Introduction

Migration is a global and historical reality (^{Soto-Almela & Alcaraz-Mármol, 2017}) that, according to different national and local contexts, involves particular phenomena. When it comes to Chile, migratory mobilizations have been recorded for a long time: the first immigrants were the Spanish colonizers, followed by Italian, German, Yugoslavian, Arab, and Asian settlers, among others (^{Cano & Soffia, 2009}). However, these flows of a silent nature did not give rise to any large-scale debate that presented immigrants as a multidimensional problem; their emergence on the national scene was rather perceived in terms of their cultural and economic contribution to the country (Cano & Soffia, 2009). This, however, changed during the 1990s-by the end of the military dictatorship in Chile-, when an increase in intraregional and border immigration from countries such as Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina became noticeable (^{Stefoni, 2007}), and then during the first 15 years of the 21st century, when, as a result of a series of economic, political, and social crises, migration flows from countries such as Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, and Haiti added to the list (^{Palominos, 2016}; ^{Rojas et al., 2016}). Thus, one of the elements in conflict when studying migration phenomena in Chile would be the country of origin of migrants, which would bring in an additional element to the configuration of otherness with respect to national identity (^{Stefoni, 2016}).

According to the results of the 2017 Census, the foreign population in Chile corresponded to 4.4% of the country’s total, or 746 465 international immigrants, of which 50.6% (377 023) corresponded to women and 44.9% (368 749) to men (^{Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas [INE], 2017}). This increase impacted public discourse. Already in 2016, the report La migración en Chile: breve reporte y caracterización (Migration in Chile: A Brief Report and Characterization) warned that the idea spread among public opinion that the “country was flooded by migrants” (^{Rojas Pedemonte & Silva Dittborn, 2016}, 10)-although statistics would prove the opposite-, a perception that became more acute over time. Currently, a report conducted by ^{CADEM (2021)} detected that 56% of the total of its respondents consider that the arrival of immigrants to the country is not good.

Parallel to this, in the last presidential terms, those of Bachelet (2014-2018), and Piñera (2018- 2021), the concern for the migration phenomenon was evident even if from contrasting approaches, both to political programs and discourse. In the government of President Bachelet, from an inclusive perspective, presidential instructions were issued focusing on approaching migration as a multidimensional phenomenon, that needed to be addressed by the different public services; in addition, she promoted a migration bill, which however did not advance in its legislative process. On the other hand, during the government of President Piñera, emphasis was placed on the concepts of security, regularity, and control, initially materialized through Presidential Decrees that modified the forms of access and permanence in the country, and later in the new Law 21.325 on Migration and Foreigners enacted on April 20, 2021 (^{Law 21.325 of 2021}). These demographic, social, and political changes caused a nationwide discussion which reflected in the media.

In view of this, it becomes interesting how the media represent, communicate, and construct certain social images on migration and migrant subjects, since they are one of the main sources of information and provision of meaning, production of social reality, source of knowledge, for the elite and civil society in general (^{Ivanova & Jocelin-Almendras, 2021}; ^{McCombs & Evatt, 1995}; ^{Van Dijk, 1993}; ^{Verón, 1994}). Thus, by highlighting some aspects over others, the media influence the way people think about certain issues, enabling the privilege of hegemonic voices by being sources from which to learn prejudices and forms of discrimination (^{Hall, 2010}; Van Dijk, 2005).

As for the general representations of migration in the media, these are associated with negative and conflictive aspects of it. That is, there are certain ideas in the collective imaginary such as: immigrants take away jobs, immigrants saturate public services, immigrants bring diseases, immigrants collapse the system, immigrants generate crises, immigrants are invading the country, among others (^{Cárcel Fernando, 2015}; ^{Contrucci et al., 2009}).

In the particular case of immigrant women, their gender, their status as foreigners and, in many cases, their irregular migratory situation, make them multidimensionally more vulnerable. Analyses on their visual representation in the press agree in that they tend to be made invisible, depersonalized, or rather presented from their vulnerability and marginality (^{Masanet Ripoll & Ripoll Arcacia, 2008}), “ignoring the itineraries of autonomy and independence that many of these women harbor when they decide to emigrate from closed societies” (^{Suarez Villegas, 2013}, p. 13). In the Chilean case, works on the representation of female migration in the media are practically nonexistent. In this regard, the contribution made on the analysis of the representation of immigrant women in Chilean soap operas stands out, where it can be seen that the imaginary of immigrant women is associated with sexualization, antagonism and victimization (^{Gallegos Krause, 2019}).

