Negotiating Trauma and Loss in the Migration Experience Roundtable on Global Woman

Abstract

The author explores the psychological meanings of the migration of women from the global South to the global North, especially when this experience is motivated by political repression as well as economic inequities characteristic of their countries of origin. The article focuses on Latin American women and highlights the psychodynamic complexities inherent in the stages of migration, which entail multiple psychological, as well as social, losses and adaptive challenges. It is argued that in capitalist globalization Third World women contribute a number of caregiving activities in low-waged and informal labor markets in which the individuals, families, and corporate structures of the global North that benefit fail to recognize and reciprocate for the emotional and material needs of the women on whom they increasingly rely for the care of their basic human requirements.