Globalizing the Care Chain: Representations of Latinas in Maid in America

Immigrant women from Latin America and the Caribbean are gradually populating the U.S. landscape through an incorporation within the most sacred social institution; the family unit. As it has been argued by Arlie Hochschild, Rachel Salazar Parrenas and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, among other cultural critics, globalization is witnessing a vast proliferation of women traveling from the Global South--including Central America, South America and the Caribbean--in order to provide for their families and to contribute to their developing economies through the use of remittances. Although this is not the only pattern of female migration, the transformation of the family unit has been deeply affected by the women who leave their families behind and/or by those who find themselves working as domesticas and house cleaners in the host cultures. (1) The documentary Maid in America broadcasted in PBS in 2005 and directed by Anayansi Prado is a good example of the global and transnational phenomena invested in the mobilization of female bodies in search of a better life. Based on the lives of Telma and Eva--two Mexican women--and Judith--a Guatemalan mother--the documentary attempts to reflect the social injustices and sacrifices undergone by these women who have to survive in the new cultural scenario. Telma, Judith and Eva are but three of thousands of women who arrive at foreign soil undocumented and risking their lives as illegal citizens. Although this piece of work can be considered a feminist practice that engages the visual through images and voices of culturally invisible lives eager to promote social and political action, the repetitive embodiment of motherhood in which these bodies are inscribed is purportedly hyperbolic all throughout the documentary. By projecting ideal maternal bodies, these women are rendered productive, useful and necessary within the confinements of the U.S. nation and family. Instead of being bodies "stuck" in images of fear and threat to the purity and safety of the nation, the three immigrant women are represented as angels, easily assimilated to the host country, maternal heroines and protectors of the nation; they accurately exemplify the love extracted by the Global North. Along with these depictions of transnational women, I argue how an appropriation of emotions and affect that circulate among the protagonists and the spectators allows us to convey this idea of protection incarnated in the female bodies. In this sense, emotions and affect are pretty much circumscribed to femininity, and gender binaries are therefore conventionally reified. Given the lack of male emotional responsibility within the family unit and men's role as exclusively breadwinners, the documentary fails to call for a deep reorganization of gender roles within the family structure. Instead, it reinforces the image of the immigrant woman as the ideal mother of both her native and host countries. Moreover, the sign motherhood is mobilized through competing surrogate and biological figures. In the end, the maternal locus is more properly and effectively occupied by the biological mothers, as I will show in certain specific moments in the documentary. Also emotions as signs that circulate and "stick" onto bodies reinstall a conservative ideology that correlates the female colonial body with the victimized "other. " Ina similar fashion, the audience feels compassion and empathy for these immigrant women whose self-sacrifice places them into the space of the ideal women--mothers--of the U.S. nation. Visual representations of domesticas have populated the U.S. media for the last couple of decades. As Yajaria Padilla argues un her article "Domesticating Rosario: Conflicting Representations of the Latina Maid in the U.S. Media", we encounter films such as Down and Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), As Good as It Gets (1997), Spanglish (2004) and Babel (2006), for instance, that project an stereotypical image of the "good" Latina maid as the embodiment of maternity and of the "nobel immigrant" (1) or, on the other hand, the "beautiful and sought-after exotic Other" (1). …