That said, the main objective of this paper is to analyze the visual representation of immigrant women in the Chilean print media in three newspapers of nation-wide circulation: El Mercurio, La Tercera, and Publimetro between the years 2015 and 2019. Through the analysis of photographic content and image captions, this research provides empirical evidence on the visual representation of immigrant women in three Chilean media outlets, thus going on a research path little explored in the country, important in terms of how public, political, and social discourses and perceptions about female migration in Chile are constructed. This study is doubly important in the current context of hatred, violence, and exacerbation of extreme nationalism in the country, such as the acts committed against migrants and their families on September 25, 2021 in the city of Iquique, northern border of Chile (^{González, 2021}).

Current sate of the discussion

There are three main characteristics to contemporary migration flows in Chile: a) they are interregional (south-south migrations), taking place in scenarios of socio-political, economic, and environmental crises; b) they have a racial component that disrupts national identity (racialization); and c) they are characterized by their feminization, the latter understood in the framework of the entry of women into the local and global labor market (^{Stefoni, 2016}; ^{Stefoni & Fernández, 2011}; ^{Tijoux Merino, 2011}). For some authors, these characteristics mark a new way of understanding migration in Chile and, therefore, a new way of relating to otherness from a whitened national identity (Tijoux Merino, 2011; Tijoux Merino & Palominos Mandiola, 2015).

These new patterns of mobility and settlement (^{Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013}) occur in unequal scenarios, and under structural conditions that either enable or hinder the inclusion of various types of migrant populations, establishing patterns of mobility and settlement that define which migrant groups are the allowed or denied entry. To this end, it is useful to take into account the contribution of studying border policies to this whole analysis (^{Stefoni et al., 2019}), precisely because such a study allows us to observe how the typological construction of the immigrant is particular, and not generalizable in terms of economic, political and historical conditioning factors that determine who are good and bad migrants, who can belong to the national community, and what position they will occupy within the social hierarchy system.

Despite acknowledging these differences, when representing migrants there is a tendency towards generalization mechanisms that contribute to a stereotyped display of the other, which are strongly produced and reproduced in the media. In this regard, ^{Appadurai (2007}) mentions that discourses on others are scrutinized in everyday life due to the dissemination of ideas in which racism, demographics, and social stereotypes are articulated as evidence, and consolidated through media campaigns, performances, rumors, all of which contribute to imagining the other from an ideological and multidimensional construction that generates a consensus on him/her as an enemy.

Thus, the figure of the migrant appears symbolically and analogically associated with his/her exclusion and subordinate position, as a form of hegemonic representation that fulfills a knowledge function (^{Abric, 1991}). The term (in)migrant designates a social condition that in itself is thought of in exclusionary terms, in a position of social, cultural, and economic inferiority as a stigmatized individual (^{Correa Téllez, 2016}; ^{Tijoux Merino & Palominos Mandiola, 2015}) who lacks agency, that is, lacking power to influence, who fulfills a passive role as an spectator in the society in which he/she is inserted (^{Cuadrado Vertel et al., 2013}), where the migrant is defined as a radical outsider (^{Santos Herceg, 2012}). In other words, as the one who is perceived in opposition to the homogeneous national us, the one who is defined outside the margins of the senses of belonging of the “contemporary, whitewashed, Eurocentric, free-market and Catholic-conservative ʻChilean identityʼ” (^{Rojas Pedemonte et al., 2015}, p. 2). Thus, the national/foreign dichotomy is sustained (^{Liberona Concha, 2015}), as part of national conformations of otherness (^{Briones, 2005}; ^{Segato, 2007}), and as markers of foreignness (^{Restrepo, 2020}, 2022).

Thus, when analyzing the forms of representation of otherness, it was observed how typologies are constructed to categorize, symbolize, and stigmatize the other, typologies that tend to make the particular aspects of the other’s identity disappear, as in the case of migrant women represented in the press. ^{Van Dijk (2005}) argues that, as citizens, individuals obtain most of their knowledge about the social, political, and general facts of the world from the information they hear, read, and see on a daily basis. In this context, the media are considered as “spaces of ideological reproduction and legitimization of reality” (^{Crespo Fernández, 2008}, p. 45), that is, they not only assume the role of sources of information and public space for the expression of opinions, but are also the main entity of ideological reproduction (Van Dijk, 2005) and “powerful spaces of social legitimization” (^{Villalobos, 2009}, p. 4).

