‘Compañerismo’: Care and Power in Affective Labor Relations

Abstract

Many Chilean women employers desire domestic workers who are also ‘partners’ or ‘someone to do life with’. Taking ‘partnership’ or ‘compañerismo’ seriously, this paper draws on an affective labor framework and economic sociology to examine how care and power operate in affective and highly commodified labor relations between Chilean women employers and migrant Filipina domestic workers. We contextualize this discussion within historical relations of servitude in Chile and salient demands for more horizontal social and gender relations. We show that rather than reinforcing power or control, employers’ emphases on affective aspects of the labor relation enable their willful ignorance of power hierarchies, through normalizing the racialized presence of the worker in the household. However, explicit talk about money exposes the material conditions of affect and care in this racialized affective relationship. This reveals the uneven distribution and production of both care and power in the household, and highlights the disruptive nature of care work as affective labor.

Keywords

domestic work migration care affect racialization commodification Chile

Introduction

The global COVID-19 pandemic and closure of schools and childcare facilities led to public discussions about the role of live-in domestic workers (colloquially termed nanas) in Chile. ‘To live without a nana’ (Vivir Sin Nana), a self-published book by Chilean author Michelle Reich (2017), provoked debate by proposing that upper-class Chilean families can be ‘free’ of their dependence on domestic workers. Yet, many women also identified with an opinion column published by the national newspaper La Tercera, where the author defined her relationship with her domestic employee in terms of companionship (compañerismo):¹

I am not saying . . . that we are friends . . . but if I had to find a label, I would speak of compañerismo (companionship) . . . Many people could say that a relationship with a contract or payment could never be horizontal . . . But the truth is that for me [this] hierarchy does not exist and the contract – which obviously matters – is totally circumstantial. Because with Marcela, whatever happens, we will be united forever. (Morales, 2021)²

These contrasting discourses of companionship and desires to ‘be free’ from dependence on a domestic worker speak to the complex and affective nature of employer–employee relations. We take Chilean employers’ desire for ‘companionship’ with domestic workers as a starting point to examine the shifting nature of paid domestic work and the employer–employee relationship in urban diversifying cities such as Santiago, where an entrenched culture of servitude co-exists with demands for more democratic and egalitarian relationships. In contrast to existing sociological research emphasizing care as an intentional form of control and dominance by domestic employers over employees (Constable, 2007 [1997]; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Parreñas et al., 2021; Rollins, 1985), our study highlights that care cannot be free from or reduced to power in these racialized affective labor relations.

Domestic work in Chile must be contextualized socio-historically. During the colonial period, domestic servants were typically black, Indigenous, and mestizo persons. They enabled the reproduction of racialized class hierarchies (Araya, 2005) and articulated a culture of servitude (Ray and Qayum, 2009), which endured over time in domestic worker–employer relationships (Fernández-Ossandón, 2018; Stefoni and Fernández, 2011). This culture of servitude positions racialized others as naturally disposed to serve, and ‘white’ employers–masters as entitled to being served, due to their racial and class superiority (Ray and Qayum, 2009). During the 20th century, rural and Indigenous women from the south of Chile were hired as domestic workers in the capital due to perceptions of their docility; their over-representation in domestic work reproduced the culture of servitude and naturalized colonial legacies. However, during the 1990s, employers complained that these Chilean workers ‘knew too much’ about labor rights, and were no longer as willing or available to serve. Employers began hiring newly arrived Peruvian migrant women perceived as more caring and devoted due to their rural upbringing, and more compliant, since they depended on employers for visas (Fernández-Ossandón, 2018; Stefoni and Fernández, 2011). By the mid 2000s, Peruvian domestic workers began organizing alongside their Chilean peers, demanding legal and social recognition of their work in the reproduction of families and the national economy (Hutchinson, 2022). These rights narratives challenged ideas of nanas as ‘part of the family’ (Staab and Maher, 2006). This is the context in which Filipina domestic workers arrived in Chile in the 2010s, where commercial agencies promoted them as the new ‘ideal’ nanas for their obedience, professionalism, and loyalty. This article focuses on relationships between Chilean women employers and Filipina domestic workers to examine how the introduction of a new racialized group to perform domestic work in Chile reproduces and problematizes the culture of servitude and racialized class hierarchies.

We take a critical feminist intersectional perspective to examine how the presence of racialized migrant women in Chilean households have shaped affective relations and expectations in the home today. Feminist research has long highlighted that although domestic employers may describe workers as ‘part of the family’, such narratives can be used to emotionally manipulate workers to extract unpaid labor, and justify exploitative practices (Constable, 2007 [1997]; Ehrenreich et al., 2003; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; MacDonald, 2011; Rollins, 1985; Romero, 2016 [1982]). Paid domestic work illuminates the challenges of establishing strict boundaries between the public and private spheres, and the professional/personal relationship between employers and employees. Employers and employees share intimate physical spaces of the home, and tend to share emotional attachment to and caring relations with children or elderly in the household. Thus, domestic work should be understood as care work, which entails affective and emotional labor to different degrees depending on the work and living arrangement involved, where careworkers often care for and care about members of the family (Yeates, 2012). Domestic work as care work thus entails ‘relational work’ (Zelizer, 2005), where the meanings and boundaries of the relationship between workers and employers – as ‘part of the family’ but not quite – are constantly negotiated. Furthermore, this relationship is also one marked by racialized and class differences. Scholars have examined how the exploitation and devaluation of racialized labor in the context of domestic work prioritizes the reproductive, professional, and individual aspirations and endeavors of white women and elites at the expense of those of racialized women (Constable, 2007 [1997]; Ramos-Zayas, 2020; Yeates, 2012). For women employers who may identify as feminists and politically progressive, even more relational and affective work is required to rationalize the presence of a racialized domestic worker in their lives.

