Remembering and imagining a normal home

Early in my fieldwork, I was invited to the places where my informants lived. In most cases, women only experienced privacy and intimacy within their bedrooms. The lack of a space that women could call home, a space where they could live, either alone or with their families, instead of having to share it with strangers, was an important source of personal anxiety, insecurity, and social decline. Room doors were the entrances to their “homes” and were kept locked at all times to protect both their belongings and their privacy. The women, who generally worked eight to ten hours a day, did not spend much time at home. Therefore, they generally did not interact with the other inhabitants of the flats and houses where they lived, unless they shared a bedroom with a stranger or met their flatmates in common areas such as the kitchen or the bathroom. In most cases they lived among other Latin American migrants because they tended to look for flats where people would at least speak the same language or have a similar cultural background.