“In the Guaraní world, our way of being isn't to make something to sell. We're always in family, sharing”: Gendered Frictions of Care and Commerce in Peri‐Urban Bolivia

Abstract This paper explores frictions of care among lowland indigenous Guaraní and other low‐income women, including highland (Aymara and Quechua) migrant women, in peri‐urban Santa Cruz in Bolivia's lowlands. Gendered ideals of informal entrepreneurialism circulate, given limited options for marginalised women to support their families and protect themselves from exploitation, while also looking after dependents. However, maintaining informal microenterprise is particularly difficult for Guaraní women given material poverty and differences in lifeworlds and practices of (self‐)care. This fosters racialised representations of Guaraní women as “lazy”, when their care labour, including debt‐work, does not conform to ideals of the citizen–mother–entrepreneur. Drawing out tensions of care reveals subtle forms of differentiation between marginalised women as well as a more complex picture of shifting inequalities during the Bolivian process of change following the election of the leftist MAS government in 2005.