Rethinking Care in Female Migration: From Rupture to TransformationAbstract
This article advances a conceptual correction to dominant accounts of care in female migration by arguing that care does not disappear but transforms across the migratory cycle. Drawing on a critical theoretical review, it develops a typology of transformed care comprising four dimensions: care at a distance, commodified care, care in transit, and invisible care. Particular attention is given to transit contexts, where care is reorganized under conditions of mobility, risk, and institutional absence, as illustrated by transit corridors such as the Darién. The latter dimension captures the mental and emotional labor that remains unrecognized within existing policy frameworks. From an intersectional perspective, the article shows that these transformations are unevenly distributed across migrant women, according to their social position. It argues that the gap between nominal gender-sensitive policies and effective protection is not merely a problem of implementation but an epistemic gap: policy frameworks cannot protect what they cannot name, nor name what they are not designed to see. The article contributes both conceptually, by proposing a typology of transformed care, and critically, by demonstrating that the limits of migration governance are rooted in the invisibility of care in transit.
Keywords:
transnational care; care in transit; female migration; mental and emotional labor; intersectionality; Darién Gap
Resumo
Este artigo propõe uma correção conceitual às visões predominantes sobre o cuidado na migração feminina, argumentando que o cuidado não desaparece, mas se transforma ao longo do ciclo migratório. Com base em uma revisão teórica crítica, desenvolve uma tipologia dos cuidados transformados em quatro dimensões: cuidados à distância, cuidados mercantilizados, cuidados em trânsito e cuidados invisíveis. Atenção especial é dada aos contextos de trânsito, nos quais os cuidados são reorganizados em condições de mobilidade, risco e ausência institucional, como no corredor do Darién. Essa última dimensão abrange o trabalho mental e emocional que permanece sem reconhecimento nos marcos normativos existentes. A partir de uma perspectiva interseccional, o artigo mostra que essas transformações estão distribuídas de forma desigual entre as mulheres migrantes, conforme sua posição social. Argumenta-se, ainda, que a lacuna entre as políticas nominais sensíveis às questões de gênero e a proteção efetiva não é meramente um problema de implementação, mas uma lacuna epistêmica: os marcos normativos não podem proteger o que não conseguem nomear, nem nomear o que não foram concebidos para enxergar. O artigo contribui tanto conceitualmente, ao propor uma tipologia dos cuidados transformados, quanto criticamente, ao demonstrar que os limites da governança migratória estão enraizados na invisibilidade dos cuidados em trânsito.
Palavras-chave:
cuidados transnacionais; cuidados em trânsito; migração feminina; trabalho mental e emocional; interseccionalidade; Estreito de Darién
Introduction
In the Darién Gap, a woman moves through the jungle with her children. As she manages their food, rest, and safety in a context marked by violence, her care work does not disappear; it intensifies. Yet this work - essential to survival - remains entirely absent from institutional records, protocols, and normative frameworks designed to protect people on the move.
This is not an exceptional case but a concrete expression of a broader problem. While migration governance in Latin America - particularly in transit corridors such as the Darién corridor - has increasingly recognized that migration is gendered, it continues to operate through categories that fail to capture how care transforms in contexts of mobility. As a result, significant dimensions of migrant women’s care work remain invisible and, consequently, unprotected, a condition that has been described in studies of the Darién corridor as a broader pattern of social invisibility and exclusion affecting people in transit (Sandoval, 2024).
In recent decades, Latin America has made important normative advances in the field of gender and migration. Regional platforms such as the Regional Conferences on Women, the South American Conference on Migration, and the Puebla Process have produced agreements and guidelines that recognize the feminization of migration and call for gender-sensitive policies (Martínez Pizarro, 2007; Fries, 2019).
However, these advances coexist with the persistence - and in many cases the intensification - of the forms of violence affecting migrant women, including trafficking, labor exploitation, sexual violence in transit, and the precarization of care work. These dynamics have become particularly visible in the post-COVID-19 context, as the reconfiguration of migratory routes and the expansion of transit corridors such as the Darién have intensified both mobility and exposure to risk - a situation further exacerbated by the resurgence of anti-immigrant rhetoric and border externalization policies in the United States, which have deepened securitization across the region and rendered care work in transit increasingly invisible. This paradox cannot be explained solely as a problem of implementation. Rather, it points to a deeper limitation: normative frameworks do not protect what their categories are not designed to see. The limitation becomes particularly visible in transit spaces, where care is reorganized under conditions that escape institutional recognition.
