Respatializing the domestic: gender, extensive domesticity, and activist kitchenspace in Mexican migration politics

摘要

The collective Las Patronas' is one of Mexico's most famous and most decorated activist groups. For the past 20years, they have given food, water, and clothing to migrants on moving freight trains, without reciprocation. This article considers the centrality of the kitchen and of kitchenspace to the group's project, especially as part of their strategy for becoming and remaining public'. In Mexico, the kitchen' may be two different kitchens and two types of kitchenspace, one for the everyday, the other for the singular and special. The ceremonial cocina de humo figures prominently in the Patronas' day-to-day lives as well as media representations. It legitimates their public place and enacts a ritual importance to their provisioning. In tracing the importance of kitchenspace, how the Patronas' project becomes translated in media accounts such as the documentary De Nadie and the television show Tiempo de Heroes, and how the Patronas perform maternal domesticity to take up a form of authority, this article argues that the Patronas spatially perform publicness and domesticity non-exclusively. The Patronas' strategy produces a spatially expansive, rather than exclusive, domesticity, and in so doing, the group explodes the domestic-public binary.