Raising Brooklyn

Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Community

Tamara R. Mose

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780814791431
• eBook ISBN: 9780814725085
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Stroll through any public park in Brooklyn on a weekday afternoon and you will see black women with white children at every turn. Many of these women are of Caribbean descent, and they have long been a crucial component of New York’s economy, providing childcare for white middle- and upper-middleclass families. Raising Brooklyn offers an in-depth look at the daily lives of these childcare providers, examining the important roles they play in the families whose children they help to raise. Tamara Mose Brown spent three years immersed in these Brooklyn communities: in public parks, public libraries, and living as a fellow resident among their employers, and her intimate tour of the public spaces of gentrified Brooklyn deepens our understanding of how these women use their collective lives to combat the isolation felt during the workday as a domestic worker.
Though at first glance these childcare providers appear isolated and exploited—and this is the case for many—Mose Brown shows that their daily interactions in the social spaces they create allow their collective lives and cultural identities to flourish. Raising Brooklyn demonstrates how these daily interactions form a continuous expression of cultural preservation as a weapon against difficult working conditions, examining how this process unfolds through the use of cell phones, food sharing, and informal economic systems. Ultimately, Raising Brooklyn places the organization of domestic workers within the framework of a social justice movement, creating a dialogue between workers who don’t believe their exploitative work conditions will change and an organization whose members believe change can come about through public displays of solidarity.

1
West Indians Raising New York

One day in 2007 I sat at my dining room table with Jennie, a thirty-four-year-old childcare provider from Grenada, while the girl she cared for and my two children played in the living room together. Jennie and I were engaging in one of our formal interviews after two years of observation. Although we interrupted the interview several times to make sure that the children weren’t getting into trouble as they moved from the living area to the bedrooms, we were able to speak deeply about Jennie’s work as a childcare provider and how it had affected her outlook on the field of domestic work in general. Jennie usually wore dreadlocks tied up with a scarf or in a bun. She cared for two siblings: one boy, who was six years old and in school during the weekdays, and Sam, a two-year-old girl. She had aspired to be a registered nurse back in Grenada, but because she needed more coursework than she could afford she ended up working instead at a day care center for a few months and then as a newspaper reporter in her homeland. She received a visitor’s visa to come to the United States while still in her twenties and then stayed past her visa expiration. When I asked her why she had come to New York, she said she had cousins, an uncle, and her sister living here and wanted a fresh start in life. It had taken her a year to find work as a babysitter. One of the poignant remarks she made during our interview showed me that she viewed her work as a childcare provider in a broad historical context. She began, “After you know that we were once enslaved, and knowing how we were treated by white people and how our forefathers were treated by white people, how could you not treat us better after you know what it’s like, I mean what it still is…. I think we have slavery now, it just happens differently.” Jennie was expressing a politicized understanding of black childcare providers’ shared history of subordination and exploitation. Her words may at first seem harsh, but they speak to the history that the people most profoundly affected by it have never forgotten.

To understand the complex work lives of the women I discuss in this book, it is important to first understand what that work entails and what its history is. Childcare providers fall under the rubric of domestic workers, a category that in recent years has come to include a variety of duties. The responsibilities of the group of domestic workers in this study involved primarily childcare, although there were some additional duties such as house-cleaning, grocery shopping, and walking the dog. Childcare itself included such tasks as feeding the children, reading to them, bathing them, taking them to lessons or playdates, taking them on walks, arranging their birthday parties, and helping with schoolwork. The typical day extended anywhere from seven in the morning to seven in the evening, three to five days a week, although the majority of the women in my study worked from eight in the morning to five in the evening. Most of the women I observed and later interviewed interacted mainly with a female employer, and three interacted mainly with a male employer (the husband) who worked flexible hours during the day, although in almost every case the female employer took care of the payments to the provider and communicated the schedule that the provider would have to follow. In this chapter I discuss the historical trajectory of Caribbean-born immigrant women, the focus of this book, who have gained employment primarily as domestic workers.¹ An overview of the history of domestic work in the United States will set the stage for the discussion of domestic work as an occupational field for West Indian immigrant women, particularly in New York. I will trace the changing relationship between domestic workers and employees, especially in the context of racial relations, social constructions of race, and a changing labor market.

History of West Indian Immigration and Domestic Work

West Indian migration to New York began in the late nineteenth century and continued into the early twentieth century as a result of unemployment “push” factors from the Caribbean and opportunity “pull” factors from the United States.² Between 1900 and 1910, around thirty thousand West Indians immigrated to the United States, many of them highly literate and highly skilled as professionals or white-collar workers—more so even than the native-born white population in the United States or European immigrants.³ This group laid the foundation for Afro-Caribbean life in New York City.⁴ A steady increase in immigration, due to the economic hardships of the declining sugar industry between 1910 and 1924, had brought this number to one hundred thousand when immigration was halted by Congress. The Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted nonwhite and European immigration via a quota system, decreased but did not entirely stop Caribbean migration to the United States.

