Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios: A decolonial feminist geographical methodology to conduct research with migrant women

ABSTRACT

Global North migration studies have historically been marked by colonising discourses partially stemming from methodological nationalism tendencies and a limited engagement with the body. In particular, Anglophone studies on intimate partner violence against migrant women have largely reproduced problematic gendered culturalist representations, which may be symptomatic of a methodological scarcity of research with, for and/or by – rather than about migrants. Expanding on methodological attempts to counter these trends, this paper proposes a decolonial feminist geographical praxis for migration studies, which builds on existing efforts to decolonise feminist geographical methodologies. Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios is a travelling methodology to conduct decolonial feminist geographical research with migrant women. As a Brazilian woman researching Latin American women’s experiences of intimate and state violence(s) and resistance in England, I implemented this methodology in a Global North context of COVID-19 restrictions. Mobilising and adapting Cuerpo-Territorio (“Body-Territory”), as an embodied Latin American ontology and as a method, I methodologically advance critical migration studies and feminist geopolitics’ perspectives towards a decolonial direction. This approach decolonises migration research by proposing a multi-scalar methodological framework that centres on a decolonial feminist understanding of the body, as the first territory-scale of analysis and from which knowledge is critically produced.

KEYWORDS:

• Travelling cuerpo-territorios;
• decolonial feminist geography;
• violence; migration;
• COVID-19

Introduction

When you are abused physically or psychologically, the pain is felt all over the body. My body is like my world; when my world is attacked, it is felt on the arms, legs, and everywhere, because everything is interconnected. […] It is a feeling of rage, pain, hate, fear, it is a mix of everything.

(Eduarda, mixed-race Brazilian woman, 32 years)

Eduarda¹ is a working-class mixed-race Brazilian (cis) woman who migrated to London with an EU family visa to join her middle-class white Brazilian husband, who was also an Italian national. He abused her physically, psychologically, emotionally, and economically in Brazil and after migration. Once in England, these forms of violence worsened and became compounded by (state-sponsored) intimate border violence – a term I conceptualise elsewhere to refer to intimate forms of violence that directly stem from the state border violence of the UK immigration system and its necropolitical operating logic (Lopes-Heimer Forthcoming). Eduarda was constantly reminded of her visa dependency by her husband, who attempted to use this as a tool of control, repeatedly saying that he “brought her here”. In Eduarda’s words above, she suggests how the various forms of violence she experienced were felt and imprinted on her body, as she reflected on the map she crafted as part of my study (see Figure 1). On her map, she identified, with number 7, several parts of her body that were marked by violence(s), and with number 8 those where she found strength and power to resist these. As she reasserted, her body is her “world” and when one part of it is under attack, her whole body is affected. This suggests an understanding of the body as her first territory, in line with the Latin American concept and method of Cuerpo-Territorio (“Body-Territory”) (Cabnal 2010; Hernández and Tania 2016; Zaragocin and Angela Caretta 2020) which conceives of bodies in their totality and as part of an ontological continuum with territories. Cuerpo-Territorio has been mobilised and implemented as part of my PhD research methodology – which is the main focus of this paper.

Figure 1. “Today my suffering is on this map as healing, as an ongoing practice” – Eduarda’s Cuerpo Territorio (Photograph by Nina Franco, reproduced with the research participant’s permission).

My PhD research explored the interconnections between Latin American women’s experiences of intimate partner violence and state violence in England (particularly in London) as well as their resistance strategies to these. This article focuses on a specific tenet of my wider methodology, which also involved three months of participant observation within the London-based charity Latin American Women’s Aid,² together with the experience of having worked there for nearly four years. Through this organisation, I recruited and interviewed ten Latin American front-line workers and twenty Latin American women survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV). The participating survivors were all cis women from nine different Latin American countries, they were from various but mostly mixed racial backgrounds, the majority were working-class, and heterosexual. Although most of them held regularised immigration status when my research was conducted, many were undocumented or in a precarious and dependent immigration situation in the past when they experienced IPV.³ Engaging with a decolonial feminist understanding of coloniality (Lugones 2008; Quijano 2000) at material and discursive levels, my project aimed to unveil the ways intimate and state forms of violence are underpinned by a multi-scalar continuum of colonial, racist, and patriarchal bordering and territorialisation processes. Whilst these operate at multiple scales in relational ways, I particularly focused on how they penetrate and affect the intimate and embodied scales.

The Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios methodology I developed for my study adapts the Cuerpo-Territorio method to operate remotely in response to the challenges of undertaking fieldwork during the COVID-19 pandemic.⁴ Planned and implemented together with my friend Nina Franco,⁵ an Afro-Brazilian visual artist and activist, as part of an art-research collaborative project,⁶ its key methodological innovation revolves around the creative incorporation of technological and logistical tools/services (Lopes-Heimer and Franco 2020). As part of this method, participants were asked to draw their silhouette on a body-size piece of paper, then write and draw on them as they reflected on their embodied spatialised experiences. Making use of video, postal services, and online video-conference meetings, participants were able to carry out the activity individually at home, whilst subsequently being offered a virtual space for debriefing, connection, and dialogue. The invitation of migrant survivors to craft their maps individually and privately at home meant they were in full control of their time and space and able to sit with and reflect on their embodied memories, emotions, and sensations relating to their lived experiences across and within various territory-scales.

Expanding on critical migration, feminist political geography and geopolitics perspectives, in this paper I advance Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios as an embodied decolonial feminist methodology to research migrant women’s multi-scalar experiences of intimate and state violence (s) and resistance, in a Global North context marked by COVID-19 restrictions (Amelina and Faist 2012; Hyndman 2012; De Genova 2013; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Williamson 2015; B. Anderson 2019). I propose to move theory and methodology together towards a decolonial feminist geographical praxis for migration, which builds on existing efforts to decolonise feminist geographical methodologies (Hernández and Tania 2016; Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo 2017a; Colectivo de Geografía Crítica 2018; Zaragocin and Angela Caretta 2020; Hernández, Agustina Diaz Lozano, and Elizabeth Ruales Jurado 2020). As a travelling, remote methodology to conduct decolonial feminist geographical research with migrant women, Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios builds on and adapts Cuerpo-Territorio.

