"I'm Here, but I'm There": The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood
Author(s): Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Ernestine Avila
Source: Gender and Society , Oct., 1997, Vol. 11, No. 5 (Oct., 1997), pp. 548-571
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/190339
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"I'M HERE, BUT I'M THERE"
The Meanings of Latina
Transnational Motherhood
PIERRETTE HONDAGNEU-SOTELO
ERNESTINE AVILA
University of Southern California
Latina immigrant women who work as nannies or housekeepers and reside in Los Angeles whil
children remain in their countries of origin constitute one variation in the organizational arrangem
ofmotherhood. The authors call this arrangement "transnational motherhood. "On the basis ofa s
in-depth interviews, and ethnographic materials gathered in Los Angeles, they examine how L
immigrant domestic workers transform the meanings of motherhood to accommodate these spa
temporal separations. The article examines the emergent meanings of motherhood and alter
child-rearing arrangements. It also discusses how the women view motherhood in relation to t
employment, as well as their strategies for selectively developing emotional ties with theiremp
children andfor creating new rhetorics of mothering standards on the basis of what they view i
employers 'homes.
While mothering is generally understood as practice that involves the prese
tion, nurturance, and training of children for adult life (Ruddick 1989), the
many contemporary variants distinguished by race, class, and culture (Collins 1
Dill 1988, 1994; Glenn 1994). Latina immigrant women who work and resid
the United States while their children remain in their countries of origin const
one variation in the organizational arrangements, meanings, and prioritie
motherhood. We call this arrangement "transnational motherhood," and we ex
how the meanings of motherhood are rearranged to accommodate these spati
temporal separations. In the United States, there is a long legacy of Carib
women and African American women from the South, leaving their children
home" to seek work in the North. Since the early 1980s, thousands of Cen
American women, and increasing numbers of Mexican women, have migrate
REPRINT REQUESTS: Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, University of Southern California, Los A
CA 90089-2539. We wish to thank Maxine Baca Zinn, Linda Blum, Michael Messner, Barrie T
Abel Valenzuela, and the anonymous reviewers of G&Sfor helpful comments on earlier versions
paper This research was supported by grantsfrom the Social Science Research Council and the So
California Studies Center at USC, and it was written while the first author was in residence at
Chicano Studies Research Center.
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 11 No. 5, October 1997 548-571
? 1997 Sociologists for Women in Society
548
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Hondagneu-Sotelo, Avila / TRANSNATIONAL MOTHERHOOD 549
the United States in search of jobs, many of them leaving their children behind with
grandmothers, with other female kin, with the children's fathers, and sometimes
with paid caregivers. In some cases, the separations of time and distance are
substantial; 10 years may elapse before women are reunited with their children. In
this article we confine our analysis to Latina transnational mothers currently
employed in Los Angeles in paid domestic work, one of the most gendered and
racialized occupations.' We examine how their meanings of motherhood shift in
relation to the structures of late-20th-century global capitalism.
Motherhood is not biologically predetermined in any fixed way but is historically
and socially constructed. Many factors set the stage for transnational motherhood.
These factors include labor demand for Latina immigrant women in the
United States, particularly in paid domestic work; civil war, national economic
crises, and particular development strategies, along with tenuous and scarce job
opportunities for women and men in Mexico and Central America; and the subsequent
increasing numbers of female-headed households (although many transnational
mothers are married). More interesting to us than the macro determinants of
transnational motherhood, however, is the forging of new arrangements and meanings
of motherhood.
Central American and Mexican women who leave their young children "back
home" and come to the United States in search of employment are in the process
of actively, if not voluntarily, building alternative constructions of motherhood.
Transnational motherhood contradicts both dominant U.S., White, middle-class
models of motherhood, and most Latina ideological notions of motherhood. On the
cusp of the millennium, transnational mothers and their families are blazing new
terrain, spanning national borders, and improvising strategies for mothering. It is a
brave odyssey, but one with deep costs.
Immigration: Gendering Transnational Perspectives
We pursue this project by drawing from, and engaging in, dialogue with
literature on immigration and transnational frameworks; family and motherhood;
and women's work, place, and space. The last decade has witnessed the emergence
of transnational perspectives of migration. Emerging primarily from postcolonial,
postmodern-inspired anthropology, and explicitly challenging the linear, bipolar
model of "old country" and "new world," of "sojourner" and "settler" that is typical
of assimilationist models and other well-established immigration paradigms, transnationalist
proponents argue that the international circulation of people, goods, and
ideas creates new transnational cultures, identities, and community spheres (Basch,
Schiller, and Blanc 1994; Kearney 1995; Rouse 1991). Accordingly, these fluid
entities become semiautonomous spheres in their own right, transcending national
borders. The new emergent cultures and hybrid ways of life resemble neither those
in the place of origin nor the place of destination.
Although we welcome these insights, we raise three objections to the transnational
perspective. First, we object to transnationalism's emphasis on circulation
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550 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 1997
and the indeterminance of settlement. While significant segments of fore
Latinos regularly return to their countries for annual fiestas or to visit
members, most Latino immigrants are here to stay, regardless of their initia
tion intentions. Most Latina/o immigrant workers in California are not wor
industries with seasonal labor demand-agriculture employs only a small f
of Mexicans for example-but in urban-based jobs requiring stability of em
ment.2 A glance at cities, suburbs, and rural areas around California testifies
demographic transformation, as new Latina/o communities have emerged i
borhoods that were previously African American or White. While some
Latina/o residents in these diaspora communities are involved in transn
political organizations and hometown associations, many more are invol
activities and organizations firmly rooted in the United States, with local
parishes or storefront Evangelical churches, Parent-Teacher Association
and schools, or workplace associations. Transnationalism emphasizes the
eral circuits and understates the permanency of Latina/o settlement.
The celebratory nature of the transnational perspective merits caution.
of the writings, it is almost as if "resistance" is suggested merely through m
across borders and by the formation of circuits, which enhance the possib
survival in places full of uncertainty. In these renditions, the power of the
state is often underestimated, and the costs-financial, social, and emoti
the individuals involved in transnational migration may be overlooked.
A final objection to the transnational perspective is the assumption of gen
transnational migrants. In recent years, literature on women and migrat
flourished (Pedraza 1991; Tienda and Booth 1991), but many studies that d
at women in migration-especially those informed by demography-e
gender as a variable rather than as a construct that organizes social life. W
exception of Mahler's (1996) recent work, transnationalism, like the assimi
models that it counters, ignores gender altogether. Examining transnation
erhood, defined not as physical circuits of migration but as the circuits of af
caring, and financial support that transcend national borders, provides an op
nity to gender views of transnationalism and immigration.
