DOMÉSTICA
Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring
in the Shadows of Affluence
With a New Preface
PIERRETTE HONDAGNEU-SOTELO
University of California Press
Berkeley • Los Angeles • London
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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2001, 2007 by the Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette.
Doméstica : immigrant workers cleaning and caring in the shadows of affluence / Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo ; with a new preface
p. cm.
Originally published in 2001.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-520-25171-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Women domestics—California—Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. 2. Nannies—California—Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. 3. Hispanic American women—Employment—California—Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. 4. Women alien labor—California—Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. 5. Women immigrants—California—Los Angeles Metropolitan Area—Economic conditions. 6. Working class women—California—Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. 7. Upper class women—California—Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. I. Title.
II. Title: Immigrant workers cleaning and caring in the shadows of affluence.
HD6072.2U52 L674 2007
33I.4'8I64046'O8968O79494—DC22
2006050016
Manufactured in the United States of America
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).
For Cristina Maria Riegos, 1971-1998,an inspiration and cherished memory
Contents
PART TWO FINDING HARD WORK ISN'T EASY
4. Formalizing the Informal: Domestic Employment Agencies
5. Blowups and Other Unhappy Endings
6. Tell Me What to Do, But Don't Tell Me How
7. Go Away…But Stay Close Enough
8. Cleaning Up a Dirty Business
Preface to the 2007 Edition
THE DOMESTIC GOES GLOBAL
Can we conceive of globalization without migrant domestic workers? In the preface to the first edition of this book, I argued that the work of Mexican and Central American domestic workers was critical to keeping afloat the culture and the economy of Los Angeles, and more generally, the United States. I still think this is true. But as I look back now, I am struck by the pervasiveness of this pattern around the globe. Women from countries as varied as Peru, the Philippines, Moldavia, Eritrea, and Indonesia are leaving their families, communities, and countries to migrate thousands of miles away to work in the new worldwide growth industry: paid domestic work.
Paid domestic workers in the United States have historically been disregarded and treated as though they were invisible in the homes where they work. So it is too with migrant domestic workers on the global scene. Both the celebrants and critics of globalization have rarely paused to consider the importance of migrant paid domestic workers. Not only were the modernization theorists wrong in prematurely predicting the demise of paid domestic work in modern societies, but neither they nor the globalization theorists who followed them predicted or acknowledged the role of migrant domestic workers in the era of globalization and postindustrial societies. I think the reason they have not paid attention is relatively simple: the cleaning and caring that takes place in private homes is seen as women's work. For many observers, shipping containers, overseas factories, and international banking are the stuff of globalization. But a group of policy makers and academics, most of them working from a feminist perspective, has been paying ample attention to the recent expansion and dispersal of transnational migrant domestic workers. A plethora of recent research—a selected list of which appears at the end of this preface—illuminates the presence of foreign domestic workers in Europe, the Gulf States of the Middle East, Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, and in Canada and the United States. Meanwhile, particular nations around the globe have emerged as the places producing migrant domestic workers. The domestics' countries of origin are diverse, as are the circumstances situating their migration and domestic employment, but they share a status as the new cleaners and caregivers of the twenty-first century
We live in the age of migration. Around the world, at least 185 million people, and perhaps as many as 200 million, reside in countries other than those where they were born. Why are so many people leaving their countries of origin? The legacies of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, civil wars, imperial wars, uneven development, and the contemporary shock effects of neoliberalism and political shifts have laid the structure for today's global migration. Meanwhile, innovations in technology, particularly in transportation