Forging mobilities, becoming ideal workers? Temporary migration and the gig economy

Orth, Barbara Article — Published Version Forging mobilities, becoming ideal workers? Temporary migration and the gig economy Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies Provided in Cooperation with: Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) Suggested Citation: Orth, Barbara (2025) : Forging mobilities, becoming ideal workers? Temporary migration and the gig economy, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, ISSN 1469-9451, Informa UK Limited, London, Vol. 51, Iss. 11, pp. 2793-2811, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2467176 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/328344 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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Temporary migration and the gig economy Barbara Orth To cite this article: Barbara Orth (2025) Forging mobilities, becoming ideal workers? Temporary migration and the gig economy, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 51:11, 2793-2811, DOI: 10.1080/1369183X.2025.2467176 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2467176 © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published online: 26 Feb 2025. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1452 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 2 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjms20 Forging mobilities, becoming ideal workers? Temporary migration and the gig economy Barbara Orth Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS), Erkner, Germany ABSTRACT This study investigates the connection between a specific migration trajectory, the Working Holiday Visa Scheme and new forms of precarious, digitally-mediated jobs. Drawing on 20 narrative interviews conducted between 2021 and 2023, it follows working holidaymakers from Chile as they migrate to Germany. The findings reveal how research participants forge mobilities against temporary visa regimes and how these practices in turn shape their subjectivities and their relationship to platform work. I argue that this particular experience of liminality produces an ideal workforce for platform companies requiring a high turnover of hyperflexible, digitally savvy workers. Focussing on one particular and yet understudied visa category contributes to theorisations of the co-constitution of platform labour and immigration regulations. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 28 February 2024 Accepted 10 February 2025 KEYWORDS Working holidays; visa regimes; labour; platform work Introduction Service economy jobs such as food delivery and domestic cleaning are increasingly mediated by digital labour platforms. As technology companies, these platforms function according to network logics. This means their ability to raise investor capital and ultimately make a profit depends on market domination. As a result of this winnertakes-it-all logic, the entire platform economy is predicated on fast growth. This momentum, scholars have argued, can only be maintained through hyperflexible work arrangements that can start today and end tomorrow (van Doorn, Ferrari, and Graham 2023). To fill these jobs, platform companies rely on fragmented and migrantised labour markets, marked by a differentiation of workers along gender, race and immigration status (Altenried 2024; Gebrial, 2024; Orth 2024; Maury 2024). Platform companies eschew regulatory mechanisms for employers resulting in precarious labour conditions for workers. These include job insecurity, lack of social security protections, and low wages (Ravenelle 2019). Therefore, workers often do not stay in these jobs long-term resulting in high turnover rates. To quickly achieve market dominance, companies need large numbers of workers that can start the next day but are © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTACT Barbara Orth [email protected] This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent. JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 2025, VOL. 51, NO. 11, 2793–2811 https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2025.2467176 also unwilling to improve working conditions to retain them over longer periods of time. Thus, companies require a constant supply of new workers with basic digital literacy skills, raising the question where these workers come from (see Orth 2024). In Central and Northern Europe, studies point to temporary migration schemes such as the Working Holiday Visa (WHV). Platform researchers have noted a significant share of working holidayers from Chile and Argentina within their gig economy worker samples (see e.g. Altenried 2022; Floros and Bak Jørgensen 2023; Gruszka, Pillinger, and Gerold 2024; Niebler and Animento 2023; Orth 2022,2024; van Doorn 2020). While the salience of this mobility pathway in urban platform economies is well-documented in the platform labour research field, it is not yet well understood why working holidayers seem to gravitate to this type of work and how they experience these jobs. This paper addresses this research gap by tracing the experience of Latin American gig workers who reside in Germany on a WHV. Exploring the working holiday migration trajectory as a newly emergent labour mobility in Europe is not only of academic