In Chile, studies on the representation of migrants in the written press have focused-mainly- on border migration between Chile-Bolivia and Peru (^{Arévalo Salinas, 2014}; ^{Browne Sartori & Romero Lizama, 2010}; ^{Liberona Concha, 2015}; ^{Mayorga Rogel & León Pino, 2007}; ^{Póo Figueroa, 2009}). Although written and non-visual discourses are analyzed, they share the idea that the print media have contributed to the creation of stereotypes through the negative representation of otherness, reproducing and affirming the national/foreign dichotomy, as a reflection of a historical correlate that has reinforced the interethnic conflict between bordering countries, as well as the promotion of extreme discourses ranging from paternalistic compassion to the criminalization of the immigrant (^{Póo Figueroa, 2009}). On the other hand, some works highlight the way in which the media in Chile have contributed to the ideological reproduction of migration as a social problem that encompasses poverty, crime, illegality, among other factors (^{Stefoni & Brito, 2019}), as well as the biased association between migration and the pandemic, and the reproduction of racist discourses in the media (^{Póo Figueroa, 2020}).

When it comes to the representation of migrant women in the international press, studies have approached it from the media analysis taking into account the categories of nationality, roles, social relations, visual context, personification, contact with the camera, and headline analysis (^{Aierbe, 2008}; ^{Castagnani & Colorado, 2009}; ^{Masanet Ripoll & Ripoll Arcacia, 2008}; ^{Pérez, 2003}). These studies agree that “the media construct certain representations or social images of immigration” (Masanet Ripoll & Ripoll Arcacia, 2008, p. 170), which echo the ways in which migrations unfold in each of the countries involved. In addition, such studies refer to the construction of images as an ideological process (^{Wilmott, 2017}), mediated by the ideas, trends, and editorial lines of the media. This is why the representation of immigrants in the press, particularly those of women, will always be subject to an intentionality of representation.

Also, the aforementioned studies agree that migrants are presented as masculine others, and that women are subsumed in this exercise, since their image emerges by associating them with situations of vulnerability, processes, work, and family, depersonifying them or presenting them as always related to the masculine other, whether that be children, partners, and/or authorities. This is why understanding the role played by the representation of migrant women is crucial, since the mechanisms to produce subalternation of women crystallize male dominance in society, widening the distances between us and the other (^{Lube Guizardi et al., 2018}).

This summary shows how the representation of migrants-particularly that of women-is associated with the position they occupy within the hierarchy, revitalizing the relations of social domination/subordination (^{Stefoni & Fernández, 2011}) that are added to the administrative situation in the place of destination and to the generational condition, altogether with the meanings that the society of destination imposes on women according to their origin and position within the racialization system (^{Thayer, 2011}). It is precisely in this area of definitions where this study is positioned, addressing how the press attributes meaning to migrant women based on their nationality, roles, relationships, and actions, and how this meaning is constructed through photographic images.

This is why photography is part of each article, as it complements the idea of the written text. Psychological studies have shown that individuals can remember 80% of what they see, but only 30% of what they read and 10% of what they hear (^{Batziou, 2011}). Images are powerful framing tools because they are less intrusive than words and, as such, require less cognitive focus (^{Rodriguez & Dimitrova, 2011}). This may be not only because images, like photographs, appear closer to reality, but also because they have the power to create stronger immediate emotional cues. Due to their high attraction value, images seen on a page, website, or screen, provide the first impression of a story and are easily remembered (^{Rodgers & Thorson, 2000}).

Likewise, images, in addition to staying in memory longer than words, can also be recalled more quickly (^{Wardle, 2007}). Therefore, photographs in newspapers are an important part of how an individual interprets the news and constructs his or her own opinions (^{Wilmott, 2017}). According to ^{Burgin (1982}), photographs are instantly and naturally decoded, and their choice for an article is not random, but rather depending largely on the photographer and the editor. ^{Hall (2010}) confirms that, although news photographs appear as objective and natural representations of the real world, the selection of an image for news is a highly ideological procedure that will be influenced by the originality, polemic value, and importance of each news item. In the case of a newspaper photograph, first, its meaning depends on the photographer, who creates his or her own interpretations of the events and the individuals he or she chooses to place in front of the camera (^{Hamilton, 1997}). Then, this meaning is enhanced by the editor, who chooses a photograph and places it alongside the text of the article. Thus, photographic and visual representations are never neutral and largely obey human decisions (Wilmott, 2017).

