Experiences of Brazilian Immigrants in the United States

Transnational Perspectives on Women’s Domestic Work: Experiences of Brazilian Immigrants in the United States DeAnne K. Hilfinger Messias, PhD, RN

SUMMARY. This article focuses on immigrant women’s transnational experiences and perceptions of paid and unpaid domestic work. The dominance of work was an evident theme throughout the interviews with 26 Brazilian women who had been employed in domestic or food service work in the United States. Various intersections of gender, class, culture, and migration were evident in the women’s changing definitions of work, measures of the quantity and quality of their paid and unpaid domestic work, and perceptions of their own fluid identities as Brazilian women, domestic workers, and immigrants. Through their daily lives and work experiences these immigrant women made concerted efforts to forge, maintain, or recreate contacts and connections with values and perspectives from both Brazilian and U.S. society. In the process they created dynamic transnational understandings and perspectives on women’s domestic work. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678. E-mail address: Website:  2001 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.] DeAnne K. Hilfinger Messias is Associate Professor, Family and Community Health Nursing and Women’s Studies, University of South Carolina, College of Nursing, Columbia, SC 29208. Research funded in part by the National Institute of Health, Institutional Grant #NR07055, T32 and the University of California, San Francisco, School of Nursing Century Fund. [Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “Transnational Perspectives on Women’s Domestic Work: Experiences of Brazilian Immigrants in the United States.” Messias, DeAnne K. Hilfinger. Co-published simultaneously in Women & Health (The Haworth Medical Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 33, No. 1/2, 2001, pp. 1-20; and: Women’s Work, Health and Quality of Life (ed: Afaf Ibrahim Meleis) The Haworth Medical Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc., 2001, pp. 1-20. Single or multiple copies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-342-9678, 9:00 a.m. 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: [email protected]].

 2001 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.

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WOMEN’S WORK, HEALTH AND QUALITY OF LIFE

KEYWORDS. Immigrant women, domestic work, occupational health, transnationalism, narrative analysis

Historically, immigrant women from around the world have been employed as domestic workers in the United States. The delegation of domestic cleaning, laundry, childcare, and eldercare to immigrant women is increasingly common in U.S. homes, a result of local and global trends such as women’s formal employment outside the home and international migration. The current demand for the services of paid domestic workers has been stimulated by income and occupational polarization, growth in management and the professions, and the mass entrance of women into the formal sector (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994). As is the case with other new immigrants, who often have limited language skills and may lack legal immigration papers, domestic work has been a common source of employment for Brazilian women in the United States. Within the past 15 years, significant numbers of Brazilians have left their homeland, migrating to the United States, Japan, and Australia. To a large extent, this exodus has been tied to the instability of the Brazilian economy and to policies that have resulted in chronic hyperinflation, low wages, underemployment, and relatively high costs of living. Many of those who left for economic reasons, including a large number of middle class, educated Brazilians, have found themselves working in low-status jobs (Margolis, 1994). In a large-scale survey of Brazilians living in New York City, Margolis found 56% of the women interviewed were employed in domestic service, either cleaning houses or taking care of children. Prior to migration these women had been social workers, lawyers, engineers, teachers, registered nurses, students, school administrators, clerical workers, clerks, and domestic maids. Margolis suggested that because of their class backgrounds and the low status and regard for household workers in Brazil, domestic service jobs were particularly antithetical to their lives and experiences prior to migration. “Newly arrived Brazilian immigrants enter the U.S. labor market and are quickly shorn of their former status. This disjunction between social roots and current employment provides a crash course in downward mobility. Nowhere is this truer than in domestic service” (p. 129). This article focuses on the transnational experiences and perspectives of women’s domestic work and employment, as evidenced in the narratives of Brazilian women living in the United States.

DeAnne K. Hilfinger Messias

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RESEARCH METHODOLOGY An underlying assumption of the research is that women experience the world through the socially constructed phenomenon of gender. The processes of feminist narrative inquiry and interpretation are based on the premise that the relationships between knower and what is to be known are subjective and interactive (Bell, 1988; Devault, 1990; Gorelick, 1991; Personal Narratives Group, 1989; Riessman, 1993). The resulting knowledge does not stand alone; it is a co-creation of the multiple voices of those who participate in research, narrators and interpreters alike. This paper derived from a broader study of the transnational migration, work, and health experiences of Brazilian women living in the United States (Messias, 1997). I recruited participants for the study through informal networking and snowball referrals within urban Brazilian immigrant communities on the east and west coasts. Women who had engaged in domestic or low-wage service employment as part of their migration experience were included in the sample. Purposefully excluded were exchange students, visiting scholars, diplomats or employees of the Brazilian government, and women on guest worker visas. I personally conducted the in-depth interviews in Portuguese with 26 Brazilian women. The interviews, which lasted from one to three hours, were held at times and locations chosen by the participants. Twenty women were interviewed individually; four women were interviewed more than once. To accommodate participant preference and convenience, I conducted two collective interviews, each involving three women who knew each other. Fluency in the Portuguese language and Brazilian culture and my personal migration and domestic employment experiences were instrumental in creating a sense of rapport and mutual communication in which the stories could literally flow. The interpretive processes involved listening, reflecting, transcribing, coding, searching for, and identifying story threads. The reconstructed narrative representations were then interpreted and translated. The participants have been represented by pseudonyms and the direct quotations from the interview data, translated from Portuguese, have been italicized. THE WOMEN AND THEIR IMMIGRATION AND EMPLOYMENT The immigrant women who shared their stories as part of this research were a diverse group of Brazilians, ranging in age from 22 to 60