Rethinking Motherhood
Feminist scholarship has long challenged monolithic notions of famil
motherhood that relegate women to the domestic arena of private/public
mies and that rely on the ideological conflation of family, woman, reprod
and nurturance (Collier and Yanagisako 1987, 36).3 "Rethinking the
prompts the rethinking of motherhood (Glenn 1994; Thorne and Yalom
allowing us to see that the glorification and exaltation of isolationist, pr
mothering is historically and culturally specific.
The "cult of domesticity" is a cultural variant of motherhood, one made p
by the industrial revolution, by breadwinner husbands who have access to
ers who pay a "family wage," and by particular configurations of globa
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Hondagneu-Sotelo, Avila / TRANSNATIONAL MOTHERHOOD 551
national socioeconomic and racial inequalities. Working-class women of color in
the United States have rarely had access to the economic security that permits a
biological mother to be the only one exclusively involved with mothering during
the children's early years (Collins, 1994; Dill 1988, 1994; Glenn 1994). As Evelyn
Nakano Glenn puts it, "Mothering is not just gendered, but also racialized" (1994, 7)
and differentiated by class. Both historically and in the contemporary period,
women lacking the resources that allow for exclusive, full-time, round-the-clock
mothering rely on various arrangements to care for children. Sharing mothering
responsibilities with female kin and friends as "other mothers" (Collins 1991), by
"kin-scription" (Stack and Burton 1994), or by hiring child care (Uttal 1996) are
widely used alternatives.
Women of color have always worked. Yet, many working women-including
Latina women-hold the cultural prescription of solo mothering in the home as an
ideal. We believe this ideal is disseminated through cultural institutions of industrialization
and urbanization, as well as from preindustrial, rural peasant arrangements
that allow for women to work while tending to their children. It is not only
White, middle-class ideology but also strong Latina/o traditions, cultural practices,
and ideals-Catholicism, and the Virgin Madonna figure-that cast employment
as oppositional to mothering. Cultural symbols that model maternal femininity,
such as the Virgen de Guadalupe, and negative femininity, such as La Llorona and
La Malinche, serve to control Mexican and Chicana women's conduct by prescribing
idealized visions of motherhood.4
Culture, however, does not deterministically dictate what people do.5 Many
Latina women must work for pay, and many Latinas innovate income-earning
strategies that allow them to simultaneously earn money and care for their children.
They sew garments on industrial sewing machines at home (Fernandez-Kelly and
Garcia 1990) and incorporate their children into informal vending to friends and
neighbors, at swap meets, or on the sidewalks (Chinchilla and Hamilton 1996).
They may perform agricultural work alongside their children or engage in seasonal
work (Zavella 1987); or they may clean houses when their children are at school
or alternatively, incorporate their daughters into paid house cleaning (Romero 1992,
1997). Engagement in "invisible employment" allows for urgently needed income
and the maintenance of the ideal of privatized mothering. The middle-class model
of mothering is predicated on mother-child isolation in the home, while women of
color have often worked with their children in close proximity (Collins 1994), as
in some of the examples listed above. In both cases, however, mothers are with their
children. The long distances of time and space that separate transnational mothers
from their children contrast sharply to both mother-child isolation in the home or
mother-child integration in the workplace.
Transnational Mothers' Work, Place, and Space
Feminist geographers have focused on how gendered orientations to space
influence the way we organize our daily work lives. While sociologists have tended
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552 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 1997
to explain occupational segregation as rooted either in family or individu
teristics (human capital theory) or in the workplace (labor market segm
feminist geographers observe that women tend to take jobs close to hom
they can fulfill child rearing and domestic duties (Hanson and Pratt 199
1994). Transnational mothers, on the other hand, congregate in paid domes
an occupation that is relentlessly segregated not only by gender but also
class, and nationality/citizenship. To perform child rearing and domestic d
others, they radically break with deeply gendered spatial and temporal b
of family and work.
Performing domestic work for pay, especially in a live-in job, is ofte
patible with providing primary care for one's own family and home (Gl
Rollins 1985; Romero 1992, 1997).6 Transnational mothering, however,
exclusive to live-in domestic workers nor to single mothers. Many women
with transnational mothering after they move into live-out paid domestic
into other jobs. Women with income-earning husbands may also becom
tional mothers.7 The women we interviewed do not necessarily divert th
ering to the children and homes of their employers but instead reformu
own mothering to accommodate spatial and temporal gulfs.
Like other immigrant workers, most transnational mothers came to th
States with the intention to stay for a finite period of time. But as time p
economic need remains, prolonged stays evolve. Marxist-informed theo
tains that the separation of work life and family life constitutes the sep
labor maintenance costs from the labor reproduction costs (Burawoy 19
1986). According to this framework, Latina transnational mothers work to
themselves in the United States and to support their children-and repr
next generation of workers-in Mexico or Central America. One precurso
arrangements is the mid-20th-century Bracero Program, which in effe
tively mandated Mexican "absentee fathers" who came to work as con
agricultural laborers in the United States. Other precursors, going back f
history, include the 18th- and 19th-centuries' coercive systems of labor
African American slaves and Chinese sojourner laborers were denied th
form residentially intact families (Dill 1988, 1994).
Transnational mothering is different from some of these other arrange
that now women with young children are recruited for U.S. jobs that p
than a "family wage." When men come north and leave their families in
they did during the Bracero Program and as many continue to do today
fulfilling familial obligations defined as breadwinning for the family. Wh
do so, they are embarking not only on an immigration journey but on a mo
gender-transformative odyssey. They are initiating separations of space
from their communities of origin, homes, children, and-sometimes-h
In doing so, they must cope with stigma, guilt, and criticism from others
difference is that these women work primarily not in production of ag
products or manufacturing but in reproductive labor, in paid domestic wo
vending. Performing paid reproductive work for pay-especially caring
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Hondagneu-Sotelo, Avila / TRANSNATIONAL MOTHERHOOD 553
people's children-is not always compatible with taking daily care of one's own
family. All of this raises questions about the meanings and variations of motherhood
in the late 20th century.
DESCRIPTION OF RESEARCH
Materials for this article draw from a larger study of paid domestic
Angeles County and from interviews conducted in adjacent Riverside
materials include in-depth interviews, a survey, and ethnographic f
had not initially anticipated studying women who live and work apar
children but serendipitously stumbled on this theme in the course of o
For this article, we draw primarily on tape-recorded and fully t
interviews with 26 women who work as house cleaners and as live-out or live-in
nanny-housekeepers. Of these 26 women, 8 lived apart from their children to
accommodate their migration and work arrangements, but other respondents also
spoke poignantly about their views and experiences with mothering, and we draw
on these materials as well. We also draw, to a lesser extent, on in-depth, fully
transcribed interviews with domestic agency personnel. All of the interview respondents
were located through informal snowball sampling. The domestic workers
interviewed are all from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala, but they are diverse
in terms of demographic characteristics (such as education, civil status, and children),
immigration (length of time in the United States, access to legal papers), and
other job-related characteristics (English language skills, driver's license, cardiopulmonary
resuscitation [CPR] training).