This article draws on 19 semi-structured interviews conducted in-person and online between 2020 and 2021 with five Chilean employers, two migration intermediaries, a representative from the Philippines Embassy in Chile, and a former Embassy staff in Singapore and 10 Filipina domestic workers who work and live in upper-class families in central Chile (Santiago and Valparaiso regions). The interviews lasted between 1 and 5 hours and were conducted in Spanish with the employers and in English with the workers. In contrast to other studies in Chile and elsewhere on domestic employer–employee relations, women employers in this study strongly expressed desires for more horizontal relations with their Filipina domestic workers, emphasizing ‘emotional connection’ with ideal domestic workers who are also ‘companions’ or ‘partners’.

Focusing on the multidimensional interdependency between women employers and domestic workers, we examine how uneven dynamics of power are negotiated through idioms and practices of care between women. We shift away from analyses of power that assume a binary or dichotomy of oppressor–oppressed or dominator–dominated in the domestic employer–employee relationship (cf. Fernández-Ossandón, 2021). Building on critical research that characterize domestic work as racialized and affective labor (cf. Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010; Ramos-Zayas, 2020), we seek to reveal the unstable and disruptive character of care work that may generate strategies that refuse logics of commodification and kinship metaphors. Consequently, we see ‘companionship’ as signaling the messy and contradictory attempts to navigate new complex social and labor arrangements. Attention to ‘companionship’ demands a more critical perspective on contemporary forms of care relations and power dynamics that reproduce and question socio-historical hierarchies (Fassin, 2005; Fernández-Ossandón, 2021; Ticktin, 2011).

In the next section, we characterize relations between employers and domestic workers as primarily a racialized affective relation, one that is deeply commodified. This focus enables an analysis of the dynamics of care and power in a relationship that cannot be fully captured in analyses of labor or familial tropes. An emphasis on the affective nature of employer–employee relations may serve employers’ efforts to be willfully ignorant of power hierarchies, and/or enable the establishment of reciprocal relations of care and the expansion of women’s care networks. Next, we contextualize Filipina women’s position in the domestic work landscape in Chile. We focus on Filipina workers because they are highly commodified in Chile as global servants and ideal careworkers, compared to other racialized workers represented in the sector (Choy, 2003; Parreñas, 2001; Rodriguez, 2010). We discuss employers’ demand for Filipina domestic workers, and the circumstances that reinforce the structural and social inequality they might experience in Chilean households. By examining Chilean women employers’ expectations and experiences of their relationship with Filipina domestic workers, we analyze the affective aspect of the domestic employer–employee relation. We propose that both employers and workers constantly negotiate power unevenly through care practices and discourses. Finally, we show that explicit talk and negotiation of money and salaries between employers and employees exposes the material conditions and limits of this racialized affective relationship. Talk about money reveals the uneven distribution and production of care and power in the household, and highlights the disruptive and messy nature of carework as affective labor.

Care relations and racialized affective labor in domestic work

Domestic work is a broad category that includes cleaning and other activities that involve intimate bodily care such as bathing and feeding others (e.g. children, the sick, or the elderly). It also involves intimate knowledge about individual preferences or concerns of employers and their family (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001). Partly because domestic labor is organized within private households, regulating domestic work globally as ‘real work’ has faced multiple challenges (Gutierrez Garza, 2019; Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Zelizer, 2005). These challenges reveal how the affective and relational nature of carework are often undermined. While feminist scholars have highlighted the emotional labor involved in domestic work, we agree with sociologist Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez (2010) that domestic work is better understood in terms of affective labor; it involves ‘more than just caring for others or emotional labor, their labor is inherently connected to the exchange and circulation of affects’ (p. 5). For her, the social fabric of domestic work is shaped by ‘the expression and exchange of affects’, which are ‘not just perceived as emotions and feelings, but also intensities, sensations and bodily reactions’, such as disgust and disdain, that ‘disrupt and reaffirm power relations in the household’ (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010: 5).

Furthermore, this affective value of domestic labor is both racialized and feminized. The fact that domestic work is unpaid or low-wage and typically performed by racialized women illuminates the gender and coloniality of labor in its value character and codification (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010: 144). Characterizing domestic labor as affective labor captures how Chilean women employers in our study perceive the main function of paid domestic work. Beyond the tasks of childcare and routine cleaning, women employers expressed desires for workers who could offer them ‘contención’. ‘Contención’ can be translated as ‘emotional support’, but it more accurately corresponds to the 21st-century therapeutic term, ‘holding space’. ‘Contención’ implies a space provided by another that would allow the free and safe expression of one’s potentially explosive feelings, a haven where one (e.g. the employer) would be able to find emotional release and validation. The work of holding space is thus primarily affective: to actively hold space is to listen with patience and non-judgment, and simply ‘be there’ for the other in an empathic way. ‘Contención’ as affective labor is intangible work not linked to a particular task. Its product is instead attached to feelings, emotions, and energies (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010), such as containing an employers’ rage or frustration, in producing or modifying another person’s affective experience.

Precisely because domestic work often involves caring relationships with members of the employer’s household, this ‘mingling of personal care with economic transaction’ tends to cause intense moral and emotional tension and conflict among persons involved (Zelizer, 2005: 161). A relationship of care, in its most basic terms, involves ‘sustained and/or intense personal attention that enhances the welfare of its recipients’ (Zelizer, 2005: 162). While care relations can vary from the impersonal to interlinked lives, caring relationships tend to be intimate since they involve a degree of trust. Zelizer (2005) argues that ‘relational work’ is required in domestic worker–employee relationships; boundaries must be drawn to avoid confusion between the ‘proper matching of relationship, transaction, and medium’ when intimate care and economic transactions are combined (p. 161). In these contexts, employers and paid caregivers must continually negotiate over the social meaning and economic content of their relationship and contract (Zelizer, 2005: 179; Gutierrez Garza, 2019; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001). In addition, these relationships tend to be more complex because employers and employees often avoid explicit discussions about the financial, and we would add, racialized aspects of their relationship.