Existing scholarship on the feminization of migration and global care chains has made fundamental contributions to rendering visible the role of women in contemporary migration processes (Hochschild, 2000, as cited in Nguyen, Zavoretti, Tronto, 2017; Herrera, 2016; Sassen, 2003). However, this literature has largely focused on the poles of migration - origin and destination - without developing a systematic understanding of care as a process that transforms across the entire migratory cycle, particularly in transit. Transit corridors - such as the Darién Gap - remain under-theorized as spaces where care is not suspended but reconfigured under conditions of mobility and risk. Nor has it sufficiently engaged with the epistemic dimension of the gap between the nominal recognition of gender in policy frameworks and their actual capacity to protect the most vulnerable women. Recent scholarship on the political economy of transit migration in the Andean-Central American corridor has identified collective forms of care among the strategies through which migrants sustain their trajectories while negotiating with state, criminal, and humanitarian actors (Gandini et al., 2024). Building on these insights, this article conceptualizes care in transit as a distinct analytical dimension within the broader process of transformed care, arguing that these practices remain largely outside institutional frameworks, precisely where vulnerability is most acute.
This article advances this debate through two main contributions. First, it develops a conceptual framework of transformed care in female migration, identifying four interrelated dimensions - care at a distance, commodified care, care in transit, and invisible care - and showing how their articulation enables a more precise understanding of how migrant women’s care work persists, is redistributed, and remains unrecognized across the migratory cycle, particularly in transit contexts. Second, it advances a critical argument: drawing on an intersectional perspective, the article shows that the gap between nominal gender-sensitive policies and substantive protection is not merely bureaucratic but epistemic. Policy frameworks cannot name what their categories have not learned to see and cannot protect what they cannot name.
Methodologically, the article is based on a critical theoretical review. The selection of literature was guided by three criteria: conceptual relevance to debates on gender, care, and migration; inclusion of perspectives from both the Global North and the Global South, with particular emphasis on Latin American scholarship; and the capacity to engage with existing empirical evidence on the region. The empirical cases - the Darién corridor as a transit space and the Mexican anti-trafficking law - are used illustratively, not for empirical generalization but to substantiate the conceptual argument through documented evidence. Data on the Darién draw on previous research (León Rojas, 2025) as well as reports from international organizations, while the analysis of trafficking in Mexico builds on the empirical work of Izcara Palacios (2022).
The article is structured in three sections. The first develops the conceptual framework, proposing a shift from rupture to transformation, outlining the typology of transformed care, and applying intersectionality as an analytical lens across the migratory cycle. The second examines the nominal advances in regional Latin American frameworks on gender and migration. The third demonstrates the epistemic nature of the gap through the case of trafficking as a diagnostic of the distance between recognition and protection and discusses the theoretical and political implications of understanding this gap as a problem of knowledge.
2. Conceptual framework: rethinking care in female migration
2.1. From rupture to transformation: a necessary correction
The study of care in migratory contexts has long been shaped by the metaphor of global care chains, coined by Hochschild (2000, as cited in Nguyen et al., 2017; Herrera, 2016) to describe the transnational links established through paid and unpaid care work. Further developed with Ehrenreich (Ehrenreich, Hochschild, 2003, as cited in Nguyen et al., 2017), this framework has been central in rendering visible how women from poorer regions sustain the social reproduction of wealthier households, producing deeply gendered and transnational inequalities while foregrounding the affective dimension of care work - what Hochschild conceptualized as emotional surplus value (Herrera, 2016).
However, this framework carries conceptual limitations with significant theoretical and political implications. On the one hand, it tends to reduce care to individual interactions and discrete activities, thereby obscuring the institutional, cultural, and relational dimensions that constitute it (Nguyen et al., 2017). On the other hand, it presupposes unidirectional flows of care - from poorer to wealthier contexts - and conceptualizes care primarily as a proximal activity, that is, as work performed through physical co-presence and therefore lost when the caregiver migrates (Withers, Hill, 2023). This logic implicitly sustains the idea of rupture: if care is fundamentally tied to physical presence, the departure of the woman who provides it inevitably produces a void in the place of origin.
