Care Work: A Latin American Perspective

Abstract

The growing demand for care services has been challenging academics by broadening their research lines in the international scientific community although in different pace. In fact, the theories and debates on care, which date back to the 1980s in the United States, have developed much more recently in Europe, where publications only appeared in late 1990s. This phenomenon has also elicited a growing interest in Latin America from late 2000s, where research has been conducted in different countries like Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay. On the other hand, although comparative studies are frequent, they cover mostly European countries. Nevertheless, Latin America is a social space where professional care has expanded dramatically over the past 20 years. However, unlike Japan, in the US and European countries, such expansion took place in a context of heterogeneous and poorly structured markets, which challenge not only academics but also decision makers. This chapter aims at presenting the scenario of Latin American research on care and care work vis-à-vis the international debates in the field. Firstly, the authors will situate the new empirical material vis-à-vis the broader preexisting literature. Secondly, they will explore how the Latin American experience transforms existing understandings on the social organization of care, especially on its relations with gender and race/ethnicity inequalities, which ground the new experiences of care policies in the region.