“Le quita el pecho a su hijo y se va a trabajar”: estereotipos de indianidad y violencias históricas en la percepción de equipos de salud sobre la maternidad de migrantes bolivianas en Chile

Although the migration of women has gained increasing visibility in migration studies, little attention has been paid to the maternal experiences of Bolivian women who work in masculinized sectors such as agriculture and commerce. This article draws on research that explored maternal and child care practices among both health teams and migrant adults who entered Chile through irregular border crossings and were responsible for children and adolescents during the pandemic. The study examines how historical forms of violence are reproduced in therapeutic settings through the ways stereotypes of indigeneity shape health teams’ perceptions of Bolivian migrant motherhood. The study is based on multisited qualitative research carried out between 2022 and 2024, involving 19 migrant adults, 14 members of NGOs focused on migration, and 15 health-team members in Tarapacá, Arica, Antofagasta, Santiago, and O’Higgins. In-depth interviews and body-mapping exercises were conducted with all participants. Within this context, the long-standing perception of Aymara women’s mobility as a transgression of the Chilean nation-state’s borders reappears in the therapeutic sphere, where intimate aspects of migrant women’s mothering become subject to tensions and judgments that position these women—their mobility and their maternity—at the threshold of negligence. The article argues that the stereotypes imposed on these Bolivian women are not merely expressions of discrimination or mistreatment; they are linked to a broader social order anchored in the construction of the Indigenous figure as the antithesis of the civilizing project. This reveals the ongoing force of racialized hierarchies that date back to the formation of the nation-state and that continue to be reproduced by institutional actors in the current landscape of South American migration.