Clara Lemme Ribeiro
Clara Lemme Ribeiro is a PhD Candidate at the Geography Department. Her research centers the relationship between international migrations, labor, social reproduction, and precarization. She focuses on Latin American contexts and is currently studying Brazilian migration to the United States.
Clara's project summary:
In my research project "Impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on Bolivian immigrants in São Paulo, Brazil," I studied how the ripple-effects of the pandemic affected this particular immigrant community. Most Bolivians in São Paulo live and work in home-based garment-industry sweatshops, where they have historically faced highly precarized labor and social reproduction conditions.
During the pandemic, there was a significant drop in garment-industry production which led to a debasing of already exploitative working conditions, including a staggering drop in wages. Consequently, several São Paulo-based Bolivian families experienced evictions, homelessness, and hunger. Thus many Bolivians returned home early in the pandemic and, as they tried to re-enter Brazil later on, faced new politics of “sanitary” border control that increased cases of undocumentation. As a result, countless Bolivian immigrant families were pushed further into precarity.
This research project was developed in collaboration with three local organizations that supported immigrant sweatshop workers before and during the Covid-19 pandemic: the Migrant Support Center, the Alinha Institute, and the Immigrant Women Association. It is also a result of my long-term deep engagement with these organizations and the Bolivian community in São Paulo. I volunteered as a Portuguese teacher and staff member at the Migrant Support Center for four years, in addition to working for a year at the Alinha Institute, where I supported sweatshop owners to improve health, safety and labor conditions. Presently, I am a board member at the Alinha Institute.
I will present a poster as my artifact, in which I will combine descriptive text, quotes from qualitative interviews, and images that represent living and working conditions in São Paulo’s garment-industry sweatshops. Through this visual juxtaposition of textual and imagetic elements, I will re-create the emergent narrative of Bolivian immigrants during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, including their struggles and resilience.