Caring in the Diaspora: Care Practices of African Migrant Women in Southern Spain

Abstract Care operates at the intersection of intimacy and structure, becoming a key lens through which to understand how migration reshapes gendered lives. This article explores how African migrant women living in Southern Spain negotiate caregiving practices across migration, focusing on the reconfiguration of care responsibilities, support networks, and gender relations in their everyday lives. The study adopts an intersectional feminist perspective to examine how care is shaped by the interaction of gender, migration status, and race in a new cultural context. The findings show that migration entails a profound transformation of care arrangements. While women lose the extended family and community networks that previously sustained caregiving, this absence becomes a key factor prompting the questioning of traditional gender roles within the household. At the same time, participants identify access to public healthcare, education, and social services in Andalusia as a significant structural difference, even as their position as migrant and racialized women generates barriers to fully accessing these resources. The analysis highlights care as a central site where inequalities, resistances, and negotiations converge. Women simultaneously experience increased caregiving burdens, new forms of vulnerability linked to institutional dependence, and opportunities to renegotiate responsibilities with male partners. By situating care at the intersection of informal support systems and welfare-state structures, this study contributes a nuanced understanding of how migration reshapes caregiving practices and gender relations, challenging linear narratives of either empowerment or deterioration in migrant women’s lives.