Here and there: Brazilian migrants' transnational relationships of labor and social reproduction

Abstract

My doctoral dissertation examines the Brazilian migration process to the metropolitan Atlanta area and the transnational relationships of labor and social reproduction that underscore this migration. To do so, I draw from cross-border ethnographic research Brazilian migrant workers in the metropolitan Atlanta area and their family members in Brazil. I focus on one particular sending community in Brazil, the city of Goiânia, where most Brazilian migrants in Georgia come from. Brazilian migrants leave middle and lower-middle class contexts in Brazil to join precarized labor markets in housecleaning and construction in the US, spurred by the “search for a better life.” In this context, I seek to understand how relationships of precarized labor, family, and care create distinct zones of convergence linking specific sending and receiving places. I draw from a Marxist-feminist framework on the dialectics of labor and social reproduction that understands workers to be contradictorily free: “free as birds” to sell their labor force, but compelled to do it in order to reproduce themselves and their families, daily and intergenerationally. Thus, I investigate the Brazilian migration process to the metropolitan Atlanta area from individual and family backgrounds in Brazil, access to labor markets and working conditions in the US, material social reproduction conditions in the US, and family care dynamics in the US and Brazil. In doing so, I characterize the precarization of labor Brazilians face in the US, the motivations and conditions that constitute the “search for a better life,” and the dynamics of social reproduction and care between Brazil and the US that underscore the Brazilian migration process and migrants’ participation in precarized labor markets in the US. I argue that Brazilian migration to Marietta cannot be understood simply as a search for employment but rather that migrants’ decisions to leave Brazil, enter precarized labor markets in the US, and stay in Marietta are shaped by global regimes of labor and social reproduction and uneven social reproduction conditions between here and there.