interest; it also has political implications for the protection of workers in the present and future: as the EU Directive on Platform Labour seeks to ameliorate widely decried precarious working conditions in the gig economy, it is highly relevant to understand how and whether it will help to protect migrant workers. As the largest economy in Europe, Germany provides a good case to explore how different socio-legal statuses shape migrant workers’engagement in and relationship to platform-mediated jobs. Against this background, this study explores how the regulations of the WHV shape gig workers’subjectivities. WHV visa schemes allow young adults, typically between the ages of 18 and 30, to spend a limited amount of time in a partner country. As WHVs are based on bilateral treaties, the specifics for each partnership vary; what is important is that eligibility is premised first and foremost on an applicant’s age and secondly on their citizenship. Put differently, the WHV does not hinge on a candidate’s educational or professional qualifications as other visas typically do, nor does it tie migrants to a particular job, education programme or sponsor. At the same time, it allows working holidayers to take on any jobs, including full-time work, making the visa exceptionally well-suited as a labour mobility visa (Orth 2024). Conceptualising the WHV as a category of labour mobility, the paper does not primarily focus on the WHV’s cultural significance and the liminality of young adulthood as other studies have done (Kato 2013; Wilson, Fisher, and Moore 2009). Instead, it traces how the particular logic and regulations that underpin the visa shape migrants’ engagement with platform work. Since a migrant’s legal status has important ramifications for their experience of work, it is important to understand the socio-legal effects of particular regulations. In the case of the German WHV, these regulations are first and foremost related to time and temporariness (Stingl and Orth 2024): while open to any citizen of the twelve partner countries 1 , the visa is only available during a relatively short time in a person’s life course, between the ages of 18 and 30. In addition, it is a one-off1-year-visa that is neither extendable nor renewable.As I will argue throughout the paper, this particular experience of liminality produces an ideal workforce for platform companies requiring a high turnover of hyperflexible, digitally savvy workers. 2794 B. ORTH The paper first offers an appraisal of the emerging scholarship on migration and the gig economy. Drawing on the field of youth mobility studies, the literature review also introduces the WHV in more depth. Following this, I present the research design and sample this study draws on. While migration trajectories are of course rarely linear, I show that research participants tend to see a working holiday in Germany as a stepping stone to forge longer migration projects. My findings reveal how the inherent precarity of this newly emerging labour migration pathway affects workers’relationship with work. Diverting from the studies that cite largely material reasons for why migrants take up platform work, the findings show that gig jobs fit particularly well into working holidayers’larger life world. Overall, my analysis affirms the need to understand the co-constitution of new forms of labour migration and new forms of work. Zoning in on immigration status in the platform economy Digital labour platforms do not formally act as employers but claim to simply ‘connect’ their users. As freelancers, workers are paid for one ‘gig’at a time, not entitled to any social security (including health insurance, accident insurance or unemployment benefits) and managed through a set of technological tools known as algorithmic management. Freelance status and algorithmic management combined result in low wages and overall precarious working conditions. A lot of platform labour literature has studied these mechanisms and detailed the experience and resistance of workers within digitally mediated labour systems. This literature has also noted the overrepresentation of migrants in this type of work (van Doorn, Ferrari, and Graham 2023) and sought to explain why migrants choose gig jobs despite their downsides. Foregrounding technologically mediated application processes and the lack of formal requirements in platform work, scholars have described these jobs as exceptionally accessible for people without knowledge of the local language, established social networks, and limited options in the labour market (Altenried 2024,2022; Benvegnù and Kampouri 2021; van Doorn and Vijay 2024). Platform work can provide a stopgap or fallback option for migrants (Floros and Bak Jørgensen 2023; Maury 2020; Newlands 2022; van Doorn 2022), and some scholars even suggest automated onboarding systems requiring no contact with hiring managers limit migrants’exposure to everyday racism and cultural stereotyping (Benevegù and Kampouri 2021; Bonhomme and Muldoon 2024; van Doorn and Vijay 2024). While these studies have made important contributions to the specific experience of migrant workers, particularly their motivations to take up platform work, they largely do not differentiate between different groups of migrants or different legal statuses in the country of