In the next section, I provide an overview of Cuerpo-Territorio, contextualising its origins, ways that it has been deployed as well as setting out its decolonial feminist potential as a method for migration when applied in an embodied, relational, and accountable way. I then move on to review some of the migration literature and its conceptual-methodological propositions to situate my position and the contribution I aim to advance with Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios. The last half of this article is dedicated to outlining how I implemented this methodology in the context of my PhD research and discussing some methodological insights that emerged through this experience. I discuss and argue specific ways in which this methodology has done important decolonial feminist work and contributed to marginalising universalist Western knowledge foundations whilst illuminating multiple scales at which border violence and resistance to it can operate. In my conclusion, I summarise my main original contribution and reflect on the possibility to implement Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios in other areas of migration research.

Engaging with Cuerpo-Territorio through embodied relational accountability

The notion of Territorio Cuerpo-Tierra (“Territory body-earth or body-territory”) has emerged as a political slogan by Indigenous Maya-Xinka women in Guatemala and is central to the communitarian feminist political project (Cabnal 2010), as well as to Latin American women’s territorial struggles more broadly (Ulloa 2016; Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo 2017b, 2014; Hernández and Tania 2016). As Lorena Cabnal (2010) contends, Cuerpo-Tierra represents an ontological continuum between earth and bodies. As this author explains, this concept bridges the ongoing struggles of Indigenous women to defend their territories against extractive exploitation with the historical violation of Indigenous women’s bodies. Apart from being a cosmological and epistemological proposal, it is also a political call to defend and reclaim the body as a territory, a base to promote life and dignity whilst resisting capitalist, patriarchal exploitation (Cabnal 2010).

Cuerpo-Territorio has become a central ontological base for Latin American knowledge production committed to a decolonial praxis. Working alongside Indigenous and peasant communities, various Latin American geographic collectives have operationalised this as a mapping method in significant and innovative ways. During a research visit to Ecuador in the spring of 2019, I had the opportunity to meet members of the Colectivo de Geografía Crítica de Ecuador,⁷ the Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo⁸ (Ecuador), and Geobrujas (Mexico) (among others) and gain a more practical understanding of their work at the Autonomous Geographies Encounter hosted by Colectivo de Geografía Crítica de Ecuador. These theoretical and embodied encounters as well as the methodological guides published by these collectives informed my implementation and adaptation of Cuerpo-Territorio as a method to research migration experiences (see Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo 2017a; Colectivo de Geografía Crítica 2018; Geobrujas 2018). Cuerpo-Territorio has flourished in its hemispherical travels across the Americas (Zaragocin and Angela Caretta 2020; Mollett 2021; Haesbaert 2020; Satizábal and Zurita Forthcoming), and likewise moved and migrated with my own body to London.

Cuerpo Territorio presents itself as an ontological and methodological base to counter what Latin American authors have conceptualised as internal colonialism in its cultural/intellectual dimension (Casanova 2006; Rivera Cusicanqui et al. 2016), intellectual colonialism (Fals Borda 1979) or coloniality of knowledge (Quijano 1992). Cuerpo-Territorio helps to marginalise and displace Western epistemology from its universal positioning, whilst creating the conditions for feminist decolonial thinking to emerge. This is because it methodologically builds on an embodied, decolonial feminist ontology that de-links/detaches from the European paradigm of “rationality/modernity” (Quijano 1992; Walsh 2007; Maldonado-Torres 2008; Ramón Grosfoguel 2007; Gordon 2011; Escobar 2007), whilst recognising the epistemic authority of Indigenous women of Abya Yala⁹ (Cumes 2012; Espinosa-Miñoso 2009).

However, to actualise this shift in the body/geopolitics of knowledge, which is crucial in decolonising epistemologies and methodologies, there must be simultaneous attention paid to the political economy of knowledge (Riveira Cusicanqui 2012). This requires an embodied ethical engagement with subaltern ontological conceptions, epistemologies, and struggles based on which this method emerged. In this sense, it is important to state that Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios has been proposed as an adapted methodology for migration, but not a completely new one. Hence it is an ethical imperative to emphasise Cuerpo-Territorio’s ontological roots in Indigenous communitarian feminism as well as its many methodological travels across Latin America in the praxis of women’s territorial movements, critical/decolonial geography collectives, and scholars.

Even though body-mapping has been used as a methodology for research with undocumented migrants and survivors of violence in the Global North (Gastaldo et al. 2012; Lykes and Crosby 2014), little attention has been paid to the decolonial feminist potential Cuerpo-Territorio offers, nor to how it can be fruitfully combined with feminist geopolitics and critical migration/border studies perspectives. More generally, Global North researchers’ use of body-mapping as storytelling (Gastaldo et al. 2012; de Jager et al. 2016; Coetzee et al. 2017) does not tend to conceive of its process in explicitly political terms nor build on an alternative ontology. As an exception, Sweet and Ortiz Escalante (2017) research on gender violence with Mexican women (in the US and Mexico) engages with Territorio Cuerpo-Tierra, arguing it to be a useful tool to deconstruct Western notions of bodies separated from the land, whilst also blurring the public/private divide.

Indeed, I concur with Zaragocin and Angela Caretta (2020), who suggest that Cuerpo-Territorio as a concept and as a geographical method carries a significant decolonial feminist potential: grounded in the ontological continuum between bodies and territories, it enables the co-production of knowledge in embodied and more accessible ways. I argue, however, that the unlocking of such potential depends on the specific ways in which this method is deployed and/or combined. I am therefore calling for a contextualised, accountable, and relational embodied research practice as this method is deployed and implemented in the migration field (Said 1984; Daigle and Sundberg 2017; Daigle 2018; Ramírez 2018).

As Indigenous scholars contend, relationships and relational accountability are key notions in Indigenous ontologies and research paradigms (Tuhiwai Smith 2002; Wilson 2009; Leeuw, Cameron, and Greenwood 2012). As such, decolonial geographers emphasise the need to situate their embodied positions in relation to the spaces they inhabit through an accountable practice committed to decolonisation and liberation struggles (Daigle and Sundberg 2017; Daigle 2018; Ramírez 2018). As Leeuw, Cameron, and Greenwood (2012, 188) suggest, nurturing relational accountability must go beyond researchers and research participants or institutional spaces of research evaluation to include friendships, networks of relationships, and other spaces where research and researchers “are themselves constituted.”