While the interviews provide close-up information about women's experiences
and views of mothering, a survey administered to 153 paid domestic workers in
Los Angeles provides some indicator of how widespread these transnational
arrangements are among paid domestic workers. Because no one knows the total
universe of paid domestic workers-many of whom lack legal papers and work in
the informal sector where census data are not reliable-we drew a nonrandom
sample in three types of sites located in or near affluent areas spanning from the
west side of Los Angeles to the Hollywood area. We solicited respondents at
evening ESL (English as a second language) classes, at public parks where nannies
and housekeepers congregate with the children they care for in the midmorning
hours, and we went to bus kiosks on Mondays and Tuesdays during the early
morning hours (7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.) when many domestic workers, including
live-in workers, are traveling to their places of employment. While we refrained
from conducting the survey in places where only certain types of domestic workers
might be found (the employment agencies, or organizations of domestic workers),
going to the bus stops, public parks, and ESL classes means that we undersampled
domestic workers with access to private cars, driver's licenses, and good English
skills. In short, we undersampled women who are earning at the higher end of the
occupation.
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554 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 1997
The study also draws on ethnographic field research conducted in publ
buses, private homes, a domestic workers' association, and the waiting r
domestic employment agency. A tape-recorded group discussion with
women-including several who had their children in their countries of o
the employment agency waiting room also informs the study. Nearly al
in-depth interviews, structured survey interviews, and fieldwork were c
in Spanish. The climate of fear produced by California voters' passage
immigrant legislation in November 1994 perhaps dissuaded some potentia
dents from participating in the study, but more important in shaping the i
is the deeply felt pain expressed by the respondents. The interview tr
include tearful segments in which the women recounted the daily indig
their jobs and the raw pain provoked by the forced separation from the
children.
TRANSNATIONAL MOTHERHOOD
AND PAID DOMESTIC WORK
Just how widespread are transnational motherhood arrangements in p
tic work? Of the 153 domestic workers surveyed, 75 percent had childre
to the images of Latina immigrant women as breeders with larg
dominant image used in the campaign to pass California's Propositio
half (47 percent) of these women have only one or two children. More
for our purposes is this finding: Forty percent of the women with child
least one of their children "back home" in their country of origin.
Transnational motherhood arrangements are not exclusive to paid
work, but there are particular features about the way domestic work
that encourage temporal and spatial separations of a mother-employ
children. Historically and in the contemporary period, paid domestic w
had to limit or forfeit primary care of their families and homes to earn
providing primary care to the families and homes of employers, who ar
by race and class (Glenn 1986; Rollins 1985; Romero 1992). Paid dom
is organized in various ways, and there is a clear relationship between
job arrangement women have and the likelihood of experiencing tra
family arrangements with their children. To understand the variations,
sary to explain how the employment is organized. Although there ar
within categories, we find it useful to employ a tripartite taxonomy of p
work arrangements. This includes live-in and live-out nanny-housekee
weekly housecleaning jobs.
Weekly house cleaners clean different houses on different days acc
what Romero (1992) calls modernized "job work" arrangements. The
tual-like employee-employer relations often resemble those between c
vendor, and they allow employees a degree of autonomy and scheduling
Weekly employees are generally paid a flat fee, and they work shorte
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Hondagneu-Sotelo, Avila / TRANSNATIONAL MOTHERHOOD 555
earn considerably higher hourly rates than do live-in or live-out domestic workers.
By contrast, live-in domestic workers work and live in isolation from their own
families and communities, sometimes in arrangements with feudal remnants (Glenn
1986). There are often no hourly parameters to their jobs, and as our survey results
show, most live-in workers in Los Angeles earn below minimum wage. Live-out
domestic workers also usually work as combination nanny-housekeepers, generally
working for one household, but contrary to live-ins, they enter daily and return to
their own home in the evening. Because of this, live-out workers better resemble
industrial wage workers (Glenn 1986).
Live-in jobs are the least compatible with conventional mothering responsibilities.
Only about half (16 out of 30) of live-ins surveyed have children, while 83
percent (53 out of 64) of live-outs and 77 percent (45 out of 59) of house cleaners
do. As Table 1 shows, 82 percent of live-ins with children have at least one of their
children in their country of origin. It is very difficult to work a live-in job when
your children are in the United States. Employers who hire live-in workers do so
because they generally want employees for jobs that may require round-the-clock
service. As one owner of a domestic employment agency put it,
They (employers) want a live-in to have somebody at their beck and call. They want
the hours that are most difficult for them covered, which is like six thirty in the
morning 'till eight when the kids go to school, and four to seven when the kids are
home, and it's homework, bath, and dinner.
According to our survey, live-ins work an average of 64 hours per week. The
best live-in worker, from an employer's perspective, is one without daily family
obligations of her own. The workweek may consist of six very long workdays.
These may span from dawn to midnight and may include overnight responsibilities
with sleepless or sick children, making it virtually impossible for live-in workers
to sustain daily contact with their own families. Although some employers do allow
for their employees' children to live in as well (Romero 1996), this is rare. When
it does occur, it is often fraught with special problems, and we discuss these in a
subsequent section of this article. In fact, minimal family and mothering obligations
are an informal job placement criterion for live-in workers. Many of the agencies
specializing in the placement of live-in nanny-housekeepers will not even refer a
woman who has children in Los Angeles to interviews for live-in jobs. As one
agency owner explained, "As a policy here, we will not knowingly place a nanny
in a live-in job if she has young kids here." Ajob seeker in an employment agency
waiting room acknowledged that she understood this job criterion more broadly,
"You can't have a family, you can't have anyone (if you want a live-in job)."
The subminimum pay and the long hours for live-in workers also make it very
difficult for these workers to have their children in the United States. Some live-in
workers who have children in the same city as their place of employment hire their
own nanny-housekeeper-often a much younger, female relative-to provide daily
care for their children, as did Patricia, one of the interview respondents whom we
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556 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 1997
TABLE 1: Domestic Workers: Wages, Hours Worked and Children's Coun
Residence
Live-ins Live-outs House Cleaners
(n = 30) (n = 64) (n = 59)
Mean hourly wage $3.79 $5.90 $9.40
Mean hours worked per week 64 35 23
Domestic workers with children (n = 16) (n = 53) (n = 45)
All children in the United States (%) 18 58 76
At least one child "back home" 82 42 24
discuss later in this article. Most live-ins, ho
ninety-three percent of the live-ins surveyed
per hour). Many live-in workers cannot af
Angeles, but once their children are in the sam
work to live with their children.
