The Dialectics of Opportunity

This chapter approaches female experiences in the Parana’s Tri-Border Area (TBA). The analysis of 30 Paraguayan women’s life histories investigates the profiles of those who are profoundly vulnerable in this region. It shows how the women’s productive and reproductive overload drives them towards border displacements. At the same time, the construction of community care, together with the search for social protection in terms of health and education, constitutes female transborder agencies. These findings propose that researching female mobility in border territories implies investigating the calculations of care performed by women and the differences in public social protection offered to them on the different sides of the border. It also implies that both elements are traversed by the tensions between formality and informality, and legality and illegality. This perspective encourages us to critically read the relationship between violations and agencies in the female border experience. It calls to expand both the reductionist readings that conceive of care overload strictly as violation factors and those that disregard the violence faced by women by assuming the border as a “space of flows.” The chapter moves forward, then, towards a dialectical reading of the border as an opportunity.