For Haitian women who live and work in Santiago, expecting a baby entitled to Chilean nationality involves recognizing their maternal bodies at different institutional levels and transforming who they are and how they care for themselves and others as migrants, workers, and mothers in a new country. Based on ethnographic research, this article examines how the pregnant body’s moral legitimacy generates a form of agency among racialized migrant workers who become mothers. Pregnant migrants’ sense of self as working mothers and migrant workers emerges from their embodiment of institutional discourses of self-responsibility and self-care as they navigate contradictory forms of recognition and belonging to the global economy and the nation’s reproduction. The experience of migrant motherhood exposes the lived contradictions inherent in the gendered politics of reproduction. By grounding the meanings of care and social reproduction in migrant selfhood, this analysis expands on the scholarship of gendered migration, and reproductive and care labor, across unequal registers of migrant and nonmigrant livelihoods.

Formal work is essential to gain legal residence in Chile and the reason why Latin American and Caribbean migrants purchase fake contracts on the black market. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with migrant Haitian women applying for work visas in Santiago, this article explores the effects of desired formality and its promises of a good life on contemporary statehood in Chile. The analysis shows how Haitian women’s efforts to become formal workers transform their experiences as racialized and gendered migrants in Chile, and impact how state institutions manage and control migration. Desired formality reveals the paradoxical character of state policies that help create a racialized and precarious labor force within its legal frameworks and explain why migrants attach themselves to fragile good-life projects in new countries.

This article examines the effects of racialization practices in quotidian encounters between migrant Haitian women looking for work and Chilean recruiters in job interviews and skills-training programs in Santiago. Drawing on ethnographic research, I show how racialized differences are made material and emotional based on a particular history of white supremacy and mestizaje. I argue that to become appropriate and hirable workers in the service economy, Haitian women transform their appearance, movements, feelings, and attitudes according to white pedagogies of affective labor. I show how the skilling of labor performed through these pedagogies is deeply affective, shaping Haitian women's sense of worth and their self-constitution as migrants beyond labor encounters. The analysis of how anti-Black racism toward migrant women perpetuates local manifestations of white-mestizo privilege reveals how affective labor and racialization practices articulate intimate experiences of transnational mobility with intersectional scripts of power.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological InstituteVolume 27, Issue 4 p. 1014-1015 Book and film reviews Angé, , , Olivia. Barter and social regeneration in the Argentinean Andes. xii, 224 pp., illus., bibliogr. Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2018. £99.00 (cloth) Sofía Ugarte, Sofía Ugarte University of CambridgeSearch for more papers by this author Sofía Ugarte, Sofía Ugarte University of CambridgeSearch for more papers by this author First published: 17 November 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13629Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume27, Issue4December 2021Pages 1014-1015 RelatedInformation

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This article portrays the way life insurance as a consumer device lives through kinship ties of care in London in order to harness the uncertainties and limits of mortality and loss. A life insurance policy is a private contract people subscribe to, along with paying monthly premiums, to get money if the policyholder dies unexpectedly. Based on ethnographic material of the life insurance market in London, this work aims to illustrate life insurance as a social and cultural practice that informs family relations in contemporary western society. For Londoners, taking a life insurance policy is an anticipatory action that helps families cope with the irreducible possibility of early death, controlling and sustaining caring relations across time among intimate kin. Through the transformation of the policyholder into an immortal (monetary) figure that extends relations beyond death, life insurance becomes a ‘technology of care’ that mediates and bonds intimate kin in absence, as well as a ‘technology of governance’ that creates new subjectivities in the form of privatized risk inside the family. As such, this article seeks to address the ethnographic understanding of an everyday consumer practice within a wider scope of neoliberal modes of governance in western society, taking into account the consequences that buying a life insurance has for both the people and their families. In doing so, this study also contributes to the comprehension of the life insurance market and its specific situatedness in a contemporary neoliberal reality.