Event Description
Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Honduran migrant women who, after being rerouted from Central American migration corridors, now work as live-in caregivers (internas) for the elderly in Valencia, Spain, this talk introduces the concept of "intimate captivity" — a form of confinement produced not through walls or checkpoints, but through the very bonds of care, gratitude, and love that these women are expected to sustain. Tracing this concept across the border regime, the domestic spaces where they labor, and the transnational, digital motherhood they practice from a distance — where phones become sites of both connection and surveillance, generating persistent guilt and the fear of being seen as a "bad mother" from thousands of kilometers away — the talk shows how care work in Spain and mothering across the Atlantic converge into a single, exhausting, and often invisible affective labor. It closes by turning to the small, weekend "micro-worlds of resistance" — a shared rented flat, a Sunday meal, a night of dancing — through which these women partially reclaim moments of freedom and selfhood, insisting that life inside intimate captivity is still a life worth living and defending.
Event Speaker
Yaatsil Guevara González, Junior Professor of Migration and the Americas at the University of Heidelberg
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required for guests without an active Columbia University ID via the event webpage. Please email [email protected] with any quwations.
Hosted by the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia University.
