THE HEART OF THE MATTER
Language, emotion and Latin American female workers in
exploitative home care in Barcelona and Palma
Lluís Ibáñez Juncosa
11234733
lluisiju@gmail.com
MSc Cultural and Social Anthropology Anthropology Department, GSSS University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam 26/06/2017 Word count: 27068
Supervisor: Dr. Vincent de Rooij 2nd Reader: Dr. Kristine Krause 3rd Reader: Dr. Barak Kalir
Plagiarism Declaration
I hereby declare that this thesis meets the rules and regulations for fraud and plagiarism as set out by the Examination Committee of the MSc Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. This thesis is entirely my own original work, and all sources have been properly acknowledged.
Lluís Ibáñez Juncosa 26/06/2017
Abstract
Under the context of new demographic and political realities in Spain, domestic work has been increasingly shifting from ‘women’s work’ to ‘foreign women’s work’ in the homes of middle-class families. Hiring professionals outside the household to conduct caring services for the elderly and children is the first step in the commodification of intimate activities and relationships that locates the care worker in an ambiguous position between market and family logics. Focusing on Latin American female migrants in Spain and their communicative practices in domestic care work, I argue that employers require workers to display genuine links of affection (cariño) to the care recipient. I conducted over thirty in-depth interviews with employers, workers and employment agencies alongside participant-observation in two domestic care contexts in Barcelona and Palma, Spain, with the aim of exploring the discursive links between linguistic practices and emotional authenticity. I examine how affective language becomes a commodified linguistic skill of the care worker in the context of ‘language work’ that translates into economic capital within the specific niche market of the ‘purchased intimacy.’ At the same time, I demonstrate how both commodification and affective ambiguities in the household intersect with understandings of gender, race and class summoned by the employer in making sense of the relationships between language, emotion and a genuine self. In turn, these ideological links participate in the legitimation and reproduction of the migrant care worker’s economic and emotional exploitation by naturalising their unequal status.
Acknowledgements
I want to express my gratitude to those who have participated in this research, for their generosity, trust and patience in sharing their lives with me. In concrete, without the assistance of Gisell, Mercè, Lourdes, Elsa, and the members of Balet Tinkuna and Centro Boliviano Catalán this thesis would have simply not been possible.
I would also like to thank those who guided me during the various stages of the research, especially Silvia Bofill and Joan Pujolar in Barcelona; and Kristine Krause and Daniel Guinness in Amsterdam. Vincent’s supervision and comments have offered stimulating challenges and cheering encouragement, and I am grateful for his passion.
A big appreciation should also go to friends and classmates whose observations and precious company have made this process enjoyable, and brought colour to months of dwelling in the Fifth Floor.
Contents
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
1
‘They are…’ 1
Commodification of care 2
Language and emotion 4
Setting 6
Methodology 11
Outline 14
CHAPTER 2. THE PURCHASE OF A FAMILY MEMBER
16
Preface: On cariño 16
Introduction: Luz and Don Miquel 16
Goods 19
The language of the family 23
In the name of love 25
Conclusion 32
CHAPTER 3. THE HEART: AFFECTIVE LANGUAGE
33
Emotional work and cariño 33
Affective language 40
Commodified affective language 43
Conclusion 46
CHAPTER 4. THE MATTER: INVISIBLE WORK(ER)
48
Introduction: affective labour 48
Invisibility 49
Feminization and coloniality of labour 57
‘Raw emotion’ 59
Conclusion 62
CONCLUSION
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ANNEX: TRANSCRIPTIONS
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1
Chapter 1: Introduction
‘They are…’
Some figures appear to move slower than the rest of the busy pedestrians. I am walking up an avenue in one of the richest neighbourhoods of Barcelona, and the leafless trees do not cover the bright sun of early winter. Every bench I cross has become a common sight: a person with white hair sitting next to a visibly younger woman of browner skin, whom I imagine to be of South or Central American origins. Some of them converse calmly, others hold hands and stare silently at the busy city. One of the younger women is pushing a wheelchair up the avenue as she seems to whisper in the ear of a nodding older lady that sits in it. I count twenty-four such couples in five minutes as it gets closer to noon.
I cannot help but pay close attention to how they interact. Only an hour ago I had an interview with Blanca, the CEO of an employment agency who privately hired a cuidadora1 (elderly carer) from Ecuador to stay with her mother. She had been quick to explain that the overwhelming presence of Latin American women in the caring business is because “they are simply more loving.” She had started listing the affectionate terms of reference they use, the sweet tone of their voice and their tendency to physical intimacy. “They are naturally more loving”, she had concluded, “you can see it in the way they speak.”
As I sit in one of the benches and go over her words, I am sympathetic with her claims: they do indeed seem loving in how they speak. I see tenderness in their physical contact, in their smiles and their affectionate voice tone. I hear a loud female voice in Colmbian Spanish: “Ai, my love, you are so handsome today!”, and I turn to see a woman kissing a senior man in the forehead as she helps him sit next to me. It is then that I also remember the end of the conversation with Blanca. She had complained that those same women use affectionate language very easily, to the point it had to be “fake, empty”. “Acting” to fulfil the requirements of the job.
Confused by what I take to be a contradiction, I try to look at these couples and discern whether they are ‘truly’ loving or ‘performing’ it. Indeed, it can be either way. How can I tell, or in fact, why would I?
This vignette from the beginning of my fieldwork in Barcelona illustrates the moment I was confronted with the original puzzle for this research. Blanca claims that employers seek out authentic feelings of affection when hiring a person to care for another. Women from Latin
1 Throughout the thesis I refer to each actor as they were reported to me: most workers referred to the care recipient as their (explicit possessive pronoun) señora/señor or abuela/abuelo (f/m); niña/niño in the case of childcare. Workers in turn were usually referred by their employers as cuidadora (elderly care provider), niñera (nanny) and limpiadora (cleaner). In the specific case of private care companies most care recipients were called
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American countries are understood to be the best positioned for these tasks judging by their affectionate ways of communicating, and this is the apparent reason for their high numbers in the sector. However, as the worker is being paid for that service, the authenticity guiding their feelings is problematized; although affectionate in form, their language is also taken to signify their inauthentic nature.
In other words, the apparent contradictions in ‘paying for natural love’ meet in the use of affective language by Latin American care workers: it both signifies their essential loving disposition and their mastery of inauthentic, empty talk.
