Abstract
As Hannah Arendt (1958) notes, freedom means, among other things, freedom from the labor that is commanded by necessities, that creates nothing permanent and must be perpetually renewed so as to sustain life. With women’s growing participation in the labor market, there is growing demand for this type of labor, i.e. for childcare services and domestic work. Usually, this demand is met by immigrant women who are looking for better fortune outside their home countries. Freedom is achieved and the burden of biological existence is eliminated by pushing it onto the shoulders of immigrant workers. The immigrants’ presence usually causes some cultural, economic and social tensions – both in the host country and in the host home.
The growing academic coverage of immigrant domestic labor illuminates both the increasing scope of immigrant domestic labor and increasing awareness of its social and cultural implications. Raising Brooklyn by Tamara Mose Brown is a fascinating ethnographic account of Caribbean childcare providers in Brooklyn, New York. It provides in-depth descriptions of Caribbean childcare providers’ daily life in the gentrified, predominantly white neighborhood.
The first chapter, “West Indians Raising New York,” illuminates the role of female Caribbean immigrants and the childcare services they provide within the economy of New York. Taking into account the invisibility, low status and low pay for childcare labor, and racial differences, many of the care providers themselves argue their situation replicates the historical experiences of colonialism and slavery. The book tells a lot about reinventing race and how certain experiences and inequalities are attributed to the fact of blackness. Although immigrants are of varying ethnic and geographical origins, they are seen, identified and categorized as “Caribbean” – through a typical process of reducing differences and exaggerating shared characteristics, which leads to a simplified understanding. The imposed shared identities and shared position of subalternship intensifies feelings of pan-ethnic Caribbean nationalism (Us, people from the islands, versus Them, whites of New York).
The second chapter, “Public Parks and Social Spaces,” illuminates typical routes and spaces used by the sitters, as well as techniques of surveillance employed by their hosts. As the author notes, hiring a babysitter is an act of conspicuous consumption and a manifestation of personal status. Their visibility, their presence and their loving attitudes towards the white child becomes the symbolic asset of the family. The babysitters use public parks both for the needs of children and for their own needs, that is, breaking through the emotional isolation of domestic labor, connecting with people outside home and developing temporal communities of belonging. The public parks, along with playgrounds and other public spaces, constitute a reverse model of the Habermasian public sphere, where citizens, white men of wealth and privilege, meet as equals beyond any bonds of social and economic dependency and discuss common issues – here, the sitters, non-citizens, dis-privileged females of color, meet as equals and discuss their common issues; the private experiences are voiced out and contested, semi-institutional communal forms of mutual support are developed, and the members are empowered via their participation.
The third chapter, “Indoor Public Spaces,” illuminates the politics of domestic space. With the growing number of freelance parents who work from home, spatial arrangements of the home area have to accommodate professional and childcare activities. The home area becomes increasingly contested and negotiated. The child’s presence becomes “unwanted” at some point. The children and the sitters are pushed out into exploring and using spaces outside the home.
The fourth chapter, “A Taste of Home,” illuminates cultural struggles in the kitchen. Via ethnic cooking, Caribbean sitters do not only assert their ethnic identities, but also shape the white children into “American in blood, Caribbean in taste,” which is a reverse replica of Macaulay’s (1835) infamous dictum “Indian in blood, English in taste, morals and education.” Through their ethnic cooking, the sitters are turning children into their allies who refuse the traditional food of their parents’ culture; in this way sitters are manifesting their expertise and accommodating themselves more confidently in their employer’s home.
The fifth chapter, “Mobility for the Non-mobile,” explains how technologies are transforming human relations and blurring the boundaries between home and non-home. The author makes significant contributions towards understanding remote mothering (continuous surveillance and orchestration of domestic family activities, as well as emotional ties maintained by informational technologies) and double surveillance (babysitters are being controlled by their employers by phones and cameras and simultaneously control their own children via phone).
The sixth chapter, “Where’s My Money?,” deals with the financial networks based on shared ethnic and occupational identity, rotating credit associations among Caribbean sitters. It illuminates how traditionalist community models are being replicated outside the home country, bonding people and fostering mutual trust and connectedness among them. The development of parallel structures replicates, to a certain extent, the idea of parallel polis, once developed by Benda (1989) in the totalitarian context of the socialist regime. The parallel polis implies non-resistive, semi-legal structures accommodating those who are unable or unwilling to participate in the larger state-sponsored and state-organized structures. Credit associations between undocumented Caribbean care providers represent the development of parallel economic institutions for those who are poorly integrated into the larger economic and social structures.