Evidence from Latin America directly challenges this premise. Studies of South-South and South-North migratory circuits in the region show that communities of origin do not necessarily experience an absence of care, but rather a multiplicity of arrangements and reorganizations that, while shaped by conditions of inequality and vulnerability, reflect active processes of care provision and maintenance (Herrera, 2016). This regional evidence is theoretically significant because it demonstrates that the metaphor of care chains - largely derived from Global North experiences, particularly the Filipino case - does not adequately capture the dynamics of transnational care in Latin America. Its uncritical application risks reproducing the same androcentric and economistic biases that feminist migration scholarship has sought to dismantle.
What this body of evidence suggests, instead, is that when women migrate, care does not disappear; it is reconfigured across new spatial, relational, and temporal arrangements (Withers, Hill, 2023). Care expands geographically, persists through practices that conventional analytical frameworks do not always recognize as work, and continues to fall disproportionately on women throughout all stages of the migratory cycle. This reconfiguration is neither a diminished substitute for face-to-face care nor a temporary adaptation to migration; rather, it constitutes a structural transformation with its own logics, burdens, and forms of invisibility.
Proposing this conceptual shift - from rupture to transformation - is therefore not a minor semantic adjustment. It has direct implications for how migrant women’s care work is measured, recognized, and protected. If care is understood as broken, the migrant woman appears as an absence that generates a deficit. If care is understood as transformed, she emerges as an active worker whose labor remains unrecognized. Crucially, this invisibility is not accidental but the effect of measurement categories and normative frameworks that were not designed to apprehend it, particularly in spaces of transit that have been described as “non-places” where migrants are stripped of recognition and reduced to conditions of extreme vulnerability (Cárdenas Benítez, 2021).
2.2. The dimensions of transformed care
The conceptual correction proposed in the previous section requires the development of a typology that can name with precision the forms care takes when it transforms in female migration. Four analytically distinct but empirically intertwined dimensions are identified, operating simultaneously across the migratory cycle: care at a distance, commodified care, care in transit, and invisible care. None of these dimensions is entirely new - the literature has approached them from different angles - but their articulation as a typology of transformed care allows for a more precise understanding of how migrant women’s care work persists, is redistributed, and remains unrecognized throughout the migratory process. In line with feminist economics approaches that place the sustainability of life at the center of analysis (Pérez Orozco, 2019), this typology shifts attention from care as a discrete activity to care as a structural process that sustains life under conditions of mobility.
The first three dimensions - care at a distance, commodified care, and care in transit - correspond to specific modalities of care depending on their location within the migratory cycle. The fourth - invisible care - has a distinct analytical status: it does not refer to a modality localized in a specific phase, but rather to the cognitive and emotional dimension that cuts across and articulates the other three. It operates simultaneously within all of them and constitutes their most persistently invisibilized substrate. This distinction is crucial to avoid treating the four dimensions as parallel and equivalent categories, when in fact invisible care has a transversal character that helps explain why the other three remain systematically outside frameworks of recognition.
Care at a distance is the most documented dimension, although it is frequently reduced to its economic expression. Discussions of transnational care tend to privilege remittances as the primary indicator of the relationship between migrant women and their families of origin - as if the money sent exhausted the content of that relationship. This reduction obscures the fact that care at a distance is fundamentally relational labor sustained over time: phone calls that organize the daily life of those who remain, decisions regarding health, education, and family conflicts made across distance, and affective presence maintained through communication technologies that are often precarious or inaccessible (Withers, Hill, 2023; Baldassar, 2008, as cited in Bryceson, 2019).
This form of care does not cease with departure, nor is it fully delegated. Instead, what emerges is a reorganization of responsibilities within transnational families, involving multiple actors - grandmothers, older daughters, neighbors - in a redistribution that, far from being equitable, tends to fall disproportionately on other women in the country of origin (Herrera, 2016; Withers, Hill, 2023). This dynamic has been conceptualized in Latin American scholarship as part of what Baldassar and Merla (2014, as cited in Herrera, 2016) describe as the circulation of care - a concept that, unlike “chains,” allows for recognition of multidirectionality and asymmetric reciprocity within transnational family arrangements. Studies in the region show that communities of origin do not necessarily experience a deficit of care, but rather a range of arrangements that, despite being shaped by inequality, constitute active forms of sustaining family life (Herrera, 2016).
