Housing and Living Conditions of Bolivian Migrants in Argentina: Precariousness to Inhabit and Produce

The arrival of Bolivian workers in Argentina is part of the migratory flow from neighboring countries that the country has been receiving since the second half of the 20th century. There are currently more than 3 million foreign inhabitants living in Argentina, most of whom come from neighboring countries, especially Paraguay and Bolivia (DNP, 2022). One of the main activities carried out by migrants from Bolivia is the primary production of fresh vegetables. Since the late 1970s, they have settled in productive spaces located around cities, known as ‘green belts’ (Barsky, 2005) due to their peri-urban character and their production of leafy vegetables. Over time, they have become the predominant actors in this type of production, which has the characteristics of intensive family farming. In this paper we propose to analyze the habitat and housing conditions of these migrants, who settle in farms that they access through renting where they reside and live. They rent ‘bare’ fields, with nothing more than the land, and it is the producers themselves who make this place habitable and producible. They build precarious housing with wooden walls, tin roofs and earthen floors, often with only one space for the whole family. They are also responsible for providing the minimum infrastructure necessary for production, for which they develop collective strategies together with other migrant families. The precarious conditions of production and housing are what, paradoxically, enable the continuity of the migratory flow based on ties of kinship and belonging to the “Bolivian community”, as they allow production in large quantities and a certain capacity for accumulation based on self-exploitation. We work from a qualitative methodology, with an ethnographic approach.