Paper short abstract:

Most of the literature on 'global care chains' is based on the experiences of women migrants working in care work and engaging in South-North migration between a small number of countries. In this paper I focus on South-South migration and the experiences of men working in a broader range of jobs.

Paper long abstract:

There has been a lot written about care and international migration in the last couple of decades. The 'global care chains' (GCC) literature has shown that when women migrate from poorer countries in the Global South to richer countries in the Global North to work as nannies or elderly care workers, they leave a 'care drain' in their countries of origin (Hochschild 2000; Yeates 2004, 2009). Globally, this indicates a resource move from poorer to richer countries, along gender, class and racial hierarchies, in which households and countries of destination are the net beneficiaries (Silvey 2009). However, most of the literature on 'global care chains' is based on the experiences of women migrants working in care work and engaging in South-North migration between a small number of countries (Kofman and Raghuram 2015). In this paper I propose to expand this narrow view by including regional, South-South migration, and the experiences of men working in a broader range of jobs. Based on longitudinal and multi-sited research with Bolivians in Argentina and Spain, the paper shows how a broader perspective on care, combined with an analysis of how it influences migration flows and how it is reconfigured through regional and South-North migration and through time, gives a more varied and less bleak picture.