Bolivian immigration to São Paulo and Confection Sector - in Search of an Alternative Paradigm Analytical

Abstract

The Bolivian immigration linked to the work in precarious conditions at the sweatshops in the garment industry of São Paulo city has gained visibility in the 1990s and is one of the trends of the “new migration flows” to and from Brazil. In the Brazilian sociological debate about it, there is a dialogue with international literature on the emergence of the contemporary “new” informality due to the “new” needs of capital accumulation in a worldwide economic recession from the 1970 and 1980. In this analytical approach, the new immigrants are the main victims of the perverse effects of globalization. Because, while, on the one hand, these processes exacerbate regional inequalities worldwide, boosting mass emigration movements in countries that have lost the development game. On the other hand, they impose an increase in standards of competitiveness and the companies respond with over-exploitation of the work force in large subcontracting circuits. Despite the importance and pertinence of this approach, they don't permit ask about the socio-cultural and spatial effects due to these population movements.  In other words: what these people in motion create in terms of arrangements and territories from that movement and in face of structural constraints imposed on them? The communication proposed will address the emerging debate in the French urban sociology about the patterns of socio-economic insertion of the “new migration flows”: its dynamic dimensions and complex games between “subordination” and “agency” that characterizes the economic activities of migrants who set in motion on the fringes of globalization. It is intended to highlight the possibilities opened up by this theoretical framework, based mainly on the concept of “circulatory territory”, for the research of the Bolivian immigration linked to the garment industry of the São Paulo city.