The Friends of India Endowment Presents: "Leisure and Religion in South Asian Women's Workplaces in Spain"

This talk by Dr. Emilia Bachrach (Oberlin) draws from ongoing ethnographic fieldwork among South Asian economic migrants in Barcelona, to examine how women transform their commercial workplaces into dynamic spaces for community formation. Focusing on Hindu and Muslim women from North India and Pakistan, I explore how grocery stores, clothing boutiques, travel agencies, and cultural centers function as hybrid sites where economic activity, leisure, religious practice, and everyday forms of care are organized together. Building on scholarship that attends to the intersections between gender, labor, and religion, I argue that women act as "spatial entrepreneurs," deliberately cultivating their workplaces as settings that uniquely enable them to exchange information, build economic and social relationships, and organize and lead religious activities in ways that are not always available within more "formal" religious institutions. Attending to women's own descriptions of these hybrid spaces in terms of kinship (e.g., as maikās, or their natal places), I suggest women's sites of work are distinctly vital as they shape not only their economic, but also their religious and social lives in Barcelona.