As a racialised Brazilian migrant woman researching violence against Latin American women in England, my critical, relational, and embodied sense of accountability underpinned my drive to address methodological issues relating to the study of migrant women’s experiences of intimate and state violence(s) and how they resist to these. My long history of migration as well as experiences of intimate, intra-family, and state violence(s) have drawn me to research this topic from an embodied commitment to social justice. Even as I move to the centre in my position as a PhD researcher at King’s College London, I choose to embrace the margin as a radical place of openness from which I produce knowledge and commit to oppositional struggle (hooks 1989). I embody this commitment by being accountable for my own experiences and the political, professional, and personal relationships that imbued me with trust and enabled me to conduct my study. As an early career migrant/migration scholar based at the core of a former colonial Empire researching migration from the South, I occupy a disruptive yet ambivalent position. Doing research with gendered “colonial immigrants” whilst being a gendered “colonial immigrant” myself (Ramón Grosfoguel, Oso, and Christou 2015) is complex since we share similar experiences and concerns, though our interactions are also crossed by power. Striving to produce critical decolonial/border thinking, therefore, meant recognising our unequal power relation, our similarities as well as differences, listening, and practicing an embodied relational accountability for the design and implementation of my methodology.

Embodied relational accountability has driven me to counter epistemic violence, to search for a method with the potential to become a “crossroads”, a method that can help us live sin fronteras as migrant women – to survive the material, political, symbolic, and academic borderlands, paraphrasing Gloria Anzaldúa (1991). I argue that Cuerpo-Territorio can be this crossroads. As a Global South method that travels and transforms across spatialities and temporalities, it already lives in the in-betweenness, where feminist border thinking is possible. As Lugones (2010, 45) contends, the colonial difference can only be transcended “from a perspective of subalternity, from decolonization, and, therefore, from a new epistemological terrain where border thinking works.”

Decolonising migration methodologies from the body

In this section, I critically review some of the conceptual-methodological tendencies within the migration scholarship. I situate my position within feminist geopolitics and critical migration and border studies, from which I build and advance Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios as a potentially decolonising methodology to investigate migration experiences.

Much of migration studies have been historically driven by a colonial bias or a north-centric view conceiving of migration as an exceptional problem to be tackled, and the nation-state as a naturalised, bounded entity (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002; Ramón Grosfoguel, Oso, and Christou 2015; B. Anderson 2019). This is at least partially due to historical blindness towards colonialism in migration research and its lack of engagement with decolonial and post-colonial theories, which helped pave the way for methodological nationalism (Lucy and Turner 2021; Tudor 2018; Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002). Post-war immigration integration theories uncritically put forward what Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002, 302) have termed methodological nationalism: “the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of the modern world.” This assumes the nation as an integrated and stable territory with a somewhat homogenous community, whilst migrants are seen as security threats, cultural others, and social deviants whose integration becomes a major problem to be studied.

Attempts to go beyond methodological nationalism have led to a flourishing of studies in the past decades adopting a transnational migration framework that moves away from the nation-state as the scalar focus of empirical analysis (Amelina et al. 2012; Amelina and Faist 2012; Glick Schiller 2015; B. Anderson 2019). However, as Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2002) note, some transnational studies have continued to accept a view of the world as divided into nations, reifying transnational migrant communities and/or overlooking interactions across migrant and non-migrant communities. The contribution of Latin American migration scholars investigating transnational cities (Besserer 2016), spaces (Román-Velázquez and Retis 2021), religious communities (Levitt and de la Torre 2018; Sheringham 2013) and families (Herrera 2016) have been crucial in surpassing these, as have been critical feminist analyses of the role of migrant women on global care chains (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2010; Herrera 2011; Malgesini 2004; Vega Solís 2009).

Some studies on gender and migration implementing an engendering transnationalism approach (Mahler and Pessar 2001, 2003) may have, nonetheless, been guilty of reproducing both methodological nationalism and Western feminist views on gender and patriarchy. Investigating how gender identities and “gender ideologies” are challenged, reconfigured, or reinforced through transnational migration processes, these have unintendedly put forward reified culturalist notions of patriarchies linked to specific national/ethnic belongings (see Boehm 2008; McIlwaine 2010; Pessar 2005). Methodologically, the scale of the nation has once again been privileged and treated as a container – now, of “gender ideologies”.

Research on intimate partner violence against racialised migrant women in Anglophone countries has largely exhibited similar problems. Culturalist arguments have led to the portrayal of migrant women as passive victims trapped in their own “patriarchal” culture, contributing to further stereotyping and stigmatising whole migrant communities (Raj and Silverman 2002; Latta and Goodman 2005; Brownridge and Halli 2002). Within this area of study, there is a methodological scarcity of research with, for and/or by – rather than about – migrant women, which often translates into scant reflections on how research findings and representations impact the communities studied. As Ramón Grosfoguel, Oso, and Christou (2015) suggest, uncritical migration scholars tend to neglect the embodied and geopolitical epistemic location from which knowledge is produced, hence risking to reproduce the viewpoint of the coloniser.

Compelling alternative methodological propositions within migration research have, however, continued to firmly oppose methodological nationalism. These include, for example, mobilities approaches, bordering methodologies, methodological de-nationalism, and multi-scalar perspectives (Amelina and Faist 2012; Hyndman 2012; De Genova 2013; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Williamson 2015; B. Anderson 2019). Similarly, there have been efforts to bring the decolonial into migration research (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2010; Walia 2013; Ramón Grosfoguel, Oso, and Christou 2015; Tudor 2018; El-Enany 2020; Lucy and Turner 2021).

The theoretical-methodological contributions to migration scholarship by feminist geopolitics and political geography (Hyndman 2004, 2012; Hiemstra 2017; Sundberg 2011; Kwan and Schwanen 2018; Mitchell-Eaton and Coddington 2022) and critical migration and border studies (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Casas-Cortes et al. 2015; De Genova 2013) are particularly relevant to my approach. With its focus on border regimes, critical migration and border scholars advanced a significant shift in how borders are researched (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015). Grounded in a constructivist de-naturalising approach to borders, the border regime encompasses practices, systems, and discourses that produce and reproduce borders in a more or less ordered manner – though politically contested and changing. Within this perspective, “the border can only be conceptualized as being shaped and produced by a multiplicity of actors, movements and discourses” (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015, 69). Similarly, feminist geopolitics and political geography propose a multi-scalar framework that shifts the overemphasis on the national, engaging with the body as a scale of analysis and source of situated knowledge production (Hyndman 2004). These perspectives converge in their treatment of scales and borders as relational and historically produced rather than seen as pre-given. Calling for engagement with multiple other scales, they effectively de-centre the state (whilst not dismissing it), in particular as they focus on migrant bodies (Hyndman 2004; Mountz 2011; Smith, Swanson, and Gökarıksel 2016; Smith 2020), how borders become embodied (Coddington 2020; Geobrujas-Comunidad; de Geógrafas 2021), migrant subjects and their struggles (De Genova 2002; Dimitris and Tsianos 2013; Álvarez 2017; Cordero, Varela, and Mezzadra 2019; Gil Everaert 2021), non-human actors’ involvement in boundary-making (Sundberg 2011; Pallister-Wilkins 2022); and bordering processes from within and beyond the state’s physical boundaries (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2019; Hyndman 2012; Mountz and Hiemstra 2014; Casas-Cortes et al. 2015; Domenech and Dias 2020).

The Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios methodology I put forward to research migrant women’s experiences builds and expands on these efforts by suggesting a multi-scalar approach that centres on the body and adapts the Latin American Cuerpo-Territorio method. Within this method territories and borders are to be understood as socially, politically, and economically produced as they are traced and mapped onto bodies. Whilst the nation-state continues to be empirically and analytically relevant, it is conceived in constant relation to multiple other scales, from the body to the global. Prioritising the body not only as a scale of analysis but also in the research method, I am methodologically further decolonising feminist geopolitics and critical migration and border studies. Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios combines a decolonial feminist understanding at the global scale (the colonial/modern gender capitalist world system) with a decolonial feminist geographical ontological approach to the body/embodiment – understood in a continuum with territories. I argue that through its practical focus on the body as a method it is possible to practically expand on the “epistemologically situated”, “embodied”, and “accountable” research principles advocated by Hyndman (2004) as she conceptualises feminist geopolitics. Similarly, it aligns and ontologically pushes forward the important methodological propositions of feminist political geographers’ on the use of periscoping to research seemingly hidden topics in the field of borders and migration (Hiemstra 2017; Williams and Coddington 2021). As I bring Cuerpo-Territorio to migration, I build on the rich counter-mapping work of feminist geographers (Whitesell and Faria 2020; Zaragocin et al. 2018; Suárez Val 2021) whilst also uniquely advancing critical migration and border scholars’ use of counter-cartographies as embodied and situated methods for militant research (Casas-Cortes et al. 2015; Casas-Cortes and Cobarrubias 2018; Mason-Deese et al. 2019; Geobrujas-Comunidad; de Geógrafas 2021). Cuerpo-Territorio has been deployed within my methodology as a counter-mapping method that centres bodies: from an embodied position, it maps bodies’ travels and how violent bordering and territorialisation processes at various scales, as well as resistance to these, cross bodies.

The decolonial feminist geographical approach to the body/embodiment, which takes centre stage in this methodology, also requires scholars to interrogate and account for their own embodied relational positioning as they implement the adapted Cuerpo-Territorio. Centring the principle of embodied relational accountability is a methodological effort to counter the risk for Cuerpo-Territorio to be emptied of its decolonial feminist potential as it travels to migration research. If not adapted in contextualised and accountable ways, Cuerpo-Territorio risks de-politicisation, emulating a colonial “move to innocence” and therefore contributing to the metaphorisation of decolonisation (Eve and Wayne Yang 2012, 3).

Cuerpo-Territorios that travel

Inspired by and building on the work of Latin American collectives and scholars, I designed Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios as a methodology to specifically work with Latin American migrant women survivors of intimate and state violence(s). In this section, I discuss this methodology in more detail as well as the various travels Cuerpo-Territorio has taken in the context of my project, conducted in England in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Cuerpo-Territorio has travelled conceptually, methodologically and physically across various scales as part of the implementation of this methodology – from the global, national, local, and virtual scales. Cuerpo-Territorio travelled globally, as a concept (from South to North) as well as locally, as body-size papers that moved across London (and sometimes beyond it) to become survivor-made Cuerpo-Territorio maps at the home of participants and then travelled back into the hands of my collaborator, the visual artist Nina Franco. What also travels are the journeys that participants themselves have taken as migrants, imprinted on their maps as embodied memories, emotions, and sensations. The twenty Latin American women participating in my project were from nine different Latin American countries. Their bodies travelled many journeys, moving across countries, cities, and neighbourhoods with or to join their partners, fleeing intimate partner violence and/or seeking safety and a better future for themselves and their children.

Cuerpo-Territorio is a travelling concept/theory and methodology (Said 1984) within the framework of my project, which moves it from its place of origin to another. Although concepts travel in time and space, as Said (1984) eloquently suggests, when examining travelling theories, it is crucial to be attentive to the risk that they become reified or de-politicised in the new context. Indeed, as Said (2000) also contends, when carefully reconsidered, the process of transplanting a theory – and a method, I would argue – may indeed politicise it.

To ensure that Cuerpo-Territorio remained relevant and attuned to the new political possibilities arising from the new context, I paid careful consideration to the new dynamics at play. Designed as a methodology to be implemented in a Global North migration context, I have tailored Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios to engage with territorialities at multiple scales, recognising both decolonising conceptions of territory and also more traditional ones connected to state territorial border practices (Wastl-Walter and Staeheli 2004; Sandoval, Robertsdotter, and Paredes 2017; Halvorsen 2018).

Due to COVID-19 safety measures, my initial plan for the implementation of this method had to be modified. Since physically meeting in a group workshop was no longer viable, instead, research participants were invited to map their Cuerpo-Territorio at their own home, which was then followed by a video conference debrief session. After considering its particular emotional implications, those who felt comfortable taking part in the activity were sent body-size papers by post. Papers travelled from Nina Franco’s home through London and to other cities, arriving in migrant women’s homes. Following a set of questions, participants drew and wrote their memories, feelings, sensations, and emotions on different parts of their body-silhouettes, crafting their own Cuerpo-Territorio map. These then travelled back to us digitally and physically.

In addition to written instructions with questions to reflect on, participants also received a video in which a Brazilian female survivor of violence performed the mapping activity with Nina. Drawing on the guide by Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo (2017a), the video started with an exploration of the Cuerpo-Territorio notion followed by a step-by-step visual tutorial. After the maps were individually produced at home, participants displayed them digitally in follow-up debriefing sessions by video conference, in which they also reflected on the differences and commonalities of their embodied experiences. This was a fundamental feature of the methodology, useful to firmly ground the activity as an embodied relational practice and a collective diagnosis of healing potential, aligning with core principles associated with Latin American communitarian feminism (Cabnal 2010).

Cuerpo-Territorios in the making

In this section, I briefly outline and discuss the practical steps taken to implement the Cuerpo-Territorio method in the context of the Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios methodology. I then turn to the empirical material to discuss some of the embodied methodological insights arising from this experience. This is, however, far from an exhaustive account of my empirical results, which is beyond the scope of this paper.

