Latinas in Domestic Service

Abstract

There are currently at least 53 million adult domestic workers worldwide, and another estimated 10.5 million child domestic workers. These numbers are steadily increasing, marking paid domestic service as a distinctive growth industry. In the United States, Latinas are becoming more and more predominant in the growing workforce of domestic service workers, a result of a complex tangle of interrelated issues of race, gender, class, migration, patriarchy, and privilege. There are many parts to an analysis of the larger context of commodified domestic service, patriarchal and racially hierarchical constructs of privilege in domestic service, and the growing trend of feminization of migration related to the transnationalization of domestic service work. This bibliography reviews literature in four categories of scholarly work related to Latinas in domestic service, starting with General Overviews that explain the strong link between Latinas and domestic work. The section on Theories of Domestic Service Work and Workers establishes the relationship of race, class, and gender to domestic service and is followed by analyses of the Transnationalization of Domestic Service and the importance of Migration and Immigration Policies, including citizenship status for domestic service workers, within the current context of economic restructuring and globalization. These sections focus on how Latina immigrants are corralled into domestic service work by immigration policies and other limiting factors that make domestic work one of the few viable options for employment in an era of mass deportations and workplace raids. Scholars explain the predominance of Latinas in domestic service as part of a larger context of a “care deficit” cycle in which immigrants come from across the Americas to care for other people’s homes, children, and elders while having to make the difficult decision to leave their own children and elders in the care of other family members in their home country. They come to fill a care deficit in the United States, but create a care deficit in their own family in the process. There is a feminization of migration across Latin America as growing numbers of women leave their home countries to come to the United States to work in domestic service. Contradictions embedded within the transnational domestic service industry have not gone unchallenged. The final section, Empowerment, focuses on initiatives to empower Latina domestic service workers, including attempts to organize, pass protective legislation, and create new information and knowledge about domestic work and domestic workers.