Portugal’.