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years. The sample included 18 women who identified themselves as partnered or married, 5 unmarried single women, and 3 who were separated or divorced. The majority (14) had at least a high school education, 6 had completed college, and 6 had less than an eighth grade education. Age at the time of emigration from Brazil ranged from 17 to 56 years, with 46% having arrived in the United States between the ages of 30 and 39. The length of stay in the United States ranged from 2 months to 17 years, with an average of nearly 6 years. Several women in this study easily fit the profile of economic refugees. Dissatisfaction, anger, frustration, and disbelief in Brazil’s roller-coaster economic policies were identified as salient motivating factors to emigrate. Some considered themselves temporary sojourners who had come to find employment, earn and save U.S. dollars, and then return home with the economic resources to achieve their “American dream” of buying a car or a piece of real estate in Brazil. However, not all the migration stories were about economics. Migration was embedded in personal and family lives and in many cases was more about family ties, marriage, friendship, romance, personal enrichment, or adventure, than money. Regardless of the motives or means for their migration, all of the women in the study experienced some form of work or occupational transition in the process. Prior to migration, only five of the women had employment experience as domestic workers in Brazil. None had previously worked in food service or restaurant jobs. Several had been homemakers or students. Other areas of prior employment included sales, clerical work, teaching, business and educational administration, marketing, cosmetology, graphic arts, and nutrition. Their employment histories in the United States also varied, but at some point all the women had engaged in some form of domestic wage work (e.g., house cleaning, live-in nanny, baby-sitting, home health care) or food service employment. THE DOMINANCE OF WORK IN IMMIGRANT WOMEN’S LIVES The dominance of work was evident throughout these women’s narratives. For some, gainful employment was the purpose for immigrating, an end in itself. For others, employment was a survival strategy or the necessary means to other ends. However, the price of economic migration was at times higher than had been anticipated. The women noted


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that although employment was the key to accumulating dollars, the work itself was often hard and arduous, employment was not necessarily easy to come by, and migration was not necessarily a panacea for economic difficulties. Issues of work overload, stress, and occupational health were woven through many of the narratives. Another concurrent theme was that of personal growth, satisfaction, competence, and expertise derived from work and employment experiences. The dominance of work: Putting life on hold. The lives of some immigrant women were literally consumed by their domestic employment. Clara’s story exemplified the dominance of work in the lives of some economic migrants. A lower working class Brazilian, Clara was no stranger to work. As an adolescent she had been employed as a domestic worker. Prior to migrating she worked as a store clerk and sold produce from her home. Clara and her husband came to the United States explicitly as temporary economic migrants, in an attempt to overcome the economic limitations they faced in Brazil. Work dominated Clara’s life to the point that it seemed to have been put on hold. She considered herself a competent worker, derived satisfaction from her work, and endured the overload by keeping her sight on the future she hoped to build once she returned to Brazil. My husband and I work together. We work all day. We start working on the first house at about 8:30 and don’t eat a meal until we get home at 4:30. It’s really demanding. But it’s worth it. I like cleaning. I’m the type who was domesticated at home, so if someone says for me to clean a house, it doesn’t bother me at all. I like it. I do it with pleasure. I put everything into it. This business of saying “no” if it’s hard work, that’s not the way it is with me. There are some of the houses that are really tiring, but there are others that are really good. It’s hard. It’s certainly not light work. Take my husband, for example. Mondays through Thursdays he works with me in cleaning, then he goes to his other job delivering pizzas from 5 to 11:30 in the evening. On Fridays and Saturdays he works from 5 until 3 in the morning. I work at the pizzeria too, Wednesday through Friday. And we clean houses every other Saturday. Life is difficult here. It’s really hard, because we work practically all day and all night. The work is really tiring, but I think living here is fine. We have plans to go back next year. I came here to get a start on life, a little egg nest. I want to make that life and continue it in Brazil. We came to work. And we’re working, even a little too much! Comparing different workloads. It is important to note that not all the women considered their present workloads excessive or unmanageable. In particular, several of the lower working class women were quick to

