Paper short abstract:

This work approaches the recent migration of Colombian and Brazilian single women to the Iberian Peninsula and tries to unveil its complex character in which, the colonial past, the latest expansion of capital and borders, and the subsequent reconfiguration of the feminine condition, crystallize.

Paper long abstract:

In Spain and Portugal, the rebound of arrivals in recent years of single migrant women from Colombia and Brazil, attests to the impossibility of living in Latin America under the Neoliberal regime, and it also rediscovers the current validity of colonial history as a main conditioner of human displacements across the Atlantic Ocean.

Departing from a multi-situated fieldwork carried out between the urban peripheries of São Paulo, Porto and Madrid, which entails 20 in-depth interviews conducted with Brazilian and Colombian women who have migrated to the Iberian Peninsula; our work furthers the concept of 'autonomy of migrations' (Cordero, Mezzadra and Varela, 2019).

We try to approach the complex causality that makes these women travel alone, focusing on the inevitable overlap between `the structural´ and `the personal´ that emerges in the hybrid narratives that Colombian and Brazilian migrant women deploy to explain themselves and to make sense of their migratory and vital trajectories.

The research addresses the specific ways in which the process of neoliberalization of life, -with the transformation of temporal and spatial parameters that it implies-, has impacted Latin American women. Thus, built upon these women testimonies, this paper analyses migration as a direct consequence of the expansion of capital and borders, but also as a form of political and daily resistance against it.