The ideology of the family and household as a space of refuge, intimacy, and emotional reassurance (Berlant, 2011) sits uncomfortably with the commodified relationships presented with the hiring of a domestic worker and the stubborn gendered division of labor in the household (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010: 103). Thus, domestic work is a field inherently charged with and mediated through affect: an enormous invisible affective and relational work is required by everyone involved to resolve this contradiction or normalize the racialized presence of the person who has been hired to care for the household and family. This normalization – through ‘part of the family’ or ‘companionship’ discourses – is important for the production and circulation of positive effects such as tranquility, love, and security in the household. This labor of normalization is implicit and discomforting; for employers and employees, domestic and care work in the household carries a palpable history and legacy of its association with colonialism, feudalism, slavery, and servanthood. The ghost of slavery and servanthood haunts many employers’ narratives and rationalizations of hiring paid domestic work today across diverse contexts and families (Ramos-Zayas, 2020: 189; see also Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001: Chapter 6).

We contribute to the extensive discussion on care and (migrant) domestic work by focusing on the care work and relational work that occurs between racialized migrant domestic workers and women employers. Our study resonates with existing research that identify women employers as typically working mothers who are highly dependent on domestic workers to oversee the household, including grocery shopping, cooking, and care and discipline of the children. Live-in domestic workers are also usually highly dependent on women employers due to the intimate nature of the working and living arrangement, and since women employers typically occupy the role of the ‘main’ employer–supervisor, while male employers either mediate conflict or take charge of specific tasks such as paying salaries. While existing research on the employer–domestic employee relationship emphasizes its personalized and ambiguous nature, researchers have mainly focused on domestic workers’ care work and relations with children, the elderly, or the sick (MacDonald, 2011; Parreñas, 2001). The few studies that examined women domestic employer–employee relationships highlighted the centrality of children’s welfare and the ‘mother-child’ bond in dynamics between mother–employers and their ‘shadow mothers’ (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; MacDonald, 2011; Rollins, 1985). Our research examines instead how women negotiate the complex affective relationship when women employers are explicitly the main recipient (and provider) of care in this labor relation.

Generally, employers adopt negative attitudes toward the ‘relational work’ involved in hiring domestic workers in Los Angeles (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001), Brazil (Ramos-Zayas, 2020: 188), and even Chile (Fernández-Ossandón, Forthcoming). Since such caring relations are complicated, employers prefer to avoid the effort required to build such relationships. In contrast, Chilean women employers in our study searched for an intensely emotional relationship with domestic workers, not only as ‘co-mothers’ but as women. In an earlier study from 2014 to 2015, Rosario Fernandez found that upper-class Chilean employers wanted not only ‘submissive nanas, but also for an authentic affective performance of obliging devotion’ (Fernández-Ossandón, 2018: 57; see also Maher and Staab, 2005). Racialized women such as Peruvians and Filipinas were desirable workers because of perceptions of ‘their natural willingness to serve and indulge employers’ needs, and their loving attitude towards children’ (Fernández-Ossandón, 2018: 57; see also Maher and Staab, 2005). We examine how employers’ expectations have shifted nearly a decade on in a rapidly evolving Chile that has witnessed significant feminist movements and a 2019 massive social protest against socio-economic inequality and precarity in the country. In this ‘new’ Chile, we examine how care and power are (re)negotiated in racialized and affective ways in the domestic labor relationship. We argue that, in 2021–2022, paid domestic labor not only enables a specific lifestyle for some women employers (Fernández-Ossandón, 2018). Instead, employers who identify as socially progressive view domestic workers’ provision of emotional support as necessary to help them to navigate their contradictory attitudes towards domestic work and racialized care relations, and resolve their liberal guilt in hiring racialized women to perform care work so that they themselves can develop their professional careers.

Relations of servitude in Chile and the position of ‘Nanas Filipinas’

In Chile, discourses of domestic workers as ‘part of the family’ emerged after the 1960s, when the nuclear family and the morally responsible mother figured strongly in the reorganization of the national economy and domestic life. These ideas were reinforced during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973–1988; Oyarzún, 2000). Women were encouraged to become ideal housewives, take charge of homes, and the emotional and physical well-being of children and husbands. Domestic workers became a necessity, especially for middle- and upper-class families, due to the labor required to reproduce the ideal family. Domestic workers were no longer servants but ‘nanas’ of the family; the endearing term gave an affective dimension to their role. While these ideas about womanhood and families persisted into the 21st century, Chilean society also experienced important structural and social transformations. Post-dictatorship and feminist movements inspired demands for more horizontal and egalitarian relationships generally (Araujo and Martuccelli, 2012). In this scenario, we argue that Chilean domestic employers and workers today navigate more complex relationships due to the contradictions between demands for horizontal and professional relations on one hand, and, on the other hand, employers’ nostalgia and emotional attachment to the cultural legacy of servitude.

Today, approximately 800 Philippine nationals live and work in Chile; most of them are women domestic workers.³ This article focuses on the experiences of employers of Filipina domestic workers because of the special position Filipinas occupy in this sector. Their arrival in significant numbers to Chile during the 2010s coincided with the establishment of commercial agencies that facilitated the recruitment and placement of Filipina women with Chilean employers. Such agencies are unprecedented; existing agencies only offered to place workers who were already in Chile. Employers can also find workers through Facebook groups and their own social networks, or in parks in their neighborhoods. In this context, Filipina domestic workers are highly commodified. Employers we interviewed paid between 2 million to 3 million Chilean pesos (around US$2500) to hire Filipina women from abroad. This cost included plane tickets, visa fees, and agency fees.