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point out that they had worked harder in Brazil. For example, prior to immigrating, Ana Maria had been a pattern maker in a dress shop. I worked all day on my feet, at a table, without stopping. It was very hard work. And there were even days when I had to work overtime and didn’t have time to go to school at night. Class and cultural perspectives were evident as Leonora compared her situation as a live-in nanny with an American family to her prior experience as a full-time maid in Brazil. In making the comparison, Leonora was quick to note how her employment conditions had improved and her workload diminished. My goodness! In Brazil I started at 6:30 in the morning. Every blessed morning I had to go to the bakery to get bread, then make the coffee, wake up the children, get the children up, put their clothes on, and get them ready so that when their mother and father got up, in a rush, they could have breakfast, put the kids in the car, and zoom, off they’d go. Then it was my job to clean up the house and prepare the meals. Finally around 7:30 at night, I’d have to clean up the kitchen after dinner. And I only had one day off every two weeks. It’s better here, in the United States, than in Brazil, because here I work less. Here my workday starts at 8 and by 6:30 in the evening, the lady of the house is already at home. From that point on, I don’t have to do anything. I don’t have any obligations. If I want, I can go out, or do whatever I very well please. I don’t clean up the kitchen after dinner. I help them, but I don’t have any obligation to do it. I don’t work on Thursdays and I have Saturdays and Sundays off. Work overload: Putting health on hold. Another consequence of the domination of work in these immigrant women’s lives was that they tended to put their health on hold, particularly when it came to the issue of seeking professional health care. For example, Raquel had been cleaning houses in the United States for over eight years. She had started her own housecleaning agency in which she employed other Brazilian immigrants and considered herself a “professional.” In her interview, Raquel identified several personal health issues and concerns, including a history of tuberculosis. However, it was evident that she often put work priorities ahead of her own health. I’ve got really bad pains in my back, down low. I don’t know if it’s stress, or kidney, or what. I’ve had them for about three months. They’re really strong. I go to work and in my mind I think, “I have to go to the doctor.” Then I look at my housecleaning schedule, it’s full of things to do, and I never go. Lack of information and concerns about the costs of seeking professional care, in terms of both time and money, factored into women’s decisions to delay seeking health care. No, I haven’t gone to a doctor here.


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When I first arrived I had a very bad cold, so I went the drugstore to try to get some medicine. But since I didn’t understand the inserts, I couldn’t figure out what to buy. I didn’t go to a doctor, even though I should have–because colds here are so much worse than they are in Brazil. Another time I needed to go to a doctor when I had a lot of vaginal itching. It was very strong, really very strong. So I was ready to go [to a doctor] but I just kept putting it off. I don’t know if it is so with Americans or not, but a Brazilian only goes to the doctor when there is no other way out. At least that’s the way it is with me . . . I went to the dentist once. He examined my teeth and gave me an estimate. Just to replace the filling in one tooth it would have cost $800. But I am not going to have it done . . . Because the estimate for the full treatment, restoring the fillings that are old, is like $2,000 . . . We looked into the university student dental clinic but it’s not that much cheaper. The difference in price isn’t that much and it takes more time for the treatment at the university. In our case, if we’d go to the university clinic, all of a sudden we’d lose a whole afternoon–that’s a whole afternoon that we don’t work. So I’m not going to take care of that now, I’m not going to have the dental treatment. If need be, I’ll wait and get my teeth fixed in Brazil. (Mariana) OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH The participants in this study also identified various health issues related to their domestic employment and workloads. The women employed as house cleaners frequently identified concerns of work overload, physical stress and exertion, muscular-skeletal problems, and exposure to toxins and diseases. When I work eight hours a day, that’s a lot. On a very busy day I work seven hours a day . . . But it’s demanding because you are on your feet, bending down and getting up. It really does your back in from bending over a lot. If I have to clean for people who are moving out, that’s a really heavy cleaning, because the person who is moving out leaves the house like a garbage pit . . . And the ovens! Ovens do my back in. I hate cleaning ovens because you have to bend down the whole time in the same position and you have to really make an effort with your arm, so you’re pushing and pulling your arm and straining your back and bending over all at the same time. (Mariana) Some women actively responded to concerns about occupational health risks with specific preventive measures, such as using gloves, avoiding certain products, and dietary precautions. The cleaning products here are very strong, but I always wear gloves. Usually when I’m

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using a strong product, such as ammonia, I open the windows. I never work in a closed room with a strong cleaning product. And usually I leave the heavier work to my boyfriend . . . We always wear gloves, because we don’t know everyone we work for. Especially in the bathrooms, where there is the risk of catching some disease. Bathrooms are very dirty places, but we always wear gloves. (Helena) I know that I have to take care of my nutrition and drink lots of water. I know that in my kind of work I breathe lots of dust and poison. I don’t use ammonia for anything, because I know that ammonia is a real poison. When I go to houses that have ammonia, I flush it down the toilet and tell them that I don’t use ammonia, if they want me to clean their house, it’ll be with what I want to use. (Raquel) Health consequences of work and worry overload. Joana’s story exemplified the negative health effects of migration and work-related stress and overload. A former physical education teacher, Joana had been a live-in nanny for an American family for nine years. Several years after immigrating she was diagnosed with a stress-related ulcer. I’ve had stomach problems, nervousness, and diarrhea . . . My doctor said it was stress. It started when I had this big dental bill to pay, so I took another job and was working overtime. Then the lady went and fired me because another person came back to work for her. Sure it’s enough to make you sick. Of course I got sick. All of a sudden that was $400 gone from my income . . . My employer is a flight attendant. When she had to go to work, I had to work even though I was sick. Sometimes the kids’ grandmother came to help me, but not very often, because she was very busy. I was sick for about six months. It was a really long illness. I had to follow a really strict diet. Although Joana’s gastric problems had improved with medication and dietary precautions, her work and worry overload continued. Her employer was sponsoring her application for permanent residency status. Because the process was still pending, Joana depended on the support, cooperation, and good will of her employer. But economic necessity forced her to take on another daytime childcare job, creating a situation in which she was essentially a “working mother” for children in two different families, neither of them her own. I’m working two jobs now, because my employer can’t pay me the money that I want. So she put the children in daycare, and during the day I work from 8:30 to 5:30 for another family. Then I have to pick up the children at daycare, and take them home and fix supper. At the other house I do the cleaning, wash the baby’s clothes, and make dinner twice a week. When I get home, I have to make supper for “my" two kids, if their mother isn’t home. If she’s at


