Cuidar en asentamientos informales: prácticas generizadas frente a violencias entrelazadas

The rapid expansion of informal settlements reflects broader dynamics of the contemporary urban crisis. Across the globe, growing numbers of people are living under conditions marked by material precarity, socio-spatial exclusion, and limited access to basic urban services. In Latin America, these patterns are closely tied to enduring forms of uneven urbanization that produce territories shaped by overlapping social challenges. Although scholarship on urban violence has often emphasized the link between poverty and violence, less attention has been given to how different forms of violence intersect and how they disproportionately affect women. This article addresses this gap by drawing on critical and feminist geography, which highlight the central role of women—particularly caregivers—in shaping living environments and sustaining processes of urban self-construction. It examines how women caregivers in informal settlements contend with the multiple forms of violence that structure these spaces. At the same time, it explores how everyday practices of care—within households, neighborhoods, and communities—contribute to sustaining collective life and to the ongoing production of social space. The analysis is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in two informal settlements in Chile. The findings reveal that these women confront both infrastructural precariousness and institutional discrimination. Yet, through their care practices, they actively sustain daily life, organize neighborhood dynamics, and build networks of support that allow them to navigate these intertwined forms of violence. The article proposes care as a key analytical lens for understanding the intersections between violence, gender, and territory. It also identifies a specific form of violence that remains insufficiently examined: the violence of structural indifference, through which state neglect is effectively privatized and its burdens disproportionately placed on women.