Mothercoin
The Stories of Immigrant Nannies
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
A historical and cultural exploration of the devastating consequences of undervaluing those who conduct the “women’s work” of childcare and housekeeping
In taking up the mothercoin—the work of mothering, divorced from family and exchanged in a global market—immigrant nannies embody a grave contradiction: while “women’s work” of childcare and housekeeping is relegated to the private sphere and remains largely invisible to the public world, the love and labor required to mother are fundamental to the functioning of that world. Listening to the stories of these workers reveals the devastating consequences of undervaluing this work.
As cleaners and caregivers are exported from poor regions into rich ones, they leave behind a material and emotional absence that is keenly felt by their families. On the other side of these borders, children of wealthier regions are bathed and diapered and cared for in clean homes with folded laundry and sopa de arroz simmering on the stove, while their parents work ever longer hours, and often struggle themselves with these daily separations.
In the US, many of these women’s voices are silenced by language or fear or the habit of powerlessness. But even in the shadows, immigrant nannies live full and complicated lives moved by desire and loss and anger and passion. Mothercoin sets out to tell these stories, recounting the experience of Mexican and Central American women living and working in the private homes of Houston, Texas, while also telling a larger story about global immigration, working motherhood, and the private experience of the public world we have all created.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rice University lecturer Muñoz debuts with a powerful study of the relationships between immigrant nannies and their employers, their own families, and the children they care for. The book's primary subjects are Sara, a young mother who followed her own mother to Houston from El Salvador; Rosa, a Mexican grandmother managing family on both sides of the border; and Pati, a young woman from El Salvador who knows how it feels to be a "left-behind child." Muñoz analyzes these women's experiences through the concept of the "mothercoin," a complex and harmful moral contradiction in which love becomes transactional, whether in the expectation that nannies genuinely care for the children under their charge, or the substitution of money for love when parents leave their children for work in the U.S. Interviews with well-intentioned employers in the U.S. reveal how the lack of value placed on the work of mothering binds American career women as well as their nannies; Muñoz fiercely critiques contemporary feminism for being under-engaged with this issue. Balancing big ideas about the worth of motherhood and the outsourcing of gendered work in the global marketplace with intimate profiles of individual women, Muñoz offers valuable insights on a thorny social issue. Feminists and immigrant rights activists will savor this thought-provoking cultural analysis.
