Circular Care and Emotions in a Border Area in the Global South

In border areas between Chile and Bolivia, circular care is developed through the circular mobility of Bolivian domestic workers in Chile. By circular care, we refer to the care practices carried out by Bolivian nationals with regard to their children left behind in Bolivia. Carrying out domestic work without a labour contract and highly precarious, Bolivian women carry out a circular mobility, taking advantage of the opportunity to care for their children in person, complementing the care practices that they carry out from a distance. In the background, there are multiple inequalities among Bolivian circular domestic workers, as they carry out their work in a structural framework of domination. Thus, their emotions are gendered, racialised, and their status as foreign nationals is added to this. In this way, they experience discrimination and inferiorisation marked by inequalities of class, ethnicity, nationality and migratory status. How the emotions related to the care of these domestic workers are constructed in a context of circular mobility is what we propose to elucidate in this paper.