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home, she makes dinner. Then I send the kids off for their baths, check to see if they’ve done their homework, get their lunches ready for the next day, and put them to bed. At 8:30 they’re in bed. It’s just like being a mother who has an outside job. So now I’m working double. I work at home and at the other house . . . The other woman makes me nervous. I don’t know if I’ll be able to take it much longer or not. I do everything just right. There isn’t any way to do anything any better and the woman still complains . . . The stress comes from my work. I worry a lot. I’m very preoccupied. And if I have an intolerable employer, then I really get stressed out and my stomach aches. I think I’m stressed now, because my stomach hasn’t been at all good these days. Work overload, financial worries, concern regarding her immigration status, and a troubling relationship with an employer all contributed to Joana’s stress level and affected her health. Time constraints further limited her access to activities that might improve her physical and mental health. In Brazil I used to get a lot of exercise. I danced a lot. I did tap dance. I didn’t have to worry. I lived among my own people; I didn’t have bills to pay. Then when you come here and live alone, you have to work alone. There’s nobody to help you out. If you lose your job you lose the roof over your head. I’d like to be more active, do some exercise here, but I don’t have time. I was taking some classes on Saturdays, jazz, tap dance, and swimming, but now I don’t have time because I’m working extra on the weekends. My employer pays me $50 for working weekends and applies it to my phone bills. I call home once every two weeks. I call my aunts, cousins, godchildren, sister, brother. Everyone gets on the phone. But it’s good. It’s something that money doesn’t buy. Joana considered her long distance calls to be well worth the additional cost of working overtime on weekends. Like Joana, many of the women considered their international phone calls to Brazil a critical factor for their personal survival as immigrants. International phone calls (and the internet, for some) provided a means to overcome geographic separation and maintain social contact and connectedness with family and friends, something most of the women valued greatly. EXPERIENCING DIFFERENCE, REDEFINING WORK, AND CREATING NEW IDENTITIES In reflecting on their domestic work and employment experiences in the United States and Brazil, these immigrant women provided various

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examples of their changing perspectives and redefinitions of work, roles, and identities. Satisfaction, necessity, opportunity, survival, vocation, motivation, energy, activity, and cultural values and practices were some of the ways women characterized their work and employment. Tereza, who had a university degree and had worked in a bank in Brazil, found little satisfaction in domestic employment. Work is not what I do now days. Because I think that you have to like your work. What you like, you do well. Then you are fulfilled and satisfied with your work. House cleaning, which is what I do, is not fulfilling. But I have to do it. We have children to support. I would like to have work that corresponded to our financial needs, but at the same time, was satisfying. Unfortunately, the world revolves around money and most of the time satisfaction and fulfillment get left behind. I enjoyed my work [at the bank in Brazil]. I had contact with the public. Unfortunately I had to change fields when I migrated! I’ve thought about changing jobs, but what could I do? I don’t speak perfect English, so it’s difficult. And many employers are asking for green cards. Even for house cleaning, they are asking for the green card and references. It’s difficult to get a job here now. Tereza was dissatisfied with her current occupation, but interestingly, was able to maintain the Brazilian middle-class custom of having paid help in her own home. She employed another Brazilian woman to take care of her house and children while she cleaned other houses! Tereza’s domestic employee was a more recent immigrant who was less educated, did not speak English, and did not have a driver’s license, all factors that limited her opportunities for employment in American homes. Julia, who had a degree in marketing and was working as a waitress at the time of our interview, also talked about how her migration and immigrant employment experiences had changed the way she conceptualized her own work. Usually when I think about work, I don’t only think about earning the bread money, about survival. I also think about my energy, my drives, my motivation, what is it that makes me do it . . . or what makes me not be cleaning some rich lady’s house. Work, for me, is a combination of the two things, of survival and vocation . . . I’ve thought a lot about this, because in Brazil, work for me was intrinsically something that I liked. Here, it’s not necessarily so. Because here it is much more a question of survival. Processing the changes in the contexts and meanings of domestic work did not necessarily diminish over time. Dora had been in the United States for 17 years, was married to an American, and had chil-