Redesigning Cuerpo-Territorio to travel in the COVID-19 context called for greater logistical effort and flexibility whilst also demanding a specific kind of emotional labour which were carefully considered throughout the implementation of this method as these affected everyone involved in the research. As both Nina and I experienced the embodied physical, emotional and mental effects of the pandemic, we tried to anticipate how this new context would also be affecting the health of women participating in the project in various ways. These were Latin American survivors with various intersecting identities and at different stages of their healing journeys, some with childcare responsibilities, most with very limited social networks and emotional support in England. Striving to embody our ethics of care, we sought to be mindful of their circumstances whilst maintaining their agency. Having conducted interviews with participants prior to the body-map activity helped establish rapport and build trust with participants as well as provided important background knowledge to sensitively adapt the activity, conduct the debriefing sessions, and further analyse the maps. With that said, although I do not consider that within this methodology participants must necessarily be interviewed first, this felt ethically important within a project enquiring about experiences of violence.

As a practical step, I called each of the twenty women I previously interviewed to check-in, see how they were and generally explain the proposed changes for this phase of the project. At this stage, one of them already admitted to not feeling well enough to participate. I advised another one not to take part and she agreed, given that she disclosed having returned to live with her abuser. The remaining 18 agreed to receive information by email and were given two weeks to confirm and provide consent. Out of those, 17 confirmed participation and later received written instructions and a video tutorial by email, as well as a body-size paper and markers by post. Eventually, ten women completed their Cuerpo-Territorio maps, which they documented by photograph before posting them back to us.

Combining the individual mapping activity with subsequent group discussions engendered a significant political process of recognition and resignification of bodies. Reflecting on the methodology, many participants identified advantages of carrying out the mapping process privately in their own homes, describing having been able to set their own pace and space, and sit with themselves in their own time with their bodies, feelings, memories, and thoughts. For example, for Amanda, a white middle-class Costa-Rican woman in her 40s, mapping in a group setting “would not have worked in the same way, because by yourself you have more privacy, more space, more silence to think and to remember.” Having experienced severe physical, sexual, emotional, psychological, economic, and state violence(s) upon her body from an early age until late adulthood, the process of mapping was experienced in intense and visceral ways (see Figure 2 – where she was marked with number 6 parts of her body affected by various forms of violence). She took around three hours to complete her map, allowing herself time to take breaks, go out to smoke a cigarette, sit and process the questions. For Tainara, a white working-class Brazilian woman also in her 40s, it took even longer, nearly a week. She left the paper on the floor for three days until she asked her daughter to help her draw her body silhouette, and another two days passed before she proceeded with the mapping process. As she explained, she was preparing herself and waiting for the right moment as she was aware that mapping her Cuerpo-Territorio would surface old feelings and potentially trigger uncomfortable bodily responses – such as the strong migraines she used to experience as a result of her ex-husband’s post-separation harassment.

Figure 2. “This is the reflection of what it is to survive” – Amanda’s Cuerpo Territorio (Photograph by Nina Franco, reproduced with the research participant’s permission).

Participants recounted how conducting the mapping in isolation enabled them to deeply submerge into their thoughts, bodily experiences, and feelings, which affected them differently according to their healing stage. Their experiences and reflections were not homogenous – they converged but also significantly differed at times. Some women lived their mapping process in visceral ways, describing temporarily experiencing bodily symptoms in its aftermath (such as headaches, sadness, and fatigue). Others considered it lighter and more reflective in comparison to the interview, where they verbally recounted their experiences in more detail. For example, for Lorena, a working-class Indigenous descendant Brazilian woman who experienced extreme levels of state and intimate border violence – intersecting with psychological, emotional, physical, and economic abuse from her British ex-husband; mapping her body turned out to be less emotionally intense and more reflective than the interview.

I was afraid to do the mapping and that everything would come back again because the interview is quite intense. But it was not like that, it was ok … I reflected a lot about everything but there wasn’t that kind of heavyweight.

(Lorena, Indigenous descendant Brazilian woman, 30 years)

The mapping activity allowed Lorena to reflect on the embodied ways (intimate) border violence suffocated her throat/dreams and affected her stomach, as a result of ongoing anxiety. She identified this not only with her husband’s abuse but also with the “Home Office”, seen as an institutional source/perpetrator of this ultimately state form of violence (see numbers 2, 6, and 7 in Figure 3). On her map, it is also possible to see how she resisted these by focusing on her “work” (number 8) as she actively waited, years within her abusive relationship, and then months after separation, for her “freedom” (number 4) in the form of an Indefinite Leave to Remain (IRL) status.

Figure 3. “When I think about what happened too much I feel it on my whole body” – Lorena’s Cuerpo Territorio (Photograph by Nina Franco, reproduced with the research participant’s permission).

Nearly all women spoke about the pain of remembering, associated with the act of re-living violent experiences, something which looked different for each of them. Some considered themselves to be slowly healing or having indeed already healed, describing having experienced the mapping process as a less painful type of remembering. For them, visualising everything their bodies went through was shocking but also made them feel stronger. They were able to put into perspective how much they had to survive and yet how far they are still determined to go. Thinking through the questions also caused them to remember things they had forgotten, recognising which parts of their bodies healed and which ones were still in need of care – ultimately aiding their self-learning and embodied healing journey. This was the case for Jaqueline, a working-class mixed-race Brazilian woman, whose words suggest how through mapping her Cuerpo-Territorio she became more aware of her body, how violence(s) affected it and where she still needed to seek healing.

I thought the mapping process of responding to the questions and identifying what I was feeling on the body was very interesting because these are the parts where it really affects you. It starts revealing your sensibilities, where you still may need to find healing.

(Jaqueline, mixed-race Brazilian woman, 45 years)

For other participants, the mapping experience turned out to be much more painful, with some feeling they went back in time and/or realised that some of their embodied pains were still with them. Two participants repeatedly described how they both felt like “the time never passed” and that the violence they went through would stay with them forever, that they would “always feel the same.”

Listening to these discussions also triggered specific reactions in my own body, such as anxiety, chest pain, and headaches. I felt troubled by upholding an ethical sense of responsibility and a commitment to respecting the women’s agency and capacity to choose to get involved as well as withdraw participation. As a researcher, it was hard to hear how painful the exercise was for some of the participants. This is something that continues to give me pause. However, later in our conversations, I understood that those women decided to participate with an awareness that it would be difficult, in the hope that their stories could ultimately travel to and help other women like them.