Commodified care emerges primarily in destination contexts. Migrant women are disproportionately incorporated into the care sector - domestic work, elder care, childcare - as receiving societies face unresolved crises of social reproduction that are externalized onto migrant labor (González, 2016; Herrera, 2016). This dynamic produces what the literature has described as a global transfer of care, whereby women from poorer regions sustain the social reproduction of wealthier households while their own families are cared for by other women, reproducing the feminization of care across multiple scales (Hochschild, 2000, as cited in Nguyen, Zavoretti, Tronto, 2017). From a broader perspective, Sassen (2003) argues that these processes are not marginal but constitutive of globalization: feminized survival circuits - built on the labor, and often the exploitation, of migrant women - sustain key sectors of the global economy under conditions that render them invisible and limit their capacity for collective agency.
Commodified care is characterized by informality, low wages, and limited legal protection - conditions that are exacerbated under irregular migratory status (León Rojas, 2020). Far from being exceptional, irregularity is often produced by securitization policies that criminalize mobility while simultaneously generating the very vulnerabilities they claim to prevent (León Rojas, 2020). In this context, commodified care operates under a double invisibility: it remains unrecognized because it takes place within the domestic sphere, and unprotected because those who perform it lack regular legal status. This invisibility is not a failure of registration but a structural feature of the economic system: much of the labor that sustains life is deliberately kept outside frameworks of recognition, as its invisibility is functional to the system that exploits it (Pérez Orozco, 2019).
Care in transit is the least explored dimension in literature and arguably the most revealing of the limitations of existing analytical and normative frameworks. Throughout the migratory journey - which may last days, weeks, or months - women do not suspend their care responsibilities. They care for their children during displacement, manage the needs of others within migrant groups, and negotiate collective safety in contexts marked by extreme vulnerability. Comparative research on transit geographies has shown that increased containment and securitization transform spaces of transit into spaces of stasis, generating conditions of particular vulnerability for women whose gendered and racialized positions are compounded by immobility (Parent et al., 2023). These dynamics make transit corridors especially revealing sites for examining how care is reorganized under conditions that existing migration governance frameworks are not designed to apprehend.
The Darién Gap corridor offers a stark illustration of this dimension. Between 2021 and 2022, more than 380,000 people crossed this route - a 575,000-hectare jungle controlled by criminal organizations, lacking state infrastructure, and marked by the documented presence of trafficking networks (León Rojas, 2025). Women in transit are exposed to extreme forms of violence: between April 2021 and March 2022, 396 cases of sexual violence were recorded, including cases involving girls aged 9 to 17 (León Rojas, 2025). Trafficking for sexual and labor exploitation has also been documented as a form of coercion imposed by criminal groups in exchange for continued passage (León Rojas, 2025). Under these conditions, care in transit takes place within contexts of terror: women continue to care - for their children, for others, and for themselves - while simultaneously being subjected to severe forms of gender-based violence.
These practices do not appear in institutional records. They are absent from statistics, excluded from protocols, and generate no rights. State responses to transit in the Darién have largely focused on facilitating rapid passage through ad hoc measures that fail to address differentiated needs, framing the phenomenon as a matter of border control rather than a gendered human rights crisis (León Rojas, 2025, 2020). As Vogt (2013) argues, such transit spaces must be understood as sites where local and global economies intersect to profit from migrant vulnerability - and within these intersections, women’s bodies become systematically exploited terrains.
Invisible care constitutes the transversal dimension of the typology. It does not correspond to a specific phase, but rather to the cognitive and emotional substrate that underpins the previous three dimensions and remains the most persistently excluded from frameworks of recognition. It encompasses not only what goes uncounted, but what is not even perceived as work: the cognitive burden of planning from afar, anticipating needs, and making decisions under uncertainty; the sustained guilt of absence; the constant monitoring of those left behind; and the emotional management of family relations across distance. This burden - conceptualized by Withers and Hill (2023) as the emotional and moral responsibilities of care - is continuous, unremunerated, and unrecognized. As Pérez Orozco (2019) warns, expanding the concept of care without transforming the categories that render it invisible risks producing nominal recognition without substantive protection.