In commodifying intimate activities and relationships, the worker is located in an ambiguous position between market and family logics. Arising from different experiences in the field, I wanted to work with the hypothesis that language, or rather communicative practices that were understood as carrying affectionate feelings (affective language from now on) was in the centre of this conflicting position. The research question that has guided this study is what is the role of affective language in the commodification of care? In the following sections of the introduction I will review the different theoretical assumptions it is based on, and present the setting and methodology of the research.
Commodification of care
Care as a theme has received growing attention in social sciences during the last two decades, although what it stands for is often left imprecise (Drotbohm & Alber, 2015: 1). Following similar global patterns, domestic tasks in Southern European houses like cleaning, cooking, and a whole range of activities engaging with direct or indirect wellbeing of the household members have been relegated to the female members, understood as natural carers (Carrasco et al., 2011; Folbre & Bittman, 2004). Early feminist studies have struggled to describe care as a form of labour to define domestic activities, traditionally unpaid, performed mainly by women and contributing to gender division and inequality, in the line of what has been termed ‘reproductive labour’ (Duffy, 2013). Rose (1986) indentifies the mystique of care in the common understanding that those activities only involve emotional dispositions and no labour, as they are often embedded in familial notions of love and responsibility. This discourse has played a major role in conceiving domestic work as unproductive (Federici, 2012), and legitimised its poor regulation and visibility by state and laws. At the same time, recent feminist studies have highlighted the emotional character of domestic work in general
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(Boris & Salazar Parreñas, 2010; Gutiérrez Rodriguez 2010), parallel to a rising interest in what has been considered emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983).
These latter perspectives are englobed in how Drobohm & Alber understand care “as a social and emotional practice… that entails the capacity to make, shape, and be made by social bonds” (2015: 2). As reviewed by Buch (2015a), care has also been analysed for its moral and ethical aspects in the way Kleinman defines it as what makes us “more present and therefore fully human” (2009: 293). Similarly, Mol (2008) understands care as central in negotiating over competing notions of the “good”. Buch (2013) makes sense of these approaches as “ways that care is involved in the social constitution of personhood” (2015a: 280-1).
The diverse ways to stress different aspects of care highlights its dual nature as activities and services, but also as social relations and emotions. It is particularly expressed in the English language through the distinction of caring for and caring about.
The notion of care dealt in this thesis is that of a service outsourced from the family and assigned a market value. As a person is asked to provide services understood as caring in exchange of a salary, it demands an expansion of its conceptual meaning: care as waged labour becomes commodified (Marx, 1978). I purposely start with an imprecise definition of care following Mol et al. (2010) since I want to take it as a category to be explored in the dynamics between worker, employer and care recipient and employment contract.2 This flexibility also allows me to be sensitive to power relations in the very definition of what conforms caring activities under employment.
Whereas the presence of care in the household would be traditionally legitimised appealing to the ‘natural’ emotions inherent in links of kinship, an employed care worker is potentially a “polluter” (Douglas, 1995) of those relationships. Ideologies of “separate spheres” (Zelizer, 2005) reproduce the idea that the sale of care services within capitalist markets necessarily problematizes the authenticity of caring emotions and relationships. In
2 The choice of terms is not only directed to refer to definable entities, but also to position theoretical perspectives and political claims. I have been careful in identifying those involved in care relationships, specifically avoiding the use of ‘caregivers’ and ‘care receivers’ as they are problematic when defining care as an intersubjective and co-produced. Instead, I propose the use of ‘care worker’ or ‘care provider’ and ‘recipient of care’, closer to a neutral ideal. It also reflects the intent to define them through their explicit contractual relationship. Furthermore, they are terms of current use in international literature (e.g. Alber & Drotbohm, 2015). In turn, I also employ the terms older adult, older person, and elder as they tend to be preferred by advocates of their rights in the US-context according to Buch (2013: 648n). I choose the term migrant as it allows to focus on the person rather than defining them in relation to the land (e.g. immigrant).
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that confrontation, Bridget Anderson witnesses the translation of the employment link into a family one as an “attempt to manage contradictions”, and reject the commodification of human relations (2000: 214). Following parallel global economic processes, authors are increasingly set to study how love and emotion are performed (Brennan, 2007) or conflicted with authenticity (Bernstein, 2007; Narotzky, 1991) as it becomes materially rewarded.
A similar conflict is found in Blanca’s testimony above. She suggests the importance an employer might give to recognising genuine links of affection in the hiring of a care worker, yet as the service is commodified, the authenticity of these emotions is potentially challenged. It is in the worker’s communicative behaviour that she can ‘read’ both interests.
Language and emotion
Why should language be a relevant focus in this research question? Extensive linguistic anthropological research backs up the claim that a correlation between linguistic features and social information will always be mediated by the speakers’ rationalisation. According to Wilce, even arguments claiming “the speech style of some class of persons is naturally more emotional than some standard of comparison” is the consequence of language ideologies (2009b: 8). In a recent review, Paul Kroskrity identifies them as “beliefs, feelings, and conceptions about language structure and use, which often index the political economic interests of individual speakers, ethnic and other interest groups, and nation-states” (2016: 95).
As the researcher problematizes the link between emotion and language, it can be conceived following different semiotic paths that are ideologically furnished. The concept of indexicality has been used in most anthropological studies of language (Peirce, 1955), and in the context of an utterance it implies the indexical and what it stands for are “in a sense copresent” (Hanks, 2000: 124). That is, the interpretation of the form depends strictly on its context. Linguistic forms like sound variants and prosodic features can index (i.e. point to) the speaker enacting anger, fear or affection; but also their geographical origins, ethnicity or sexuality.
Moreover, the link between an emotional state and its linguistic utterance can also be conceived as an iconic one. Instead of co-occurring in an indexical association, a linguistic feature depicts a person or “social group’s inherent nature or essence” (Irvine & Gal, 2000: 37), a direct illustration of a speaker’s emotional ‘inner self’. Specific language use is taken to signal inner states that exist independent from speech, rather than a form of social action. This way of representing the relation between specific language uses and inner states reflects the
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“iconization (essentialization) of what is but a probabilistic (indexical) relationship” (Wilce, 2009b: 132) and may be only “historical, contingent or conventional” (Irvine & Gal, 2000: 37).
Being aware of such ideological connections should refrain the researcher from falling into speculations about the genuine relationships between the linguistic utterances and “inner states” (Wittgenstein, 1960: 41). This is not to say it is not worth studying on a discursive level: after all, Blanca’s claims above are worthy of analysis precisely because of their ideological nature. I will therefore base this work on a pragmatic theory of meaning that asks not the validity of language charged with emotion, but their effects (Wilce, 2009b; Lutz, 1988).