residence (Orth 2024). Migrants work on all kinds of visas, including those that are not at all, or not primarily, intended to be labour migration visas. As a result, there is what Könönen (2019, 786) calls a ‘juridical division of labour’, especially in low-paid service work. In other words, for people with non-permanent leave to remain, it is the conditions of their immigration status that primarily shape their labour conditions. Therefore, it is vital to show how different visa categories interact with new forms of digitally mediated labour. This leads to a more nuanced understanding of how new forms of labour regimes are co-regulated and co-constituted by immigration policies. JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 2795 While any category of immigration could help theorise this connection, the WHV is a particularly interesting case not only because working holidayers form a sizeable group of workers in this sector but also because it remains a category of ‘hidden’labour mobility. Despite the wealth of research on the WHV as a form of ‘guest worker’regime in Australia and Canada (James 2024; Robertson 2014,2016; Vosko 2023), it remains overlooked in the European context. In Germany specifically, student and au pair visas have been studied as forms of labour mobility (Hess 2009), but there has been no research on the WHV to date (see also Stingl and Orth 2024). This is all the more surprising given Germany has greatly expanded its working holiday schemes over the last decade, 2 signing agreements with Chile in 2014, Brazil in 2015, Argentina in 2016, and Uruguay in 2017. 3 Closing the research gap on the German WHV is both relevant and timely if the Australian and Canadian cases are anything to go by: since their respective governments began to promote WHV schemes to fill labour shortages in the 1990s and 2000s (Chartrand and Vosko 2021; Wright and Clibborn 2020), industries that employ working holidayers have been associated with widespread employer abuse and often pay below minimum wage (Howe et al. 2018;James2024; Vosko 2023; Wright and Clibborn 2020). Working holidayers are at great risk of falling through the cracks of labour inspections –however fraught –associated with other visas. The legal and discursive framing of working holidays as simply being ‘tourist’,‘lifestyle’,‘cultural exchange’,or‘youth mobility’schemes hides their importance for labour migration (Reilly 2015; Wright, Groutsis, and Kaabel 2022). This study is thus not only relevant to migration scholars but also to policy makers interested in labour protections. Research design The findings of this paper emerged from a larger project that traced migratory routes into Berlin’s gig economy. To understand the particular migration trajectory of young Chileans better, I pursued a ‘follow-the-people’approach (Marcus 1995): I conducted fieldwork with prospective migrants in Chile (September 2022–October 2022) and traced their journeys to Germany (November 2023–May 2023). The analysis draws on 20 biographically focussed interviews with working holidayers. Migrants were interviewed at different stages of their journeys: some were interviewed in Chile as they prepared for a working holiday in Germany 4 ; some were already in Germany on a WHV at the time of the interview; and some had first arrived in Germany on a WHV and since transitioned out into other visas. 5 Interviewing people at different points of their journey allowed me to understand working holidayers’‘reality checks’and their changing relationship with work over time. The gender make-up of the sample was balanced (42% male, 58% female) but their socio-economic background was relatively homogeneous: all but one were university educated, and most had held professional jobs in the fields they had trained in before moving to Europe. Even though the German WHV is formally available to any Chilean national between the ages of 18–30, it comes with financial requirements that inadvertently select for those backgrounds (Orth 2024, 482). Relatedly, all research participants considered themselves white 6 and/or of European descent as socio-economic status and race are highly intertwined in the postcolonial societies of Latin America (Ceron-Anaya, de Santana Pinho, and Ramos-Zayas 2023). Indeed, the high education 2796 B. ORTH levels, socio-economic background and racial makeup of this study’s research participants are consistent with other studies on WHV migration (Dewey and Fozdar 2023; Robertson 2014) and Latin American migration to Europe (Bayona-i-Carrasco and Avila-Tàpies 2020, 214). During the first field phases of the project in Berlin, I had learnt that most of my Latin American research participants were very active in the digital community groups. For the additional periods of field work, I recruited participants through posting calls on these social media groups. Interviews were conducted in English, Spanish, and German, often switching back and forth between languages reflecting the varied language competencies of interviewees. 