Abstract

This article examines the orientations of long-settled Peruvian migrant women in Chile toward recent migration, focusing on processes of symbolic boundary-making in contexts of social diversification and growing hostility toward immigration. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with women who arrived in the country in the 1990s and 2000s, we propose the notions of defensive and reflexive symbolic boundaries as interdependent processes, challenging accounts that reduce these orientations to the reproduction of the "good" and "bad" migrant binary. The findings show that length of residence operates as a source of moral authority supporting judgments that associate recent migration with urban insecurity, labor precarization and state dependency. At the same time, persistent memories of exclusion and precarity activate a situational reflexivity that nuances those judgments by reorienting the critique from the individual migrant toward shared structural conditions. Defensiveness and reflexivity do not constitute opposing orientations, but processes that coexist and intertwine, offering a more complex understanding of symbolic boundary construction in South-South migration contexts.