Indeed, perceptions of language and discourse are not freely circulating but are subject to power and socioeconomic determinisms; they are “constructed in the interest, or from the perspective, of an economically positioned social or cultural group” (Kroskrity, 2016: 98). Most of the studies of language ideologies have also focused on the political economic conditions underlying them, and how they are used to legitimise certain social and moral orders (Gal, 1989; Irvine, 1989; Lutz, 2008). Language is not a reflection of the social but is “part of what makes it happen” (Heller, 2010: 102).
Why is Blanca’s claim above worth analysing? The link between language and emotion has as many moral and political implications as any other discursive act of positioning and being positioned. To attribute emotion to a person or group “is at least potentially an act of power, and such indexical acts have important histories” (Wilce, 2009b: 89). In that regard, language plays a vital role in what Padilla et al. call the “political economy of love”, an approach that foregrounds a structural vision of the ways that social and economic inequalities influence “the lived experiences of love and intimacy” (2007a: x).
The assumptions that ground my research question can be read through these theoretical suggestions. Care is understood as strongly related with affective and moral relationships, and its commodification exposes the often conflicting forces of purchase and intimacy. In turn, the link between language and emotion is always ideological and it potentially participates in the legitimation and reproduction of certain socio-political orders. By asking what is the role of affective language in the commodification of care?, I aim to explore both dimensions; language’s presence in discussions of emotional authenticity and its relationship with discursive formations in the political economy.
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Setting
‘Foreignization’ of domestic work
Entering market logics, the commodification of intimacy (Constable, 2009) in Southern European countries is directly linked to the arrival of international migrants. Its ‘foreignization’ implies not only a transfer of the initial gender division from ‘national’ to ‘non-national’ women, but also a perpetuation of inequalities based on class, ethnicity and nationality (Gil-Araujo & González Fernández, 2014: 22). Transnational female workers emerge as the ‘reserve army’ that allows local women to enjoy a professional life away from the domestic duties (Parella Rubio, 2000) and a change in relations between local heterosexual couples. Furthermore, their presence is often legitimised through an apparent ethnification of the specific market demands, notions of labour ethics and affect stereotypically linked to particular groups (Parella Rubio, 2003).
As a global process, Hochschild (2003) sees transnational emotional labour as contemporary imperialist exploitation, extracted from the poorer regions of the world for the benefit of richer ones at low cost3. These migration fluxes are also possible through the new technologies, which help create and maintain “a sense of intimacy with family members far away” (Constable, 2009: 53) like ‘long-distance mothering’ (Parreñas, 2005) that allow transnational familiar care relations beyond the professional contracts.
Latin American migration in Barcelona4
Catalonia is one of the regions in Spain with most immigrant attraction. From 1.067.883 legal newcomers in the territory at the beginning of 2016, between 16% and 20% resided in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, the capital city (Secretaria d’Igualtat, Migracions i Ciutadania, 2016). An ageing population and growing presence of women with working responsibilities out of home, along with a reduction of state support in public welfare in both national and regional context have directly shaped migration to the city (Gil-Araujo & González-Fernández, 2014). This has been especially important for migrants of Latin
3 In contrast, authors like Benería (2008) argue against analysing it only in terms of ‘emotional imperialism’, as it victimizes and obscures the decisions involved in the process of migration. She argues that an imperialism scope focuses on opposite tensions north-south, instead of pointing that both ends of the chain share the need to fight the consequences of neoliberal policies.
4 Palma, the capital city of Mallorca in Spain is also a focus of this thesis although in less measure. Similar contextual characteristics apply to this city as well as Catalan is also co-official and they share similar migration pattern.
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American origin, especially Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Colombia and Peru who have dramatically increased their numbers since the beginning of the 2000s (see TABLE 1), both in Barcelona and the rest of Spain. The most significant case is that of Ecuadorians, whose presence increases ten times between 2000 and 2004.
The majority of those Latin American migrants arriving before the economic crisis were women (54.6% in 2007) and the first link within migration chains (Pedone, 2006). Escaping from the financial crisis, impoverishment and degradation of working conditions in their respective countries, these migrants enjoyed existing migratory networks and shared linguistic and cultural backgrounds including colonial ties (Hierro, 2013: 75-76). Furthermore, the Spanish state created appealing favourable legal treatment for this group, illustrated in the naturalisation of members of former colonies (except Morocco) in two years instead of ten, and relatively easy tourist and working visas. However, the current national economic difficulties have lowered the number of (legal) newcomers for the last years (Direcció General per la Immigració, 2016), and increased the emigration of previous immigrants. Some return to their countries of origin whereas others travel to richer European regions (Parella Rubio, 2013). 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012 2016 Bolivia 110 268 4.810 18.759 14.154 9.280 Colombia 703 2.288 13.307 13.032 12.328 7.930 Cuba 286 997 2.301 2.407 2.246 2.034 Dominican Republic 1.066 3.349 6.777 7.101 7.614 5.636 Ecuador 202 2.703 32.946 22.943 15.511 8.108 Honduras 104 220 863 3.382 4.955 6.726 Peru 2.094 5.669 13.163 15.240 13.464 7.955
Table 1: Numbers of legal residents in Barcelona, Spain by country of origin 1996-20165. Source: Ajuntament de
Barcelona, Departament d’Estadística. Gabinet Tècnic de Programació
5 The exact numbers are necessarily problematic due to the high numbers of undocumented migrants, although the table gives a sense of the movement and settlement patterns.
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According to the National Survey on Immigration 2007, “domestic service, construction and accommodation and food services” would be the most accessible sectors for Latin American migrants upon arrival (Hierro, 2013: 74), the first and third often expressing explicit demands of female workers. They have readily become ‘female, ethnic niches’, which often brings to the public consideration that these migrant groups are the best suited for that job (Martinez Veiga 2004: 150), as Blanca reflects above.
Moreover, the region of Catalonia presents certain particularities in its political autonomy that affects the employment of migrants. Spanish and Catalan are co-official languages, with the local administration treating the latter as the public language of use and a symbolic means of cultural integration. Both languages are obligatory during education, and an important capital to ensure access to economic resources and social mobility (Bourdieu, 1991; Pujolar, 2016), while it has traditionally been key in the maintenance of ethnic and socioeconomic boundaries between local and immigrant (Woolard, 1989, 2016; Pujolar & González, 2013; Frekko, 2013). In that sense, research points at how “large sectors of the local population still treat it as a minority language not adequate to be spoken to strangers” (Pujolar, 2010: 229).
