 |
|
|
|
Anayansi Prado’s entry into the world of las domésticas—Latina household workers—started when she moved to Los Angeles. Without a car, she depended on the bus for transportation and began to wonder about the lives of the many women she saw on their way to jobs as maids, nannies, cooks and servants. MAID IN AMERICA is the result of the questions that began to formulate in Prado’s mind during those bus rides.
|
Guysborough, Nova Scotia, 1900
Photo: Nova Scotia Archives
|
History
Despite the lip service paid to children as the most important things in the world, the people entrusted to look after them have traditionally been some of the most poorly paid and disenfranchised women of society. In the pre-Reconstruction South, the job often fell to slaves; in the Northeast, the job often fell to Irish immigrants, who had come to America and Canada by the millions to escape the potato famine of the 1840s.
Both before and after the Civil War, African American women on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line were domestics, charged both with housekeeping duties and childcare responsibilities. By the turn of the century, though, that was changing, as the Irish assimilated into American society. Even after slavery was a thing of the past, African American women continued to serve as maids and nannies.
New immigrant groups at the end of the twentieth century began to change that, particularly in the Southwest. Mexicans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans and other Central Americans began coming to the United States in ever-greater numbers—both legally and illegally—and, just as in the past, those on the lowest rung of the economic and enfranchisement ladders found that the only jobs they could get were as domestic workers.
Labor groups
Some of today’s domésticas have attempted to organize groups and form co-ops in order to address members’ needs. In MAID IN AMERICA, audiences see one of the women attending meetings of the Dynamic Workers, a co-op of domestic workers in Los Angeles. This basic form of domestic labor organizing had its genesis in the early 1920s, with the National Council on Household Employment (NCHE).
The Cornell University Library holds many of the records for the NCHE, a group of domestic workers that organized in the late 1920s. Comprised mainly of African American workers in the then-segregated Washington, D.C. area, workers in the group attempted to address many of the same issues facing Latina household workers today, including standards for treatment, pay and redress. But many of the leaders were white employers (Eleanor Roosevelt, for a time, lent her name as an honorary chair). The group disbanded in 1941, and was resurrected in 1964 with black leadership by the National Council of Negro Women.
Today there are other groups attempting to give domestic employees a greater voice in their treatment and working conditions, though they’re often informally structured. One of the more formal co-ops is organized by the Community Health Partnership, a division of the social group New Mexico Voices for Children.
“Las Nannies”
In Southern California, the fantasy of a “Mary Poppins” live-in caregiver is replaced by the reality of las nannies, the "Spanglish" term given to the thousands of Latina
child-minders employed by middle- and upper-class Angelenos. USC Sociology Professor Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo writes in her book Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (University of California Press, 2001) that there are over 100,000 domestic workers in Los Angeles. And even in the best of situations, the employee/employer relationship is fraught with uncertainty and guilt.
In MAID IN AMERICA, we meet the Marburys, an upper middle-class African American family whose son, Mickey, has been cared for by their employee Telma since he was an infant. With a demanding career, Karol Marbury is openly grateful for Telma’s help, and Telma loves Mickey as her own son, but there are some uneasy undercurrents: Karol can’t help but be uncomfortable when Mickey refers to Telma as his mother, while Telma’s love for Mickey is tempered by the fact that she has children of her own who don’t get the attention she lavishes on Mickey.
Even in the best of situations, las nannies’ lives can be hard in ways that aren’t immediately apparent. As sociologist Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo notes, “…because their homes are located in remote hillsides, suburban enclaves or in gated communities, live-in nanny/housekeepers are effectively restricted from participating in anything resembling social life, family life of their own or public culture.”
The world of las nannies is a sociological phenomenon so widespread in Los Angeles that it became the subject of a play, Living Out, which had its premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in 2003. Playwright Lisa Loomer’s tragicomedy explores the dynamics between Nancy, an L.A. attorney, and Ana, the Salvadoran immigrant hired to look after her baby. It went on to play well-received engagements in New York, Seattle and elsewhere, and has been performed in Spanish-language and “Spanglish” versions.
"It's everywhere," Loomer told the Los Angeles Times in a 2005 interview.
"It's this city. It's the great divide in this city."
sources
|
|
|
