Paper short abstract:

This paper makes a comparison between two of the historic Cape Verdean communities settled in Spain, in León and Galiza, with the aim to demonstrate the plasticity and dynamism of gender as a social construction, which can be negotiated and reconstructed in migratory contexts.

Paper long abstract:

Cape Verdean fluxes in Spain, settled from 1978, present specific organization guidelines, which structured around gender and island origin, leading to communities based on feminine or masculine work, and with major origin on Santiago or on the other islands.

We propose to make a comparison between the communities settled in Galicia and Leon, representing the flows of the two differentiated lines by origin in the archipelago, which will serve as an example of the fluidity and dynamism of gender relations and roles its three decades of existence. Both communities have different evolutions which show how, in a context of multifactoriality, the labor sphere appears as determinant in their evolution.

The comparison will serve as an example of the fluidity of gender as a structuring element in migratory processes. Starting from radically different realities (Leon´s women as autonomous workers; Galiza´s women as dependent wives), legal status, social and economic roles of Cape Verdean women changed with the passage of time, demonstrating the plasticity and dynamism of gender as a social construction, that can be negotiated and reconstructed in migratory contexts (Gregorio, 1998; Donato, 2006; Mahler e Pessar, 2006).

If, on the one hand, many of the migrants from Madrid abandoned their initial migratory laboral project in Madrid to join a man in León, staying as housewives, in the Galician case, women, arrived as wives, were able to change their subalternity status thanks to male absence, winning not only labor spaces, but also of representation and organization of the community.