Home care
The Spanish case is thus characterised by an ageing population that is progressively more dependent in performing the activities of daily life. According to IMSERSO, 40% of people over 65 years old are in a situation of different degrees of dependency. Public policies have been poorly invested in elders, child care and dependency laws (Bofill, 2010; Agrela, 2012), and increasingly directed to keep older adults at home since 2002 (IMSERSO, 2005, 2015), following the policies of supported familialism (Krüger & Jiménez, 2013). The state priorities reside in enhancing the traditional role of the family (i.e. women) in their support to the household members. Such approach has promoted either the employment of a member of the family (usually informally) or the outsourcing of care through a professional care provider, qualified or not. In 2014, 11% of men and 13% of women over 80 received the services of a private professional at home, with supposedly greater numbers in cities where wages are likely to be higher, and family tends to take less caring responsibilities (IMSERSO, 2015) 6. The ones in charge of the decision in the cases I reviewed were generally the children or
6 In fact, some families use the public benefits that are aimed to encourage family care in order to informally hire a care worker, generally migrant (Martínez Buján, 2011). The figures of employed domestic carers might then be higher than proposed, although de iure it is be the family who are officially taking up the responsibilities.
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nephews and nieces of the recipients of the care services, although the payment was almost exclusively coming from the latter’s pension and savings. The most common argument for home care is that it provides a sense of continuity to the care recipient’s lives rather than experiencing the unknown environment of a nursing home, which would mean a loss of privacy and an impersonal and serialised treatment (Moreno-Colom et al., 2016). Furthermore, accessing public nursing houses involves long waiting lists, and private-run institutions tend to be costly.
Resorting to migrant carers emerges as a solution to women working out of home and the high costs of private care companies (Ahonen et al., 2010). All the employers that participated in this research belonged to middle and upper-class families as hiring a worker meant an extra expense as opposed to the family taking the responsibilities. In an attempt to reduce the expenses, migrant workers ensure cheap labour as they are willing to work for lower salaries and in exploitative conditions. They are sometimes hired informally without the safety of a contract or any working rights, and their salary is often below the minimum wage (Bettio et al., 2006). Moreover, when a contract exists, the worker is not legally benefited by mandatory paid holidays nor unemployment benefits; receiving these supports depends entirely on the kindness of the employer. They are required few, if any formal job qualifications, which is striking considering the multiple domestic tasks they realise. There is no formal definition that determines the duties of a paid care provider in Spain, as contracts are seldom specific. A care worker can generally be involved in different domestic activities such as cooking, cleaning, doing the laundry, shopping and gardening. Other tasks are conditioned by the degree of dependence of the care recipient, and include feeding, help with body hygiene, control and dispense drugs, physical and memory training, accompanying outdoors, and so on. These responsibilities are actively negotiated between care provider, employer and care recipient, especially as the degree of physical dependence from the latter tends to change with time.
Home care work can be divided into different regimes that condition the worker's experience substantially. First, in live-in care work (interna/fija) the worker is expected to live in a room in the same house or flat as the recipient of care. The care provider is required permanent availability, so there are no explicit working hours although in most cases they are allowed one day off. In practice, this implies a lack of privacy and no time for a life outside of work (Anderson, 2000: 40-44), as she has no rest from her role of worker. Live-in care work is the most valued among newly-arrived, undocumented workers, as they might be pressured
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to repay debts after the trip, and, hence, minimise expenses by ensuring accommodation and food, and find shelter from the police.
The modality of live-out (externa/pseudoexterna) requires the care provider to have her own accommodation out of the recipient’s home and thus allows her to enjoy leisure hours. It nevertheless implies long shifts (10-14 hours), either day or night (Martinez Veiga, 2004: 168). The pay per hour is usually between 5’13€ (minimum wage) and 6€ the hour, while the live-in salary tends to be between 707’6€ (minimum wage) and 1000€ per month, since their service is virtually not divided into hours. In employment without a contract, the salary tends to be below the minimum wage as no law regulates it.
Live-in as well as live-out rarely require the worker to have any qualification related to providing caring services. Work paid by hours (por horas) is qualitatively different as it ranges from 2 to 5 hours per user with varying degrees of dependency, and is generally provided by private or public companies that have hired the worker (in the previous cases agencies merely ‘connect’ worker with employer in exchange for a fee from both parties). The hiring processes imply potential workers are expected to hold professional qualifications and a CV.
In this research I focused on Latin American women currently working or having been employed in the first two regimes, as it involves a more intense relationship with the employers and recipients of care, and it is the areas where they are more numerous (see TABLE 2 below). Employers tend to require live-in workers in the agencies I contacted, while the Latin American women that participated in this research would aim for live-out work. For them it meant less personal control and dependency, the possibility of spending time with their own families and of working in more than one household, either part-time or in the weekends. The usual pattern is live-in on arrival and live-out after some years, often regarded as their only ‘career’ option7.
Furthermore, most of the participants had also worked in childcare or cleaning jobs, often both. Although the thesis’ focus is on elderly care, these other cases are also important in the participants’ experience and will be added to the analysis.
The presence of Latin American women in domestic care work is hard to calculate as it is often based on informal markets and has not received much scientific quantitative interest
7 López et al. consider such workers to be “a cast of servants” due to the impossibility or high difficulty to change the kind of work (1996: 300).
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(Yufra, 2016). However, it is true that women from Latin America were employed in overwhelming numbers according to employment agencies. I had access to the statistics of four of them set in Barcelona (TABLE 2) that show their employment in different sectors. It shows how they are prioritized in caring services before cleaning, especially live-in work, and how they are the major ethnic group in every department. In cleaning and child-care services, Filipina and local women have also a relevant presence, followed by Moroccan. Finally, male workers are also present but limited to jobs paid by hours, such as gardening, chauffer services and particular tasks like outdoor walks with older adults.
Live-in elderly care Live-out elderly care Live-in child care Live-out child care Cleaner (2-5 hours) Agency A 90% 76% 100% 78% 46% Agency B 58% 54% 45% 40% 37% Agency C 86% 80% 75% 68% 58% Agency D 100% 95% 83% 80% 78% Table 2: Percentage of Latin American women employed in different regimes by four agencies (2010-2017).
As informal contacts have an important role in the employment process, the numbers provided by agencies should only be taken as approximate illustrations. Furthermore, some of the agencies tended to be more accessed by specific ethnic groups; Agency D has a strong presence of Latin Americans and Agency B is focused around Filipina workers.
