Domestica

By:Brenda Wells

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo embarked on a goal to listen to the stories and trials of immigrant workers in the United States. She specifically focused on the domestic workers who clean and care for a job. Pierrette interviewed countless women from either Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America to understand the difficulties of the job or the life revolving around it. She also was able to interview a few people who hired domestic workers to clean their homes and care for their children. Pierrette touched on a subject and a style of life that few have even thought about. Cleaning homes and babysitting can be easy, depressing, back-breaking, and much more from the stories these immigrant workers tell. And the people who employ them sadly sometimes do not even consider the job that immigrant workers to in regards to cleaning and caring for their children is a full-time job. In this book, the lives of immigrant workers, the job, the feelings, and the actions of the people who hire them are descriptively written about.

Immigrant people go through difficult and strenuous journeys in order to cross the border to the United States. Most of the immigrants who come to America had left their country because they needed to earn money somewhere to care for their families back home. The women that were specifically talked about in the book Domestica, had at times left their children back home. Many had described the process of finding a job in the America difficult and laborious. Most people want to work in an environment that is not back-breaking and hard on ones mindset, yet the only job available for immigrant workers are jobs just like that. Finding a job for an immigrant who is male is a lot more difficult than finding a job for a woman. The need of having an in house nanny and housecleaner is one of the jobs that are often what immigrant women first start in. This job as a nanny/housecleaner is also one of the jobs that most immigrant women resent the most. One of the main components of this job is living in with a family and providing care for their children. Many immigrant women describe this job as the least family friendly and most isolating job. For example one women described her experience in depth about the family she had stayed with when she newly arrived to the United States. She had said that they had put her in room that was on the other end of the house. They never really talked to her and ignored her when she was around. She was a silent figure in the home expected to clean and care for children with a real low wage. The family invited her to eat their food from their home, but never once did they invite her to have dinner with them. At times they would even label the food as to which was allowed to be eaten or not. Caring and cleaning for a home is one of the most isolating jobs for newly arrived immigrants. It hides them away from immigration police yet it takes away the vibrant culture that these women had been part of.

Breaking into the domestic work of a housecleaner is a job that could be easy to do or be complex. House cleaning is a job preferred by most immigrant workers for many reasons. Being a housecleaner, one can have the ability to pick their own hours, decide how many times they are going to work during the week, the job allows working mothers to come home instead of being a full time nanny, and the pay can be a lot better than other work that immigrant workers find. Much of the way these immigrant women obtain houses to clean is through having people recommending their services, through agencies, and or through the good old flyers and newspaper ads. Many employers sometimes exploit the recommendation system for housecleaners. On many cases an immigrant’s services are cheaply sold to their neighbors and friends. Many immigrant women have talked about how some recommenders tell the price they had hired their housecleaner and they pass on the amount to others. This hinders the ability for some immigrant workers to increase their pay or their pay is at an extreme low. This practice is fairly common phenomenon and if the women does not want to accept the low wage, there are hundreds of others who would. Agencies also are a big help to immigrant workers who are looking for jobs in housecleaning. Many though complain that working for these agencies causes them to loose the little wage they have. Sometimes they end up with employers who treat them badly and many immigrant workers request never to work for someone of their own background or Jewish people. It has been known among the immigrant community that these particular employers are a lot harder and judgmental to work for. Using ads and newspapers can also have its own difficulties for immigrant workers. Some resort to this measure because they do not want to go through the difficulties of agencies and also because they do not have that many sources that could recommend their services to others. Immigrant women use this method with extreme caution because they could be called by anyone and sometimes the people who call can be of trouble. Sometimes though, immigrant workers get calls from their ads or flyers for people who want them to do an overload of work. For example; one immigrant women talked about how she answered one of those calls, showed up at the door to the individuals house and was given forty dollars to work. The pay was low but she needed it and upon walking in she noticed how disgusting and filthy the home was. Forty dollars was not enough for such an awful job and she put the money back and left for good.

Work in the United States is at point where its extremely hard to find jobs. Many jobs such as working at McDonalds are not even open to some. Being a nanny/housecleaner or a housecleaner is a job with many trials and troublesome factors. It a job taken up by many immigrant workers in the United States. These jobs are important for the women who do them and employers of these domestic workers should respect that ideology also.