Joane Florvil. Un abordaje interseccional de la racialización de las mujeres migrantes en Chile

Abstract

Joane Florvil, a 28 years old migrant woman from Haiti, was arrested on the 30th August 2017. She was accused of allegedly having abandoned her two-month-old daughter inside a public facility in Santiago de Chile. She died a month later due to a
liver failure caused by a complication during the hospitalization; she was still under arrest. This case study confirms the pervasive racist, sexist and classist interlocking mechanisms of the Chilean institutions and media, as the development of the process against Miss Florvil illustrates. This case shows the interaction between different categories of intersectional disempowerment. In other words, the fact that Ms. Florvil was a woman, mother, migrant, African descendent, poor and not Spanish-speaker were key features to understand the lethal ending. In this article the processes of racialization and exclusion suffered by Ms. Florvil are described. The arbitrary discrimination suffered by the woman evidences the Chilean mono-cultural approach to motherhood.