The Maid's Daughter

Living Inside and Outside the American Dream

Mary Romero

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814769362
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

2012 Americo Paredes Book Award Winner for Non-Fiction presented by the Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College Selected as a 2012 Outstanding Title by AAUP University Press Books for Public and Secondary School Libraries

This is Olivia’s story. Born in Los Angeles, she is taken to Mexico to live with her extended family until the age of three. Olivia then returns to L.A. to live with her mother, Carmen, the live-in maid to a wealthy family. Mother and daughter sleep in the maid’s room, just off the kitchen. Olivia is raised alongside the other children of the family. She goes to school with them, eats meals with them, and is taken shopping for clothes with them. She is like a member of the family. Except she is not. Based on over twenty years of research, noted scholar Mary Romero brings Olivia’s remarkable story to life. We watch as she grows up among the children of privilege, struggles through adolescence, declares her independence and eventually goes off to college and becomes a successful professional. Much of this extraordinary story is told in Olivia’s voice and we hear of both her triumphs and setbacks. We come to understand the painful realization of wanting to claim a Mexican heritage that is in many ways not her own and of her constant struggle to come to terms with the great contradictions in her life. In The Maid’s Daughter, Mary Romero explores this complex story about belonging, identity, and resistance, illustrating Olivia’s challenge to establish her sense of identity, and the patterns of inclusion and exclusion in her life. Romero points to the hidden costs of paid domestic labor that are transferred to the families of private household workers and nannies, and shows how everyday routines are important in maintaining and assuring that various forms of privilege are passed on from one generation to another. Through Olivia’s story, Romero shows how mythologies of meritocracy, the land of opportunity, and the American dream remain firmly in place while simultaneously erasing injustices and the struggles of the working poor.

A happy ending for the maid's daughter: Hector Tobar's profile of Olivia for the LA Times

1

Who Is Caring for the Maid’s Children?

The classic question, “Who is taking care of the maid’s children?” is key to understanding that the employee’s children go without care or are less likely than the employer’s children to have a full-time adult paid to provide the same quality of care. Globalization of child care is based on income inequality; women from poor countries provide low-wage care work for families in wealthier nations.¹ Even with the low wages and variability in the market, hiring a nanny is recognized as the most expensive child-care option there is.² The largest number of domestic workers are located in areas of the country with the highest income inequality among women. In regions with minimal income inequality, the occupation is insignificant.³ Particular forms of domestic labor affirm and enhance employers’ status,⁴ but employers shift the burden of sexism to low-wage women workers⁵ and relegate the most physically difficult and dirty aspects of domestic labor.⁶ However, little attention has been given to the ways that privilege is reproduced through parenting styles and child-care arrangements and the significance that Third World immigrant women’s labor plays in reproducing privilege.

MOTHERING AND THE BOUNDARIES OF PAID CARE WORK

Contrasting motherhood and childhood in the employer’s and employee’s families, the divisions of work and family are revealed as structural issues that transcend the purely personal. Both employer and employee families have child-care needs, but their purchasing power presents completely different options—placing the children of domestics at an enormous disadvantage. Contemporary child experts advocate two types of ideal parenting, commonly referred to as intensive and competitive mothering. Intensive mothering is based on the ideology that mothers need to devote themselves to raising their children and that mothers should ultimately be held responsible for the welfare of their children. In order for working women to fulfill this function, time is differentiated between quantity and quality, with quality time being most valued. In addition, financial resources are required to assure an abundance of cultural and educational opportunities. Competitive mothering involves providing children with activities that assure their ability to be successful. Intensive and competitive mothering revolves around individuality, competition, and the future success of one’s children.⁷ Competition and individualism are values embedded in children’s activities.⁸ Sociologist Annette Lareau refers to this version of child rearing as “concerted cultivation” geared toward “deliberate and sustained effort to stimulate children’s development and to cultivate cognitive and social skills.”⁹ Concerted cultivation aims to develop children’s ability to reason through their negotiation with parents and by placing value on children’s opinions, judgments, and observations.¹⁰ Family leisure time is dominated by organized activities for children, such as sports, clubs, and paid lessons (e.g., dance, music, tennis). Most children’s time is structured by adults rather than child-initiated play. “Play is not just play anymore. It involves the honing of motor skills, communication skills, hand-eye coordination, and the establishment of developmentally appropriate behavior.”¹¹

Aspects of intensive and competitive mothering are at odds with demanding careers. Everyday practices of intensive mothering require immense emotional involvement, constant self-sacrificing, exclusivity, and a child-centered environment. These mothering activities are financially draining and time consuming. Mothers with disposable income often use commodities to fulfill aspects of intensive and competitive mothering that enhance their children’s education experiences.¹²

