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Paper short abstract

Amid isolation and precarious work, this paper explores how Madrid’s domestic and care workers have created collective spaces that foster connection, belonging, and new ways of inhabiting the city, revealing life-sustaining labor often relegated to the margins.

Paper long abstract

Many domestic and care workers, especially those employed as internas (live-in), are no strangers to isolation. Precarious labor arrangements, restrictive housing conditions, and migration-related constraints often limit autonomy, mobility, and social connection. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Madrid, this paper examines an empowerment center created by and for these workers as a collective response to these challenges, exploring how shared spatial practices reshape everyday experiences of marginality, belonging, and presence in the city.

The center functions as a flexible and evolving environment: a place to rest, cook, learn, move, gather, and spend time outside employers’ homes and surveilled public spaces. Through these everyday practices, the center enables forms of shared presence that counter the fragmentation produced by precarious labor, housing, and migration regimes. Thinking with bell hooks’ (1990) notion of homeplace and Soja’s (1996) Thirdspace, I approach the center as a relational space where marginality is not only endured but actively reworked through mutual support, affective ties, and collective making.

I argue that the center allows workers to inhabit the city otherwise, allowing for practices of what Porto-Gonçalves (2006) refers to as re-existence. Where modes of emplacement are grounded in lived experience and sustained through everyday collaboration. In doing so, it makes visible forms of labor and life that are often rendered invisible, while also creating conditions for longer-term organizing and feminist claims-making. Attending ethnographically to these spatial practices offers insight into how urban spaces are continuously produced through care, presence, and collective effort.