Moreover, some of the participants reiterated that even though mapping was hurtful and visceral, they would do it again and recommend other women in their lives do it too. For example, Hermana, a middle-class white Mexican woman explained that although extremely painful, the mapping process was useful to recognise that her life story is not only defined by violence and suffering but also by resistance, community, happy moments, and places. She experienced psychological, emotional, economic, and intimate border violence from her white, middle-class English husband, which intersected with state forms of violence (particularly institutional violence at the family court), and the effects of these were still being felt on her body. In Figure 4, it is possible to see how Hermana’s body seems to have been overtaken by CPTSD signs in the form of generalised stress, fear, anxiety, fatigue, racing thoughts, loneliness, desperation, sadness, and insomnia, in addition to chronic physical pain on her foot and other physical symptoms. As she mapped her body, Hermana realised that even though she is strong and resilient she also needs help to heal, something she is now determined to seek.

Figure 4. “Everything takes its toll on the body” – Hermana’s Cuerpo Territorio (Photograph by Nina Franco, reproduced with the research participant’s permission).

It is really impressive what living in fear can do to your body. But I am determined to heal, I want to become a story showing that it is possible to heal completely. I’m convinced that I want to pursue that.

(Hermana, white Mexican woman, 38 years)

Through women’s maps, their collective spatialised resistance strategies to violence became visibly manifested in viscerally embodied ways that connected people, places, and communities across scales and temporalities. Overlapping multiple scales, women drew memories of places and people who have given them strength and helped them resist, heal, and move forward in the face of violence (see, for example, Hermana’s drawings on her body’s chest, marked with numbers 5 and 8 on Figure 4). These were sometimes located outside England, providing them emotional strength from afar – and, often, also unknowingly.

By mapping, not only their experiences of violence but also resistance, the exercise was at least somewhat an empowering process whereby pain and suffering, as well as strength and resilience, could be recognised and put into perspective. In particular, being part of nature and feeling in connection to it emerged as a source of healing energy for participants, suggesting a particular embodiment of the Cuerpo-Tierra ontological conception of body and nature in a continuum, as a whole (Cabnal 2010). Just below her chest, Gisela, a mixed-race working-class migrant woman from Chile, who experienced psychological, emotional, and (intimate) border violence from her white middle-class English husband, drew a sun and the beach of Mallorca (see Figure 5). This is where her cousin lives and where she wanted to move once she acquired an independent immigration status: “The beach helped me a lot, the sun, being part of nature, to be in nature. It was really beautiful and it was really good for me. Being able to feel connected. The salty water cleans you.” Jaqueline also drew a beach and sun just above her shoulder and close to her neck, where she reported feeling pain due to stress – as a result of intimate partner violence combined with living under the fear of being undocumented and destitute as a single mother for more than ten years. As a Brazilian migrant woman from Rio de Janeiro (a city known for its long coastline), she explained that she pictures a sunny beach when she thinks of a relaxing place; it is what makes her feel good.

Figure 5. “Healthy mind, healthy body” – Gisela’s Cuerpo Territorio (Photograph by Nina Franco, reproduced with the research participant’s permission).

The participants welcomed meeting other women during the follow-up discussions, they told their stories through their maps, recognising each other in the differences and similarities of their embodied narratives. This virtual space was a powerful platform for women to connect, listen, feel validated and look up to each other, where they generously provided comfort, words of advice and hope. They found connecting dots even when their experiences drastically differed from one another, suggesting insidious ways that collective resistance strategies emerge from the embodied effects of violence and migration.

Displacing Western rationality and moving towards a decolonial feminist direction

Having presented how Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios has been implemented in the context of my research, in this section I discuss how Western research premises and colonial impetus are radically contraposed by this methodology. Based on this practical experience, I argue that Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios effectively responds to the need to decolonise methodologies in migration research. In particular, it helps us move beyond methodological nationalism by practically and ontologically advancing feminist geopolitics and critical migration scholars’ perspectives on borders, bodies, and scales towards a decolonial direction.

Re-centring an ontology based on the geo/body-political location of Indigenous women, Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios helps confront the false Western separation between theory and practice. As a political slogan arising from Indigenous women’s alternative ontologies (Cabnal 2010; Ulloa 2016; Hernández and Tania 2016), Cuerpo-Tierra/Cuerpo-Territorio mobilises theory and practice in ways that match the imperatives of decolonial feminist epistemologies and methodologies (Curiel 2014; Espinosa-Miñoso 2014; Lugones 2020; Zaragocin and Angela Caretta 2020). As argued by Curiel (2014), moving beyond the binary between theory and activism is crucial considering that historically, Indigenous, Black and racialised women have produced knowledge and alternative epistemologies directly connected to their lived experiences, personal and collective struggles (e.g. Collins 2000; Cumes 2012; Lerma and Ruth 2014).

The implementation of Cuerpo-Territorio as an enacted travelling embodied participatory methodology has practically brought forward a decolonial feminist conception of bodies and embodied objectivity in research that significantly contraposes ontological fractures upon which Western rationality is constructed as a universal option (Lander 2000; Castro-Gómez 2005; Dussel 2000). In particular, it contrasts Descartes’ foundational separation of body and mind and objectivity prescriptions striping the knowing subject from sensorial and empirical experiences, necessarily detached from the object of study (Castro-Gómez 2005; Lander 2000; Maldonado-Torres 2007). Within this methodology, migrant women are invited to actively reflect and map their own lived experiences concerning their gendered, racialised, class-based and geopolitically situated embodiments. They are therefore recognised as epistemic subjects instead of being treated as “raw material” to be “objectively” studied – as has historically been the case in research with racialised people from the South (Tuhiwai Smith 2002; Rivera Cusicanqui 2018; Tilley 2017).

The above mentioned Western ontological separations were also countered in the ways Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios enabled migrant women to conceive body and territory as the same and body and mind as a whole. This understanding deeply resonated with migrant women’s embodied experiences of violence and resistance within and across various territorial border struggles. A non-hierarchical understanding of intersecting forms of violence emerged as connected and felt through various territorialities. Violence inflicted on the external physical body was understood to affect the mind, and what was done to the mind was understood to affect the physical body. Participants situated their minds not as detached or above, but as part of the body and in an interconnected relational continuum with all its other organs, feelings, sensations, and emotions. Something which is clearly illustrated in the opening quote by Eduarda in the introduction of this paper.