By the 1930s, one-half of black immigrants went to New York.⁵ At that time, over 90 percent of these immigrants were of Caribbean descent, constituting a fifth to a quarter of New York’s black population.⁶

Between 1940 and 1950, over four hundred thousand African American women left domestic employment to obtain work in factories, shipyards, and other war-related industries, where they could earn relatively decent wages. At the same time, Caribbean immigration began to increase because in the Caribbean many workers were being forced off the farms and had to find work elsewhere; these immigrants found low-skilled work in agriculture and soon in other sectors of the American economy, since the percentage of professionals among West Indian immigrants was beginning to decline.⁷

At the end of the war, many African Americans and women of other ethnic or racial groups were laid off and economically forced to return to domestic labor in private homes. But by 1945, and increasingly afterward, some African American women, resisting the return to domestic service, found jobs in manufacturing and in offices, and their upward mobility allowed Caribbean immigrants to establish themselves in the low-wage positions that African American women had vacated. Such positions proliferated after the mid-1970s.⁸ Caribbean women could obtain American visas much more easily than Caribbean men and thus solidified their position in the domestic sphere.⁹

By 2001, West Indians ages twenty-five to fifty-four made up 58 percent of New York’s black population.¹⁰ West Indian women have played a crucial role in New York’s economy by providing low-wage domestic services, thus supporting white middle-class (and in this case upper-middle-class) employment.¹¹ (Nonwhite employers have tended to depend mainly on familial or kinship networks or on paid day care centers as primary childcare.) In the 1960s West Indian women came to New York with the assurance of gaining a work visa for domestic work that would eventually allow for future mobility.¹² Other West Indian women who came to the United States later overstayed their tourist or education visas to remain in the United States, a practice that continues today.¹³ They were also considered more likely to send money back home (compared to their male counterparts) in the form of remittances.¹⁴ These women made substantial sacrifices, which sometimes included leaving more prestigious professional careers back in their native homelands, in the hopes of providing their families with the “American Dream.”¹⁵ That dream, however, has been limited for first-generation West Indian women, who have for the most part experienced downward mobility, housing segregation, and limited economic opportunities leading to their employment in the domestic services sector.¹⁶

In New York City, where, at various periods of history, the majority of non-Hispanic black immigrants in the United States have lived, white upper-middle-class working women, unlike their black counterparts, have often depended on this group for their domestic needs, specifically childcare.¹⁷ In particular, West Indian domestic workers/childcare providers are hired for a variety of reasons, including that, for most, their native language is English, they have more education on average than their Latino immigrant counterparts, and they will accept lower wages than some other groups of childcare providers.¹⁸

White upper-middle-class households continue to maintain distinct divisions of labor along both gender and class lines.¹⁹ Although over the last few decades men have participated more in housework and childcare, these tasks are still the primary responsibility of women, including employed women.²⁰ Women are forced into a balancing act of contributing to household income as wage-earning women while experiencing a crisis in terms of meeting in-home domestic responsibilities.²¹ “The second shift,” as Hochschild and Machung have called it—taking care of the home after working outside the home—leads to stress and guilt among working middle-class women, who feel that their children may suffer from their absence.²² In the absence of publicly provided childcare or available assistance from family members, white working women who can afford it often cope with these feelings by looking for outside domestic help, specifically low-cost “off the books” immigrant domestic help.²³ This allows them to feel secure in their “commitments to personal ideologies of care,” in which employing a private childcare worker in the home is considered preferable to using outside public day care.²⁴ Ruth Milkman, Ellen Reese, and Benita Roth show how the macroeconomic structure of New York influences this reliance on private childcare as well.²⁵ Urban centers have a higher maternal labor force rate and thus a greater demand for domestic care. As the economic disparity in urban centers increases, the rich hire the poor to do private domestic work, supporting further economic disparity. This dynamic, especially in a place like New York City, sets the conditions for West Indian and other immigrants who come to the United States looking for employment.

Recent West Indian Migration to New York

New York City census tract figures across the span of the three decades ending in 1980, 1990, and 2000 for place of birth and employment by gender show that the percentage of West Indian women in New York City who are employed has increased more than the comparable percentage for West Indian men.²⁶ These numbers are not adjusted for the probable undercounting of undocumented people.