7 All research participants have been assigned pseudonyms, and their quotes in this article have been slightly abridged and edited for grammatical correctness and language consistency. In the following sections, I will draw out my main findings relating to the WHV as a new pathway of labour migration to Germany. I present the findings structured by the two themes of migration trajectory and relationship to platform work. First, I draw on pre-departure interviews with prospective migrants in Chile to explain how people envision their migratory projects and what happens when they brush up against the enforced temporariness of the visa in Germany. I then offer a brief analysis of this particular migration trajectory as insecure and precarious, requiring migrants to constantly negotiate the structural constraints of their temporary status. I then highlight how this shapes migrants’relationship with gig work. My findings reveal that the regulatory framework of the visa –selecting for middle-class people, who need to be young, able-bodied, and unattached, and remain in a state of precarious visa status –provides an ideal workforce for the gig economy. The German WHV as a stepping stone A 25 year-old woman I will call Carmen was very excited when I met her a few days before her flight to Germany at a cafe in Santiago, Chile. When I asked her about how she had decided to come to Germany, she recounted how frustrated she had been the last few years. Despite her Master’s degree and professional job, she was not able to afford a place of her own and hoped the working holiday would enable her to make a transition into economic independence. Yet, instead of pursuing ‘upward’career progression by migrating, she wanted to focus on personal growth and development, improving her yoga practice and her English skills, and rejected notions of professional aspirations: I can’t live with my parents anymore! I want to live alone, work and study, and I think it’s more possible in Europe than it’s in Chile now […]But I am also just going to enjoy this year [on the WHV]. I want the ‘travel life’. I don’t really expect to save money. It’s okay if I do it, but I don’t feel like I’m obligated. I prefer to take [yoga] classes. Carmen’s story is emblematic for all of my interview partners: their motivations to undertake a working holiday were extremely varied and ranged from aesthetic consumption, identity and culture to emancipation from financial dependence on their families. As Robertson (2021, 73) argues, working holidayers’motivations to move thus often oscillate between ‘economic desires and lifestyle desires, sojourn and settlement’. JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 2797 While the motivations to do a working holiday amongst my research participants thus mirror those of other working holidayers, they differ in two important ways: my research participants by and large had no prior knowledge of Germany or interest in the country; this was surprising given the importance of imaginaries of faraway places in the literature on lifestyle, youth, and working holiday migration (see e.g. Kawashima 2010; Salazar 2014; Yoon 2015). In addition, potential income opportunities did not feature very prominently either as accounts of economic migration would suggest. Instead, almost every single working holidayer I met pre-departure highlighted Germany as a stepping stone towards other destinations. This seemed especially important after experiencing material and political instability during the social uprisings in Chile in 2019 and the ensuing COVID-19 pandemic. Many wanted, as Javier put it, a chance to ‘escape the country, to escape from reality’. And this is where my respondents differ from previously studied working holidayers from the Global North: Chileans do not have as many options for international mobility. Many were acutely aware of their position within a global hierarchy of mobility, and knew how hard it was to emigrate to North America, Europe, or Australia. Gloria explained this calculation: If you don’t have a[n EU] passport or get married [to an EU citizen]––you know, these are the only two options—from this reality, [the WHV] is kind of a good way out. And maybe you will get another better visa afterwards if you do the things ‘right’. Unlike working holidayers from countries with strong economies and passports, who often pursue the working holiday as a ‘rite of passage’(Clarke 2005; Rice 2010; Wilson, Fisher, and Moore 2009), my research participants saw working holidays as a first step towards longer term migration projects if they ’did it right’. As the WHV was often seen as a first step, migrants foregrounded practical aspects such as how much time, money and effort it would take to get this first visa. WHV agreements always depend on bilateral negotiations between two governments. Therefore, WHV schemes vary quite substantially in what they require of an applicant in terms of savings, language skills, and eligible age ranges. Research participants carefully weighed their different options with Naomi’sapproach being illustrative of many similar accounts in my sample: I had an Excel [sheet] with all the possible countries that Chile has a working holiday visa agreement with, with different fields: what is the age limit? Do I need to know the language to get into the country? …And that’s how I went about eliminating candidates. Naomi chose Germany because the application is cheap compared to other destinations and does not require language proficiency test scores. In addition, candidates can apply at any point in the year, and there is no annual ceiling or quota on the number of visas issued. Research participants conceptualised these differences in the administrative processes as a hierarchy between different destination countries. At the top of this hierarchy were English-speaking countries which research participants saw as the most desirable destinations but also as the most difficult visas to obtain. 