Nor does invisible care meet the criteria of recognition embedded in most normative frameworks addressing migrant women. This absence is not incidental. Measurement systems and policy instruments are designed to capture visible, physical, and market-based labor - and invisible care fits none of these categories. As Herrera (2016) observes, debates on migrant women’s rights have historically remained confined within national frameworks, failing to account for the transnational and deterritorialized nature of care. What is not named is not measured; what is not measured is not protected. And what remains unprotected - as the following section will argue - is not simply a bureaucratic omission, but an epistemic limitation embedded in the very frameworks that claim to incorporate a gender perspective into migration governance.
2.3. Intersectionality as an analytical lens for the migratory cycle
The typology developed in the previous section describes what happens to care when a woman migrates. What it does not explain - and what intersectionality allows us to specify - is why this transformation affects different women in markedly different ways. Without an intersectional lens, the typology risks reproducing the very problem it seeks to address: treating “migrant women” as a homogeneous category, when in fact this group encompasses deeply differentiated social positions that shape not only which dimension of transformed care falls on each woman, but also with what intensity and under what conditions of vulnerability.
Intersectionality, in its original formulation, begins from the recognition that categories such as race and gender do not simply add up but intersect, producing specific forms of inequality that cannot be understood by examining each axis in isolation (Crenshaw, 1989, as cited in Expósito, 2012). This is not a matter of accumulating disadvantages, but of a particular configuration in which each intersection produces a distinct social position with its own constraints and possibilities (Expósito, 2012). This distinction is theoretically decisive: multiple discrimination describes how many inequalities affect a person; intersectionality explains how those inequalities interact to produce a condition that none of them can account for on their own.
Applied to the migratory cycle, intersectionality reveals that women’s positions are not static, but reconfigured at each stage of the process. This analysis also requires a multi-scalar perspective - from the transnational to the local - recognizing that gender inequalities are not expressed uniformly across origin, transit, and destination, but are instead rearticulated at each stage (Pérez et al., 2008). At origin, gender intersects with class, ethnicity, and family position to shape who migrates, under what conditions, and through which routes. A woman with access to economic resources and support networks does not migrate in the same way as an indigenous woman in conditions of structural poverty whose only option is an irregular route - and this difference is not merely one of degree, but of kind. The inequalities structured in the place of origin do not remain there: they travel with women, are reconfigured in transit, and are reactivated at destination in new forms (Pérez et al., 2008).
In transit, as shown in the previous section, irregular migratory status becomes the most acute axis of intersection. Yet this status does not operate in isolation; it is compounded by gender, nationality, age, and the presence or absence of dependents. A Haitian woman crossing the Darién with young children does not face the same risks as a Venezuelan woman crossing alone, even though both are irregular migrants - and neither faces the risks encountered by a man on the same route. The systematic sexual violence documented in this corridor does not affect all people equally: it falls disproportionately on women and girls, and within this group, on those who accumulate the greatest vulnerability through their specific intersections (León Rojas, 2025).
At destination, the intersection of gender, nationality, and race shapes access to employment, working conditions, and possibilities for legal protection. Contreras (2019) shows how Latin American migrant women in receiving countries experience forms of racism and exclusion that intersect with gender to produce positions of triple subordination: as women, as migrants, and as racialized subjects. This position limits access to quality employment, as well as deepens exposure to the precarization of commodified care and the isolation that sustains invisible care. They are, in Expósito’s (2012) terms, the “otherness within otherness.” This position is not merely the result of multiple contemporary forms of discrimination but is rooted in a modern/colonial gender system that has historically rendered racialized bodies from the Global South invisible as subjects of knowledge and protection (Lugones, 2008). From this perspective, the gap between normative frameworks and the most vulnerable women is not a contingent failure but a structural feature of the system itself.
The political implications of this reading are direct and provide the bridge to the following section: policies designed for “migrant women” as a uniform category are not merely insufficient - they are epistemically flawed. At best, they protect the most visible women: those with fewer intersecting vulnerabilities, more regular status, and forms of care that are legible within existing frameworks. Those who accumulate the most unfavorable intersections - those most in need of protection - are precisely those these frameworks fail to see. And what remains unseen cannot be protected. This is the primary mechanism through which the gap between nominal and substantive policies is produced: not through bad faith, but through the structural incapacity of policy frameworks to recognize what intersectionality reveals.