Census data also show an increase, over three decades (1980, 1990, 2000) in the percentage of those employed West Indian women who are in the childcare occupation. Again, numbers are not adjusted for the possible undercounting of undocumented people. For Brooklyn specifically we see increases, from 1980 to the latest 2006/2008 census, among West Indians (mostly women) aged sixteen and up who reported themselves to be “childcare workers.” In 1980 such workers numbered 980, in 1990 they numbered 1,752, in 2000 they numbered 7,007, and in 2006/08 they numbered 9,232.²⁷ Numbers can at best only be estimated, since many West Indians are reluctant to say they are babysitters or childcare workers and perhaps say instead that they are cosmetologists or identify their occupation by whatever other training they may have received.²⁸ Also, many are working for cash and may be reluctant to say too much to the Census Bureau.

Many transnational families have changed in their patterns of migration. In the early 1900s, men typically settled overseas and gradually brought other family members to join them. West Indian women, however, have had a long history of migrating and leaving their families behind in the homeland, a phenomenon that has been termed “transnational motherhood.”²⁹ Transnational mothers are Filipina and Latin American as well as West Indian, and together these groups make up the great majority of transnational mothers in the United States.³⁰ West Indian childcare providers have immigrated to the United States both with their families (including their children and/or husbands) and on their own.

Flora, an Indo-Trinidadian sitter in her mid-thirties who had two children (ages eight and eleven) and was married to a West Indian man, described to me the “push factors” that had influenced her decision to migrate.³¹ She had moved to the United States with her husband fifteen years ago because occupational opportunities in Trinidad were so limited. She stated, “There is a lack of opportunity in Trinidad—if you are not highly educated and working for the government, there is little reason to remain there. Everyone here does an honest day’s work…. You can do anything and work as anything here…. Crime rates in Trinidad have escalated in the past few years and it is because of the government…. All of the top executives are pocketing the international monies being made instead of giving it to the people through the creation of jobs.”

Catherine, a sitter from Guyana in her mid-twenties, was single and had no children. She had moved to New York around five years earlier and now lived in Brooklyn. Back home in Guyana she had worked as a data entry analyst, but here she had found employment in childcare. When I asked her if this was her career, she replied, “No, this is just for now until I make enough money…. I want to go to school for nursing eventually, but haven’t found the time to research how to go about doing it…. Many of the sitters feel the same way, but do actually enjoy what they are doing.” When I asked why she chose New York, she said that she had family already living here. This was a recurring theme among sitters. Many of these women found the transition to New York easier when they had family already living there who could put them in contact with employers and who had an established residence that could serve as an interim place to stay.³² In a sense, these women were fostered into the homes of their relatives. Specifically, West Indians found it easier to settle in Brooklyn (also in Queens and the Bronx) because these boroughs feature a distinct Caribbean ethnic enclave, including stores run by West Indians that sell many of the products, such as West Indian produce, other foods and spices, and hair care products, that they would get in their homelands, giving them a sense of comfort.

The large number of women immigrating from the Caribbean is reflected in New York’s childcare industry and the presence in Brooklyn of one of the largest West Indian ethnic enclaves, many of whose residents work in a domestic capacity. Brooklyn is thus a prime area for the study of West Indian women and domestic work.

Concept of “West Indianness” and Group Ethnic Identity

The term West Indian as it is used throughout this book implies a uniform group identity used by all of the childcare providers I studied. While some providers came from Guyana, which is geographically part of South America, they all referred to themselves as West Indian or Caribbean and as such identified with other childcare providers from the Caribbean region.³³ This group identity differs from the racial identity of being black, although many of the childcare providers claimed that identity as well.³⁴ As noted by the sociologist Philip Kasinitz in his book Caribbeans in New York, the notion of “black” is problematic: it is a social construction whose meaning varies across space and time.³⁵

The categories of race, then, differ from those of ethnicity, which “implies that a group shares a real or mythological common past and cultural focus, the central defining characteristic of ethnic groups is the belief in their own existence as groups.”³⁶ The common features that make up group ethnic identity include shared “practices, languages, behaviors, or ancestral origins.”³⁷ The West Indian women I encountered often referred to themselves as black, Caribbean, or West Indian. Their acceptance of a pan-ethnic label formed through the shared experience of an occupation in childcare allowed the women under study to construct certain norms that counteracted some of the injustices to which they found themselves subjected in the workplace. As I observed it over a three-year period, the acceptance of a pan-ethnic ident...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 West Indians Raising New York
• 2 Public Parks and Social Spaces
• 3 Indoor Public Play Spaces
• 4 A Taste of Home
• 5 Mobility for the Nonmobile
• 6 Where’s My Money?
• 7 Organizing Resistance
• Conclusion
• Appendix A: Methods
• Appendix B: Demographic Information
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author