Hiring a live-in immigrant worker, for those who can afford it, is the most convenient child-care option for juggling the demands of intensive mothering and a career.¹³ “As care is made into a commodity, women with greater resources in the global economy can afford the best-quality care for their family.”¹⁴ The most burdensome mothering activities (such as cleaning, laundry, feeding children, and chauffeuring children to their various scheduled activities) are shifted to the worker. Qualities of intensive mothering, such as sentimental value, nurturing, and intense emotional involvement, are not lost when caretaking work is shifted to an employee.¹⁵ Employers select immigrant caretakers on the basis of perceived “warmth, love for children, and naturalness in mothering.”¹⁶

Different racial and ethnic groups are stereotyped by employers as ideal employees for housework, for child care, or for live-in positions. Stereotyping is based on a number of individual characteristics—race, ethnicity, class, caste, education, religion, and linguistic ability—and results in a degree of “otherness” for all domestic servants. However, such a formalization of difference does not always put workers in the subordinate position, and employers’ preferences can vary from place to place. Janet Henshall Momsen has noted that “professionally-trained British nannies occupy an élite niche in Britain and North America.”¹⁷ Interviewing employers in Los Angeles and New York City, Julia Wrigley observed that Spanish-speaking nannies were identified by employers for their ability to broaden the cultural experience of their children, particularly in exposing them to a second language in the home.¹⁸ Employers referenced the growing Latino population in their community and the long-term benefits for their children to learn Spanish.

Cultural standards for contemporary mothering are geared toward reproducing the family’s place in society. This is partially accomplished through socialization into class, gender, sexual, ethnic, and race hierarchies. Employment of immigrant women as caregivers contributes to this socialization. Children, reinforced by their parents’ conceptualization of caretaking as a “labor of love,”¹⁹ may assume nannies’ natural abilities for care and service. Growing up in race- and class-segregated communities, these children are likely to learn a sense of entitlement to receive affection from people of color that is detached from their own actions.²⁰ As children move from their home, located in class- (and frequently race-) segregated neighborhoods, to school (also likely to be segregated), power relationships and the larger community’s class and racial etiquettes are further reinforced. Child-centered homes with fulltime nannies will tend to raise children to be consumers of care.²¹ Privilege is learned as children acquire a sense of entitlement to have a domestic worker always on call to meet their needs.²² Children are likely to internalize images of themselves not as members of a community or society but rather as independent individuals who are not responsible for the care of others. Nannies are rarely given parental authority over the child but follow employers’ instructions. Parents reprimanding nannies in front of their children or treating them as nonequals conveys the message of inferior status between worker and family members. Systems of class, racial, ethnic, gender, and citizenship domination are taught to children by witnessing “the arbitrary and capricious interaction of parents and servants; moreover, sometimes they are permitted to treat domestic servants in a similar manner.”²³ Caretaking without parental authority does not teach children reciprocal respect but rather teaches the treatment of women of color as merely means and not as ends in themselves.²⁴ The division of labor between a mother and a live-in caretaker or domestic is reinforced by allocating the most burdensome and manual labor to immigrant women of color. This gendered division of labor serves to teach traditional patriarchal privilege as well as teaching class, race, and citizenship inequalities.²⁵

Immigrant women of color employed as domestics are likely to be exposed to exploitative working conditions, particularly if they have live-in arrangements. Live-in conditions are most vulnerable for workers because they have less control over their working hours, may not be given adequate food, may be denied privacy (e.g., sharing a room with the employer’s child), may barely receive minimum wage or benefits, may lack job security, and may be exposed to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. Exploitative working conditions for immigrant domestics and nannies increases opportunities for “learned helplessness and class prejudice in the child” and teaches “dependence, aggressiveness, and selfishness.”²⁶ Conditions under which immigrant women of color are employed in private homes are structured by systems of privilege, and consequently, employers’ children are socialized to these norms and values.

Third World immigrant domestics experience inequalities of caregiving firsthand as they provide labor for parents in rich, industrialized countries while leaving their own children at home.²⁷ Sarah Blaffer Hrdy equated mothers leaving their children with relatives in their homeland to European infants left in foundling homes or sent to wet nurses during the eighteenth century: “Solutions differ, but the tradeoffs mothers make, and the underlying emotions and mental calculations, remain the same.”²⁸ Bridget Anderson has noted that immigrant women’s “care for their children is demonstrated in the fruits of hard labour, in remittances, rather than in the cuddles and ‘quality time’ that provides so much of the satisfaction.”²⁹ Transnational mothering cannot provide the “physical closeness, seen as healthy and ‘normal’ in the Western upbringing of a child … because most of the women are not allowed to take their children with them.”³⁰ These conditions reduce mothering to the basic function of economic support. In research on Filipina women in Rome and Los Angeles, Parreñas observed the impact of economic ties rather than affective ties between mother and child separated from each other over a long period of time.³¹ The absence of retirement-benefit pensions assures that workers will not be able to contribute financially to their children’s future but rather will need their adult children’s assistance.

