Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Hondagneu-Sotelo challenges the reader to rethink the organization of caring work, the roles of race and immigrant status in the structure of dometic work, the importance of regulations, and the need for legal and personal recognition of the rights and human dignity of each worker. This book is an important contribution to our understanding of work and family among immigrant Latina women and also among the families that employ them."-Bonnie Thornton Dill, author of Across the Boundaries of Race and Class: An exploration of work and family among Black female Domestic Servants

"Through brilliantly nuanced portraits of housekeepers and their employers, Hondagneu-Sotelo tells a neglected story of growing importance, spotlighting the relation of mistress to maid."-Arlie Russell Hochschild, author of The Time Bind

"Doméstica is a pathbreaking study. It opens our eyes to the hidden world of transnational care-work and calls on us to shape domestic and international policies that will bring basic principles of human rights and social justice into that world. Everyone who is concerned about care and equality should read it."-Lucie White, Professor, Harvard Law School

"Beautifully written, sensitive to all the nuances of the situation, and committed to the protection of our most vulnerable immigrants, Doméstica has an important, poignant story to tell; one that will appeal to anyone interested in immigration and the way it is transforming America."-Roger Waldinger, author of Still the Promised City?

"This engaging book bristles with fresh insights into the working lives of immigrant house cleaners and nannies, living on the margins in the nation's capital ofconspicuous consumption. Hondagneu-Sotelo beautifully exposes domestic workers' yearnings for respect and dignity."-Ruth Milkman, author of Farewell to the Factory

"I do not know of any other study that captures with such depth of detail and insight the relationship between domestic workers and their employers. This book will be indispensable to those trying to further our understanding of the relationship between class, gender and migration."-Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, Princeton University

Author Biography: Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration (California, 1994) and coeditor of Challenging Fronteras: Structuring Latina and Latino Lives in the U.S. (1997) and Gender through the Prism of Difference: Readings on Sex and Gender (2000).

SYNOPSIS

As American women have entered the labor force in greater numbers, the traditional work of wives and mothers-cleaning houses and caring for children-has gradually moved into the global marketplace. Paid domestic work has largely become the domain of disenfranchised immigrant women of color. Unlike the working poor who toil in factories and fields, these women see, touch, and breathe the material and emotional world of their employers' homes. They scrub grout, coax reluctant children to eat their vegetables, launder and fold clothes, dust, vacuum, and witness intimate family dynamics. In this enlightening and timely work, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo highlights the voices, experiences, and views of Mexican and Central American women who care for other people's children and homes, as well as the outlooks of the women who employ them in Los Angeles.

FROM THE CRITICS

Los Angeles Times