“Latin American women in Brussels, defying their disadvantageous gendered positions through their Transnational Artistic Career.”

The life goal of constructing Transnational Artistic Careers might open up opportunities for some migrant women who wish to participate in today’s global cities’ cultural domains. In this context, this contribution is based on my first observations in the city of Brussels in which, I encountered complex dynamics of Latin American and Gender identities constructions, both among my participants and myself. Drawing from Transnational (Glick-Schiller and Levitt 2004) and Cosmopolitan Perspectives (Glick-Schiller, Tsypylma et al. 2011) I traced in a life-course fashion, the Transnational Artistic Careers (Martiniello and Rea 2011) that served the women invoked in my analysis, to develop cosmopolitan competencies. Such competencies, I argue became their tool to find recognition as well as to express, a sense of belonging that extended beyond ethnic categorizations deployed by more hegemonic perspectives. They described themselves as the entrepreneurs of their artistic careers while they developed through them alternative representations of how they wanted to be known by “others”. Concluding, by aiming to discover different forms of Transnational Artistic Careers this paper focused on the agency by which these women resisted and empowered themselves against racialized, and ethnicized global hierarchies of power.