ILPC 2026

Since the mid-1990s Argentina has become a destination for the new flux of African migrations -especially the Sub-Saharan ones-, a phenomena known as south-south migrations.

Senegalese group is the most numerous among them, and has suffered a process of hyper-visibility in the local context because of the conjunction of their black phenotype, exposed in long working days of street vending, and the historical negation of Africans in the hegemonic idea of Argentinian nation.

This abstract proposes an approach for the analysis of the heterogeneity among the Senegalese migration in Argentina focusing in diversity of labour-migratory trajectories based on four different migrant’s cases in La Plata’s city, as paradigmatic of the possibilities that Senegalese finds here for reaching the aims of their migratory projects. All of them started in the same way: which is selling bijouterie on street, the dominant practice among them all over the country. However, in the search of social mobility, each of them ended –so far- in different forms of commerce -more or less “regular”, and even one has explored the formal building sector, a new entire labour market niche for these migrants here, that emerged as “a way out of streets”, in a context of deepening conflicts with local council for the urban space. All of these paths are configured and configure ways of being and belonging.

An intersectional perspective becomes crucial to understand the structuration’s processes of these trajectories, which requires to considerate variables such as transnationalism, social class, gender, religion, social representation and migratory laws.

This proposal framed under my ongoing PhD research, consisting in a visual ethnography of Senegalese migration in La Plata and Puerto Madryn with focus in labour processes.