Filipina domestic workers typically arrived in Chile with a visa sujeto a contrato, where their temporary work visas are tied to the fulfillment of their 2-year contract with a single employer. After this 2-year period, migrants can apply for temporary residency, and eventually achieve permanent residency with relative ease as compared to other common destination countries where this is virtually impossible (Parreñas, 2022). Domestic workers who do not fulfill their 2-year contract can also change employers. In comparison to other migrant destination countries, Chile has fairly high labor standards and has sought to improve regulations for domestic work. Combined with the higher salary promised to Filipina women, Chile appeared as an attractive new destination, despite the distance from the Philippines (Carranceja, 2018).

An initial factor that provoked the demand for Filipina domestic workers was the promotional work of agencies such as ‘Proyectos Nanas’ and ‘Nana Filipina’. These present Filipina women as a niche within the sector due to their professionalism, warmth, obedience, and ability to speak English. These agencies racialize and market Filipina women against stereotypes of Chilean and migrant women. Nana Filipina writes on their webpage that

Filipina maids would never steal . . . They are warm and affectionate. They would never be aggressive with anyone in the family. They establish a strong bond with the family they work with. They have a high level of education. They come to Chile with the singular objective to work, to maintain their families (in the Philippines). They obey their employers’ instructions. They do not complain. They strictly guard the privacy of the family they work with.

Proyecto Nanas similarly claim that ‘Filipina maids are characterized by having a very good disposition towards domestic work; for their lovability and honor and their responsibility and commitment they acquire with their employers’.

In addition, we argue that Filipina domestic workers are appealing because they present the possibility of total availability and devotion to Chilean families. Most Peruvian and Latin American domestic workers have families in Chile, and prefer not to live with their employers. Their families’ needs sometimes disrupt their ability to show up for work on time; they might take emergency days off to care for their families. In contrast, Filipina women tend to leave children and partners behind in the Philippines, and prefer live-in working arrangements. Compared to their Latin American counterparts, their personal lives and concerns are less visible, and ostensibly located far away. The promise of total availability speaks to the possibility for the Filipina to approximate the ideal figure of the ‘nana’ that is ‘part of the family’. Chilean women employers we interviewed, all expressed the desire for domestic workers to be ‘part of the family’, although this trope is increasingly irrelevant for Chilean and other migrant domestic workers who live with their own families. Other studies have shown that Chilean employers expressed reluctance to build personal relationships with domestic workers due to perceptions that workers were unwilling to be part of the family and were ‘too familiar’ with their labor rights. Employers viewed them as disloyal, disrespectful, and untrustworthy; these domestic workers also desired working arrangements that would grant them more independence and autonomy (Fernández-Ossandón, Forthcoming). Why do Chilean employers of Filipina workers in our study, instead, prefer an emotional relationship with their workers? We suggest that although Filipina women, in contrast to Latin American domestic workers, appear too culturally distinct to form ‘part of the family’ in Chile, the promise of arriving as an unmarried woman or woman without her family allows employers to expect that they can devote long hours of work and be emotionally available for the family, just like ‘nanas’ of the past.

An additional factor shaping the unequal power relationship between Chilean employers and Filipina domestic workers is the fact – transparently promoted by agencies – that many Filipina women have worked in Asian and Middle Eastern countries, where domestic work is poorly or unfairly regulated. Thus, Filipina workers may arrive with low expectations of what constituted a ‘good employer’. This ostensibly provided a solution to the problem identified by Chilean employers in earlier studies where they claimed that domestic workers knew ‘too much’ about their rights (Fernández-Ossandón, 2018: 57; Staab and Maher, 2006). While Filipina women in Chile have vastly different experiences and expectations based on their previous experiences elsewhere with diverse employers and families, generally, their worst experiences with previous employers or agencies – particularly in Singapore – profoundly shaped what they expect from ‘decent’ employers. As Lorelei described her first Chilean employers, ‘They’re good to me because they don’t do anything bad . . . They give me food’. While food provision should be a right for live-in domestic workers, Lorelei’s previous experiences in Singapore where she was deprived of food and asked to sleep on a bare mat shaped her appreciation that her Chilean employers did not ‘do anything bad’. Similarly, Angelica was grateful that she could keep her passport when working for Chilean employers, because previously, employers or agents had always kept her passport to control her mobility. Nevertheless, the fact that Chilean employers paid a lot to bring Filipina women to Chile was consciously used as a narrative by agencies to demand that Filipina women enact servitude and deference toward employers.

Despite these evidently unequal power dynamics between Chilean employers and Filipina women due to the structural and racialized nature of their relationship and women’s journeys to Chile, in our interviews, women employers paradoxically emphasized a desire for horizontal and deeply affective relationships with their domestic workers that do not question or acknowledge power asymmetries between them. In the next section, we trace how these unequal but interdependent labor relations have been reconfigured in affective and practical ways in the context of current salient national discussions about the need for more horizontal social and gender relations in Chile.

‘I was looking for a partner’: Employers’ expectations and narratives of the domestic labor relation

The Chilean women domestic employers that we interviewed are of a specific socio-economic background in a country that is extremely stratified by social class and economic status (Fernández-Ossandón, 2018). They are all working mothers, highly educated, and well-paid professionals who hired live-in domestic workers when their children were either newborn or toddlers. They also share a relatively modest upbringing. Two are divorced, single mothers who live with and have primary custody of their children. Three of them were raised in families that had long-term live-in domestic workers; while the others were raised primarily by female relatives while their mothers worked. While individual biographies certainly shaped their unique relationships, the women commonly emphasized the importance of a reciprocal and affective relation with their domestic workers.

For Francisca, a high-level executive in a multinational company, the fact that her mother was a live-in domestic worker for many years shaped her expectations of the ideal domestic labor relationship. At the time of the interview, Francisca was searching for a new domestic worker. She said,

I want someone who can be part of the family, to establish bonds (generar lazos) . . . I want someone who would . . . give me advice (about the children) . . . Maybe it is too much what I am asking for . . . in reality (I’m looking for) someone who is like a mother . . . .