At the other end of the spectrum are the h
earn substantially higher wages than live-in
to $3.79) and who work fewer hours per we
We suspect that many house cleaners in Los
and work more hours per week, because we
women who drive their own cars to work
suggests that house cleaners appear to be the
spatial and temporal separations from their c
Financial resources and job terms enhance h
children to the United States. Weekly house
job but rather an achievement. Breaking in
because an employee needs to locate and sec
this reason, relatively well-established women
United States, who speak some English,
references predominate in weekly housecle
lished in the United States are also more likely
of weekly housecleaning employment-part
worked per week, scheduling flexibility, an
to live with, and care for, their children. So,
house cleaners who are mothers have their c
Compared with live-ins and weekly cleane
at an intermediate level with respect to the l
Forty-two percent of the live-out nanny-ho
having at least one of their children in thei
workers, according to the survey, earn
workweek of 35 hours. Their lower earnin
longer workweeks than house cleaners, but hi
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Hondagneu-Sotelo, Avila / TRANSNATIONAL MOTHERHOOD 557
scheduling flexibility than live-ins explain their intermediate incidence of transnational
motherhood.
The Meanings of Transnational Motherhood
How do women transform the meaning of motherhood to fit immigration and
employment? Being a transnational mother means more than being the mother to
children raised in another country. It means forsaking deeply felt beliefs that
biological mothers should raise their own children, and replacing that belief with
new definitions of motherhood. The ideal of biological mothers raising their own
children is widely held but is also widely broken at both ends of the class spectrum.
Wealthy elites have always relied on others-nannies, governesses, and boarding
schools-to raise their children (Wrigley 1995), while poor, urban families often
rely on kin and "other mothers" (Collins 1991).
In Latin America, in large, peasant families, the eldest daughters are often in
charge of the daily care of the younger children, and in situations of extreme
poverty, children as young as five or six may be loaned or hired out to well-to-do
families as "child-servants," sometimes called criadas (Gill 1994).8 A middle-aged
Mexican woman that we interviewed, now a weekly house cleaner, homeowner,
and mother of five children, recalled her own experience as a child-servant in
Mexico: "I started working in a house when I was 8 ... they hardly let me eat any
food.... It was terrible, but I had to work to help my mother with the rent." This
recollection of her childhood experiences reminds us how our contemporary
notions of motherhood are historically and socially circumscribed, and also correspond
to the meanings we assign to childhood (Zelizer 1994).
This example also underlines how the expectation on the child to help financially
support her mother required daily spatial and temporal separations of mother and
child. There are, in fact, many transgressions of the mother-child symbiosis in
practice-large families where older daughters care for younger siblings, childservants
who at an early age leave their mothers, children raised by paid nannies
and other caregivers, and mothers who leave young children to seek employmentbut
these are fluid enough to sustain ideological adherence to the prescription that
children should be raised exclusively by biological mothers. Long-term physical
and temporal separation disrupts this notion. Transnational mothering radically
rearranges mother-child interactions and requires a concomitant radical reshaping
of the meanings and definitions of appropriate mothering.
Transnational mothers distinguish their version of motherhood from estrangement,
child abandonment, or disowning. A youthful Salvadoran woman at the
domestic employment waiting room reported that she had not seen her two eldest
boys, now ages 14 and 15 and under the care of her own mother in El Salvador,
since they were toddlers. Yet, she made it clear that this was different from
putting a child up for adoption, a practice that she viewed negatively, as a form of
child abandonment. Although she had been physically separated from her boys for
more than a decade, she maintained her mothering ties and financial obligations to
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558 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 1997
them by regularly sending home money. The exchange of letters, photos, a
calls also helped to sustain the connection. Her physical absence did no
emotional absence from her children. Another woman who remains in
involved in the lives of her two daughters, now ages 17 and 21 in El S
succinctly summed up this stance when she said, "I'm here, but I'm ther
the phone, and through letters, she regularly reminds her daughters to
vitamins, to never go to bed or to school on an empty stomach, and to use p
from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases if they engage in sexual
with their boyfriends.
Transnational mothers fully understand and explain the conditions that
their situations. In particular, many Central American women recognize
gendered employment demand in Los Angeles has produced transnational
hood arrangements. These new mothering arrangements, they acknowle
shape despite strong beliefs that biological mothers should care for th
children. Emelia, a 49-year-old woman who left her five children in Guatem
years ago to join her husband in Los Angeles explained this changing rel
between family arrangements, migration, and job demand:
One supposes that the mother must care for the children. A mother cannot so
throw her children aside. So, in all families, the decision is that the man comes (t
U.S.) first. But now, since the man cannot find work here so easily, the woman c
first. Recently, women have been coming and the men staying.
A steady demand for live-in housekeepers means that Central American
may arrive in Los Angeles on a Friday and begin working Monday at a l
that provides at least some minimal accommodations. Meanwhile, her m
terpart may spend weeks or months before securing even casual day labo
While Emelia, formerly a homemaker who previously earned income in G
by baking cakes and pastries in her home, expressed pain and sadness at
with her children as they grew, she was also proud of her accomplishme
children," she stated, "recognize what I have been able to do for them."
Most transnational mothers, like many other immigrant workers, com
United States with the intention to stay for a finite period of time, until t
pay off bills or raise the money for an investment in a house, their c
education, or a small business. Some of these women return to their cou
origin, but many stay. As time passes, and as their stays grow longer, so
women eventually bring some or all of their children. Other women wh
their U.S. jobs are adamant that they do not wish for their children to trav
multiple hazards of adolescence in U.S. cities or to repeat the job experien
themselves have had in the United States. One Salvadoran woman in the
room at the domestic employment agency-whose children had been ra
earnings predicated on her separation from them-put it this way:
I've been here 19 years, I've got my legal papers and everything. But I'd have
crazy to bring my children here. All of them have studied for a career, so why w
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Hondagneu-Sotelo, Avila / TRANSNATIONAL MOTHERHOOD 559
I bring them here? To bus tables and earn minimum wage? So they won't have enough
money for bus fare or food?
Who Is Taking Care of the Nanny's Children?
Transnational Central American and Mexican mothers may rely on various
people to care for their children's daily, round-the-clock needs, but they prefer
a close relative. The "other mothers" on which Latinas rely include their own
mothers, comadres (co-godmothers) and other female kin, the children's fathers,
and paid caregivers. Reliance on grandmothers and comadres for shared mothering
is well established in Latina culture, and it is a practice that signifies a more
collectivist, shared approach to mothering in contrast to a more individualistic,
Anglo-American approach (Griswold del Castillo 1984; Segura and Pierce 1993).
