Paro migrante en Argentina: el trabajo como subjetividad política*

Abstract

This article aims to investigate the way in which labor emerges and takes place as a predominant figure in migrant struggles' processes of political subjectivation that started its constitution in Argentina from 2016. To accomplish this, a qualitative methodology was used, combining documentary analysis, field registration and in-depth interviews. The systematization and analysis of the information allows to propose that positioning themselves as workers was a defensive strategy to confront the state discourses and practices that criminalize migration, and at the same time, it was a way of contesting the dominant visions and representations that sought to victimize and politically nullify them. Thus, recognizing themselves as workers became a way and a place from where migrants were constituted as political subjects. This way of conforming as political subjects was borned from a double movement of visibility and flight. That is, in the production of political subjectivity linked to labor, there is a tension between the search for recognition and accounting for the work carried out by migrants, at the same time that it is intended to reveal and reject migration policies and practices that seek to make migrants politically invisible and try to produce differential and hierarchical forms of exploitation of migrant labor.