This lecture is part of the ZILAS Winter Lecture Series 2025/26.
Yaatsil Guevara González is Junior Professor/anthropologist at the Heidelberg Center for Ibero‑American Studies (HCIAS), Universität Heidelberg. Her research focuses on forced migration, spatial practices, emotional geographies, labor practices, everyday life of migrants under migration regimes, and how migration affects bodily and emotional experience. In this talk she will focus on Honduran migration, especially food provisioning, labor captivity, and emotional spaces created by displacement.
This talk explores how care—both as labor and as affective practice—structures the migratory experiences of Honduran women with irregular migratory status, whose journeys toward the United States were interrupted and redirected toward Europe. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a migrant shelter in Tenosique, Mexico, and among live-in domestic workers in Valencia, Spain, I examine how food, caregiving, and embodied discipline are entangled with broader regimes of mobility, confinement, and dependency. In Tenosique, shared cooking and commensality generate fleeting forms of solidarity and affective connection amid precarious conditions of transit. In Valencia, the intimate and affective labor of 24/7 caregiving often leads to spatial and emotional enclosure. Across this transnational continuum, care emerges as an ambivalent infrastructure—one that sustains life while reinforcing gendered, racialized, and legal forms of captivity. The talk reflects on how irregularized migrant women navigate emotional labor, autonomy, and constraint within wider architectures of power, borders, and belonging.