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dren born in the United States. She talked at length about her on-going conflicts and struggles related to gendered and cultural values of women’s work. I believe that my definition of work has changed because of what I’ve experienced, and at the same time I feel some conflict with this definition. Because in my head, work is when you earn money. In Brazil, when you work for money and have a career, you can go to work, but your children are at home, with family; you have a maid. You can do both in Brazil. Here I had a lot of conflict because of the fact that I did not have extended family here to help take care of the children. Because I feel that I have to earn money, and I do have to earn money–the financial pressure is there. But at the same time I wanted to work more at home–do more of my work of cooking and maintaining the family, of having dinner together, the way I like family to be. Slowly it was falling apart. Because it’s a lot of work to maintain it all, without help. Meeting the challenge of different environments and customs, without household help. In addition to their domestic employment, most of the women also were engaged in unpaid domestic work in their own homes. For the majority of middle-class women, migration meant having to assume the domestic workload they would have delegated to paid domestic workers in Brazil. Fátima noted how the experience had affected her perspectives on women’s domestic workload. When I came here, where you have to do absolutely everything–clean, cook, wash, iron and put away the clothes, take the kids everywhere, drive to the supermarket–I went nuts. My children weren’t used to it either. They had to learn to work along with me. And I’m still not a very good housewife. I don’t have much of a knack for taking care of the house, since I always had a maid in Brazil who did everything for me. My obligation was to take care of my children, because I didn’t have a nanny. But I had a maid who cooked, washed, and ironed the clothes. When visitors arrived, she’d even bake a cake and serve it, and I didn’t even have to get up from my chair. It was a difficult phase when I first arrived. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to work before, but it had been so long since I’d had to do it. And things were different. Here, you don’t hose the bathrooms down! So housecleaning is different, because you don’t wash down the kitchen walls and floors. When I first came, I thought, how can that be? It’s only with time that you understand it all. The theme of “not having help” echoed throughout various women’s stories. In Patrícia’s case, motherhood added a new perspective on American women’s workload. After her daughter was born, Patrícia continued to work as a part-time child caregiver in the home of an affluent dual-career professional couple. She enjoyed her job and did not

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identify her employment as a source of stress. However, she felt overwhelmed by her own mothering and household workload. The transnational lens through which Patrícia viewed her present situation was a composite of her pre-migration experiences, life in the United States, and idealized conceptualizations of what her life would be like if she were in Brazil. Oh, life here sometimes makes me want to run away and escape. Particularly now at the stage my daughter’s in! I think there is too much work for women here. I didn’t used to think so before, because it was just my husband and me. Life was very calm and tranquil for just the two of us. Now, with my daughter, there is so much responsibility. It’s a lot of pressure. I feel like I don’t have any help. Sometimes this gets to me, and gets between my husband and me, even though he’s very calm and he helps me. Here in the United States, it’s the woman who has to go out and do the shopping, and my time is limited. I think life would be a lot easier in Brazil. I think that if I were there, my life would be more a function of taking care of my daughter, not the house. Taking care of the house is what really wears me down. TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES AND INTERSECTIONS OF DOMESTIC WORK, CLASS, AND CULTURE Globalization, international migration, and telecommunications have all contributed to the current trend in transnationalism. Transmigrants are characterized by the development and maintenance of relationships and perspectives created within fluid social fields that span cultural, geographic, and political borders (Glick Schiller, Basch, & BlancSzanton, 1992). Transnational perspectives are formed in part by activities and social relations that take on meaning within the flow and fabric of daily life, as linkages between different societies and cultures are maintained, renewed, and reconstituted. Personal experience, occupational work history, educational level, Brazilian social class, and immigration status were all factors that figured into the women’s interpretations of their domestic work experiences in the United States. Among the participants, a few had been domestic employees in Brazil. However, engaging in paid or unpaid domestic work was a radical social and cultural experience for others. Migration transformed middle class Brazilian women, accustomed to having maids, into paid house cleaners. Even more surprising was the fact that several of the women’s male partners overturned the Brazilian cultural and gender norms and become paid domestic workers! In the