Perhaps this cultural legacy facilitates the emergence oftransnational motherhood.
Transnational mothers express a strong preference for their own biological
mother to serve as the primary caregiver. Here, the violation of the cultural
preference for the biological mother is rehabilitated by reliance on the biological
grandmother or by reliance on the ceremonially bound comadres. Clemencia, for
example, left her three young children behind in Mexico, each with their respective
madrina, or godmother.
Emelia left her five children, then ranging in ages from 6 to 16, under the care
of her mother and sister in Guatemala. As she spoke of the hardships faced by
transnational mothers, she counted herself among the fortunate ones who did not
need to leave the children alone with paid caregivers:
One's mother is the only one who can really and truly care for your children. No one
else can.... Women who aren't able to leave their children with their mother or with
someone very special, they'll wire money to Guatemala and the people (caregivers)
don't feed the children well. They don't buy the children clothes the mother would
want. They take the money and the children suffer a lot.
Both Central American and Mexican woman stated preferences for grandmothers
as the ideal caregivers in situations that mandated the absence of the children's
biological mother. These preferences seem to grow out of strategic availability, but
these preferences assume cultural mandates. Velia, a Mexicana who hailed from the
border town of Mexicali, improvised an employment strategy whereby she annually
sent her three elementary school-age children to her mother in Mexicali for the
summer vacation months. This allowed Velia, a single mother, to intensify her
housecleaning jobs and save money on day care. But she also insisted that "if my
children were with the woman next door (who babysits), I'd worry if they were
eating well, or about men (coming to harass the girls). Having them with my mother
allows me to work in peace." Another woman specified more narrowly, insisting
that only maternal grandmothers could provide adequate caregiving. In a conversation
in a park, a Salvadoran woman offered that a biological mother's mother was
the one best suited to truly love and care for a child in the biological mother's
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560 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 1997
absence. According to her, not even the paternal grandmother could be trust
provide proper nurturance and care. Another Salvadoran woman, Maria, left
two daughters, then 14 and 17, at their paternal grandmother's home, but be
departing for the United States, she trained her daughters to become self-suffi
in cooking, marketing, and budgeting money. Although she believes the pat
grandmother loves the girls, she did not trust the paternal grandmother enoug
cook or administer the money that she would send her daughters.
Another variation in the preference for a biological relative as a caregiver
captured by the arrangement of Patricia, a 30-year-old Mexicana who came t
United States as a child and was working as a live-in, caring for an infant in on
southern California's affluent coastal residential areas. Her arrangement was
ferent, as her daughters were all born, raised, and residing in the United States
she lived apart from them during weekdays because of her live-in job. Her
daughters, ages 11/2, 6, and 11, stayed at their apartment near downtown
Angeles under the care of their father and a paid nanny-housekeeper, Patri
teenage cousin. Her paid caregiver was not an especially close relative, but
rationalized this arrangement by emphasizing that her husband, the girls' fa
and therefore a biological relative, was with them during the week.
Whenever I've worked like this, I've always had a person in charge of them als
working as a live-in. She sleeps here the five days, but when my husband arrives h
takes responsibility for them ... When my husband arrives (from work) she (cousin
paid caregiver) goes to English class and he takes charge of the girls.
And another woman who did not have children of her own but who had work
a nanny for her aunt stated that "as Hispanas, we don't believe in bringing som
else in to care for our children." Again, the biological ties help sanction the s
child care arrangement.
New family fissures emerge for the transnational mother as she negoti
various aspects of the arrangement with her children, and with the "other mot
who provides daily care and supervision for the children. Any impulse to rom
cize transnational motherhood is tempered by the sadness with which the wo
related their experiences and by the problems they sometimes encounter with t
children and caregivers. A primary worry among transnational mothers is that
children are being neglected or abused in their absence. While there is a long le
of child servants being mistreated and physically beaten in Latin America, tran
tional mothers also worry that their own paid caregivers will harm or neglect t
children. They worry that their children may not receive proper nourishm
schooling and educational support, and moral guidance. They may remain un
as to whether their children are receiving the full financial support they send h
In some cases, their concerns are intensified by the eldest child or a nearby rel
who is able to monitor and report the caregiver's transgression to the transnati
mother.
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Hondagneu-Sotelo, Avila / TRANSNATIONAL MOTHERHOOD 561
Transnational mothers engage in emotion work and financial compensation to
maintain a smoothly functioning relationship with the children's daily caregiver.
Their efforts are not always successful, and when problems arise, they may return
to visit if they can afford to do so. After not seeing her four children for seven years,
Carolina abruptly quit her nanny job and returned to Guatemala in the spring of
1996 because she was concerned about one adolescent daughter's rebelliousness
and about her mother-in-law's failing health. Carolina's husband remained in Los
Angeles, and she was expected to return. Emelia, whose children were cared for by
her mother and sister, with the assistance of paid caregivers, regularly responded
to her sister's reminders to send gifts, clothing, and small amounts of money to the
paid caregivers. "If they are taking care of my children," she explained, "then I have
to show my gratitude."
Some of these actions are instrumental. Transnational mothers know that they
may increase the likelihood of their children receiving adequate care if they
appropriately remunerate the caregivers and treat them with the consideration their
work requires. In fact, they often express astonishment that their own Anglo
employers fail to recognize this in relation to the nanny-housekeeper work that they
perform. Some of the expressions of gratitude and gifts that they send to their
children's caregivers appear to be genuinely disinterested and enhanced by the
transnational mothers' empathy arising out of their own similar job circumstances.
A Honduran woman, a former biology teacher, who had left her four sons with a
paid caregiver, maintained that the treatment of nannies and housekeepers was
much better in Honduras than in the United States, in part, because of different
approaches to mothering:
We're very different back there.... We treat them (domestic workers) with a lot of
affection and respect, and when they are taking care of our kids, even more so. The
Americana, she is very egotistical. When the nanny loves her children, she gets
jealous. Not us. We are appreciative when someone loves our children, and bathes,
dresses, and feeds them as though they were their own.
These comments are clearly informed by the respondent's prior class status, as well
as her simultaneous position as the employer of a paid nanny-housekeeper in
Honduras and as a temporarily unemployed nanny-housekeeper in the United
States. (She had been fired from her nanny-housekeeper job for not showing up on
Memorial Day, which she erroneously believed was a work holiday.) Still, her
comments underline the importance of showing appreciation and gratitude to the
caregiver, in part, for the sake of the children's well-being.
Transnational mothers also worry about whether their children will get into
trouble during adolescence or if they will transfer their allegiance and affection to
the "other mother." In general, transnational mothers, like African American
mothers who leave their children in the South to work up North (Stack and Burton
1994), believe that the person who cares for the children has the right to discipline.
