“Sincerar los trucos”. Una etnografía comparada sobre la migración femenina peruana en Arica, Iquique, Valparaíso y Santiago (Chile)

Resumen

The article develops a description of the methodological successes and failures in an anthropological research project developed between 2012 and 2015. The study in question proposed to compare, through an ethnographic strategy, the Peruvian female migratory experience in four different Chilean cities: Arica, Iquique, Valparaiso and Santiago. The insistence to explain the methodological construction of the project is linked to two axes that structured the research: its critical anthropological perspective, and the effort to historize the study, narrating it from its own processuality. In the second and third sections, we will focus on the academic debates that served as starting points for thinking and formulating our research questions: first, regarding the Latin American migration “in Chile”, and then, regarding the mobility and social organization of indigenous groups in the North of the country. The fourth section details the methodological development of the project and explains the mishaps of its implementation. The fifth section presents comparative results of the research carried out in the four sample cities. In the final remarks, we discuss our meth-odological and theoretical critical reflections on the research process and its findings.