The seventh chapter, “Organizing Resistance,” introduces some unarticulated, but clearly Marxist, perspectives on the immigrants’ domestic labor and subordinate position. As most sitters are undocumented immigrants, they reside in the legal periphery and are only partial subjects of the law. The author illuminates both institutional bodies and legal instruments protecting the rights of the domestic workers, as well as the main barriers – fear, internalized racist attitudes and experiences of not being heard, and almost non-negotiable dependency upon their employer. It illuminates how the experiences of helplessness and muteness contribute to the social construction of blackness – which is worthy of deeper analysis as, to my knowledge, undocumented immigrants are equally not being heard and confined to domestic jobs as elderly care/childcare workers, despite their race (take migrants from Soviet/early post-Soviet states as an example).
As the author herself argues, it is a book about “race, gender, ethnicity and female identity” (p. 153). I generally support the statement, yet I would say it is more about class and race than female identity. Within this study, the sitters are not recognized as women. Typically, female domestic workers are exposed to complex emotional arrangements within the host family. The research of domestic labor usually reveals certain sexual tensions within the family; in some cases it includes sexual violence against the nannies or, to the contrary, openly manifested availability of the sitter’s sexual favors in exchange for some other benefits. Typically, female immigrants in domestic jobs are stereotyped as a subject of difference, as exotic and enigmatic, vulnerable and sexually available. As for this book, the author is mostly focused on economic exploitation. Yet the book still bolsters curiosity – are sexual tensions absent/insignificant, or are they simply not covered?
The author presents fascinating ethnographic materials. Yet, at several points, she downplays the significance of her findings and leaves further conclusions for the readers themselves. The first among such aspects are the ambiguities regarding the concept of mothering. The form of childcare described in this book leads to situations where sitters do nearly all the mothering and are consequently misrecognized as mothers by the babies they care for. The research illuminates new forms of mothering, such as remote mothering and substitute mothering, which leads to serious reconsiderations of the concept of mothering and motherhood itself.
The research findings also undermine, to a certain extent, the feminist ideals, as women’s financial independence, emancipation from domestic labor and participation in the labor market are achieved simply by placing substitute workers into women’s homes, i.e. some women have to be ‘enslaved’ within the household, in order for some others to be emancipated and fully enjoy their civic, economic and political rights. As the author quotes one of her interviewees: “I was shocked at the lack of consciousness of women employers toward women employees … When feminists go to the workplace, they have an idea of how they want or expect to be treated, but then go home and exploit the women who work for them” (p. 136). This was candidly observed by Bikova (2008) in her study of au pair practices in Norway: “mothers […] could continue being good mothers by simply paying another woman to perform part of their duties.”
The author talks in some Marxist ways about the exploitation-based childcare system, but avoids targeting the central issue. The question is – can the current situation be resolved via efforts of charity organizations and local NGOs, or does the system need groundbreaking reform? The author devotes a full chapter to different institutional bodies and legal instruments, protecting rights of domestic workers. Yet it seems that Domestic Workers United and other institutional bodies are just tapping the surface in their attempts to improve the childcare providers’ situation. As the author herself states, “In the absence of publicly provided childcare or available assistance from family members, white working women [are] looking for outside domestic help, specifically low-cost ‘off-the books’ immigrant domestic help. […)] Ruth Milkman, Ellen Reese and Benita Roth show how the macroeconomic structure of New York influences [this] reliance on private childcare as well” (p. 26). The childcare system based on the exploitation of immigrants’ labor is, to rephrase Hobson’s (1902) attitude towards imperialism, false economy; it is false economy based on economic inequality and parasitic dependency on foreign markets, and social reform is the only cure.
It is a brilliant volume, illuminating the dramaturgy of everyday life, practices of silent resistance, social use of space and socio-cultural aspects of cooking, and the new forms of subalternship in contemporary societies. The most valuable contributions made by the author are her insights on changing practices of motherhood/mothering, the rise of post-ethnic Caribbean nationalism born out of a shared experience of oppression, dependency of American society on illegal foreign labor, controversies regarding the feminist agenda, and the replication of colonial conditions and colonial ideologies in contemporary societies. The author says: “often the younger West Indian babysitters viewed domestic work as a stepping-stone to living the American Dream, while older ones viewed it as a way of keeping up their hopes of one day achieving the American dream” (p. 9). The immigrants’ life is existence in limbo; it is mummified hope. To use Chakrabarty’s (2000) concept of the “imaginary waiting-room of history,” they appear throughout the book as not yet people, partial subjects, semi-legal subjects, placed temporarily into an imaginary waiting room, in an “imaginary hallway of the American dream,” waiting to be permitted to enter – they are almost Americans, but not quite.