Playing for La Vino Tinto in Santiago, Chile: Migrant Children’s Everyday Local and Global Mobilities in Latin America

Children’s mobilities have usually been approached either from a local, everyday scale through the field of children’s mobility, or from a global scale in migration studies. While both fields have addressed children’s mobilities from different angles and focusing in very different scales, with very limited dialogue between them, the mobilities paradigm (Urry 2007) has aimed at integrating different scales of mobilities in its understanding of the social: from bodily everyday local movements, to migration and global monetary flux. In this presentation, we suggest bringing together these approaches to think of children's mobilities from a multi-scalar perspective. In doing so, we discuss the results from research conducted with 11-14 year old migrant children in Santiago, Chile.

In Chile, the migrant population increased from 1% in 2006 to 9% in 2022, mainly through movements within Latin America and the Caribbean. From this group, 57,8% live in Santiago Metropolitan Area, of which 24% live in the district of Santiago, where this study was conducted. Originally, we aimed at understanding children’s everyday mobility in this district. However, given the context in which we were working, we ended up working with a great majority of migrant children, and encountering manifold ways in which their everyday movements were shaped by the wider scales of their lives as migrant children: first, their previous experiences in other territories influence their current perceptions of their mobility; second, their everyday corporeal movements are entangled with virtual and communicative movement towards their countries of origins; and third, their mobility patterns are shaped by their possibilities as migrant families. Therefore, we explore the ways in which international-long-term and local-everyday mobilities are interwoven in the everyday lives of migrant children inhabiting Santiago, arguing that a mobilities approach allows us to understand the experiences of migrant children from a multi-spatial-temporal-scale perspective.