Global care chains: everyday infrastructures of extractive constitutionalism

This article examines global care chains as juridical formations – legal arrangements that organise the extraction of reproductive labour within constitutional orders that privilege economic accumulation over social reproduction. Drawing on original data and ethnographic fieldwork in Tumaco, a historically marginalised Afro-Colombian territory on Colombia’s Pacific coast, we follow the intergenerational care work of Nelly, a grandmother raising her grandchildren while her daughters migrate to perform care work in Colombia and abroad. Through this lens, we explore how Latin American constitutionalism, despite its transformative aspirations, often fails to account for the informal, racialised, and territorially dispersed nature of care. While recent reforms have begun to acknowledge care as a public concern, constitutional frameworks frequently limit this recognition to formal declarations. Engaging feminist political economy and critical legal theory, and foregrounding the material conditions of care in contexts marked by precarity and state absence, we develop the concept of everyday infrastructures of extractive constitutionalism to describe how reproductive labour remains essential yet persistently invisibilised. From Tumaco’s constitutional margins, we show how care work sustains both economic and legal life, advancing a longstanding call from feminist scholars and women’s movements to reorient constitutional thinking around the labour that makes life possible.