Fashion from Below: Intersectional Inequalities and Transformations in Buenos Aires' Garment Industry

Bolivian migrants are transforming Buenos Aires’ garment industry through cooperation, gendered agency, and transnational ties. In Buenos Aires’ garment industry, workers reshape precarious working conditions through collective organization and throughout their trajectories of migration and garment work. Moving beyond victimizing or criminalizing narratives, Karlotta Jule Bahnsen offers an ethnographic view of migrant workers’ negotiations of intersectional inequalities across migration, gender, and labor, highlighting processes of transformation, transnational networks, and the hidden structures sustaining Buenos Aires’ urban fashion industry. This unique perspective speaks to scholars of Latin America, informal labor in global industries, migration, and gender, while offering a vivid account of agency that resonates beyond academia.