Bodies in Motion, Voices in Silence: Migration, Machismo, and the Feminine Wound in Latin America

Posted On

Introduction: The Feminine Migration of Pain

Migration in Latin America has long been shaped by forces beyond individual will—natural disasters, economic collapse, violence, political repression, and deeply rooted gendered inequalities. Yet in psychoanalytic terms, migration is not merely the movement of people—it is the movement of trauma, of history, of unresolved psychic wounds passed across borders and generations.

While women now make up nearly 50% of global migrants, their stories are rarely told outside of their roles as victims or caregivers. In Latin America, where machismo remains a powerful cultural force, women migrate to escape but often find themselves re-enacting the very subjugations they flee. Whether in the sugarcane fields of 19th-century Brazil, the informal labor markets of Argentina, or refugee shelters across the Venezuelan border, women’s bodies continue to be seen as resources, symbols, or battlegrounds.

This essay explores how psychoanalytic thought illuminates the silent traumas of Latin American migrant women—how victimhood is not an identity, but a psychic wound that risks becoming fixed when culture, politics, and economics repeatedly place the feminine in a position of sacrifice, subordination, and silence.

Historical Displacement: Bodies as Commodities

Latin America’s migratory history is entangled with colonial violence and economic exploitation. The transatlantic slave trade, the mass enslavement of Indigenous peoples, and the importation of laborers for Brazil’s sugarcane plantations established a model where bodies—especially female bodies—were circulated as commodities. In this context, the female body was both production and reproduction, valued for labor and for birth.

Even voluntary migration—such as the influx of European laborers in the 19th century—was shaped by imperial expectations and patriarchal family structures. Women were often seen as appendages to male labor: wives, caregivers, domestics. Their own desires, traumas, and rights remained invisible, much like the unpaid emotional labor they performed.

This legacy lingers today. Venezuelan women crossing borders to escape economic collapse often experience sexual exploitation, informal labor abuse, or are forced into domestic or transactional relationships. In Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina, women migrants remain overrepresented in precarious jobs—nannies, maids, caretakers—and underrepresented in healthcare, legal protection, and the labor market.

Trauma Without Language: From Witness to Victimhood

Psychoanalysis teaches us that trauma disrupts symbolization—the ability to give meaning, structure, or narrative to an experience. When a woman flees violence, war, or poverty, she is often moving not only across borders but away from the possibility of speech.

As Dori Laub (1995) emphasized, trauma often produces a collapse of witnessing. Migrant women in Latin America are often treated as if their pain is unremarkable, expected, or necessary—thus, their trauma is not “heard,” even when spoken.

This psychic void risks fixing the woman in the position of “victim”, not as an identity, but as a symbolic role repeatedly imposed upon her. In this way, “victimhood” is not something she becomes—but something she is placed into, again and again, through social, relational, and legal structures.

Jessica Benjamin (2020) speaks of the tragedy of masculinity—a psychic structure where the rejection of dependency and vulnerability fuels domination. Men raised under this model often experience the feminine as a threat, precisely because it reminds them of their own unacknowledged dependence on maternal care, emotional attunement, and fragility.

When this dependence is denied, rage replaces empathy. The woman becomes scapegoat for the man’s unconscious terror of helplessness, and in the most violent cases, this rage becomes rape, femicide, or coercion. Latin America’s high rates of gender-based violence—particularly in Brazil and Mexico—attest to how unprocessed masculine traumaturns women into mirrors of feared vulnerability, then targets of destruction.

The Maternal Shadow and the Threshold of Status

In Latin America, many migrant women carry children—in utero, on their backs, or in legal uncertainty. Their bodies become the ground of both continuity and danger. As one case describes: a Brazilian mother with a master’s degree migrates in search of a better life for her child. She is welcomed, admired—until her presence evokes frustration, and the men around her begin to reveal their violent edge. Even her daughters, absorbing the ambient pressure, suppress their tears.

This dynamic reflects a societal fear of the feminine—not just of women, but of what is fluid, relational, uncontrollable. The maternal position, especially, evokes ambivalence. She is needed but also feared. Her ability to nurture and contain becomes threatening in a world built on mastery, control, and hierarchy.

Men who fear this may become violent, but also emotionally deadened. Their masculinity becomes a caricature, an armor built against the terror of fusing with the mother, of being “nothing without her,” as Freud feared in Totem and Taboo. This creates a psychic structure where women’s subordination is maintained not by logic, but by unconscious fear—of regression, of annihilation, of dependency.

Migration and the Loss of Symbolic Anchors

When women migrate, they are not just crossing borders—they are losing symbolic anchors: citizenship, social status, language, cultural recognition. In this void, identity itself becomes unstable. For many, economic survival demands emotional invisibility. They become what others need: nanny, lover, caregiver, worker. Their own pain, rage, and trauma remain unspoken, unread, unvalidated.

In such contexts, the danger is not just violence, but psychic invisibility. Many women stop crying because there is no one to see the tears, or worse, because tears are met with anger. Emotional expression becomes risky. Silence, once again, seems safer than pain.

Being a Victim Is Not an Identity

One of the most critical insights in trauma work is this: being a victim is not an identity—it is a moment. It is a condition that, if not metabolized through recognition, mourning, and re-symbolization, risks becoming fixed, defining the self and freezing development.

For migrant women, this process is complex. They are expected to work, mother, adapt, and remain grateful, even while experiencing exploitation, discrimination, and loss. To say, “I am a victim,” is often to be dismissed, pathologized, or blamed.

Yet, not naming the trauma only deepens it. The psychic wound then travels, passed like unspoken grief, like a scream held in the breast milk of mothers who never had the chance to speak. As psychoanalysis teaches us, what is not remembered is repeated—not by choice, but by compulsion.

Conclusion: From Subordination to Subjectivity

In Latin America, the migration of women is a psycho-social phenomenon of urgency. Behind each number is a psyche shaped by history, trauma, silence, and survival. To psychoanalyze this migration is not merely to treat individuals—it is to recognize how entire societies reproduce gendered violence, displacing trauma onto the most vulnerable bodies.

The task is not only to hear women’s stories but to rethink masculinity, rewrite victimhood, and rescue the feminine from the role of scapegoat. The feminine is not weakness—it is relationality, emotional truth, and the capacity to heal through connection. If we fear it, we will destroy it. If we recognize it, we may begin to transform.

References

Benjamin, J. (2020). The Tragic Dance Between Recognition and Destruction. In Beyond Doer and Done To.
Laub, D. (1995). “Truth and Testimony.” In Testimony: Crises of Witnessing.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.
Winnicott, D.W. (1965). The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment.
UNHCR & IOM Reports (2023–2024) on Venezuelan and regional migration.
CEPAL (2024). Gender and Labor Market Inclusion in Latin American Migration.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Reports on Femicide and Gender Violence in Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico (2023–2025).