Conceiving bodies and territories in a relational continuum, Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios practically displaced the Western separation between body and nature, whilst politicising and denaturalising territories and borders. My participants’ discussions evidenced the particular ways in which the migration experience speaks to the notion of the body as women’s first territory, where many other territories at multiple scales cross and meet in a relational continuum. When migrant women’s bodies are violated, so are the territories they inhabit, whilst the territories they travel and inhabit are often controlled and contained through their bodies. Prioritising the body as the first territory-scale, not only theoretically but also methodologically, enabled critical interrogation and negotiation of the multiple borderlands emerging through our migrant bodies, making room for research participants to actively co-produce knowledge.

Starting from the scale of the body as a decolonising conception of territory, Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios methodologically disrupted nationalist tendencies whilst effectively engaging other territorial scales and how they are produced through and mark the body, including more traditional ones connected to state territorial border powers. This methodology demonstrated its potential to unveil the functioning of power and to connect multi-scalar experiences of intimate, structural, and institutional violence with ongoing coloniality, revealing how these are spatially registered and manifested in embodied ways. This has had the effect of simultaneously de-emphasising separations between intimate and state violence, by revealing the similarly embodied ways in which these are experienced in a continuum (Kelly 1988), facilitating reflections on their shared systemic roots.

As migrant women ontologically conceived body and territory as unified, their maps made visible how border violence extends from national to women’s body-territories in ways that make (state-sponsored) intimate border violence visible (Lopes-Heimer Forthcoming). Women’s maps revealed how their Cuerpo-Territorios travelled across and through spatial, symbolic, and political territorial borders – external and, the subtle but incisive, internal ones. Those journeys became imprinted on their bodies as border violence, in its state as well as intimate and embodied manifestations. Indeed, Lorena’s map (see Figure 3), discussed in the previous section, powerfully illustrates that.

I argue that this multi-scalar embodied methodological approach to studying migrant women’s experiences is needed because it is the body that travels with migration and it is our bodies that connect the multiple territories to which we belong or may never belong to – because of the intersecting meanings assigned and projected onto bodies. The multiple violence(s) migrant women are subjected to, as well as the ways we resist these, become imprinted upon our bodies, carrying and connecting multi-scalar spatialities and temporalities. As we move and cross material, economic, social, and cultural borders, our bodies become marked by specific socio-spatial processes of capitalist, gendered racialisation and (re)territorialisation which can be well-understood through Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios’s multi-scalar focus on embodiment (Longhurst 1995; Moss and Dyck 2003; Pile 2010; Zaragocin and Angela Caretta 2020). With migration, the body registers the violent borderlands that we come to live in as migrant women, and it is from the body that we may struggle to survive them (Anzaldúa 1991). As the bodies of women participating in my research show, as they migrate and settle in the Global North, they carry the South within, from which they resist as they continue to live under the abyssal line in the zone of non-being, in the colonised periphery of the modern, colonial, gendered, capitalist world system (Fanon 2021; Santos 2016a, 2016b; Ramon Grosfoguel 2016; Lugones 2008).

Within this methodology, mapping and resisting from the Cuerpo-Territorio have been approached not only as a research method but as a political act of bodily autonomy reasserting the right to our Cuerpo-Territorios – as originally intended by Lorena Cabnal (2010). As Cabnal (2010) contends, Cuerpo-Territorio invites us to consciously rethink our bodies as full of corporeal and ancestral memory. In the diasporic Global North context in which this method has been re-designed and implemented, the invitation was embraced by migrant survivors: through their mapping, they unveiled a deep awareness of embodied painful histories, feelings, emotions, and scars alongside their bodily strengths and potentialities. The conversations between survivors surfaced past pains but also strength and wisdom, something which, as bell hooks (1989) suggests, may often be yielded through suffering. In this sense, Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios can be conceived as a decolonial feminist methodological tool on several fronts, including in its commitment to refusal (Simpson 2007; Eve and Wayne Yang 2014; Mitchell-Eaton and Coddington 2022) to do research that only recognises and centres suffering as a measure of authenticity, ignoring the hope and wisdom often concealed underneath those narratives of pain (hooks 1989; Tuck 2009).

Conclusion

In this paper, I expanded efforts to decolonise geographical methodologies into the field of migration research. Refuting methodological nationalism, and responding to calls for migration scholars to seriously engage with decolonial and postcolonial perspectives and the scale of the body, I methodologically advanced critical migration studies, feminist political geography, and feminist geopolitics’ perspectives towards a decolonial direction.

I built on the Latin American Indigenous notion of Cuerpo-Territorio (Cabnal 2010; Colectivo Miradas Críticas del Territorio desde el Feminismo 2017a; Hernández and Tania 2016; Zaragocin and Angela Caretta 2020), adapting it as a concept and a method to operate remotely to grasp complex experiences of migration. Drawing on my own need to carry out fieldwork during the COVID-19 pandemic, Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios is a methodology that attends to the social distancing requirements of this moment, potentially being useful to research other contexts of constrained mobility. Therefore it can lend itself well to the purposes of feminist periscoping methodological strategies interested in researching migration topics which are seemingly hard to access (Hiemstra 2017; Williams and Coddington 2021).

Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios may be suitable to investigate Global North contexts of migration in which the coloniality of borders is ever more present but reshaping through various processes of (re)territorialisation. This was specifically designed to grasp how, in the context of the British hostile environment, an ever more dispersed border regime was operating at multiple scales, in particular, at the intimate and embodied ones. Since my study, there have been significant and fast changes in the UK’s border regime as a result of the pandemic geopolitical developments and the Brexit transition period coming to an end in December 2020. There is, therefore, scope to use this methodology to map and trace how violence(s) triggered by COVID-19 and the post-Brexit scenario have been impacting migrant bodies since then.

Even though this methodology has been developed with survivors of intimate partner violence who migrated from South to North, it could possibly be expanded to research with other migrant groups and to investigate South-South migration. As I emphasise the “travelling” character of this methodology, I encourage it to keep travelling, in particular to Latin America, where it indeed came from. Central to this methodology was the adoption of an embodied perspective to understand the body as the first scale from which scholars and research participants produce knowledge, and from which it is possible and necessary to enact an embodied relational practice of accountability in research (Daigle 2018; Tuhiwai Smith 2002). That said, as Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios travel to be used in other migration studies, it is paramount, however, that scholars critically engage with the embodied scale from which knowledge is produced – in a relational way that is accountable to migrant subjects, their migratory journeys, and struggles. This would require carefully rethinking this methodology to respond to the needs arising from varied socio-spatial-political embodied contexts it may travel to.