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narratives produced as part of this research, it was evident that the convergence of migration and domestic work and employment experiences created a more fluid, transnational milieu for gender, class, and cultural perspectives. As the women reflected on their experiences as immigrants and domestic workers, they moved back and forth within this transnational space, situating and viewing their identities and their work from multiple vantage points. An obligation to be part of the family. Leonora, who had been a live-in maid in Brazil, readily welcomed the lighter workload demanded by her American employers. However, she did not feel comfortable with the American family’s more democratic approach to her position within the household. In Brazil, Leonora’s employment was embedded in certain cultural practices that reinforced class distinctions within society and households. A member of the “serving” class, she was accustomed to the lines that separated her from her employers. As Brazilians might say, she “knew her place.” But rather than embrace her American employers’ invitation to be a “part of the family” as a liberation from the constraints of class discrimination, Leonora interpreted the gesture as an intrusion on her privacy. They like to say, “You’re part of the family–do sit down, let’s all sit down and eat together.” I do it to please them, but I’d prefer to sit by myself, like I was accustomed to in Brazil. In Brazil I’d get the meal ready, and they’d be having dinner. While they were eating over there, I’d be cleaning up the kitchen. They’d finish eating, I’d clear the table, and then I’d fix my plate, as I was cleaning up. Then I’d go to my room, sit down, turn on the TV, and eat, in peace and quiet. But here, they want me to sit down with them. They say, “You’re one of the family.” So I sit down, and eat, with the kids screaming in my ear. You know what it is, I spend the whole day with the children, and by the time the evening comes, I’d like to sit down to my meal and have a little peace and quiet. Confronting differences, blurring conventional class and cultural distinctions. Migration created and made allowances for the possibilities of social and cultural phenomena that did not fit into the context of Brazilian life. For example, one collective interview included women from divergent poles of the Brazilian social spectrum. Prior to migration, Antonia had been a single, poor, black, domestic maid. Adélia had been an upper-middle class, white, wife of an industrialist, employed as a public school administrator. Because of their disparate social, economic, and occupational status, they lived in different social spaces. In Brazil their lives would not have intersected, unless it had been in the context of a domestic employer-employee relationship. However, in the

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United States they had become friends as well as members of the same occupational group–immigrant domestic workers. In the United States, where “everything is different,” these two women found themselves in a context and space that allowed for this dialogue to take place. As Adélia was describing and comparing her health and nutrition habits in Brazil and the United States, Antonia repeatedly interjected comments that accentuated the tension between contrasting class perspectives. Although the tone of Antonia’s counterpoint was friendly, she was clear the issues at stake were not to be taken lightly. Adélia: In Brazil every morning I’d have fruit and cereal with milk. Now things have changed. I don’t have the same routine. I note the change. With this life as a babysitter I’m getting more and more lax. In Brazil I’d go swimming, do exercises, run, and go to meetings. There I had the right foods, with maids to prepare them . . . Everyday I had fresh squeezed orange juice, fresh squeezed carrot juice made on the spot. I think that is what my body is missing. How long it’s been since I’ve had carrot juice! Antonia: Because in Brazil you didn’t have to make the carrot juice! Adélia: Right. The maid did it for me. Antonia: Because you can make carrot juice here. You can make as much juice as you want. Adélia: But I start my day by leaving at 7 in the morning to do babysitting and I stay until 7 in the evening. I get home; there’s no carrots, no centrifuge. I have to eat what there is. Antonia: There are plenty of carrots here. Adélia: This is not the good life that I had in Brazil, with maids serving me. A lot has changed for me. I worked at the school and everything, but I had my own time. I had my breakfast the way I like it. Antonia: Because you had cheap labor. Adélia: Right. There you’ve got everything right in front of you; it’s all there, ready. Here you don’t have time to make things, don’t even have time to eat, because you get up and leave the house running. Everything is different. In Brazil, Adélia was the dona de casa [lady of the house] and Antonia the empregada [maid]. Antonia would have been the one to make Adélia’s fresh squeezed juice. But migration had leveled the playing field, at least to the point that both could sit at the same table and talk about their work and health. In the process Antonia could point out to Adélia that she could make her own carrot juice! Although Adélia repeatedly acknowledged that Antonia was “right” about the fundamental class and occupational distinctions characteristic of Brazilian domestic


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labor, she did not address those issues directly. Rather she focused on the different context of her life at the present time. Living in the United States and working as a baby sitter, personal time and domestic work had taken on new meanings for Adélia. Food preparation was no longer a function of another woman’s time and energy, but her own. Doing the work, but not feeling the part. Migration opened women’s eyes to different possibilities, although it did not necessarily result in their abandoning their class perspectives on domestic work and social hierarchy. As she continued to tell her story, Adélia distinguished between being a babysitter in the United States and being an empregada in Brazil. She made the point that as an immigrant in the United States she did maid’s work without “being” a maid. You know what is good about being a babysitter, that I think is different, is that you don’t feel [like a maid]. Take my example. I had three maids in my house, and you see how it feels to be a maid. Even though I think that at my house we treated the maids better than how you hear they are treated elsewhere in Brazil–the discrimination, you know. The maids themselves used to tell me how they were treated in other houses where they worked, the kind of discrimination they suffered. At least for me, I don’t feel that. I don’t feel like a maid. I feel so at ease with the family and so good about being with the children. I do what I want to with them, have birthday parties, make videos, take pictures, take them to the park, and their parents aren’t involved at all. Adélia’s narrative reflected her Brazilian cultural and class perspectives on domestic work, filtered through the lens of her migration experiences. Her description of the sense of ownership and autonomy she experienced in her paid domestic work was an indirect reference to the contrasting power and class differential embedded in Brazilian domestic relationships. Although she considered herself a “good” domestic employer, she clearly would not have expected a similar degree of independence, autonomy, and ownership among her own maids. Adélia now did the work, but she did not assume the identity or oppression of a Brazilian empregada. Up the down staircase. As a middle class Brazilian turned domestic worker, Helena’s story was about the challenge of juggling personal, social, and cultural perspectives and identities. In embracing her role as a domestic worker, she drew on Brazilian gendered and cultural values of homemaking. To confront what others labeled as downward social mobility, she interpreted her migration and employment experiences from personal and transnational perspectives. In Brazil I worked in an office. I went to work in high heels, stockings, and make-up. And yet, in

