Women migrants on the Brasil/Venezuela border: marriages, care and the powers of family practice

Abstract

Migration in border countries is characterized by different times of movement of people who cross the border to another country, marry foreigners, and construct transnational families. They keep ties to their places of origin and reorganize their family and affective ties in their new places of transit/residence where work opportunities make up part of life strategies. In this scene, the family becomes a project that is constantly constructed and reevaluated, renewing varied practices of proximity and distance between people that are “considered to be of the family”. It describes the Brazilian/Venezuelan border in the Pacaraima and Santa Elena de Uiarén observing the occurrence of intercultural and transnational marriages in which Brazilian women marry more frequently with Venezuelan men; transnational search for work, education health and income transfers; and the ways in which migrant women reorganize their lives. Case studies identify a variety of gender relation configurations which demonstrate how practices of distancing or bringing closer persons considered to be family creates stages of conflict and negotiation of power concerning representations and life experiences that turn out to be restrictive to women who are trying to establish a positive image of themselves and of their experience.