The analytical framework developed in this section does not merely describe how care transforms across the migratory cycle; it also reveals the limits of the categories through which migration is currently understood and governed. These limits become particularly visible in transit contexts, where care persists under conditions of mobility, risk, and institutional absence, yet remains largely unrecognized within policy frameworks. What appears, from a normative perspective, as a problem of insufficient protection can thus be reinterpreted as a problem of misrecognition: the forms of care that sustain life in migration are not absent but systematically excluded from the categories that organize intervention. This disjunction between what exists and what is recognized constitutes the basis of what this article conceptualizes as an epistemic gap - a gap that becomes evident when examining how gender-sensitive migration policies operate in practice.
3. Between the nominal and the substantive: the epistemic gap in gender-sensitive migration policy
3.1. What has been named: normative advances
Over recent decades, Latin America has made sustained progress in incorporating a gender perspective into migration governance frameworks. Regional platforms such as the Regional Conferences on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Puebla Process, and the South American Conference on Migration have produced agreements, guidelines, and protocols that explicitly recognize that migration is gendered - that is, that women and men experience it differently and that these differences must be addressed by public policy (Martínez Pizarro, 2007; Fries, 2019).
However, migratory transit through corridors such as the Darién reveals the limits of this recognition. Far from being a neutral movement across space, transit unfolds under conditions of violence, precariousness, and limited institutional protection. In this context, studies have identified dynamics of social invisibility and exclusion affecting migrants in transit (Sandoval, 2024), which makes visible why care practices do not disappear but are reorganized under extreme conditions.
This recognition is not trivial: it reflects decades of feminist advocacy and constitutes a normative foundation that should, in principle, translate into differentiated protection for migrant women. Yet its capacity to apprehend the specific conditions of transit remains limited, as care continues to operate outside institutional visibility precisely where vulnerability intensifies.
Among the most significant advances are the Montevideo Strategy for the Implementation of the Regional Gender Agenda within the Sustainable Development Framework towards 2030, the Guidelines for the Care and Protection of Women in Migratory Contexts developed through the Puebla Process with IOM support, and the growing incorporation of trafficking as a gender-specific issue in regional instruments. These frameworks name the feminization of migration, acknowledge the particular vulnerability of women in transit, and call for gender-sensitive policies across all phases of the migratory cycle. Yet even when transit is explicitly recognized, the forms of care that sustain life within it - particularly care in transit and its invisible dimensions - remain largely outside the scope of these frameworks.
The existence of this normative architecture, however, does not make the central question any less pressing: why, despite these advances, do the forms of violence affecting migrant women persist, intensify, and take forms that existing frameworks fail to apprehend? Addressing this question requires moving beyond the existence of norms to examine the limits of what these frameworks are able to recognize - particularly in contexts where care is reorganized under conditions of mobility and risk.
3.2. The persistence of violence: trafficking as a diagnostic case
Trafficking for sexual and labor exploitation constitutes one of the clearest indicators of the gap between nominal recognition and substantive protection. It is a phenomenon explicitly addressed in regional frameworks, national legislation, and institutional protocols - and yet it persists, intensifies, and takes forms that these frameworks not only fail to contain but may, in some cases, help reproduce. This persistence becomes particularly visible in transit corridors such as the Darién, where trafficking operates within the same spaces in which care is reorganized under conditions of mobility and risk.
Sassen (2003) argues that feminized survival circuits - built on the labor and exploitation of migrant women - are sustained precisely through the invisibility produced by legal and economic systems. Trafficking is not an anomaly but one of the most extreme expressions of these circuits within the contemporary global economy. It operates within the same spaces of informality, irregularity, and vulnerability as commodified care, follows the same routes as care in transit, and draws on the same unrecognized labor that remains outside frameworks of protection. In this sense, trafficking does not stand outside the typology of transformed care proposed in this article; rather, it emerges at the intersection of its most vulnerable dimensions, where care in transit and invisible care converge under conditions of coercion and violence. When an irregular migrant woman is captured by a trafficking network in the Darién, she is not entering an external void, but rather one of the system’s most violent internal configurations, produced by the same conditions that render her care work invisible and her body vulnerable (León Rojas, 2025).