But when adolescent youths are paired with elderly grandmothers, or ineffective
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562 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 1997
disciplinary figures, the mothers may need to intervene. Preadolescent a
cent children who show signs of rebelliousness may be brought north beca
are deemed unmanageable by their grandmothers or paid caregivers. Alte
teens who are in California may be sent back in hope that it will straigh
out, a practice that has resulted in the migration of Los Angeles-based d
youth gangs to Mexican and Central American towns. Another danger is
child who has grown up without the transnational mother's presence may
respond to her authority. One woman at the domestic employment agency
recently brought her adolescent son to join her in California, reported tha
seen him at a bus stop, headed for the beach. When she demanded to kn
he was going, he said something to the effect of "and who are you to tel
to do?" After a verbal confrontation at the bus kiosk, she handed him $10
the mother hoped that money will be a way to show caring and to advan
to parental authority.
Motherhood and Breadwinning
Milk, shoes, and schooling-these are the currency of transnational
hood. Providing for children's sustenance, protecting their current well-be
preparing them for the future are widely shared concerns of motherhoo
American and Mexican women involved in transnational mothering at
ensure the present and future well-being of their children through U
earning, and as we have seen, this requires long-term physical separation f
children.
For these women, the meanings of motherhood do not appear to be in
stage. That is, they do not appear to be making a linear progression from
motherhood that involves daily, face-to-face caregiving toward one that
primarily through breadwinning. Rather than replacing caregiving with b
ning definitions of motherhood, they appear to be expanding their defi
motherhood to encompass breadwinning that may require long-term
separations. For these women, a core belief is that they can best fulfill
caregiving responsibilities through income earning in the United States wh
children remain "back home."
Transnational mothers continue to state that caregiving is a defining feature of
their mothering experiences. They wish to provide their children with better
nutrition, clothing, and schooling, and most of them are able to purchase these items
with dollars earned in the United States. They recognize, however, that their
transnational relationships incur painful costs. Transnational mothers worry about
some of the negative effects on their children, but they also experience the absence
of domestic family life as a deeply personal loss. Transnational mothers who
primarily identified as homemakers before coming to the United States identified
the loss of daily contact with family as a sacrifice ventured to financially support
the children. As Emelia, who had previously earned some income by baking pastries
and doing catering from her home in Guatemala, reflected,
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Hondagneu-Sotelo, Avila / TRANSNATIONAL MOTHERHOOD 563
The money (earned in the U.S.) is worth five times more in Guatemala. My oldest
daughter was then 16, and my youngest was 6 (when I left). Ay, it's terrible, terrible,
but that's what happens to most women (transnational mothers) who are here. You
sacrifice your family life (for labor migration).
Similarly, Carolina used the word sacrifice when discussing her family arrangement,
claiming that her children "tell me that they appreciate us (parents), and the
sacrifice that their papa and mama make for them. That is what they say."
The daily indignities of paid domestic work-low pay, subtle humiliations, not
enough food to eat, invisibility (Glenn 1986; Rollins 1985; Romero 1992)-means
that transnational mothers are not only stretching their U.S.-earned dollars further
by sending the money back home but also, by leaving the children behind, they are
providing special protection from the discrimination the children might receive in
the United States. Gladys, who had four of her five children in El Salvador,
acknowledged that her U.S. dollars went further in El Salvador. Although she
missed seeing those four children grow up, she felt that in some ways, she had
spared them the indignities to which she had exposed her youngest daughter, whom
she brought to the United States at age 4 in 1988. Although her live-in employer
had allowed the four-year-old to join the family residence, Gladys tearfully recalled
how that employer had initially quarantined her daughter, insisting on seeing
vaccination papers before allowing the girl to play with the employer's children. "I
had to battle, really struggle," she recalled, "just to get enough food for her (to eat)."
For Gladys, being together with her youngest daughter in the employer's home had
entailed new emotional costs.
Patricia, the mother who was apart from her children only during the weekdays
when she lived in with her employer, put forth an elastic definition of motherhood,
one that included both meeting financial obligations and spending time with the
children. Although her job involves different scheduling than most employed
mothers, she shares views similar to those held by many working mothers:
It's something you have to do, because you can't just stay seated at home because the
bills accumulate and you have to find a way.... I applied at many different places
for work, like hospitals, as a receptionist-due to the experience I've had with
computers working in shipping and receiving, things like that, but they never called
me ... One person can't pay all the bills.
Patricia emphasized that she believes motherhood also involves making an effort
to spend time with the children. According to this criterion, she explained, most
employers were deficient, while she was compliant. During the middle of the week,
she explained, "I invent something, some excuse for her (the employer) to let me
come home, even if I have to bring the (employer's) baby here with me ... just to
spend time with my kids."
Transnational mothers echoed these sentiments. Maria Elena, for example,
whose 13-year-old son resided with his father in Mexico after she lost a custody
battle, insisted that motherhood did not consist of only breadwinning: "You can't
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564 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 1997
give love through money." According to Maria Elena, motherhood req
emotional presence and communication with a child. Like other trans
mothers, she explained how she maintained this connection despite the
geographic distance: "I came here, but we're not apart. We talk (by tele
I know (through telephone conversations) when my son is fine. I can te
is sad by the way he speaks." Like employed mothers everywhere, she i
a definition of motherhood that emphasized quality rather than quantit
spent with the child: "I don't think that a good mother is one who is with her
at all times.... It's the quality of time spent with the child." She spoke th
tearfully, reflecting the trauma of losing a custody battle with her ex
Gladys also stated that being a mother involves both breadwinning and
direction and guidance. "It's not just feeding them, or buying clothes for
also educating them, preparing them to make good choices so they'll hav
future."
Transnational mothers seek to mesh caregiving and guidance with br
ning. While breadwinning may require their long-term and long-distan
tions from their children, they attempt to sustain family connections b
emotional ties through letters, phone calls, and money sent home. If at all
and logistically possible, they try to travel home to visit their childr
maintain their mothering responsibilities not only by earning money
children's livelihood but also by communicating and advising across n
borders, and across the boundaries that separate their children's place of
from their own places of employment and residence.
