Mothercoin: The Stories of Immigrant Nannies

by Elizabeth Cummins Muñoz

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807051191
Publisher:	Beacon Press
Publication date:	05/03/2022
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	956 KB

About the Author

Elizabeth Cummins Muñoz holds a doctorate in 20th-century Latin American literature, specializing in Mexican and US Hispanic studies and women’s studies. She is a lecturer at Rice University and lives in Houston, TX, with her family.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
Park Benches

PART I: A TOSS OF THE COIN

1. Motherland
2. Crossing Over

PART II: THE FLIP SIDE

3. The Nature of the Job
4. Pregnant Complications
5. Las Patronas

PART III: VALUE PROPOSITION

6. Los Niños
7. Love and Labor
8. Telling Stories

CONCLUSION
The Brown Mother Beside Me

Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

01/31/2022

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. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Muñoz lays bare how essential motherhood is to the functioning global economy. Especially in the wake of the pandemic’s massive disruptions to work and childcare, Mothercoin is an affecting, essential read.”
—Booklist, Starred Review

“This is a necessary and long-overdue examination of motherhood, immigration, class, 'women’s work' and who performs it – and the consequences of the lack of value we put upon them all.”
—Ms.

“Muñoz offers valuable insights on a thorny social issue. Feminists and immigrant rights activists will savor this thought-provoking cultural analysis.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A sensitive investigation of the lives and work of immigrant nannies . . . A perceptive look into a hidden world.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“I found the subject of this book so essential to the understanding of female labor, its social value, and its implications in our everyday lives, that I would recommend Mothercoin as a mandatory reading for every freshman class in College in the US. This is an account that affects all of us, and the stories collected by the author bring forward uncomfortable questions that must be raised.”
—Anadeli Bencomo, Professor, Department of Hispanic Studies, University of Houston

“Beautifully written, a perfect balance between the humanity of the women portrayed in it, and the self-consciousness of the author about her own role in that context. A timely, important work, and I can’t wait to see it out there, sparking conversations around one of the most important gears that keep this country running.”
—Eileen Truax, author of We Built the Wall, Dreamers, and How Does it Feel to be Unwanted?

From the Publisher

2022-01-26
Moving narratives from women working in “a largely invisible industry.”

Muñoz, a scholar of Latin American literature and culture, makes her book debut with a sensitive investigation of the lives and work of immigrant nannies. Identifying herself as “a native Houstonian of European ancestry” who is fluent in Spanish, the author met nannies when she took her children to a local park. Beginning in 2010, she began to interview them, and she also reached out to some of their employers. Those interviews—recorded, transcribed, translated, and edited—form the basis of the text, which Muñoz has interwoven with historical, political, and economic context. In developing countries, migration has become “a particularly feminine survival strategy” and “a singular face of hope” for girls and women who want a better future for themselves and their families. In the U.S., they easily find work as nannies, filling a need for families in which both parents work and women face “impossible expectations” of what motherhood entails. Muñoz exposes the injustices and demands nannies encounter as much as she critiques “the false assumption that our homes and our families are held up by force of love, inexhaustible and economically inconsequential.” As a society, she writes, we “have dismissed our responsibility to raise our children and care for our elderly and infirm. We have feminized this care into triviality, swept it under the rug of visibility, and left the mothers among us with little choice but to struggle and endure—or to outsource the work to marginalized others who must bear our burdens and theirs, alone.” These women’s stories reveal broken and unjust social, health care, and legal systems; a changing landscape of immigration policy and practice; and a feminist movement that has failed to dismantle patriarchy. “When we replace the housewife with a low-wage, publicly invisible muchacha,” writes the author, “we maintain the same system of gender-based power that women have been resisting for ages.”

A perceptive look into a hidden world.

Kirkus Reviews