Methodology
The focus of this research is on the worker’s experience. I conducted 14 semi-structured interviews ranging between ninety minutes and three hours with women from Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Colombia and Cuba who are currently living in the cities of Barcelona and Palma. They are all between the ages of 30 and 60 and have lived in the country for more than five years -most of them hold Spanish citizenship-, where they worked in more than one household as elderly care workers, nannies or cleaners (often all three). Their occupational narratives have been an interesting source of data and provided access to different aspects of their daily lives and worries.
I also held informal conversations and group interviews of no less than two hours with over twenty more workers, with whom I had regular contact. Many were reached through mutual friends that were fellow workers, and others volunteered after I announced my research to
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different employment agencies8. All the interviews where voice-recorded with a phone, while I only used a notebook during informal chats.
Most of the contributors had stopped their education as young teenagers, while a few held university degrees and had been professionals in their countries of origin. The majority of the participants were married mothers who had migrated to Spain when their children were toddlers or young, aware that their household needed a new income. In some cases their children and husband ended joining them in Barcelona or Palma after some years, although that was hardly ever the initial plan. Some of those husbands would find a job in construction or service sectors, while others would stay unemployed and depending on the care worker’s salary.
By enrolling in a Bolivian folklore association in Barcelona as a dancer and costume maker, I soon participated in daily activities with migrants from different Latin American origins, most of the women being current and former domestic workers. Always clear about my research interests, I used the sewing machine more often than the notebook, and danced more than recorded. I was soon invited to other events beyond the dancing group, sometimes in private homes, and became part of reciprocity chains with activities like babysitting or cooking. In retrospective, I realise I had unwittingly joined nets of informal care support (Narotzky 2001).
Although I want to think my relationship with the participants was driven by mutual empathy, I am aware my role as a local, young male and an outsider from their migrant group allowed me access to particular data that would have been more problematic otherwise. Intense contact with those research participants permitted familiarity with their intimate lives, but also for them to explore mine. Surprisingly, they often invoked my past and current experience as an intra- and international migrant in order to draw biographical parallels between us despite our different socioeconomic positions9. Furthermore, my presence was certainly commented on by their social circle: through half-jokes, some of the husbands would call me ‘the priest’ as I had access to their wives and sister’s intimate thoughts. I had to learn how to balance a thin line between researcher and friend, each role reinforcing the other. When my presence did limit the emergence of certain topics (e.g. sexual harassment), semi-structured focus groups allowed for them to arise more naturally.
8 I ensured that in the latter case none of the participants were coerced through their agencies into contacting me. I avoided access to workers through their employers to prevent a similar situation.
9 For instance, my involvement in an international romantic relationship was sometimes summoned to bring attention to the emotional burdens of their long-distance marriages or motherhoods.
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I also conducted seven semi-structured interviews with employers of domestic care workers, generally in their houses and ranging from one to two hours. By employers I mean the female family members (often daughters, mother and nieces) who hire the care worker and organise the different aspects to the job conditions and their relationship with the recipients of care (i.e. parents, children). They are all either married or divorced, and had children or grandchildren. Two of them had employed a childcare worker and the rest elderly carers, all of them Latin American. Some complemented the domestic tasks with a migrant limpiadora (female cleaner). Their ages ranged from 30 to 60, and they all held stable jobs with a good salary. In only two of the cases I interviewed both workers and employers of the same household, and during the elaboration of the thesis I ensured no biographic details can be traced back to either party.
Participant-observation was possible in two homes where a care worker was employed as a live-in cuidadora (elderly carer) to care for an older woman in her late eighties who suffered dementia and mobility problems. In a couple of weekly visits of two hours each, I would conduct different memory-training activities with the recipient of care in their home’s living room. The initial aim was to collect data on the interaction between them and their care providers through interviews and observation, and although I tried to be always clear about these interests I could not ensure they understood the implications of the research and confirmed their consent (Jokinen et al., 2002). Because of the ethical implications of the research, I decided to neglect the care recipient’s direct testimonies and concentrate instead where their witness was not central. It proved to be surprisingly easy, as their voice barely mattered in most of the decisions taken regarding the caring activities. Although their opinions concerning some aspects of care work were often strongly voiced, they were disregarded as irrational actors by the rest of the family members and some of the care providers, appealing to their decaying mental condition.
Through careful assessment with them and their family members, we agreed their presence in this thesis would be limited to my own observations, but their opinions and conversations will not be reflected. I am aware that by ignoring their voice I am reproducing their invisibility, but also reflecting the important role of the employer in defining the conditions of care work. Participant-observation in care work was therefore not the fruitful method that I initially designed, but it also provided access to the care worker’s daily routines. Instead of a recorder, I kept track of my observations through a notebook.
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Finally, I interviewed workers in 15 different private employment agencies. Although the initial aim was to gain access to households where a care worker was employed, such interviews also helped to direct my initial interest towards specific topics (see introduction above). Furthermore, I also conducted participant observation in the waiting rooms of agencies and during some employment interviews10.
Since some of the information I gathered might make reference to conflicting interests between worker and employer, I tried to ensure the anonymity of each informant in the elaboration of the analysis through the use of pseudonyms, and conceal irrelevant biographical information after discussing it with the participant. In the case of care workers, many insisted in keeping their names and experiences. During the latest stages of the thesis I was able to contact them and carefully evaluate together which aspects should be censured.
Outline
The following chapter is an introduction to the commodification of care work by focusing on the politics of intimacy and power in paid caring relations. Regarding the central question, it addresses the relationship between wage labour and emotional attachment and pays attention to paradoxes and affective ambiguities emerging from the relationships between care workers with care recipients and employers. I structure this chapter around Luz’s and other cases, where I join excerpts of interviews and informal conversations with workers, their family and friends, employers, recipients of care and agency workers. The aim is to create a narrative collecting different voices and perspectives. I legitimate the deployment of this stylistic form to highlight the ‘fictional’ character of ethnographic writing (Clifford & Marcus, 1986).
Chapter 3 draws from the ambiguities identified above to study in more detail employers’ demand for love and affection (cariño) from the worker. In this chapter I tackle affective language more directly as the locus where this commitment is monitored, and I address it as a commodified asset. Finally, I analyse employers’ insistence on paid carers’ authentic emotional stances and a tendency to consider them natural and uncorrupted by employment requisites.
The fourth chapter takes a step further and proposes an analysis of the circulating ideologies that regiment and legitimise the abject value of migrant domestic work. I take
10 Research activities also included interviews with two teachers in a foundation that provided official formation in domestic care, but this data has not been added to the thesis.