8 By comparison to places that required language test scores or more substantial amounts of savings in their bank account, the German WHV was seen as the ‘fastest’amongst all WHV schemes and thus a perfect stepping stone. 2798 B. ORTH This was seen as a big advantage when the particular temporal horizons that govern the visa were interrupted by COVID-19-induced travel restrictions as Naomi reflected: In 2020, I was 28 and this visa is only until you’re 30. So I started to get very anxious and the fear of ‘maybe I’m not going to make it’[set in]. […] And then, because of the pandemic, the main question was: which [WHV schemes] are open, because most of them were closed. Many migrants felt their time was ‘running out ‘as their 30th birthdays, the usual cut-off age for WHV, approached. This anxiety was amplified by COVID-19-induced travel restrictions during the years of fieldwork (2021–2023). To summarise, the findings of this study suggest that Latin Americans share some characteristics with other groups of working holidayers in terms of having heterogeneous motivations for their trip but also add some new dimensions when compared with more ‘easy-go-lucky’backpackers. First, working holidayers pragmatically chose Germany because of low administrative hurdles within the application process. Second, Covid19 related restrictions further added to a time squeeze, which heightened this pragmatism. Thus, the German WHV emerged as an ideal stepping stone either to save enough money to apply for more long-term visas in other countries or to make longer-term plans for staying in Germany. Forging mobilites beyond temporary status When I spoke to them before they left Chile, research participants often did not give too much thought about what they would do when their 12 months in Germany ended. However, the German WHV is not designed to be a future-facing visa: there is no way to extend the visa or reapply for it, and migrants are supposed to return home after one year. Those who wanted to stay in Germany began to perceive their transient, temporary legal status as a problem for wanting to stay long-term (for a more detailed analysis of this process, see Stingl and Orth 2024). To navigate these structural constraints, migrants managed to find various bottom-up practices to forge longer-term mobility projects. Common options included applying for a German language study visa, available for up to two years, enrolling at a university if they had managed to improve their English or German enough to apply, or applying for a freelancer visa. The proximity of different countries where WHVs have in recent years become available means Europe lends itself particularly well to this stepwise migration strategy. Germany’s geographic location at the centre of Europe in particular means that crossing back and forth between different legal jurisdictions is comparatively cheap. For example, research participants left the Schengen Zone using visa-on-arrival opportunities with nearby countries that are not part of the Schengen agreement, such as the United Kingdom or Bulgaria to re-apply for WHV elsewhere. Carlo, for example, specifically planned to do a WHV in Austria to be able to continue being in a German-speaking country while improving his German and waiting on the long process of getting his professional degree accredited in Germany. Others aspired to use their WHV in Europe to improve their English skills and save up enough money to meet both language and saving requirements of countries like Australia and New Zealand. While many working holidayers thus regarded the ability to change over to other temporary visas as a practical opportunity to achieve particular goals, it is important JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 2799 the country and do not have to make a living wage immediately; and their class position and the social construction of the working holiday as a liminal space mean that many do not perceive menial work as downward social mobility. Platform companies benefit from this arrangement because the true costs of reproducing a hyperflexible labour force required for their business model remain not only hidden but are also shouldered entirely by the workers. The externalisation of labour risks associated with platform work, such as traffic accidents or sick leave is widely publicised. My argument here is that forging migratory pathways into urban platform work should be considered another dimension of this externalisation both in the sense of social reproduction and in terms of occupational hazards: when migrants fail to obtain the next visa and work permit, they shoulder the costs. They have to find a new way to work in Germany legally or relocate elsewhere. If they fail in obtaining a new visa or find workarounds like staying in the country on tourist or language learner visas, they risk deportation or sanctions for working on visas that officially do not permit