Francisca observed that for some families, particularly those with many children, domestic workers’ roles are ‘functional’: they are necessary for a household with two working parents to function. What she was looking for, however, was something more ‘emotional’. The first live-in domestic worker she hired, a Peruvian woman, mainly cared for her two children. Over time, she requested to live outside once her family had joined her in Chile. However, this would not work for Francisca’s own family; due to the couple’s long working hours, they needed someone who could be present at home all the time.

Through a friend’s enthusiastic recommendation, Francisca hired a Filipina worker, Maria. From the start, the women ‘did not click well’, which Francisca understood as a ‘cultural issue’. She explained,

What we looked for was someone who would be part of the family, and maybe a Filipina nana is not interested in that, it’s just her job . . . We would say to her, ‘Are you ok? Are you happy? Do you need anything? For us, it’s so important that you are well . . . ’ If this person is not doing ok, she will not care for my children and she will not be happy in the house. So it was complicated, in terms of the emotional aspect, and the connection, to reach her.

Francisca described Maria as someone who was never able to trust the family. Yet, later in the interview, she also described having cameras around the house, which she did not attribute as a factor contributing to Maria’s distrust. What is representative in Francisca’s experience was that although she described Maria as excellent in terms of the tangible tasks she did, the relationship was not ideal because there was no ‘emotional connection’. Maria ‘maintained her boundaries that this is a job’. Francisca said,

I am super respectful of working hours, that these people rest . . . But for me it is super important to establish a bond (generar un lazo) . . . Maybe it is crazy what I want because in reality of course, it is a job, but since they are in my house and we are all together, it is super important that we all get along, that we respect each other’s space, that we can share . . . (But) with Maria, when it was time (to finish work), she shut herself (in her room) and never came out . . . . I would have loved to have a conversation, the kind you would have with your mother, your children, and husband . . . to have these conversations too with this person that is in your home, tell her things that are happening to you, and that she tells you these things too, and in some manner hold space for each other, like family can do. This is what I want to offer (to a nana) and what I need.

While her emotional needs are partially linked to expectations for the worker’s caring relation with her children, Francisca’s emphasis on the personal relationship between the women was representative of the other employers interviewed. Francisca likened her current search for a new domestic worker to dating: ‘I hope we find one another, because it is a mutual encounter (encuentro mutuo). It is like dating . . . I need someone to hold space for me, not only will I hold space’. Similarly, the employer Marina also spoke of looking for a ‘feeling’ in her search for an ideal domestic worker, someone with ‘positive affect’ who could be ‘part of the family’.

This emphasis on an ideal worker who would be part of the family refers not only to the desire for a worker who can be available for longer hours to fit the hectic schedule of a household of two working parents, but also the desire for a worker who could be emotionally available to establish and mediate affective relations in the house. Remarkably, Francisca, like the other employers interviewed, required the domestic worker to ‘hold space’ and fulfill an emotional role in the household that is akin to the emotional role of a ‘mother’, romantic partner, or a close female friend, without acknowledging that unlike their own mothers or husbands, the worker is performing these roles in addition to the quantitative, practical, and material tasks of their job. Implicit in such desires is a ‘color blind’ perspective, where such horizontal relations between the women as women are perceived as possible and desirable because the structural and racialized inequality of the labor relation is rendered irrelevant.

Thus, in contrast to other studies (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Ramos-Zayas, 2020), in our study, women employers are not only willing to invest a substantial amount of time, energy, and finances into building a caring and emotional relationship with their domestic workers. They also expect this affective labor to be reciprocated actively by the worker. These desires are articulated alongside desires for horizontal relations: in two cases where employers had positive relations with their Filipina workers, they emphasized repeatedly that their relationship was ‘not at all hierarchical’. Furthermore, employers interviewed all described that their ideal household situation would include eating together with the domestic worker as a sign that the worker is integrated and ‘part of the family’. The act of eating together with the worker is highly symbolic in the Chilean context; where typically domestic workers would not be expected or asked to sit at the dining table with employers in order to maintain the social hierarchy and boundaries between employer–employee.

Patricia’s account of her shifting relationship with her Filipina domestic worker is revealing of the significance and value placed by Chilean women employers on the personal relationship with domestic workers who live with them. Throughout the interview, Patricia reflected that her desires and implicit expectations of a live-in ‘nana’ was shaped by her experiences being raised, as a child, by a traditional figure of a nana. She said,

I wanted someone who would not be like the maid . . . but someone integrated, as part of the family, a companion (acompañante) . . . I was told that the Filipinas are girls who would never complain, who would stay with you, who are loving, love children, really great and dedicated.

Patricia hired a Filipina nana, Rose, just before the birth of her first child. She suffered from extreme postpartum depression, and did not want anyone else, including Rose, to touch her newborn. Patricia and her husband separated after a year, and she also suffered a miscarriage. Although her depression caused her to feel ‘hate’ toward Rose for ‘being invasive’ and cooking ‘weird food’, their relationship changed after her miscarriage:

My world fell apart, and Rose, for the first time, was more concerned for me than for my daughter. She made me soups, a soup that her grandmother made for her mother . . . She started to pamper me, console me in the nights . . . Suddenly, a Rose appeared who was . . . holding space. (She was) totally, much more concerned about me. We could finally connect as women, not as the carer and the boss, but as women . . . . I could cry and she would understand. She was fully supportive (full apañadora) to me, truly as if she were a mother, because my mother was not present, so Rose was like a mother, or an older sister . . . She started caring for me. She gave me massages, to the heart, to the back . . . to cope with the pain. . . . From there I would say that I started to feel that she was concerned about me . . . .