As I conclude this paper, the Cuerpo-Territorio maps produced as part of my research continue travelling beyond the scope of my PhD and in alignment with participants’ wishes that their stories helped raise awareness and reached other women like them. Having carried out Travelling Cuerpo-Territorios from within an art-research collaboration has helped their dissemination among non-academic audiences – something I have been committed to. The artistic outcomes from this project – including the body-territory maps, have been publicly available on the Arts Cabinet website¹⁰ since 2020. They will also be featured at the Science Gallery London at KCL from the end of July 2022 as part of the “Embodied Lines” exhibition and Latin American women will be encouraged to visit and engage with the display through targeted outreach.

Research ethics

Ethics approval to conduct this research was granted by King’s College Research Ethics Committee under the reference number HR-19/20-14,553. Written informed consent was obtained from participants and this included permission to use and disseminate the body-maps they produced.

Acknowledgements

I am deeply thankful to all the Latin American women participating in my research, who trusted me with their stories, emotions, and perspectives. I am also very grateful to the Latin American Women’s Aid, without their generous support this research would not have been possible. Nina Franco’s support and collaboration in adapting and carrying out the mapping activity were also crucial to developing the methodology described in this paper. This occurred as part of an art-research collaborative project funded by the Visual and Embodied Methodologies Network from King’s College London. I thank both my supervisors, Prof Cathy McIlwaine, and Dr Majed Akhter and the co-editor of this special issue, Dr Sofia Zaragocin, for their useful feedback on early drafts of this paper. I also want to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments and suggestions to improve this article. All errors remain mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Brazilian Federal Foundation for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education - CAPES under Grant 88881.175461/2018-01.

Notes on contributors

Rosa Dos Ventos Lopes Heimer

Rosa dos Ventos Lopes Heimer is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. She holds a BSc in Sociology from the Federal University of Bahia and an MSc in Gender, Policy and Inequalities from the LSE. Her doctoral research investigates Latin American migrant women’s experiences of intimate and state violence and resistance in England, particularly in how it relates to coloniality, territoriality, and borders. Adopting a decolonial feminist geographical approach, it explores the ways in which coloniality informs Latin American migrant women’s experiences across multiple scales, starting from and prioritising the body as women’s first territory, to reveal specific dynamics of power, control, and resistance. As a Brazilian migrant woman herself, Rosa has been living in London for nearly a decade, having politically organised and worked with various grassroots migrant women’s organisations and collectives on issues of domestic violence, racism, and the hostile environment against migrants. Her PhD is funded by CAPES Brazil.

Twitter: @Rosaheimer

Notes

1. I have replaced all participants’ names with pseudonyms in order to guarantee their anonymity.

2. LAWA is a by and for Latin American and Black and minoritised women’s organisation specialised in gender-based violence.

3. See a full breakdown of participants’ details in tables 1 and 2 of the Appendix.

4. Although my methodology was adapted in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, my research questions did not change to reflect the ways this new context impacted on violence against migrant women. This is because when the pandemic broke out in March 2020, I was already halfway through my fieldwork.

5. Nina Franco is based in London, where she uses photography and installation to create works reflecting on the intersectionality of race, gender, and migration. See more about her work here: https://www.ninafranco.com/

6. I applied for a grant to undertake a collaborative art-research project with my friend Nina Franco, as part of a wider initiative called Imaging Social Justice developed by the KCL Visual and Embodied Methodologies network and the Arts Cabinet (more details about it can be found on their website). I saw this as an opportunity to amplify the narratives encountered throughout my research in an artistic and accessible way. I provide an extensive reflection on the processes and results emerging from this collaboration in a forthcoming paper.

7. https://geografiacriticaecuador.org/

8. https://territorioyfeminismos.org/

9. The term, from Kuna Indigenous language, has been used to refer to Latin America as a means to reclaim alternative geopolitics recognising the right of indigenous people to self-determine and name their own territories (Santiago 2015; Speed 2017).

10. https://www.artscabinet.org/imagingsocialjustice/rosa-dos-ventos-lopes-heimer-and-nina-franco

Appendix

Table 1. Details of Latin American women survivors participating in the research.

Nationality
Argentina	1
Brazil	9
Chile	1
Colombia	2
Costa Rica	1
Dominican Republic	1
Mexico	2
Paraguay	1
Venezuela	2
Race/Ethnicity
Mixed: Indigenous, Black and White (“parda” in Portuguese)	1
Mixed: Black / “parda”	1
Mixed: Black and White	1
White mixed with Black and Indigenous heritage	1
Mixed: Indigenous and White (one of them was a Guarani native speaker)	8
Indigenous descendant	2
White Hispanic	2
White	4
Class
Working-class in the country of origin and England	15
Middle-class in the country of origin and working class in England	2
Upper-middle class in the country of origin and working class in England	2
Upper-middle class in the country of origin and middle class in England	1
English Level
Beginner	5
Intermediate	8
Fluent	7
Educational Level
Primary school	3
High school	5
Higher Education	10
Postgraduate	2
Sexuality
Heterosexual	16
Bisexual	2
Pansexual	1
Hetero-curious	1
Age
23 yrs	1
30–34 yrs	7
38–45 yrs	7
49–55 yrs	4
63 yrs	1
Occupation
Cleaner	6
Cooking & catering	4
Housekeeper	3
Nanny	2
NGO worker	2
Bartender	1
Student	1
Office job	1
Religion
Christian (catholic or protestant)	16
No religion (but one of them considered herself spiritual)	2
Jewish-evangelic	1
Agnostic	1
Children
Did not have children (one became pregnant with her abuser’s child but lost it due to abuse)	6
Had children with the recent perpetrator	12
Had children but not with the recent perpetrator	2

Table 2. Immigration details of Latin American women survivors participating in the research (20).

Immigration Status
British family visa (2)	Both were previously undocumented and were able to regularise their situation many years after through their child’s status.
EU family visa (3)	1 was previously undocumented and able to apply for this visa through her daughter’s status; 2 were visa dependant on their abusive ex.
EU citizen (no visa required pre-Brexit) (7)	4 had EU citizenship by descent, although one of them spent 5 years undocumented before she was able to apply for her Italian citizenship; 3 had EU citizenship by naturalisation (due to adoption, marriage or length of residency in an EU country).
Indefinite Leave to Remain (7)	4 of them acquired ILR via the Domestic Violence Rule; 3 of them acquired ILR by means of the length of residency in the country.
British Spouse Visa (1)	Separated due to DV but unable to apply to ILR via the DVR rule given lack of evidence of abuse.