What the trafficking case reveals most starkly is that normative frameworks can fail not only by omission, but also by inversion. Izcara Palacios (2022) shows how Mexico’s 2012 anti-trafficking law - internationally praised as highly advanced - has led to the mass incarceration of poor Central American migrant women who are not part of criminal networks. Those prosecuted do not match the profile of traffickers: they are young, often indigenous women, unfamiliar with the territory and lacking the resources to operate complex criminal structures. As Izcara Palacios (2022) argues, they are punished not because they are guilty, but because they embody a transgressive figure - the woman who leaves the home, migrates independently, and assumes the role of provider. This departure from patriarchal norms becomes, in itself, grounds for criminalization.
This finding is theoretically decisive. A legal framework designed to protect women from exploitation becomes an instrument of their punishment. This occurs because its categories - structured around the figure of the passive, morally legible victim - cannot recognize autonomous migrant women as subjects of protection. Instead, they are rendered suspect. What remains unrecognized in this process is not only the condition of victimhood, but also the forms of labor and care that these women perform within migratory trajectories that exceed normative expectations. The gap between the nominal and the substantive is not, in this case, a failure of implementation, but the consequence of operating with categories that reproduce the very structures of power that generate vulnerability.
3.3. The epistemic gap: frameworks cannot protect what they cannot name
The preceding analysis points to a problem that exceeds policy implementation - particularly the persistence of care in transit contexts such as the Darién corridor, the invisibility of the cognitive and emotional labor that sustains it, and the contradictions revealed through the trafficking case. The issue is not simply that states fail to apply the frameworks they adopt, nor that resources are insufficient. Rather, the problem lies in the limits of the knowledge frameworks upon which these policies are built: normative frameworks cannot protect what their categories are not designed to see.
Pérez Orozco (2019) has argued that the invisibility of care is not incidental but structurally functional: economic and political systems depend on this unrecognized labor and therefore reproduce its exclusion from measurement and protection. Naming care without transforming the categories that render it invisible produces nominal recognition without substantive protection - precisely the form this gap takes in regional gender and migration frameworks.
This dynamic corresponds to what Sullivan and Tuana (2007) describe as an epistemology of ignorance: not a passive absence of knowledge, but the active production of not-knowing as a mechanism of power. From this perspective, the failure to recognize care in transit or the mental burden of migrant women is not accidental. It is produced in contexts where forms of labor essential to survival - particularly in transit - are systematically excluded from recognition. This exclusion is produced by frameworks whose categories delimit in advance what can be seen and what remains outside recognition.
This invisibility is also shaped by broader structures of power. Lugones (2008) has shown that the modern/colonial gender system produces hierarchies of visibility and intelligibility, rendering certain bodies and forms of labor systematically unrecognizable. The categories through which migration is measured are not only androcentric and economistic; they are rooted in epistemological traditions that have historically excluded the Global South as a site of legitimate knowledge production. Transit corridors in Latin America - such as the Darién - make this exclusion particularly visible, as they concentrate forms of labor, violence, and survival that remain unintelligible within dominant frameworks. The racialized migrant woman in irregular transit is not invisible by accident - her invisibility is produced within a system that has learned not to see her.
This constitutes the epistemic dimension of the gap. The categories through which migration is measured - flows, remittances, formal labor market participation, documentation - fail to capture care at a distance as labor, do not register care in transit, do not account for mental and emotional burden, and cannot apprehend how intersections of gender, race, and migratory status produce differentiated forms of vulnerability within the same group (Expósito, 2012; Pérez et al., 2008).
This gap also entails what Fricker (2007) terms hermeneutical injustice: a form of epistemic harm that arises when individuals lack the conceptual resources to make sense of their own experiences because those resources have been systematically excluded. Migrant women who provide care in transit not only lack protection; they also lack a recognized language through which to name that care as work. The injustice is therefore not only material but epistemic, affecting their capacity to be recognized as subjects of knowledge.
As a result, policy frameworks can identify “migrant women” as a category of concern without enhancing their capacity to protect them. In some cases, they may even produce the opposite effect. Policies that aim to combat trafficking can criminalize the most vulnerable; policies that recognize transnational care reduce it to remittances; policies that identify transit as a space of risk fail to acknowledge that care continues under conditions of extreme violence.
