Preliminary findings of the project: “Who cares for those who cared? Ethnography on Transnational Negotiations for Social Protection. “

How do ageing-migrant-domestic-workers access social protection transnationally? And how are these dynamics affected by intersecting gender, race, and class markers of difference? This paper makes a case for addressing these questions, that seem to be of much relevance as human beings increase their mobility patterns and their needs for social protection, emerge as a public transnational matter that should be relevant both for academics and policy makers. Through a moving-ethnographic I tackle the case of Peruvian-Colombian Migrant-Domestic-Workers in the city of Brussels that have contributed productively and reproductively to the development of their sending-receiving societies but experience social protection needs that can’t be properly met by formal mechanisms of protection on either side. I analyze their strategies to access social protection across borders both with formal institutions and their transnational- family-networks. Subsequently, Transnational and Intersectional perspectives are used to depict how their gender, race, and class positioning within the global reproduction of labor affects their strategies to access social protection and reproduces social inequalities. I conclude that migrant’s strategies to protect themselves socially could be theorized as a transnational-welfare-system composed of informal- formal resources that are interdependent from each other. Such Transnational-Welfare-System might increase aging migrants’ life chances while also reproduce and produce social- inequalities globally. This contribution adds to the debate on the transnational social question, by providing a glance of how transnational needs for social protection are met over borders and the inequalities that are reproduced through them.