Care, Guilt, and Surveillance Across Borders: Emotional Dimensions of Digital Motherhood among Honduran Migrant Women in Spain
Talk Summary: Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Honduran migrant women who, after being rerouted from Central American migration corridors, now work as live-in caregivers (internas) for the elderly in Valencia, Spain, this talk introduces the concept of "intimate captivity" — a form of confinement produced not through walls or checkpoints, but through the very bonds of care, gratitude, and love that these women are expected to sustain. Tracing this concept across the border regime, the domestic spaces where they labor, and the transnational, digital motherhood they practice from a distance — where phones become sites of both connection and surveillance, generating persistent guilt and the fear of being seen as a "bad mother" from thousands of kilometers away — the talk shows how care work in Spain and mothering across the Atlantic converge into a single, exhausting, and often invisible affective labor. It closes by turning to the small, weekend "micro-worlds of resistance" — a shared rented flat, a Sunday meal, a night of dancing — through which these women partially reclaim moments of freedom and selfhood, insisting that life inside intimate captivity is still a life worth living and defending.
Speaker Bio: Yaatsil Guevara González is a Junior Professor of Migration and the Americas at the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies, Germany. Previously, she worked at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies (Mainz), the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence, and the Center for InterAmerican Studies (Bielefeld). She was also a fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (CALAS) at the University of Costa Rica, and held a Visiting Professor Fellowship at the University of Copenhagen in 2026. Her research explores how migratory regimes impact and resonate in the everyday lives of undocumented migrants, as well as the spatial dimensions of irregularized migration. She also investigates the social processes occurring in the "in-between" of irregularized cross-border mobility. Specializing in refugee studies, displacement, and the anthropology of everyday life, her contributions include the edited volume (Un)Settling Place (Berghahn, 2024), the co-edited special issue Anthropology "de paso": Problematizing Transit Migration from the Americas (American Anthropologist, forthcoming), and several journal articles, such as her latest contribution, "Finding Home en Route: Home-Making Practices of Venezuelan Migrants in Transit through Central America and Mexico" (Geoforum, forthcoming).
This event is co-sponsored by Columbia University's Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS) & the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW)
Registration is required for all individuals not affiliated with Columbia University.