Patricia’s experiences resonate powerfully with the desire Francisca expressed for someone who could be like a mother to her children and to her. For Patricia, this ‘connection’ and care that she received from Rose transformed their relationship from ‘the carer and the boss’. The support and care that Rose provided, thus, was not viewed by Patricia in terms of work or labor, but something affective, emotional, and unquantifiable in terms of the labor contract, as opposed to other kinds of care work that more typically fall under this category such as childcare. The kind of emotional support that Rose gave to Patricia, however, was not perceived in the same sense, and was viewed as indicative of something mutual and necessarily horizontal.

Importantly, employers’ desires for horizontal relations are also evident in their criticisms of the exploitation of domestic workers in ‘other times’, where there were fewer regulations over their working conditions. Paradoxically, all women also emphasized that the strict 9–6 working day demanded by many domestic workers, among other working conditions, were incompatible with the needs of full-time working employers. In these discussions, employers expressed nostalgia for the bygone times where nanas were ‘part of the family’ and being a nana was not ‘just a job’. In this context, we argue that employers’ emphasis on establishing a mutually affective and caring relationship with domestic workers signals attempts to resolve the tensions between desires for more horizontal and ‘modern’ relationships with their workers and their practical need and nostalgic desires for someone who can be at their total disposition. Analyzing employers’ desires for affective relations and ‘partnership’ with domestic workers reveals the entanglement of their practical and emotional needs. Due to their awareness of the potentially exploitative nature of live-in domestic work, we suggest that employers interviewed turn to emphasizing affective relations with domestic workers partly to resolve the guilt and contradictions in identifying as socially progressive and yet participating in a highly commodified labor relation.

The fact that Filipina workers are, in fact, not ‘equal’ in the household, is sidestepped in employers’ reflections. In these narratives, descriptions of sentiments and an affective relationship – like ‘partners’, sisters, family, or friends – enable employers to frame the relationship as a ‘horizontal’ one that sits uncomfortably with descriptions of more material and tangible aspects of their workers’ labor and clear racialized differences. We suggest that employers’ focus on the affective aspects of the domestic labor relationship enables them to willfully ignore the highly unequal gender and racialized power relations in the household through normalizing the racialized presence of the worker in the household. While affective and caring relationships between employers and employees can be mutually nutritive, in all cases but one, the limits to reciprocity were clear. Some employers observed – with confusion, frustration, and disappointment – that workers preferred to maintain clear boundaries between their personal time and space, and working hours and spaces. In cases where employers described a situation of blurred boundaries where they considered the domestic worker as ‘part of the family’, the apparent mutuality of the ‘emotional connection’ was challenged when they expressed little knowledge about employees’ families or personal lives. Employees clearly withheld information about their activities on weekends, where employers assumed they spent their time with other Filipina women, and only months or even years later, realized they were in serious romantic relationships.

Nevertheless, employers’ desires for affective relations create dissonance and ambivalence for Filipina domestic workers who may, on one hand, wish to maintain professional boundaries, but on the other hand, also desire to connect with women employers with whom they live with and whose children they care for. When women employers invest time and energy in establishing close relations with workers, workers are placed in a complex position. While they value employers’ trust and recognition of their personhood and contributions to the household (compared to employers who may be cold and indifferent), they also wish to know that their employers will compensate them adequately and accordingly. Yet, when receiving offers to work for employers who offer to pay more, workers may also hesitate because they are not sure exactly what kind of treatment or relationship they will have with the future employer that will surely affect their quality of life as live-in domestic workers. Unlike other contexts studied (e.g. Singapore; Parreñas et al., 2021), Filipina workers in Santiago do have a higher level of negotiating power: they can leave their workplaces for employers who offer higher wages; they can obtain permanent residency, and eventually learn Spanish to move on to work in other sectors, or start small businesses. The negotiating power and agency that Filipina workers have – despite their relatively unequal position of power vis-à-vis their Chilean employers – articulate a situation where relations power and care are dynamic and negotiated rather than simply imposed by one onto another.

Despite employers’ contradictory discourses, we do not wish to dismiss their narratives and desires for a deeply emotional and affective relationship with domestic workers. While other studies have characterized such sentimental expressions as emotional manipulation to extract labor, maintain symbolic capital (Parreñas et al., 2021), or exert moral superiority (Rollins, 1985), we highlight instead how the fundamentally affective aspect of domestic workers’ labor in the household creates underlying tensions between employer–employee relations over time due to the unspoken understanding that today, domestic workers no longer project working their entire lives for one family. While live-in domestic work consumes a lot of their time and energy, they do plan for futures and lives outside of the employers’ household. The fact that workers may be attached to employers’ families and yet logically must leave the household someday is a central concern for many employers who are either functionally dependent on or have formed affective ties to their workers. In the next section, we describe and discuss employers’ extreme dependence on domestic workers and the fear of abandonment that this dependence provokes. In these discussions, money emerges as another trope that allows employers to resolve the uncomfortable tension between an affective relationship with workers and the contractual nature of the relationship.

‘In the end it’s just a labor relation’: the discomfort of paying for affective labor

When Chilean women employers explicitly discussed the economic aspect of their relationship with Filipina domestic workers, many except one tended to evoke the ‘hostile worlds’ view. This refers to the common perception that there should be separate areas of life for economic activities and intimate relations (Zelizer, 2005), where the confusion or combination of both ‘worlds’ will cause disorder and ‘contamination’. Such views were expressed by employers when their Filipina workers began to negotiate for a higher pay.

In Patricia’s case, during pay negotiations, her employee, Rose, eventually left. What most upset Patricia was that Rose quit over WhatsApp, and then secretly came to take her personal items. Patricia was disappointed and disillusioned:

I mean that Rose came to work for money in this country, she did not come for something else, and if the money was not up to her standards, obviously she was going to leave . . . And that was what happened . . . How intense, finally . . . after so many years, so much affection that supposedly (we had), and so much devotion, love, complicity, sad moments together, you know, and still finally after all, everything ends . . . In the end it’s just a labor relation. The concept of a companion doesn’t exist anymore.

