This article reveals the array of time-space arrangements that a group of women home-based workers deploy to accommodate paid work in their homes. Based on in-depth interviews with the workers in Tijuana, Mexico, the article emphasizes the consequences of working at home for gender relations within the family. The main argument of this article holds that the variety of women's time-space strategies may result in a variety of situations of integration or conflict. The diversity of ways in which women organize productive and reproductive activities within the household and their consequences are crosscut by their social class, occupation, educational level, and life course, as well as the larger context of their lives. Although working at home, as a strategy of income generation, gives women a new economic role and helps them to negotiate their gender roles and relations, it also may reinforce women's traditional roles.
There is an important dissonance in recent studies of children's work between the global efforts to eradicate abusive forms of child labour on the one hand and, on the other hand, local settings where children's work plays an important role in social reproduction, socialization and skill acquisition. This research explores the reasons for this dissonance by eliding both the global perspectives of children's rights and the local realities of children's daily geographies. By closing the gap between global knowledge about children (from above) and children's knowledge and agency in their own environments (from below), we seek to present a relational account of children's work within the context of their daily geographies. We draw on data collected with child workers in Tijuana, Mexico to demonstrate the complex role that children's work often plays in the daily geographies of young people.
Este artículo analiza el trabajo transfronterizo de cuidados a través de las trayectorias laborales de mujeres mexicanas residentes de Tijuana que trabajan cuidando niños y adultos mayores y enfermos en San Diego. Debido a que el estudio de las cadenas globales de cuidado ha dado mayor atención a lo transnacional, se enfatiza la dimensión transfronteriza como un elemento novedoso de análisis. Con base en las entrevistas realizadas a un grupo de trabajadoras de cuidados se argumenta que sus trayectorias son transfronterizas debido a que sus arreglos laborales están asociados al cruce de la frontera, en tanto que la rotación laboral está relacionada al curso de vida de las personas a las que se cuida. Asimismo, se encuentra que los elementos que organizan las trayectorias laborales son las motivaciones para el trabajo, el cruce fronterizo, las responsabilidades familiares, el curso de vida y las características individuales de las trabajadoras de cuidados.
The issue of child labor continues to challenge thinking on the nature of work, play, schooling and apprenticeship. New wisdom from some contemporary academic writing places children closer to the center of our understanding of consumption, production and reproduction, and at the heart of inequities generated by globalization. Child labor comes in many forms and intersects with local life and global processes in a myriad of ways. The child laborers in this study work as ‘volunteer’ checkout packers in Tijuana supermarkets. By highlighting aspects of their complex daily lives, this article develops new ways of thinking about children's work socially and spatially, while acknowledging the global contexts of this work.
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