Bonding with the Employers'
Kids and Critiques of "Americana" Mothers
Some nanny-housekeepers develop very strong ties of affection with th
they care for during long workweeks. It is not unusual for nanny-house
be alone with these children during the workweek, with no one else wit
talk or interact. The nannies, however, develop close emotional ties selectiv
some children, but not with others. For nanny-housekeepers who are tr
mothers, the loving daily caregiving that they cannot express for their ow
is sometimes transferred to their employers' children. Carolina, a Gu
woman with four children between the ages of 10 and 14 back home, m
that she tried to treat the employers' children with the same affection th
for her own children "because if you do not feel affection for children, y
able to care for them well." When interviewed, however, she was car
two-year-old triplets-for whom she expressed very little affection-b
called very longingly her fond feelings for a child at her last job, a child w
reminded her of her daughter, who was about the same age:
When I saw that the young girl was lacking in affection, I began to get close
and I saw that she appreciated that I would touch her, give her a kiss on the c
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Hondagneu-Sotelo, Avila / TRANSNATIONAL MOTHERHOOD 565
And then I felt consoled too, because I had someone to give love to. But, I would
imagine that she was my daughter, ah? And then I would give pure love to her, and
that brought her closer to me.
Another nanny-housekeeper recalled a little girl for whom she had developed strong
bonds of affection, laughingly imitating how the preschooler, who could not
pronounce the "f' sound, would say "you hurt my peelings, but I don't want to
pight."
Other nanny-housekeepers reflected that painful experiences with abrupt job
terminations had taught them not to transfer mother love to the children of their
employers. Some of these women reported that they now remained very measured
and guarded in their emotional closeness with the employers' children, so that they
could protect themselves for the moment when that relationship might be abruptly
severed.
I love these children, but now I stop myself from becoming too close. Before, when
my own children weren't here (in the United States), I gave all my love to the children
I cared for (then toddler twins). That was my recompensation (for not being with my
children). When the job ended, I hurt so much. I can't let that happen again.
I love them, but not like they were my own children because they are not! They are
not my kids! Because if I get to love them, and then I go, then I'm going to suffer like
I did the last time. I don't want that.
Not all nanny-housekeepers bond tightly with the employers' children, but most
of them are critical of what they perceive as the employers' neglectful parenting
and mothering. Typically, they blame biological mothers (their employers) for
substandard parenting. Carolina recalled advising the mother of the abovementioned
little girl, who reminded her of her own child, that the girl needed to
receive more affection from her mother, whom she perceived as self-absorbed with
physical fitness regimes. Carolina had also advised other employers on disciplining
their children. Patricia also spoke adamantly on this topic, and she recalled with
satisfaction that when she had advised her current employer to spend more than 15
minutes a day with the baby, the employer had been reduced to tears. By comparison
to her employer's mothering, Patricia cited her own perseverance in going out of
her way to visit her children during the week:
If you really love your kids, you look for the time, you make time to spend with your
kids.... I work all week and for some reason I make excuses for her (employer) to
let me come (home) ... just to spend time with my kids.
Her rhetoric of comparative mothering is also inspired by the critique that many
nanny-housekeepers have of female employers who may be out of the labor force
but who employ nannies and hence do not spend time with their children.
I love my kids, they don't. It's just like, excuse the word, shitting kids.... What they
prefer is to go to the salon, get their nails done, you know, go shopping, things like
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566 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 1997
that. Even if they're home all day, they don't want to spend time with the kids b
they're paying somebody to do that for them.
Curiously, she spoke as though her female employer is a wealthy woman of
but in fact, both her current and past female employers are wealthy
executives who work long hours. Perhaps at this distance on the class spe
class and racially privileged mothers look alike. "I work my butt off to g
have," she observed, "and they don't have to work that much."
In some ways, transnational mothers who work as nanny-housekeepers
a more sentimentalized view of the employers' children than of their o
strategy allows them to critique their employers, especially homemakers
lege who are occupied with neither employment nor daily caregiving
children. The Latina nannies appear to endorse motherhood as a full-tim
in contexts of sufficient financial resources, but in contexts of financia
such as their own, they advocate more elastic definitions of motherhood, i
forms that may include long spatial and temporal separations of moth
children.
As observers of late-20th-century U.S. families (Skolnick 1991; Stace
have noted, we live in an era wherein no one normative family arrang
predominates. Just as no one type of mothering unequivocally prevails in t
middle class, no singular mothering arrangement prevails among Latina i
women. In fact, the exigencies of contemporary immigration seem to mult
variety of mothering arrangements. Through our research with Latina im
women who work as nannies, housekeepers, and house cleaners, we have
tered a broad range of mothering arrangements. Some Latinas migrate to t
States without their children to establish employment, and after some stab
been achieved, they may send for their children or they may work for
save money, and then return to their countries of origin. Other Latinas m
may postpone having children until they are financially established. Sti
arrive with their children and may search for employment that allows the
together with their children, and other Latinas may have sufficient f
support-from their husbands or kin-to stay home full-time with their
In the absence of a universal or at least widely shared mothering arran
there is tremendous uncertainty about what constitutes "good motherin
transnational mothers must work hard to defend their choices. Some Latina nannies
who have their children with them in the United States condemn transnational
mothers as "bad women." One interview respondent, who was able to take her
young daughter to work with her, claimed that she could never leave her daughter.
For this woman, transnational mothers were not only bad mothers but also nannies
who could not be trusted to adequately care for other people's children. As she said
of an acquaintance, "This woman left her children (in Honduras)... she was taking
care (of other people's children), and I said, 'Lord, who are they (the employers)
leaving their children with if she did that with her own children!' "
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Hondagneu-Sotelo, Avila / TRANSNATIONAL MOTHERHOOD 567
Given the uncertainty of what is "good mothering," and to defend their integrity
as mothers when others may criticize them, transnational mothers construct new
scales for gauging the quality of mothering. By favorably comparing themselves
with the negative models of mothering that they see in others-especially those
that they are able to closely scrutinize in their employers' homes-transnational
mothers create new definitions of good-mothering standards. At the same time,
selectively developing motherlike ties with other people's children allows them to
enjoy affectionate, face-to-face interactions that they cannot experience on a daily
basis with their own children.
DISCUSSION: TRANSNATIONAL MOTHERHOOD
In California, with few exceptions, paid domestic work has become
immigrant women's job. One observer has referred to these Latinas a
employable mothers" (Chang 1994), but taking on these wage labor d
requires Latina workers to expand the frontiers of motherhood by leaving
children for several years. While today there is a greater openness to
plurality of mothering arrangements-single mothers, employed mothe
home mothers, lesbian mothers, surrogate mothers, to name a few-eve
discussions generally assume that mothers, by definition, will reside w
children.
Transnational mothering situations disrupt the notion of family in one
break distinctively with what some commentators have referred to as
glue" view of motherhood (Blum and Deussen 1996; Scheper-Hug
Latina transnational mothers are improvising new mothering arrangemen
borne out of women's financial struggles, played out in a new global
provide the best future for themselves and their children. Like many oth
of color and employed mothers, transnational mothers rely on an exp
sometimes fluid number of family members and paid caregivers. Th
circuits, however, span stretches of geography and time that are much
typical joint custody or "other mother" arrangements that are more clo
both spatially and temporally.
