of an Anaconda copper mining engineer was her ticket to California, bought with indentured labor. When the family that brought her to the United States refused to pay her, she found live-in domestic jobs with other well-to-do American families before eventually marrying my father, a French gardener whom she met on the job. I grew up hearing all kinds of stories about “la señora Elsa” and “la Mrs. Lowe” (the article always prefacing the name, thereby signaling a formidable presence). Throughout my childhood and adolescence, my family maintained close ties with a Chilean family for whom my mother had once worked, well after she had left their employ and migrated to the United States.4
Today, my husband and I do laundry, cook, and clean daily, but we also pay a Salvadoran woman to clean our house. Every other Thursday she drives from her apartment near downtown Los Angeles to our suburban home to sweep and mop the hardwood floors, vacuum the carpets, dust the furniture, and scrub, wipe, and polish the bathrooms and kitchen to a blinding gleam. I love the way the house looks after she's done her job; but like many of the employers that I interviewed for this study, I remain deeply ambivalent about the glaring inequalities exposed by this arrangement—and exposed in a particularly visible and visceral way. Capitalist manufacturing misery abounds in this world; but when I purchase Nike shoes or Gap jeans, my reliance on child labor in Mauritania or Pakistan, or on Latina garment workers who toil in sweatshops just a stone's throw away from my office at USC, remains conveniently hidden and invisible in the object of consumption. I take possession of a new item, and no one but the cashier stares back at me. By contrast, my privileges and complicity in a worldwide system of inequalities and exploitation are thrown into relief by the face-to-face relations between me and the woman who cleans my house.
When colleagues and students in my classes have discussed these issues, some of them have argued passionately and compellingly that we cannot have a just society until everyone cleans up and picks up after themselves, regardless of their race, sex, or immigration or class status. They might be right (and I'm certainly in favor of men and boys learning to do their fair share), but I think an abolitionist program smacks of the Utopian, not the feasible. Domestic work should not fall disproportionately on the shoulders of any one group (such as Filipina, or Latina, or Caribbean immigrant women); but putting an end to domestic employment is not the answer. Upgrading the occupation, a change ushered in by systemic regulation and by public recognition that this seemingly private activity is a job—one that creates particular obligations in both employees and employers—is our best chance for salvaging paid domestic work, for increasing the opportunities of those who do the work and of their families, and for reclaiming the dignity and humanity of both employees and employers.
Since 1990, well before I began the research for this book, I have worked toward that end with a group of women under the auspices of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA). The project began as an information and outreach program organized by immigrant rights attorneys, community organizers, and myself, but today it is a full-fledged, dues-collecting membership organization called the Domestic Workers' Association (DWA), which is part of CHIRLA. Similar organizations have sprouted up in other cities around the country, and they have long been common in Latin America. I discuss the DWA in Chapter 8; here it is mentioned only to contextualize my relationship to this topic. All research is partial, situated and shaped by who we are. My multiple social locations—as the daughter of a former domestic worker, as a current employer, and as an advocate—have certainly shaped my approach and my emphases. My engagement with previous research and scholarship, particularly that focusing on gender, immigration, and paid domestic work, also situates this study.
RESEARCH DESCRIPTION
I began this project as an interview study, but state and national politics swirling around private domestic work and immigration sometimes made it difficult to find interview participants. From the beginning, I knew I couldn't understand this occupation without understanding those who hire nanny/housekeepers and housecleaners, but some employers turned down my request to come to their home and tape-record them, fearing that I might be an 1RS agent posing as a sociologist (the Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood incidents were fresh in their memories). Others said they were too busy. Meanwhile, some Latina immigrant women, in the climate of fear created by California's Proposition 187 (which sought to bar undocumented immigrants and their children from receiving publicly funded health care and public education), suspected I might be an undercover agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service. I loathed the process of telephoning strangers to ask for interviews, and the rejections made it worse. Still, I persevered and eventually interviewed thirty-seven employers and twenty-three employees.5 I asked employers and employees alike about their varied experiences with paid domestic work, the specific job terms and how these were set, what they liked and disliked about the job arrangement, and basic demographic information. I conducted nearly all of the interviews in the respondents' homes—which means I drove great distances around Los Angeles County, visiting neighborhoods I might never otherwise see in the course of my daily life and wearing out a set of tires; a few took place at my home. Each interview lasted approximately two and a half hours, and the verbatim transcripts averaged about forty to fifty pages of single-spaced text. I read through them many times, selectively coded portions, and then created computer files to bring together pieces of interviews that addressed themes of interest to me. Nearly all of the interviews with employees were conducted in Spanish, and I translated into English only those portions that appear in the text.
Although I had no illusions about drawing a random sample of a universe about which so little is known, I knew I didn't want to confine interview respondents to self-selected groups, such as feminist university women who employ housecleaners, or Latinas who had already organized in one of Los Angeles' domestic worker organizations or cooperatives. These would have been easy pools of respondents, but I wanted to interview more heterogeneous groups of women. I therefore deliberately sought out women from different social and geographic locations in Los Angeles. For example, when I began to search for employer interviewees, I contacted a friend's mother—a liberal-leaning, Jewish retired teacher living on the West-side of Los Angeles; I subsequently interviewed several of her friends who lived in that vicinity and shared similar characteristics. I also began other small snowball samples that reflected different kinds of diversity by tapping into communities of, for example, young, white, well-to-do homemakers from a nursery school cooperative near the Hollywood Hills; middle-aged women living in a multiracial suburb deep in Los Angeles' San Gabriel Valley; and a younger group of career women, some of whom had children and some of whom didn't. This approach did not produce a representative sample (my method, for example, led me to only one interview with a male employer), but it allowed me to speak with employers from different walks of life, at different life stages, and with diverse opinions and experiences. As I requested interviews with employers, I also looked for a balance among the kinds of arrangement for paid domestic work, including respondents who hired, respectively, live-in nanny/housekeepers, live-out nanny/housekeepers, and weekly housecleaners.
I similarly recruited Latina immigrant domestic workers for the study I interviewed nannies whom I had met in the park or at bus stops, at presentations that I made in ESL (English as a second language) classes, and through referrals passed to me by friends or other interviewees; I even interviewed a woman who had left her “looking for work” card on my doorstep. These Latina immigrants, as Chapter 2 shows, are diverse in their national origins, in their ages, arid in the types of domestic work they do. With the exception of two sisters whom I interviewed together, I spoke with each domestic employee privately; and in addition to the questions mentioned above, I also asked them about their work and social lives before migrating to the United States, their family and social lives, and their future occupational aspirations. Cognizant of the precarious financial position of many of these women, and of the substantial time commitment required by my interviews, I initially tried to discreetly pass $25 or $30 in an envelope to each interview participant. Many of the women refused this money. In some cases, I succeeded in prevailing on them; in others, not. Finally, I settled on bringing to each interview a blooming plant, which I purchased at my local
