The emergence of COVID-19 made it clear that addressing health problems requires taking into account a multiplicity of factors. In 2020, we were not facing a pandemic so much as a syndemic. According to anthropologists Merrill Singer and B\u00e1rbara Rylko-Bauer<\/a>, a syndemic refers to the synergy between a virus, other health conditions, and social afflictions in a combination that had a particularly severe impact on the realities of socially vulnerable groups. At the same time, as documented by ECLAC<\/a>, women absorbed the greatest burden of care work. In large cities, this overload was especially harsh for those living in situations of urban marginalization<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Latin America, care responsibilities fall disproportionately on households and, more specifically, on women<\/a>, who devote three times as much time as men to these tasks. The map of the care economy<\/a> is characterized by high levels of labor informality and pronounced intersectional inequalities, which are exacerbated when combined with factors such as ethnicity, age, and socioeconomic status. These dynamics particularly affect rural and poor women who lack the resources to outsource care work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In addition to working in care-related activities, once they return home women must invest more time and money in supporting family and community members with health conditions. In terms of prevention, everything becomes more difficult in contexts where adequate nutrition, time for medical checkups, and available resources are scarce<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This care crisis<\/a> is further intensified in contexts of urban marginalization and environmental degradation, where the lack of basic infrastructure\u2014such as running water or sanitation\u2014makes this work even heavier and riskier for both the actions and bodies of caregivers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In large Latin American urban agglomerations, economic exclusion has consolidated a structural model that critical epidemiology characterizes as \u201cunhealthy<\/a>,\u201d as it restricts the right to health of segregated populations. Ecological risks\u2014such as water pollution, chronic dumping sites, and deficient infrastructure\u2014are unevenly distributed across cities, generating multiple forms of socio-environmental injustice. Under this logic, degraded environments are not merely physical settings; environmental crises are embodied in the \u201cbody-territories\u201d of segregated populations, shaping their processes of health, illness, and death. Environmental threats thus form part of a structural violence that determines who is most exposed to falling ill and under what conditions life must be sustained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A significant example of environmental injustice is the Reconquista Area (RA) in Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina. This territory, marked by its proximity to the CEAMSE Norte III landfill complex and the polluted Reconquista River basin, illustrates how urban segregation confines vulnerable sectors to degraded environments. There, many families have built their homes on wetland soils they managed to access, filling them with debris and garbage to raise the land and avoid flooding\u2014a difficult task in the face of increasingly intense rainfall driven by climate change, insufficient garbage collection from drainage ditches, and the river\u2019s historical presence. Residents live alongside gas emissions\u2014such as methane\u2014and strong odors from the landfill, as well as smoke from the burning of cables in chronic neighborhood dumps. These conditions cause concrete health impacts: chronic respiratory problems such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), diarrhea from contaminated water, and severe dermatological lesions among children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In these scenarios, women are the most exposed. Because they spend more time in their neighborhoods, their contact with chronic dumping sites and pollutants is greater than that of men. In their role as caregivers, they are the first to detect environmental risks through the health problems of those they care for. From these care activities, women not only recognize and act upon the impacts of the environment on people and their territories, but also occupy a key position in responding to today\u2019s climate crises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The caregiving work performed by women from multiple marginalized sectors\u2014such as those in the Reconquista Area\u2014is not confined to the walls of their homes or the upbringing of their own children. It involves collective action that sustains the well-being of the entire neighborhood. Through community care spaces and neighborhood councils, these women engage in maintaining soup kitchens, providing educational support, offering protection against violence, cleaning streets, plazas, and streams, organizing junk-removal campaigns, recycling waste, maintaining community gardens, and advocating for the expansion of basic service networks, among many other tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/L21-Banner-INGLES-1024x190.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nEnvironmental care: essential yet still invisible work<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n