In the case of the children of day workers, their life chances reflect low minimum wage, lack of health-care and child-care benefits, inflexible work schedules, mandatory overtime, and citizenship restrictions. In the case of the children of migrant workers, the loss of a parent or parents, the lack of family stability, and the commodification of their mother’s love is all too common. Although these conditions apply to the children of working-poor and lower-middle-class workers who occupy a wide range of low-wage and dead-end jobs, the children of parents employed in domestic service and the low-wage caring industry frequently experience the exchange of inequities knowing that their parents are caring for their employers’ families while they go without similar care. The costs of globalized care work are experienced by workers’ children and thus remain invisible to families who purchase private care.

EXPLORING THE COSTS OF DOMESTIC SERVICE

Caring for children is not priceless in our society but usually relies on the cheapest labor available. Immigration policies and declining welfare benefits assure professionals of a ready pool of low-wage workers.³² Child-care policies and programs that are not inclusive for all mothers, regardless of class, race, or citizenship, maintain and expand a system of privileges that relies on subordination. In this section, I report comments by some of the children of nannies and domestic workers whom I interviewed for side projects as the interviews with Olivia continued.

Like other mothers employed outside the home, private household workers and nannies are faced with the problem of child care. Child-care arrangements made by private household workers and nannies are similar to other poor and working-class mothers in the United States: mothers and fathers juggle work hours so one parent is home with the children; they call on relatives or siblings, give older siblings responsibility for child care and domestic labor, leave children alone, or in a few cases, take their children to work.³³ In my own research, second-generation Chicanos, who were more likely than other groups to live near relatives, relied on their assistance for child care:

My uncle and my aunt came from Mexico to live, and they moved into one of the back apartments. So I think that was a big help too for her [mother] ’cause my aunt would take care of my brother. When he’d come home from school, she’d give him something to eat and stuff. (Rosa García, Mexican American child in the ’60s in Los Angeles, Interview, February 1995)

Growing up in south Texas in the early ’70s, Raquel Ruiz recalled learning to take responsibility for preparing meals out of necessity and the backup support provided by women relatives living nearby:

I used to pull a chair up to the stove, and that’s how I learned how to cook ’cause I’d watch my mom. If it got late enough, I would start dinner. So when mom came home, dinner was already started. And she’d echaban las tortillas [make the tortillas], and then my father came home really late—’cause he worked two jobs. Some days she was home early, some days she wasn’t, but we had nenas [godmother] and tías [aunts] to watch us. (Interview, November 1994)

When the options for mothers was taking their child to work or leaving their child alone, some were able to get their employer’s permission to bring the child to work for the day. Interviewees who were the oldest in the family recalled accompanying their mothers to their day jobs:

I remember going there [employer’s house], and it was a fancy place—kind of impressive and a lot of work. … I just tried to stay out of the way. I only went on days in which, you know, for some reason I couldn’t go to school or was home alone. (William Taylor, African American child in the ’50s in Pittsburgh, Interview, June 1995)

The absence of available and affordable child care frequently limited options to unpaid labor. Changes in work and school schedules required flexibility and contingency plans. The irregular hours of domestic service, resulting from employers’ last-minute requests, placed an additional burden on mothers to find adequate child care. Stories about child care from the perspective of domestics’ and nannies’ children capture nuances that are frequently glossed over or remain invisible.

In some cases, fathers worked different shifts to be home with the children; in other cases, female relatives stepped in and assisted. However, the most common impact was the shift of domestic labor and care work to the children. Interviewees described having to rush home to care for younger siblings, start dinner, and do a wide range of household chores, including cooking, laundry, and house cleaning:

I was responsible for all the housework. Except my sister Josephina and I would draw little papers of who gets what [the household chores to do]. I did the cooking because she couldn’t cook, and I was like the supervisor. Whatever she cleaned I had to make sure it was right, because my mother, given what she does, was a perfectionist. (Rosa García, Interview, February 1995)

Although at first glance the chores of these children hardly seem significant, in comparison to the employers’ children, replacing their mothers’ unpaid labor meant missing extracurricular activities, sports, and time for homework:

In my eighth grade, I got into what was our drill team. I tried it for a while, but they [parents] kept saying, “You need to come home because this needs to be done, and that has to be done, and you can’t stay after school to practice.” So I missed too many times, so I finally dropped out. (Antonia Samora, child in the ’50s in Arizona, Interview, April 1994)

The burden of household duties, particularly providing child care for the younger siblings, sometimes impacted the elder children’s educational opportunities.

Most of the interviewees recalled spending a few hours alone in their homes. During this time, children were expected to contribute labor for the benefit of the household. Alex Conrad’s description of his household duties was typical of all the interviewees:

Basic rule was that we’d get home and our room had to be clean, the house had to be straight, those kinds of things. My mother would cook dinner. She would get home between six and six-thirty, put her bags down, and head straight to the kitchen to fix dinner. So our job was to have the house basically civilized when she got home. Our biggest responsibility was our room and keeping it straight, and not messing up what...