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Latin American home care workers’ different forms of felt and lived invisibility as underlying patterns rather than idiosyncrasies. Moreover, I propose how the link between language and emotion intersects with and reproduces ideas of femininity and colonial subjects. Whereas in the previous chapter the role of language is evaluated in the micropolitics of home care, the final pages are devoted in defining it as the justification of female Latin American care workers’ position in work and society.
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Chapter 2. The Purchase of a family member
Preface: On cariño
Throughout the thesis I use the the Spanish word cariño untranslated not to obscure its different shades of meaning, of interest for the overall arguments of this research. Its most direct translation to English would be “affection”, “love” or “fondness” towards someone or something.
Cariño as a noun refers to something measurable and exchangeable. One can give (dar), receive (recibir), lack (faltar) cariño, as well as have (tener) and feel (sentir) cariño towards someone or something. Something done or made with cariño means loving feelings and motivation attached to a task, whereas taking cariño of someone or something (tomar/coger) describes becoming fond or attached to them.
Cariño can be infused into words and gestures that carry an affectionate meaning, and it can be shown but also felt. When a person is cariñosa or cariñoso (f/m) it can both mean they show love (expressing affection) and that they are caring (thoughtful, kind), the latter rooted in the person’s personality or essence. Furthermore, cariño can also be used as an informal appellative for a loved one (similar to ‘darling’ or ‘honey’), and even to describe tender caressing (dar cariños) or a present done in intimacy.
My knowledge on the concept and its use comes from personal experience as a native speaker of Spanish, but also the contexts in which the word was explicitly used during the fieldwork as it will be seen in the following chapters.
I also want to argue that the use of the word as substance is harmonious with the language of commodified goods and services, as cariño can be measured and distributed, and also its ‘carriers’ (cariñoso/a).
Introduction: Luz and Don Miquel
Luz left Honduras in 2007, the day her daughter turned ten months old. Her brother’s sister had called from Spain, a country many neighbours were now living in, because she found a job for a live-in care worker. Luz was not excited with the idea of leaving her son and daughter behind, but her parents and husband agreed to the benefits of a new income – after
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all, it was the best opportunity for a housewife like her. A week later11 she was hugging goodbye to her children in her parent’s house, who would now raise them. As she was flying the 9000 kilometres between her family and her new home, she realised she did not know much about that job. “Caring for an old man,” she wondered, “will it be like when I helped my poor blind grandmother as a child?” She was 28, and it was the first time she left Honduras.
*****
Once they both retired, Miquel and Lluïsa bought a house in a village close to Girona, in Catalonia. It had two floors and a small garden, but what they liked the most was the three bedrooms where they could welcome their two sons and their families when they visited from Barcelona. Lluïsa had been working as a secretary in a national press company on the same floor as Miquel, a chief engineer. When they married she kept the job, and this allowed them to save for their retirement.
At the turn of the century, she started developing severe Parkinson. They refused to take outside help, and during the last five years of illness it was Miquel who took constant care of her at home as she gradually lost independence. She passed away in 2007. At 92, Miquel found himself confronted with a big, empty house and a beginning of dementia. His two sons lived in Barcelona, an hour and a half from him, and were attentive to his wish not to leave his home. Encouraged by his lifetime savings, they started asking different friends about an available cuidadora to come to live with him. A week later, they were picking Luz up from the airport and driving her directly to her new home. In the car they let her know she would get paid 1000€ a month, cash and without a contract, and she could eat the same as Don Miquel12 as long as she cooked it. Her main job, they told her, was to “keep their father happy” and the house clean.
From her arrival, Luz did not leave the house for a month and a half. She simply did not know if she could do so, or when. The little she knew about having a job was that it implied working hours, yet Don Miquel’s sons told her they “did not want that kind of relationship.” Day and night, from Monday to Sunday, Luz was expected to be with Don Miquel, indoors. The last day of the week, if Don Miquel’s sons would come to visit, she would be free from 9
11 Luz left to Europe with a tourist visa, which is improbable to get in a week’s notice. However, this is how it was narrated, arguably from an apparent motivation to dramatize the sudden departure.
12 Whenever possible, I refer to the care recipients and employers by the same forms of address workers use. Older adults were usually addressed by distinction titles and their first names (e.g. Don/Doña; Señor/Señora), and employers and care workers by their first names. Preserving this terms provides information about expected hierarchical distinctions.
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to 1713. She was nonetheless terrified of being found by the police as an illegal worker even though she had a tourist visa for the first three months, so she stayed in even during her free time. Soon enough living became synonymous for working in Luz’s eyes.
Her tasks in the house were also hard to tell, as she did not understand what exactly the employers expected of her. Don Miquel treated her with consideration, almost as a long-term guest. Used to caring for his wife in the terminal stage of her disease and often confused by developing dementia, he would prepare breakfast for Luz and make her bed every morning. At first he had no problems walking or dealing with his daily hygiene, and the supermarket would bring them the groceries that he would order weekly on the phone. Luz decided to focus her daily tasks on cleaning the house and cooking for both of them, often with Don Miquel’s help. Strangely, she was getting paid for basically what she had been doing for free back in Honduras. Moreover, it was the first time she lived with somebody who was not her close family, as she married and moved with her husband at the age of nineteen.
It was not until one of his weekend family visits that one of the sons realised the relationship between Luz and Don Miquel was not developing as they expected: They were happy about her being cariñosa (affectionate, loving) and attentive, but Don Miquel was doing half the work she was being paid for! His sons sent to the house one of the granddaughters, aged seventeen, to help them both understand: “She is not your wife; she is the one helping you,” she reminded Don Miquel, “more like the daughter you never had.” They all laughed, and Don Miquel made an effort to comprehend the new situation. Little by little, and as his illness stressed his dependence, he started giving in to Luz taking care of everything in the house. He needed her assistance in the shower, getting out of bed, walking around, and finally using the bathroom. Soon she became regarded as one more in the family, both by himself and by his sons.
The case of Luz and Don Miquel is not unusual. They conform, like many others, a relationship between two individuals who had no previous knowledge of each other nor mutual obligations. They are complete strangers, and neither of them is entirely sure of what to do with the other. Luz is unaccustomed to domestic work being paid for and is unaware of her responsibilities. For Don Miquel, she inherits his late wife’s position following from the politics of the previous intimate environment.
