“Nobody should experience this alone”: caregiving legal consciousness in Chile between family and welfare

Abstract Why do poor caregivers resist rights-based framings of their situation even when directly exposed to institutionalized rights discourses? Drawing on 44 in-depth interviews with caregivers, care recipients, and officials from Chile Cuida, a state assistance program grounded in the right-to-care framework, this article examines the rights consciousness of long-term, intensive caregivers in Santiago, Chile. We find that, despite significant political exposure to rights discourses, caregivers consistently frame their experiences in terms of familial duty rather than entitlement. Building on rights-consciousness literature, we identify three mechanisms that explain this pattern: cultural incompatibility , whereby caregivers resist framings that appear to contradict familial obligations; familial overspilling , whereby family-based relational expectations are projected onto bureaucratic actors; and bridging strategies , whereby caregivers invoke alternative cultural sources of entitlement – particularly notions of state duty toward the poor – to justify receiving assistance without challenging familial dominance. We argue that discursive exposure to rights frameworks is insufficient when it confronts deeply settled familial cultural repertoires, with significant implications for care policy in the region.