Patricia thus struggled to reconcile Rose’s demands for more pay with the ‘devotion, love, (and) complicity’ that they shared. The conflict began when, through conversations with Peruvian domestic workers, Rose realized she was paid ‘too little’. Patricia told Rose that she ‘could not afford’ to pay her more, and that Rose was free to look for another employer. Rose’s eventual departure was not unexpected, therefore, it was how she quit – by WhatsApp – that was hurtful to Patricia. From workers’ perspectives, employers’ reluctance to raise their pay, or their failure to pay mandatory workers’ pensions and taxes, were signs that employers did not care for them as people and saw them as ‘only’ workers.

While Patricia’s relationship with Rose ended badly, at the time of the interview, Ignacia was amid salary negotiations with her employee, Emma. Although Ignacia feared losing Emma, she resented that Emma implied she would leave the family for another that could pay her more. Ignacia’s difficulty in reconciling the affective and intangible nature of Emma’s work with commensurate pay is evident in the interview:

Emma is fundamental in my life. I trust her 1000%, and I see myself with her for a long time . . . The only thing that bothers me is that . . . she is motivated by dollars. If someone offered her 10,000 (USD 15) pesos more, clearly she will leave, you know? This creates some conflict for me, because obviously money is important, but . . . more than just work, one also creates bonds and relations that are so much more than dollars . . . The truth is I need her with me and when this functions it is perfect . . . If her attitude was different, maybe I would be more inclined to increase her salary and put more effort if I see that she is prioritizing our bond, the sentimental, the being together, the treatment, before the money. But if tomorrow she says I’m leaving for more pay, I won’t even ask her to stay.

For Ignacia, valuing the affective relation with one’s employer and asking for more pay is viewed as incompatible attitudes.

In contrast, the employer Fernanda’s affective bond with her Filipina domestic worker, Maribel, demonstrates an alternative way that employers can understand paid affective labor. Fernanda is a single mother who runs her own successful business. She receives limited help from her ex-husband and extended family network, which might explain her intense involvement in Maribel’s personal life and family plans. She describes their relationship as ideal, where there is mutual ‘feeling’ and ‘synchronicity’. Since Maribel openly discusses her plans to get married in the Philippines, Fernanda feared that she might leave their family:

It would shock me if she left. We always had this fear (that she will leave). I believe that (the fear) will always be there but I try to compensate. There is a distinct treatment.

Unlike other employers, Fernanda demonstrates a high level of involvement in Maribel’s life and family. She describes at length the relationship between Maribel and her mother in the Philippines, and Fernanda herself also chats with Maribel’s family on weekly video calls. If Maribel were to have a baby, Fernanda said she would be ‘happy’ to include the child in their household. Her dependence on and affection for Maribel as a whole person – not just someone who can be physically and emotionally available for the family – is evident. For example, Fernanda offered to help Maribel’s fiance migrate to Chile. Fernanda is aware that Maribel has life plans that are separate from her own. While other employers see such separate plans as sources of conflict, Fernanda attempts to accommodate Maribel’s plans into her family’s situation.

Fernanda’s relationship with Maribel, like any other labor relationship, is not free of unequal power dynamics. Comparing Maribel to previous non-Filipina domestic workers, Fernanda values the fact that Maribel ‘never asks’ for things. She values how Maribel is ‘very observant, she follows me, whatever I do not explain she pays attention and tries to do it in a similar way’. Nevertheless, unlike other employers discussed earlier, Fernanda feels relatively confident that she and Maribel have a mutual understanding and equal valuation of their relationship. Fernanda attempts to show Maribel through concrete actions her care for the latter. Maribel has private health insurance rather than the public health insurance that most domestic workers have. She is confident that Maribel knows and appreciates how attentive Fernanda is to her medical and emotional well-being. This emphasis on Maribel’s emotional and material well-being, as opposed to other employers’ focus on domestic workers’ provision of emotional connection or capacity to hold space, evidence the more reciprocal affective relationship between them. In this case, therefore, care and power clearly co-exist – where Fernanda’s care practices for her careworker are not necessarily ways to exert control or power over Maribel. Her ‘distinct treatment’ of Maribel enables her to negotiate power between them, in her knowledge that Maribel can and might choose to leave the household despite Fernanda’s best efforts.

Moreover, Fernanda appears to value and recognize both the ‘care’ and the ‘work’ that Maribel provides. She does not reduce Maribel’s affective labor to something beyond the labor relation; she acknowledges and communicates with Maribel about her independent career and family plans. Their relationship is arguably one that approximates a partnership. Sociologist Catherine MacDonald (2011), in her own research on employers and nannies in the United States defines such partnership as containing trust, autonomy, two-way communication, and mutual decision-making (p. 168). Such a relationship, in practice, goes beyond the dichotomy of the domestic worker as ‘just a worker’ or ‘part of the family’. Instead, both women, in acknowledging the interconnectedness and interdependence of their lives and their families, participate in expanding and deepening their care networks. While Maribel clearly actively sustains many aspects of Fernanda’s personal and professional life, Fernanda also actively supports Maribel in various ways, such as evaluating options for Maribel to reunite with her fiance, and reconcile possible challenges as a future working mother. This situation contrasts starkly with other employers’ definitions of the care relationship and partnership, where they emphasize how workers could be part of their families and lives, and very seldom the other way around. Nevertheless, these complex negotiations of power (and salaries) between Chilean employers and Filipina workers show that such care relations involving affective labor are clearly neither reducible to power nor free from it.

Discussion and conclusion: whose ‘Compañerismo’?