The gap between nominal recognition and substantive protection is therefore not primarily a matter of political will or institutional capacity. It is a problem of knowledge1. Frameworks cannot protect what they have not learned to see, and they cannot learn to see what their categories exclude from the outset. This is particularly evident in transit contexts, where care persists under conditions of extreme vulnerability yet remains outside institutional recognition. Addressing this gap requires more than additional protocols or declarations; it demands a transformation of the epistemological foundations upon which migration governance is built. This is the central argument of this article: before more effective policies can emerge, the forms of knowledge that make them possible must themselves be transformed.
Conclusions
The woman crossing the Darién with her children does not appear in any institutional record as a care worker. She generates no rights, activates no protocols, and does not exist within the categories through which normative frameworks measure migration. Yet her labor sustains lives - those of her children, of fellow migrants, of herself - under conditions that no policy has learned to see. Transit corridors such as the Darién are not peripheral but central to understanding how care is reorganized under conditions of mobility and risk. That is the problem this article has sought to conceptualize.
The typology of transformed care - articulating care at a distance, commodified care, care in transit, and invisible care - does not claim to exhaust the complexity of female migratory experience, but to provide an analytical instrument more precise than the metaphor of rupture. If care does not disappear but transforms, then the question shifts from how to repair a deficit to how to recognize labor that the system actively produces as invisible. That is a different question, and it requires different answers.
The intersectional perspective applied to the migratory cycle has shown that this invisibility is not evenly distributed among migrant women. Those who accumulate the most unfavorable intersections - irregularity, racialization, poverty, the presence of dependents - are precisely those that frameworks are least equipped to see and, therefore, least able to protect. The gap is not accidental: it is the product of categories built around an image of the migrant woman that does not correspond to the most vulnerable.
The trafficking case, examined through the evidence of Izcara Palacios (2022), demonstrates that this gap can produce consequences directly contrary to those that frameworks claim to pursue: a law designed to protect victims ends up incarcerating the most vulnerable. This outcome is particularly visible in transit contexts, where vulnerability, invisibility, and exposure to violence converge. This is not a failure of implementation but the consequence of operating with categories that reproduce the same patriarchal structures that generate migrant women's vulnerability in the first place.
The implications of this argument extend beyond the field of migration policy. Theoretically, they suggest that incorporating gender into migration studies requires not only rendering women visible but transforming the categories through which knowledge about their experience is constructed - including the forms of care that operate at the margins of the measurable. Politically, they indicate that the nominal recognition of gender in normative frameworks is a necessary but insufficient starting point: what is needed is a transformation of the knowledge systems that define which forms of labor are visible, measurable, and therefore protectable. Advancing toward that transformation requires what Fricker (2007) calls epistemic justice: the creation of the conceptual resources that allow migrant women to be recognized as subjects of knowledge about their own experience, and not merely as objects of policy intervention.
What remains open for future research is the question of which methodologies are capable of capturing invisible care in transit contexts - that is, how to produce the situated knowledge that policies need but do not yet know how to request. Future research should pay particular attention to transit corridors as key sites for generating this knowledge. This article has sought to take a first step in that direction: naming with greater precision what exists but remains outside frameworks of recognition, as a prior condition for its protection.
Declarations
Funding: This work received no specific funding.
Conflict of interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.
Data availability: Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed.
Data Availability
Research data is available in the body of the article
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The concept of “epistemic gap” used here draws on, while remaining distinct from, two related frameworks: Fricker's (2007) hermeneutical injustice - the structural absence of interpretive resources that prevents marginalized subjects from naming their own experience - and Sullivan and Tuana's (2007) epistemologies of ignorance - the active production of not-knowing as a mechanism of power. The epistemic gap, as developed in this article, refers specifically to the institutional failure to recognize certain forms of labor and experience as valid objects of knowledge and protection: the institutional manifestation of an epistemology of ignorance that sustains the hermeneutical injustice experienced by migrant women whose care work remains unrecognized.
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Section Editors
Roberto Marinuccihttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-2042-2628Barbara Marciano Marqueshttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-0835-2441