paid work. Recently, the European Commission has revealed plans to greatly expand youth mobility schemes, specifically to address post-pandemic labour shortages (EU Commission 2022).With this expansion of working holiday visa schemes across Europe in the coming years, platform companies will be able to draw on an ever increasing number of young, unattached, ablebodied people that, for visa reasons, do not even want the labour protections enshrined in the new EU Directive on Platform Labour: standard employment contracts require work permits, and hence limit both the types of platforms they can work for as well as well as the ways they can work under semi-compliant conditions on non-labour visas. Efforts to improve working conditions in the platform economy need to take this into account if they want to be successful. That being said, working holidayers’experience and the way they relate to platform work likely differ substantially from other groups within the sector, such as undocumented migrants or EU citizens (see e.g. Andersen and Spanger 2024; Dimitriadis and Coletto 2024). While the findings of this study should therefore not be construed as representative of migrants’experiences overall, it highlights the need to hone in on specific visa categories to understand the co-constitution of labour and migration regimes. Future research should strive to better understand how other forms of temporary status, such as humanitarian visas, or the lack of legal status interact with the temporariness and transient nature of gig work. Notes 1. These are: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, HongKong, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Uruguay, South Korea, and Taiwan. 2. Over the same time, the absolute numbers of au pair, working holiday, and volunteer visas issued by Germany have nearly doubled: in 2013, 8,378 visas were issued in this category. By 2022, the number had risen to 14, 682. This is my own calculation based on statistical data provided through a freedom of information request by the German Foreign Office. Interestingly, the government was unable to provide disaggregated data for the three types of visa as they are not recorded separately. Thus it is only possible to point to correlation between the new agreements and overall growth of youth mobility visas issued. 2806 B. ORTH 3. It is worth noting that these countries have particular histories of colonialism, immigration, and white supremacy (Ceron-Anaya, de Santana Pinho, and Ramos-Zayas 2023). Whether, and if so, how these have played a role in the signing of WHV agreements as scholars have explored for other schemes (Chartrand and Vosko 2021; Helleiner 2017), would be an interesting avenue for future research. 4. Of the seven individuals I first interviewed in Chile, three individuals agreed to be interviewed again once they had arrived in Germany. 5. The sample of WHV migrants in Germany includes Argentinians as well. 6. Processes of racialisation are, of course, highly context-dependent. Research participants acknowledged that their whiteness at home did not translate into what whiteness means in Germany as has been described for other Latin Americans in Europe (Gutiérrez Garza, 2024). Exploring the malleability of whiteness over the course of the migratory journey unfortunately goes beyond the scope of the empirical data collected for this project. 7. I would like to acknowledge the help of Lara Massò who helped me decipher slang and underlying meanings in interview material when my own Spanish skills fell short. 8. To give an example, New Zealand is considered a very difficult country to get a WHV for: New Zealand allocates visas through a lottery system that one can enter only on specific dates once or twice a year, and the number of visas issued is capped at an annual maximum of 940 for Chileans and 1000 for Argentines, respectively. In addition, one must prove the equivalent of NZ$ 4200 in funds and pay NZ$ 420 for the application process (New Zealand immigration, no date). 9. Owing to large-scale European emigration to Latin America’s Southern Cone in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, many Chileans and Argentinians of European descent are eligible for EU passports (Mateos and Durand 2012). Acknowledgements Thank you to both reviewers for their valuable suggestions that have greatly improved this paper. For their hospitality and warm welcome during my research stay in Santiago, I would like to thank Marisol Verdugo Paiva and Jonathan Barton at Universidad Pontificia Católica de Chile. Thank you to my research assistants Lara Massó and Emma Peterson; and to Anna Wherry, Franziska Baum, Isabella Stingl and Stephan Liebscher who have helped me think through and refine the arguments I make in this paper. As always, all remaining errors remain my own. The author would like to acknowledge the Ernst Reuter Foundation and the Ritter-Penck Foundation for funding their field work in Chile. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Statement of informed consent All research participants gave informed consent for this study. Their names and circumstances have been changed to safeguard their anonymity. All data was processed in accordance with EU data protection requirements (GDPR). 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