In this chapter I explore different aspects of the commodification of care work as they arise from the ambiguities in “the tension between the affective relations of the private and the
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instrumental relations of employment” (Anderson 2000: 122). In one sense, a domestic worker is situated in a higher level of moral responsibility, often through explicit terms of familiarity. Luz being referred to as a member of the family by Don Miquel and his sons implies a special relationship that transcends a ‘simple bond’ of employment in which labour is merely a commodity. It expresses the access into a network of affective links, rights and obligations. Notice nonetheless how at the same time, aspects of their relationship that refer directly to an employment context and thus objectify the caring tasks are subtly dealt with, as if concealed: Luz’s employers do not want her to have explicit working hours, i.e. limits between job and leisure. Furthermore, they send a less threatening presence (a teenager) to mediate the very definition of the paid activities in the home. Such preoccupation points to another aspect of familiarising their relationship, which involves obscuring the logics of employment and the hierarchical relationships behind it. Although legitimised through (new) affective links, Luz’s position is evidently not built on even grounds. After all, Don Miquel’s attempt to share the domestic tasks, including caring for Luz, is deemed out of place by his sons and granddaughter, even when it might reproduce a sense of maintained personhood and independence initially pursued by appealing to home care (Angus et al., 2005; Buch, 2015b).
The following sections deal with different implications in purchasing the services of care. I will start by analysing two aspects of the relationship between wage workers and employing family: the circulation of goods between worker and the host family, and the language used in their communicative behaviour. These are interesting topics not only because workers reported them with acute importance, but because they exemplify the tension between the moral aspects of familial links and the power hierarchies of employment relationships. I argue that these ambiguities give space to the reproduction and legitimacy of exploitative relationships in the household, the focus of the second part of the chapter.
Goods
Gifts
Gifts are of particular importance in this analysis as they are great carriers of symbolic meaning (Mauss, 1967). Along with the monthly wages, some families give regular presents to their workers in the form of clothes, toys, cutlery, furniture or leftover food, either to keep or to send home. Several weeks after Luz arrived at Don Miquel’s house, for instance, she was offered some of the clothes previously worn by Lluïsa, his recently deceased wife. Don
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Miquel’s daughters-in-law had already chosen the clothes they wanted for themselves, but Luz managed to find some dresses and shoes that would fit his mother and aunts in Honduras. Some authors have insisted on analysing the rationale behind gift-giving in the context of domestic workers. Cancelmo & Bandini (1999) define them as ‘unofficial’ salaries that help sustain the kinship-like ties or indeed create them. Following the same line, Buch argues care recipients in particular engage in gift-giving to “sustain their personhood in potentially objectifying care”, in an effort to resist the commodification of familial labour (2014: 600). These interpretations work through a definition of care as an intersubjective relation (Mol, 2008), coherent with the dimension of “care as kinship” (Drotbohm & Alber, 2015). Indeed, many employers illustrated during interviews their good terms with the workers by listing the last gifts they had sent to them14.
However, and although they do participate in the moral logics of the household, an analysis of gifts should also reflect the pragmatic operations of power and hierarchical relationships. In that sense and in the context of Latin America, Chaney & Castro (1993) read donations as employers’ way to supplement part of the wage paid to the worker. Brites goes further to interpret them as “patrimonial heritage… a communication system in which, besides material things, social meanings are transmitted” (2014: 67; following Douglas & Isherwood, 1996). It is very exceptional that these presents consist of newly bought goods, with strong emotional significance or of any current use to the employers: Luz had received toys that Don Miquel’s teen grandchildren were not playing anymore with, and clothes that belonged to a deceased person. Objects, in other words, that were otherwise going to be sent to a second-hand charity. Luz did not ‘inherit,' for instance, Lluïsa’s wedding dress, which traveled from a dusty wardrobe in Don Miquel’s house to a rental storage box in the outskirts owned by his sons. Neither was she offered Don Miquel’s collection of stamps once he passed away some years ago; instead, his sons offered it to a second cousin’s daughter in France. Following Mauss’ theory (1967), the gift given to the care worker can serve as a signifier of the donor’s excellence over the recipient. Brites interprets them as ‘reminders’ that “the person who gives away second-hand things has a higher standing in the hierarchy,” and their recipients are rendered “second-class people” (2014: 67). Not only that, but it subtly
14 Other presents were involved in their relationships, like free days or cash tips. Employers never referred to them a moral acts of familiar relations, perhaps as they reflected quite directly a professional relationship. In other cases employers and their family members provided services for the workers like help with legal matters or finding jobs for fellow migrants.
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contradicts the claims of the worker belonging to family logics as she does not participate into ‘meaningful’ links of reciprocity (Sahlins, 1972).
Workers also collaborate in similar gift exchanges, as it is often a way to prove their labour is motivated “by moral rather than mercenary commitments” (Buch, 2014: 612). Although when inverted, the parallel form and quality of the gifts are telling: after receiving leftovers every day in one of the houses Yanet worked for a salary as a live-out, she brought that family presents from her visit to her native Cuba. These were first-quality rum bottles, superior cane sugar, and academic books on local politics, altogether costing almost one month worth of salary. In her view, the idea of having brought something less expensive “did not even cross my mind”, since she wanted them to know she “really valued them… as a family”. It is also telling that her presents were strongly connected to her place of origin, whereas the items the workers receive had a more generic nature.
Furthermore, when workers are instead receivers of gifts of high emotional or monetary value for the family, this is easily problematized in the discourse of both workers and employers. In fact, I often came across circulating stories of innocent care recipients that were excessively generous and naively gave too much to their Latin American carers. In all these stories the employer was usually far away (Australia or the USA) and could not avoid the undue influence of the worker on the vulnerable old person. The story would usually end with the worker inheriting the house or the whole family’s fortune, eventually bringing their own husband, parents and children from their original countries to live in the house. If the recipient of care was still alive, she was kicked out.
I want to take these widely shared stories by workers and employers alike, always referring to an anonymous case, as cautionary tales on the appropriate limits of gifts and reflecting ‘moral panics’ (Cohen, 1980) on their potential consequences. In that sense, “too much intimate attention constitutes suspicious abuse of the relationship” (Zelizer, 2005: 160), particularly since the recipient’s attachment can culminate into economic retributions in the forms of inheritance. In these narrations, migrant care workers are described as ‘scheming opportunists’, and older adults who receive care as potentially taken advantage of. Indeed, just as Buch explores in Chicago, such depiction “occludes the ways in which workers are also deeply vulnerable and systematically taken advantage of by the structures of home care and inequality” (2014: 612). Moreover, the narration reminds of the existence of other threatening interests beyond the wellbeing of the recipient of care: they have a real family ultimately to pay loyalty to.