Methodology

This paper presents a qualitative content analysis aimed at answering the research question on how photographic images published in three Chilean print media portray immigrant women. The first step consisted in the selection of the corpus, consisting of three Chilean newspapers: El Mercurio, La Tercera, and Publimetro, which were chosen for the following reasons: El Mercurio, and La Tercera are the newspapers represented by the most important press houses in Chile, which are El Mercurio

S. A. P., and Copesa S. A. (^{Gronemeyer & Porath, 2017}). Both newspapers have a seven-day nationwide circulation and are available in print and online for a fixed fee. Both follow a formal writing style, a long-article format and cover a wide range of topics -from politics to sports-.

On the other hand, Publimetro is a free newspaper, distributed weekly at the entry points of the Santiago subway, reaching wide to different sectors of the population. This medium follows a less formal writing style and its articles contain less written text. Publimetro does not belong to any of the aforementioned media houses, nor is affiliated with any political party. Thus, the three media reach differentiated sectors of the population and have a massive distribution that is accompanied by web publications. Thus, their vital importance in producing and reproducing discourses among different sectors of the population is accounted for.

The data analyzed was collected between the years 2015 and 2019, a period characterized by two milestones in Chile. First, 2015 saw an increase in the regularization procedures of foreigners in the country, which according to the report of the National Institute of Statistics and the Department of Foreigners and Immigration translates into an increase in the provisioning of indefinite residence permits by 35.6%, and of visas by 21.2% over the previous year, which had an impact on the coverage of the migration issue in the press at the national level (^{Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas [INE] y Departamento de Extranjería y Migración [DEM], 2020}). Second, 2018, during the government of Sebastián Piñera, saw the enactment of two transitory presidential decrees that included the prohibition of the change of migratory status, and the creation of consular and differentiated visas for countries such as Haiti and Venezuela; along with the beginning of a period of extraordinary regularization that would impact the migratory system in Chile, generating a collapse in the Department of Foreigners and Immigration, directly affecting the migrant population and their families (^{Gobierno de Chile, 2018}).

The second step was compiling the corpus by means of manual retrieval method. For this, the data were collected through an online interface or by consulting the physical issue of each newspaper in the National Archive of Chile. Thus, the final corpus presented a collection of three files (one for each newspaper). In total, 705 images of immigrant women were identified over a period of four years. Each image was treated as a basic unit of analysis and was coded independently of the article text. However, following ^{Batziou (2011}), and ^{Wilmott (2017}), a review of the para-text of each image was carried out, and specifically, the captions were taken into account, as these attract the reader’s attention along with the photograph (^{Holsanova et al., 2006}), and often contain additional identifying information (name, age, profession, nationality, among others).

The third step was the content analysis for each image, according to the coding categories previously established as a result of the preliminary analysis of the images during the corpus collection process and the review of similar studies. In particular, the techniques of ^{Batziou (2011}), ^{Bleiker (2018}), and ^{Wilmott (2017}) were adopted for photographic analysis in media. The categories established for this study were organized into two sections. The first included the categorizations of otherness, understood as those social labels employed to represent the migrant other versus the national us (^{Pérez-Rincón et al., 2012}), as used by newspapers to characterize immigrant women; aspects such as racialized categorizations or markings (^{Wade, 2022}), nationality, belonging to larger collectivities, ties with the local population, and activities carried out were of particular interest. In this case, the predominance of a certain nationality and certain racialized markers (^{Magister Antropología, 2022}) in the photographs can lead to the establishment of social stereotypes among the local population about female migration in the country.

This research makes use of categories accounting for the local variants of the racial configuration of coloniality as a product of social historical constructions (^{Wade, 2022}). In the Chilean context, these categories reproduce difference in terms of inequality and hierarchies (^{Magister Antropología, 2022}), particularly so when it comes to the visual representations supporting written media.

Also, photographs that portray immigrant women in limited social interactions with the local population serve to categorize them as an out-group, which prevents viewers from visualizing them integrating themselves into local populations. On the other hand, photographs of immigrant women accompanied by others (the other gender and other immigrants) may take away their agency, as they are thus not perceived as independent but rather as part of the other. Moreover, the presence in the photographs of groups of people representing the State-such as the police, the government, and international government bodies-can provoke the construction of the image of immigrant women as linked to security issues and crime.

The second section deals with the technical aspects used for the composition of the images. First, the presentation of immigrant women as individuals was analyzed, since, according to studies in social psychology, individual photographs evoke more empathic emotions in viewers than group photographs, the latter eclipsing individuality and attributing common characteristics to all members of a given social group, thus creating distance between readers and the individuals in the photograph (^{Bleiker, 2018}). That said, the study coded images of immigrant women into four categories: 1) individual, 2) small groups of two to three people, 3) medium-sized groups of 4 to 15 people, and 4) groups of more than 16 people.

