unregulated by formal rules and contracts. Consequently, even today they often resemble relations of servitude that prevailed in earlier, precapitalist feudal societies. These contemporary work arrangements contradict American democratic ideals and modern contractual notions of employment. Doméstica reveals how these fundamental tensions in American social life are played out in private homes, between the women who do the work and those who employ them.
Paid domestic work is widely recognized as part of the informal “shadow” or “under the table” economy. Although wage and hour regulations do cover the job, scarcely anyone, employee or employer, knows about them. Government regulations remain ineffective, and there are no employee handbooks, unions, or management guidelines to help set wages or job duties or to stipulate how the work should be performed. The jobs are done in isolated, private, widely dispersed households, and typically involve negotiations between two individuals—usually women from radically different backgrounds. Yet despite this laissez-faire context, there are striking regularities in wages, hours, benefits, tasks, and directions; in disputes that arise; and in modes of recruitment, hiring, and firing. In this book, I identify many of these patterns. Relying on primary information gathered in the mid- to late 1990s from more than two hundred people in Los Angeles (in-depth interviews with 68 individuals, a survey of 153 Latina domestic workers, and ethnographic observations in various settings), I examine how the practices and concerns of both employers and employees shape how paid domestic work occurs today.
There are many lived dramas in America today, and among the least visible and most deeply felt are those that unfold behind carefully manicured lawns and residential facades. My book highlights the voices, experiences, and views both of the Mexican and Central American women who care for other people's children and homes and of the women in Los Angeles who employ them. The study of paid domestic work thus offers a key window through which we can view contemporary relations between women whose social positions are in stark contrast: between poor women and affluent families; between foreign-born, immigrant women and U.S.-born citizens; and between members of the growing, but still economically and racially subordinate, Latino communities and the shrinking population of white suburban residents, many of whom feel increasingly anxious about these demographic developments. Differences of class, race, nationality, and citizenship characterize the study's participants, yet this is an occupation in which the chasm of social differences plays out in physical proximity. Unlike the working poor who toil in factories and fields, domestic workers see, touch, and breath the material and emotional world of their employers' homes. They scrub grout, coax reluctant children to nap and eat their vegetables, launder and fold clothes, mop, dust, vacuum, and witness intimate and otherwise private family dynamics. Inside the palatial mansion, the sprawling ranch-style home, or the modest duplex, they do these activities over and over again.
Ambivalence characterizes the governance of private paid domestic work in the United States. Many contemporary employers of domestic workers feel awkward or ambivalent about the ambiguous arrangements that they make. In part, this ambivalence reflects American unease with the whole image of domestic service. Contemporary inequalities notwithstanding, Americans have no titled aristocracy and no feudal past, and the omnipresent ideology of freedom, equality, and democracy clashes with what many American employers of domestic workers experience in their lives. Some employers try different strategies to address their sense of disquiet. Indeed, most of them think of themselves not as “employers” but rather as “consumers.” Some of them try to not witness the work as it is performed, deliberately leaving the house when their house-cleaners are there even if they have no need to be elsewhere. In casual conversations, they may refer to the Guatemalan woman who works in their home as their “baby-sitter,” invoking the image of a high school girl who lives down the street and looks after the kids on Saturday night. Nanny, after all, sounds too unrepentantly British, and too class marked—though some do flaunt their privilege, grateful at least to be on the employers' side of the fence. Maid, a term that sounds servile, anachronistic, and almost premodern, is rarely used by anyone. Some employers try to snip off the price tags on new clothing and home furnishings before the Latina domestic workers read them because they fear the women will compare the prices of those items with their wages—which they invariably do. While employers often feel guilty about “having so much” around someone who “has so little,” the women who do the work resent not their affluence but the job arrangements, which generally afford the workers little in the way of respect and living wages.
Domestic work was the single largest category of paid employment for all women in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in large part because other opportunities were not available. Although the timing of exit varies by race and region, by the mid-twentieth century the doors to retail, clerical, and professional jobs were opening for many working women, and single and married women walked out of their homes and into formal-sector employment.3 Paid domestic work declined, a trend leading some commentators to predict the occupation's demise. But instead in the late twentieth century new domestic demands arose and new recruits were found, now crossing the southern border to reach the doorstep of domestic work. The work of cleaning houses and caring for children gradually left the hands of wives and mothers and entered the global marketplace. In the process, it has become the domain of disenfranchised immigrant women of color.
I focus not on the sensationalistic abuses and crimes in domestic work (e.g., the nanny who beats the children, or the employer who holds the housekeeper hostage), but rather on the everyday organization of an occupation and the concerns of the women who do the work. The “L.A. stories” presented here underline that social relationships—among the employees, among the employers, and between the two groups—organize the job. These social relationships, as well-intentioned as some of them may be, sometimes lead to less than desirable job performance and conditions of work. Problems and abuses arise that harm both employers and employees, but especially the latter, primarily because paid domestic work is not treated as employment. Remedying the problems and social injustices of paid domestic work, I argue, will involve bestowing social recognition on the work of caring for homes and for children, and learning to see and treat paid domestic work as employment.
SOCIAL LOCATIONS, RESEARCH LOCATIONS
I wrote this book on time stolen away from teaching and administrative duties at my university, and away from my own housecleaning, grocery shopping, cooking, and child care. Even when blessed with a sabbatical and summer vacations, I struggled to find time when school holidays, or unexpected bouts of chicken pox or flu, would not derail my research and writing momentum. And although I pay a Salvadoran woman to clean my house every other week, I still feel there are not enough hours in the day to do everything I need to do. In this regard, I'm afraid I fit the profile of the harried working mom.
Here's the ironic rub: in this book, I argue that cleaning houses and taking care of children is “real work,” yet in the ways I live my life, I still define my real work as my teaching, research, and writing, not the varied activities involved in taking care of my children and home. I love my family and my home, and I spend a good part of each day thinking about, planning, and engaging in family and home activities. Still, if someone asks me, “What do you do?” I tell them what I do for a living. My job as a university professor is privileged work that has been a struggle for me to achieve; I like it, and I don't for a moment take it for granted. The same can truthfully be said of my domestic life, but why don't I claim my own homemaking and care work in the same way? There are many reasons to explain this, and they are primarily social, not individual. They have to do with how we regard—or, more accurately, disregard—the work of running families and households, how we romanticize family as a “natural” arena of expression for women, and how we conceptualize and reward “work,” which remains, even as we enter the twenty-first century, something we still think about in terms of nineteenth-century models of production.
Several other biographical features about me frame this study. I am the daughter of a Latina woman who, like many modestly educated women in mid-twentieth-century Latin America, migrated from the countryside to the city to work as a live-in nanny/housekeeper. Eventually, employment in her native Chile
