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| 103 5 “I Am Not Only a Domestic Worker; I Am a Woman” Immigrant Women and Domestic Service Sarla, an immigrant from Nepal who worked there as an accountant , spoke contemplatively of her entrance into domestic service through an unexpected route and the dilemmas and questions she faced after coming to the United States in 2003: What do I tell you? We got trapped coming here. Our name came in the diversity lottery. Everyone said we were lucky. We gave up our life there [in Nepal] and came [to the United States]. We never anticipated a life like this. It’s a result of our sins in a previous life! . . . Soon, the money we had brought almost finished. My husband was having difficulty finding work, children had to start school. . . . We were looking for odd jobs. My daughter looked up this job in the Indian newspaper . . . . After the interview, they [prospective employers] told me I had to live in. This was not mentioned in the advertisement. Had I known, I would not have applied. But they liked me for their child, so they said that if I stay during the week, I could go home on the weekend. I came home and told my family, . . . and my children said, “It is okay, take the job, we will manage.” It felt so wrong to me to leave my children and do child care. I was torn. But there was no option. . . . I had never thought I will become a domestic worker, but I said to myself, “I know how to do this work, and I will not let my family suffer.” So I took up the job. Bettina, who migrated from Argentina, reflected on the path that led her from her home to her life caring for children in a household in the United States: 104 | “I Am Not Only a Domestic Worker; I Am a Woman” The woman I used to work for in Buenos Aires had a brother in USA. When he got his second child, she wanted me to go there because they trusted me. The situation in Argentina was not good at the time. . . . I had worked for this family and knew them. So I agreed to come. He did not get a work contract; when I got the visa he said that he will get the work contract later, and it was very easy to get it. . . . He also promised to bring me back in a few months to visit Argentina. After reaching here, it took me two months to have any reaction. I had not called home for a month. . . . I don’t remember what happened in the first few weeks—there was so much work. . . . I just hit the ground, not like I got a day or two. I had to take care of the two children right away. . . . It wasn’t until a few weeks that I hadn’t looked into the mirror that I saw hair on my lips and my thick eyebrows—I was shocked to see myself. Like I didn’t care and gave myself up, like I was on autopilot or something. I just gave myself to work. . . . I came from a big city, but what made me nervous was that I didn’t know anything here, I could not speak English, did not understand anything. Bettina’s and Sarla’s narratives are reflections of the globalizing world where women are emerging as important economic players and where domestic service is evolving as a notable form of paid labor for women across national borders. Both of these women represent the everyday modes within which women face and challenge the structural impacts of global capitalism. In the context of the international migration of women, domestic service embodies intriguing contradictions. On one hand, it has been a propeller of the autonomous migration of women, as an occupational category whereby women become primary contributors to household and national incomes. These women who leave their families and the shores of their native countries are decision-makers, risk-takers, and entrepreneurs in their own right. Yet, on the other hand, this feminization of migration and women’s avatar as an economic entity is happening through women’s increasing participation in domestic service, a gendered occupation that, being labeled as woman’s work, undermines its economic value. The fact that domestic work is historically and traditionally characterized by notions of servility and subservience and is marked by its exclusion from the formal labor market in...

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