Subsequently, the distance from the camera was categorized for the coding of the images. Following ^{Batziou (2011}), the photographs were coded as close-up, where only the face is shown; close, where the person is depicted from the waist up; medium-close, when the person appears from the knees up; full, where the whole body of the person is shown; close-long and medium- long, to show people at a close or medium distance in the foreground and long distance in the background, respectively. In addition, the coding analyzed the women’s eye contact with the camera. These decisions were based on studies suggesting that closer photos-especially those in which subjects look directly at the camera-produce a more intimate connection with readers, and that, therefore, images in which contact does not occur evoke distance.

From this, the present study will delve into the analysis of press images taken from three Chilean print media: El Mercurio, La Tercera, and Publimetro, published between the years 2015 and 2019, in which migrant women are featured.

Results and discussion

Closing remarks

Images published in the media play a central role in framing how immigrants are publicly perceived and politically debated. These images construct political-social reality by showing or not what can and cannot be seen, and indirectly, what can and cannot be thought, thus influencing not only what it is possible to legitimately say in public, but also what it is not possible to express (^{Bleiker, 2018}).

The results of this study show that the migrant woman represented by the written press between the years 2015 and 2019 is foremost a woman circumscribed to a larger group or collective-first a migrant and then a woman-, agreeing with propositions by ^{Batziou (2011}) and ^{Wilmott (2017}). As for the categorizations of otherness used to chart, on the one hand, migrants and, then, migrant women, an articulation is established between racialized markings, nationality, and belonging to a collectivity that is conceived as a category of otherness vis-à-vis nationals. There is a special emphasis on the presentation of photographs of women from neighboring and Latin American countries, mainly black, South American women; the migrant other is then black, Latin American, a radically different foreigner (^{Santos Herceg, 2012}).

Also, when images intentionally seek to present the figure of migrant women, the media tend to appeal to the roles or activities they perform, linking them to child rearing, family formation, traveling, transiting, and displacement, and in some instances to working and housing. Moreover, migrant women, like migrant men, are presented as subjects who are always in transit, in conflict after situations of waiting. This matches the readings that other authors have made on the presentation of recent-mainly, Latin American-migration, as novel and massive, in such a way that it has configured an ideology that positions Chile as a pole of attraction of migrant population, where migration and migrants begin to be constructed as a social problem (^{Cano & Soffia, 2009}; ^{Contrucci et al., 2009}; ^{Correa Téllez, 2016}; ^{Lube Guizardi & Garcés, 2014}). In this case, by positioning migrant women as massive groups in a constant wait, they are presented under an inaction of sorts that deprives them of their capacity for agency and self-representation.

This way, the visual representation of female migration in the press reveals how the socio- historical, economic, and political conditioning factors-which enable or hinder the displacement and inclusion of women in a national community that thinks of itself from an imagined homogeneity (^{Anderson, 1993})-act as arguments that contribute to construct an image of the migrant other as a subject lacking the capacity to make their own demands, to transform and influence the unequal contexts in which he/she is located (^{Sassen, 2010}). Thus, the migrant woman-for the media-is mostly black, mestizo, South American and/or Caribbean, a woman who raises families, works, and is always subject to not belonging.

As mentioned at the beginning of this paper, the importance of paying attention to images and how the media echo the different social and political discourses is of the essence in the current national context. First, because it is an area in the study of migration that has been little addressed; second, because migration movements are a constant in a world deep into crisis, and because violations of the human rights of migrants have become increasingly common in this country, where the media reproduce racist discourses and inform practices of racial discrimination (^{Magister Antropología, 2022}).

Finally, it was deemed necessary to further this line of research by addressing, for example, the transformations over time of the representation of migrant subjects in general, questioning which aspects have been emphasized at certain times, which discourses have prevailed, and which have mutated. The representation of migrants-and, in particular, that of migrant women-is the product of a correlate produced by the media in relation to the social context and the national contingency, and is, therefore, a dynamic construction that in turn produces and reproduces social stigmas. This representation is also rooted in the foundational historical discourses on the Chilean Nation-State. The results presented open endless paths of analysis, contributing to understanding how the media influence the prevailing discourses and attitudes in society, which often end up segmenting, stratifying, and excluding the people who inhabit the territories.

Translation: Fernando Llanas.