Everyday Infrastructures of Negotiation: Borders, Xenophobia, and Belonging among Latin American Migrant Women in Portugal

Abstract

Portugal has become an important destination for Latin American migrants. Yet its self-image as a “migrant-friendly” country sits uneasily alongside bureaucratic dysfunction, rising housing precarity, and persistent gendered and racialized exclusions shaped by colonial histories. While scholarship on intersectional migration in Western Europe has focused largely on securitized border regimes and core destination states, migrant-positioned women in semi-peripheral cities remain underexplored. This is particularly the case in contexts where EU, national, and local governance frameworks are unevenly implemented. This dissertation addresses this gap by asking how migrant-positioned women from Brazil and Hispanic Latin America navigate borders, xenophobia, and belonging in Porto, Portugal, and how relational solidarities emerge as key forms of support and survival within fragmented governance arrangements. The study is based on a qualitative case study of Porto. It draws on 63 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2022 and 2024 with migrant-positioned women and representatives of migrant-serving organizations. Porto provides a particularly revealing site where global governance frameworks, including EU migration and integration regimes, are translated unevenly through national and local institutions. This produces fragmented and often inaccessible forms of support. The analysis develops a translocational approach to negotiation that brings together three interconnected dimensions. Translocationality is understood as shifting social positions shaped by gender, race, class, and legal status across time and place. Negotiation is conceptualized as a feminist practice of everyday agency, ranging from subtle adjustments to more explicit forms of resistance within the constraints of governance. Relational solidarities are understood as trust-based migrant-to-migrant networks operating across both digital and embodied spaces as informal infrastructure in contexts of institutional insufficiency. The findings show that migrant-positioned women respond to bureaucratic precarity through collective knowledge-sharing, confront racialized and sexualized forms of xenophobia linked to enduring colonial imaginaries, and actively produce forms of belonging that exceed formal integration frameworks. A counterintuitive comparative finding emerges. Hispanic Latin American women report relatively greater experiences of social welcome than Brazilian women. For Brazilian women, perceived cultural proximity to Portugal can intensify forms of discrimination. The dissertation makes four contributions. It advances a translocational lens on negotiation that resists binary framings of vulnerability and privilege, conceives relational solidarities as everyday infrastructure within fragmented governance systems, provides one of the first sustained analyses of Latin American migrant women in Portugal, and reframes digital platforms as critical spaces of collective organization under conditions of institutional fragmentation. It concludes by pointing to the importance of examining how Portugal’s post-2024 restrictive policy shifts may reshape these dynamics, particularly for women arriving without regularisation pathways.