The transnational perspective in immigration studies is useful in concep
how relationships across borders are important. Yet, an examination oftra
motherhood suggests that transnationalism is a contradictory process
20th century. It is an achievement, but one accompanied by numerous
attained in a context of extremely scarce options. The alienation and
mothering organized by long temporal and spatial distances should giv
the celebratory impulses of transnational perspectives of immigration
not addressed directly in this article, the experiences of these mothers re
current major political issues. For example, transnational mothering
precisely what immigration restrictionists have advocated through C
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568 GENDER & SOCIETY / October 1997
Proposition 187 (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1995).9 While proponents of Propo
have never questioned California's reliance on low-waged Latino immigr
ers, this restrictionist policy calls for fully dehumanized immigrant wo
workers with families and family needs (such as education and health se
children). In this respect, transnational mothering's externalization of t
labor reproduction to Mexico and Central America is a dream come tru
proponents of Proposition 187.
Contemporary transnational motherhood continues a long historical
people of color being incorporated into the United States through coerci
of labor that do not recognize family rights. As Bonnie Thornton Dill (198
Nakano Glenn (1986), and others have pointed out, slavery and contra
systems were organized to maximize economic productivity and offe
supports to sustain family life. The job characteristics of paid domes
especially live-in work, virtually impose transnational motherhood for ma
can and Central American women who have children of their own.
The ties of transnational motherhood suggest simultaneously the relative permeability
of borders, as witnessed by the maintenance of family ties and the new
meanings of motherhood, and the impermeability of nation-state borders. Ironically,
just at the moment when free trade proponents and pundits celebrate globalization
and transnationalism, and when "borderlands" and "border crossings" have
become the metaphors of preference for describing a mind-boggling range of
conditions, nation-state borders prove to be very real obstacles for many Mexican
and Central American women who work in the United States and who, given the
appropriate circumstances, wish to be with their children. While demanding the
right for women workers to live with their children may provoke critiques of
sentimentality, essentialism, and the glorification of motherhood, demanding the
right for women workers to choose their own motherhood arrangements would be
the beginning of truly just family and work policies, policies that address not only
inequalities of gender but also inequalities of race, class, and citizenship status.
NOTES
1. No one knows the precise figures on the prevalence of transnational motherhood, just as
knows the myriad consequences for both mothers and their children. However, one indicator th
at both the complex outcomes and the frequencies of these arrangements is that teachers and
workers in Los Angeles are becoming increasingly concerned about some of the deleterious eff
these mother-child separations and reunions. Many Central American women who made their
Los Angeles in the early 1980s, fleeing civil wars and economic upheaval, pioneered transn
mothering, and some of them are now financially able to bring the children whom they left
These children, now in their early teen years, are confronting the triple trauma of simultaneously
adolescence-with its own psychological upheavals; a new society-often in an inner-city enviro
that requires learning to navigate a new language, place and culture; and they are also entering
that do not look like the ones they knew before their mothers' departure, families with new siblin
in the United States, and new step-fathers or mother's boyfriends.
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Hondagneu-Sotelo, Avila / TRANSNATIONAL MOTHERHOOD 569
2. Even among Mexican farmworkers, researchers have found a large and growing segment who
settle permanently with their families in rural California (Palerm 1994).
3. Acknowledgment of the varieties of family and mothering has been fueled, in part, by research
on the growing numbers of women-headed families, involving families of all races and socioeconomic
levels-including Latina families in the United States and elsewhere (Baca Zinn 1989; Fernandez-Kelly
and Garcia 1990), and by recognition that biological ties do not necessarily constitute family (Weston
1991).
4. La Virgen de Guadalupe, the indigenous virgin who appeared in 1531 to a young Indian boy and
for whom a major basilica is built, provides the exemplary maternal model, la mujer abnegada (the
self-effacing woman), who sacrifices all for her children and religious faith. La Malinche, the Aztec
woman that served Cortes as a translator, a diplomat, and a mistress, and La Llorona (the weeping one),
a legendary solitary, ghostlike figure reputed either to have been violently murdered by ajealous husband
or to have herself murdered her children by drowning them, are the negative and despised models of
femininity. Both are failed women because they have failed at motherhood. La Malinche is stigmatized
as a traitor and a whore who collaborated with the Spanish conquerors, and La Llorona is the archetypal
evil woman condemned to eternally suffer and weep for violating her role as a wife and a mother (Soto
1986).
5. A study comparing Mexicanas and Chicanas found that the latter are more favorably disposed to
homemaker ideals than are Mexican-born women. This difference is explained by Chicanas' greater
exposure to U.S. ideology that promotes the opposition of mothering and employment and to Mexicanas'
integration of household and economy in Mexico (Segura 1994). While this dynamic may be partially
responsible for this pattern, we suspect that Mexicanas may have higher rates of labor force participation
because they are also a self-selected group of Latinas; by and large, they come to the United States to
work.
6. See Romero (1997) for a study focusing on the perspective of domestic workers' children.
Although most respondents in this particular study were children of day workers, and none appear to
have been children of transnational mothers, they still recall significant costs stemming from their
mothers' occupation.
7. This seems to be more common among Central American women than Mexican women. Central
American women may be more likely than are Mexican women to have their children in their country
of origin, even if their husbands are living with them in the United States because of the multiple dangers
and costs associated with undocumented travel from Central America to the United States. The civil
wars of the 1980s, continuing violence and economic uncertainty, greater difficulties and costs
associated with crossing multiple national borders, and stronger cultural legacies of socially sanctioned
consensual unions may also contribute to this pattern for Central Americans.
8. According to interviews conducted with domestic workers in La Paz, Bolivia in the late 1980s,
41 percent got their first job between the ages of 11 and 15, and one-third got their first job between the
ages of 6 and 10. Some parents received half of the child-servant's salary (Gill 1994, 64). Similar
arrangements prevailed in preindustrial, rural areas of the United States and Europe.
9. In November 1994, California voters passed Proposition 187, which legislates the denial of public
school education, health care, and other public benefits to undocumented immigrants and their children.
Although currently held up in the courts, the facility with which Proposition 187 passed in the California
ballots rejuvenated anti-immigrant politics at a national level. It opened the doors to new legislative
measures in 1997 to deny public assistance to legal immigrants.
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Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern
California. She is the author of Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration
(1994), and she is currently writing a book on paid domestic work in Los Angeles.
Ernestine Avila is a doctoral student in the sociology department at the University of Southern
Califoria-Los Angeles. Her areas of interest include race, gender, and immigration. She is
currently researching Latina immigrant mothers who work as nannies and housekeepers.
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