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Stealing
Another aspect of the ambivalent character of goods in the household is not only their voluntary transmission but their unexpected absence. Julia can refer to plenty of situations where the care recipient’s family would come to her explaining some jewels “were lost.” In two specific cases, they asked her if she had “by mistake, taken any of them with her.” She is aware they are often insinuations of her having stolen them, yet the ring or collar will appear in the señora’s pocket or lost drawer after hours of looking. Resembling situations happened with other workers and families, especially when dealing with female recipients of care who had daily interaction with their jewels15.
It is interesting to realise the subtlety in which these situations are always handled: Julia is aware her employers are in fact potentially accusing her when they are just letting her know something is missing, yet it never goes that far. In the Brazilian context, Kofes (1991) suggests the direct accusation of theft against domestic workers would have the symbolic effect of removing her from the family relations. A way of interpreting the subtlety with which they are all dealt with might point at the reluctance of employers to explicitly summon relations that escape the kinship links of trust. Furthermore, Brites understands the automatic blaming of the domestic worker as a result of “a tacit acknowledgement of the extreme inequality that separates domestic workers from employers” (2014: 68). After all, none of the cases involved police intervention or firing the employee. Some employers even reported to me being quite sure their Latin American cuidadora or niñera had stolen from them at some point, yet they continued to be working in the house.
These two examples have served to illustrate the vague delicate position of the worker between engaging (and being engaged) in moral and hierarchical relationships. Although framed through familial, informal links, presents carry a strong meaning of power and worth. At the same time, stealing accusations point at the worker’s tacit ‘distance’ while it is dealt subtly not to disrupt the ‘fantasy’ of a relationship based on affect.
15 Yanet’s case is particularly ironic as her employers asked her to find a missing earring around the house. Aware that she would be considered guilty if she did not find it, she desperately checked everywhere – even in the toilet’s water, where she found it had fallen from her señora’s earring. To acknowledge her concern, the employers agreed to give the earrings to her as gift once the señora passed away. Yanet remembers events with stressing the irony: from a sign of insulting distrust bathed in sewage waters, the earrings were then ‘forced’ into an aura of gratefulness and amiability. They have been lying in a drawer for years.
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The language of the family
Virtually all of the employing families of care workers that I interviewed were in fact bilingual with Catalan as the language they used to communicate with most family members and with me. In fact, its use was strongly attached to the politics of the private home. Señora Montserrat, while giving me a tour around her house, proudly pointed out how those walls had only heard Catalan being spoken since her parents moved in in 193216. María, a monolingual Spanish speaker from Colombian origin, presented a clear challenge to the linguistic history of the place when she established herself in one of the rooms three years ago. Luz’s case was similar, and it took her weeks to understand that the reason she could not understand Don Miquel speaking with his sons was, because it was a different language called Catalan.
A common trend is that care recipients and families (employers) switch to Spanish when talking to the house’s care workers. An interesting example is Alberta’s clumsy attempts to speak the Catalan she picked up from listening to her 89-year-old señora and her two daughters, which are rapidly appreciated yet discouraged by them: “Don’t worry, you are not from here! Of course you do not have to speak the language, you are from Honduras”, they often reply in Spanish. In such case, the worker’s clear interest in speaking the same language as the rest of the family is disregarded as she is not considered a legitimate user of it (Bourdieu, 1977).
It is true that not all the workers had an interest in speaking the language, and that the employers’ ‘accommodation norm’ (Woolard, 1989) was sometimes positively interpreted. However, it has to be taken into account that real kinship did communicate in Catalan, and that frustrating the worker’s attempts to speak the language can be read as indeed symbolically separating them from the familial core. Piller and Pavlenko (2009) speculate on how a limited or non-existent proficiency in the language or variety spoken by the employer may create ‘the pretence of distance’ between the foreign newcomer and those inhabiting the intimate, familiar environment. At the same time, the lack of linguistic skills might help rationalise the domestic worker’s inferiority, maintaining their unequal status. Aina, an employer introduced before, interprets her workers’ poor Catalan skills:
16 Such claims gain even more political force considering the Catalan language was banned from public institutions during the Franco dictatorial regime (1939-1974).
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(1) “I think they… It isn’t only that they lack the minimal interest to learn our language and our tradition. I mean… In eight, nine years… Even the least interested will pick up some words. (laughs) I think they just don’t have their minds trained for it, do you know what I mean? You can be as good cuidadora as you want, but to learn a language you need… You need to be a bit brighter, I think.” (Aina, Barcelona)
Aina makes sense of her workers not learning Catalan beyond their ‘desire’ to do so (Cameron & Kulick, 2003), focusing instead on their education and intelligence. It resonates with what England and Stiell (1997) found in Canada, especially a particular research participant who expresses her employers “think you are as stupid as your English is”17.
Finally, I should highlight that the three workers who claimed to speak Catalan with the care recipients and employers regularly were also the ones who celebrated enjoying the most horizontal relationships with them. Before switching to cleaning, Olga had been working for three years with an elderly lady in her early nineties. Although she started referring to her in Spanish the first year, Olga soon started answering in the proficiency of Catalan she picked up from the hours and hours of Catalan TV soap opera they would watch together. Olga describes their relationship with passion:
(2) “I was an externa [live-out], but it was always a pleasure to go back with her… She would always ask about… about myself, about my day. She was always very concerned about how I felt, and so were her children. They were calling every day more to ask how I was than to know about their mother!” (Olga, Peru-Barcelona). I have not found enough evidence to claim the positive terms of their relationship –compared to other cases- are because of their proficiency of Catalan. In fact, perhaps the relationship is inverted, and their good terms motivated the worker’s ‘accommodation’ (Giles et al., 1991). Either way, it is a correlation worth noticing and deserves future analysis.
To sum up, what language choice in the household seems to point at is that employers’ reluctance to include workers into the same language of the family not only obstructs their integration into kin relations but also legitimises the already existing hierarchical positions.
These two sections have served as illustrations of the waged care provider’s position between power and moral relationships. They should not be taken as an exhaustive account of
17 Think also about the famous example of Manuel’s character (Andrew Sachs) in the popular BBC TV sitcom
Fawlty Towers (1975-1979). Being a Spanish immigrant working as a hotel assistant, Manuel’s lack of
knowledge of the English language helps portraying his image as clumsy and unintelligent, and it often triggers his boss’ verbal and physical abuse. The role of the language barrier is so important for the character that for the show’s Spanish dub his nationality switches to Italian - with the name of Paolo.