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terms of money, I didn’t have in Brazil what I have here. But it’s hard to explain, because if you look at it in terms of comparing social status, it’s completely different. Of course, if you look at it in terms of Brazilian social levels, where there is a lot of discrimination, then I have had to go down a lot. But I don’t feel it, because I don’t think you can really make that kind of distinction. Because worthy and dignified work is that which you do honestly. So I think that all work is dignified. It’s not because someone is sub-employed, like they call it in Brazil, that the person is worth less. But there is that discrimination. Often, when people in Brazil find out I’m cleaning houses, they say, “Oh, you’re working as a cleaning lady? You mean you left a job in an office to be a cleaning lady?” So there is that kind of discrimination everywhere. Yes, some people, even family, are rather shocked, because I used to be the head of the personnel department. I worked with a computer, I had a high position, and now I work as a cleaning lady! But here I have a chance to grow more, because I’m trying to learn the language and I’m making progress. I’m going to school. I’m going to start studying English now. Helena viewed domestic work not only in terms of social class. As a “Brazilian woman,” she also embodied gendered and cultural perspectives on domestic work and workers, her own employment as a house cleaner, and her American clients’ approach to domestic work. She associated her values of cleanliness, organization, and good housekeeping skills with her Brazilian cultural heritage. We Brazilian women were brought up differently. The Brazilian, as a little girl, starts helping around the house, so she is brought up with the habit of being and having her focus on the home. I have five sisters and three brothers and I’m of an upbringing of an older generation in Brazil. I was brought up with a focus on the home and I’m accustomed to doing this kind of thing. I like to do cleaning. Helena’s assessment of Americans’ “lower” standards of household cleanliness and orderliness was similar to that voiced by some other participants. Although she readily recognized diversity and individual differences in domestic styles and skills, Helena associated time as one of the determinant values in American women’s lives. You run into people of all kinds in this work. There’s this one person’s house that we clean and it’s like she has measured everything in the house. It is totally organized, like you’ve never seen. Then there is another woman. I said to her the other day, “Where do you want me to put this?” She said, “Good question. I don’t know. Find somewhere.” It’s her house, and she had no idea where to put it! I don’t know if it’s only Brazilian women who really like cleanliness, because you see a lot of people


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around here who appear not to like cleanliness, because they don’t have time. Americans don’t have time for cleanliness. These women’s narratives were filled with comparisons between their life and work before and after migration, host and home country, Americans and Brazilians, and their own and other women’s paid and unpaid domestic work. Being able to draw on various cultural and social roles and identities served as a personal resource in dealing with the occupational and social transitions that were part of their migration experiences. Overturning gender, class, and cultural expectations. Antonia demonstrated an ability to overturn gender, class, cultural expectations and feel at home in America. Her story provided some unusual contrasts. When she was a child, Antonia had been “taken in” (and no doubt “taken advantage of”) by another family. She had only a few years’ of elementary school education and had worked in the domestic realm her entire life. As an immigrant, Antonia continued to take care of children in the homes of other families. However, having left Brazil, she left the social and class context of being a Brazilian domestic worker. I had experience as a maid in Brazil and here. At the house where I work now, it’s really good. But at the other house I stayed at, it was really special. When they’d get home, they’d set the table, and if I went to lie down, they’d call me for dinner. If a friend of mine would come over, they’d put an extra plate at the table for her to eat . . . And on my birthday they gave me a surprise party and invited my friends. I lived with them and they still send me a present on my birthday and at Christmas. They call me, I call them. Compared to Leonora, for example, who also had been a domestic prior to migration, Antonia felt much more comfortable occupying a shared social space with her American employers. Antonia drew on her Brazilian experience as a measure of comparison, but seemed freer to interpret the treatment and recognition her employers afforded her in a more personal way, rather than from role, class, or occupational perspectives. As evident in her dialogue with Adélia (see above), migration had liberated her from some of the stigma and constraints of her Brazilian social class. Unlike other immigrants who felt isolated and lonely in the context of American society or struggled with issues of downward social mobility, Antonia felt “more at home” than she had in Brazil. I really like the United States. I don’t miss Brazil at all . . . I tell you, I’m in other people’s country, other people’s home, and I’m happy! Because there are things I have here that compensate. People say that there isn’t any human warmth here. I can understand what they mean, but that’s