By examining Chilean women employers’ desires for ‘compañerismo’ or partnership with Filipina domestic workers, we proposed that the domestic employer–employee relationship is fundamentally and primarily a racialized affective and highly commodified relationship. This affective relationship, moreover, is established within a specific socio-historical context. Thus, during intimate moments where Chilean women employers experience ‘contención’ and Filipina women are brewing nourishing soups, a perspective of domestic work as racialized affective labor (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2010) reminds us that both women experience this affective relationship in embodied ways linked to socio-cultural and political histories and legacies. These are not simply moments of connection between two women. Due to the profound colonial and cultural legacies of servitude in Chile as well as in Filipina workers’ past labor experiences elsewhere, we argue that the horizontality and partnership that employers claim to desire is impossible and undesirable, due to the ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) that such relations enable. The cruelty of this relationship lies in how aspects of horizontality are practiced and performed in domestic labor relationships without fully recognizing the simultaneous coexistence of practices and attitudes associated with cultures of servitude. In other words, employers’ desires for and attempts at creating horizontality in a highly commodified relationship are cruel, because these attempts do not and cannot change the structurally oppressive nature of the labor relationship.

Scholars have characterized some domestic worker–employer relationships as enabling forms of ‘cruel optimism’ in relation to discourses and promises that the worker can be ‘part of the family’ (Ramos-Zayas, 2020). Lauren Berlant (2011) defines cruel optimism as ‘attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic’ (p. 24). Chilean women employers’ desires for horizontal relationships and ‘partnerships’ with Filipina domestic workers, as discussed in this article, approximate cruel optimism in employers’ emphasis and desire for a relationship that is usually revealed, through talk about money, as ‘fantasy’ or ‘too much’ to ask for. Regardless of the individual desires of employers and employees, the structural and racial inequality of the labor relation – which is also an affective one – is impossible to transcend or surpass.

While Berlant (2011: 189) and other scholars inspired by her work mainly discuss the cruel nature of the ‘subaltern feeling’ of subordinated workers, we argue that this unequal labor relationship is cruel for both parties involved. Indeed, promises of intimacy and familiarity in the domestic employer–employee relationship are cruel for the workers: an emphasis on the affective relation enables employers to selectively and willfully ignore the labor and economic aspect of the personal relationship between the women. Despite promises of care and concern from employers, workers’ attempts to negotiate higher pay or better working conditions may result in their dismissal. Yet, employers can also never fully experience the ‘contención’ they expect from Filipina workers, as promised by the agencies. Despite disappointments, they keep searching for a ‘connection’ in this ‘dating’ process, unable to fully accept a ‘professional’ working relationship or one that is merely ‘functional’. Explicit talk about money in the labor relationship engenders anger, disappointment, and frustration that arises due to some level of care and affection for the other. Here, power dynamics are expressed through discourses of (or desires for) care, which reveal ‘an effect of the relation between capitalism’s refusal of futurity in an overwhelmingly productive present and the normative promise of intimacy’ (Berlant, 2011: 189). This combination resonates with the employers of our study, where employers imagine that a mutual relationship of care and emotional support with their domestic workers is the ‘best’ way to resolve the emotional and structural contradictions of commodified care in the household, even when the limits to such a relationship are exposed.

Rather than examining domestic employer–employee relationships in terms of ‘instrumental personalism’ (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Parreñas et al., 2021), we suggest that some employers’ discourses of ‘family’ and ‘partnership’ are better understood instead in terms of willful ignorance. Inspired by Ann Stoler’s (2016) discussion of colonial aphasia, we propose that employers’ contradictory discourses and practices of seeking and providing emotional support for domestic workers are part of their ongoing efforts to rationalize and normalize the latent gendered and racialized inequalities in and beyond their household. While it is tempting to interpret Chilean employers’ practices and desires for emotional connection with domestic workers in terms of emotional manipulation or further oppression, in the cases under study, workers clearly appreciate some of these ‘horizontalizing’ practices of this ‘new’ generation of employers, such as the fact they have more autonomy in organizing their work schedules, are not always micromanaged, have access to the same kinds of foods that employers consume (as opposed to being given specific foods that only the worker is permitted to consume), among other examples. Our point is that these practices do little to change or address the broader structural inequality of the commodified labor relation, but instead may work to normalize or sidestep such inequality. As Stoler (2016) puts it, ‘this capacity to know and not know simultaneously renders the space between ignorance and ignoring not an etymological exercise but a concerted political and personal one’ (pp. 12–13). In other words, the emphasis on affect and ‘partnership’ is simultaneously an effort to ‘look away’ from material aspects of the domestic employer–employee relationship.

In presenting and discussing our preliminary findings and ongoing research with Chilean women employers and Filipina domestic workers, we call for scholars to seriously interrogate employers’ desires (and scholars’ own desires) for horizontality in the labor relationship (see Parreñas, 2022). We propose that in contexts of socially progressive households and societies, employers’ desires and attempts to establish ‘companionship’ with domestic workers illuminate the messy, challenging, and aspirational attempts to navigate new social and labor arrangements where forms of power and care are interwoven in increasingly complex webs of socio-economic interdependence. Attention to ‘companionship’ calls for more critical perspectives on contemporary forms of power dynamics that both reproduce and question socio-historical hierarchies. Critical analysis of ‘compañerismo’ discourses problematizes views of care work as simply reproducing exploitative gendered relations; it calls for more critical attention to the complex dynamics of care and power.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Research conducted for this article was sponsored by the Chilean National Agency for Research and Development (ANID), Fondecyt projects N° 11200270 and N° 3210057. The authors would like to thank the women interviewed for their time and trust, and thank Tamara Bulicic, Natalie Gomez, and Isabel Morales for their research assistance. They also thank Carolina Ramirez and Sofia Ugarte for their comments on the paper. This paper was presented at the Department of Sociology Colloquium at the University of Southern California, and RITHAL conference (Research network about household work in Latin America). Comments and suggestions by participants at these talks as well as from anonymous reviewers of this article contributed to refining our arguments.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research conducted for this article was sponsored by the Chilean National Agency for Research and Development (ANID), Fondecyt projects N° 11200270 and N° 3210057.

ORCID iD

Carol Chan

Notes

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