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not what I felt. What I felt is that I had more human warmth here than in Brazil. I was raised by a family in Brazil. You know the custom, many families take in a girl [to work for them] . . . I lived with this family; it wasn’t bad, but it could have been better. And I came here [to the United States] with part of that family, when one of the sons got a scholarship to study here at the university . . . The first six months were really bad. I felt like I was two years old. And I was even with a Brazilian family! But I was really interested and I liked the United States. I went to school [to learn English] . . . After one year I went to work for an American family. I didn’t understand everything, but I got by. At least I understood the basics. I even think that I’m more accepted in the United States . . . I always wanted to be independent. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s rebellion. I was brought up at home, they didn’t send me to school, they didn’t do that. Others have a lot more education than I do, but I’ve never had any problems here. I go out, I’m on my own . . . You know, this is really a shame, but there are days when I think I like the United States better than Brazil. I like the life, the people. For women like Antonia and Leonora, domestic work was the only type of employment they ever had. Other women had engaged in domestic or food service employment in the United States as a temporary step on their occupational or career ladders. For some, domestic work signified a more permanent, long-term career change. These occupational transitions were embedded in social, cultural, economic, and personal transitions, perceived and interpreted differently by individual women. In the final analysis, the essence of many of the women’s narratives was that immigrant domestic work and employment was more about meanings, values, attitudes, identities, and relationships, than about the work or activities themselves. CONCLUSIONS Women’s work occurs within multiple social, cultural, emotional, structural, and environmental contexts. The stories told course of this research illustrated how migration may trigger significant changes in the context, quality, and quantity of women’s work and in the ways individual women experience, perceive, and value domestic work and employment. Migration blurred, distorted, and occasionally erased some of the class distinctions of paid and unpaid domestic work–creating more work for some, less for others. Class and culture often influenced how women valued and measured the quality of their paid and unpaid


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domestic work. Norms and expectations informed by gender, class, and culture were constructed as barriers or hurdles by some, but provided a source of comfort and identity for others. One aim of this study was to make a contribution to the body of feminist scholarship that proposes to expand the definitions and frameworks used to describe and understand women’s work and health (Hilfinger Messias et al., 1997). The theme of women’s work and workloads was woven throughout the research interviews. Common threads of overload, invisibility, and social devaluation of women’s work have been identified across classes, cultures, and societies (Devault, 1991; Meleis, Arruda, Lane, & Bernal, 1994; Miller, Mauksch & Statham, 1988). Despite the multiplicity, complexity, and variation in women’s work lives, domestic work was present and visible, although differently valued, in the lives of all the women who participated in this research. In addition to their domestic work and employment, they performed the less visible work of situating themselves in new and different social and cultural spaces created by transnational migration. In some cases, physical and emotional overload and stress associated with domestic work and employment were identified as factors that diminished their health and quality of life. In other cases, their immigrant employment experiences had resulted in a sense of satisfaction, competence, personal growth, and well being. In their paid and unpaid domestic work and their interpretations of that work, these women made concerted efforts to forge, maintain, or recreate contacts and connections with values and perspectives from both home and host society. In the process, new understandings and dynamic transnational perspectives evolved from their experiences. REFERENCES Bell, S.E. (1988). Becoming a political woman: The reconstruction and interpretation of experience through stories. In A. D. Todd & S. Fisher (Eds.), Gender and discourse: The power of talk (pp. 97-123). Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishers. Colen, S. & Sanjik, R. (1990). At work in homes II: Directions. In R. Sanjik & S. Colen (Eds.), At work in homes: Household workers in world perspective (pp. 176-194). Washington, DC: American Anthropological Association. Devault, M. L. (1990). Talking and listening from women’s standpoint: Feminist strategies for interviewing and analysis. Social Problems, 37(1), 96-116. Devault, M. L. (1991). Feeding the family: The social organization of caring as gendered work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L., & Blanc-Szanton, C. (1992). Towards a definition of transnationalism: Introductory remarks and research questions. In N. Glick Schiller,

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L. Basch, & C. Blanc-Szanton (Eds.), Towards a transnational perspective on migration: Race, class, ethnicity, and nationalism reconsidered (pp. ix-xiv). New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Gorelick, S. (1991). Contradictions of feminist methodology. Gender & Society, 5, 459-477. Hilfinger Messias, D. K., Im, E.O., Page, A., Regev, H., Spiers, J., Yoder, L, & Meleis, A. I. (1997). Defining and redefining work: Implications for women’s health. Gender & Society, 11(3), 296-323. Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. (1994). Regulating the unregulated?: Domestic workers’ social networks. Social Problems, 41(1), 50-64. Margolis, M. S. (1994). Little Brazil: An ethnography of Brazilian immigrants in New York City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Meleis, A. I., Arruda, E. N., Lane, S., & Bernal, P. (1994). Veiled, voluminous and devalued: Narrative stories about low income women from Brazil, Egypt and Colombia. Advances in Nursing Science, 17(2), 1-15. Messias, D. K. H. (1997). Narratives of transnational migration, work, and health: The lived experiences of Brazilian women in the United States. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, San Francisco. Miller, E. M., Mauksch, H. O., & Statham, A. (1988). The qualitative approach to the study of women’s work: Different method/different knowledge. In A. Statham, E. M. Miller, & H. O. Mauksch (Eds.), The worth of women‘s work: A qualitative synthesis (pp. 309-315). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Personal Narratives Group (Ed.). (1989). Interpreting women‘s lives: Feminist theory and personal narratives. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Riessman, C. K. (1993). Narrative analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.