After more than one decade since the first massive influx of Albanian migrants in Greece started, their presence is now an unquestionable part of the contemporary Greek society. Out of models and issues of border control or of labor market, this paper will focus on relationships, as these are shaped in a specific context, in a social space and in a particular time period, revealing that migration is not a “faceless” and out of context phenomenon. In particular, this paper is about the relationship-and the social projections inherent in it-between the Albanian women working as domestic cleaners in Greece and the Greek women/housewives that employ them. Gendered and multiple divisions shape this relationship; today divisions of nation and citizenship are also increasingly salient. In many countries relationships between domestic employees and employers have been imbued with racial meanings: white “masters and mistresses” have been cast as pure and superior, and “maids and servants”, drawn from specific racial-ethnic groups, have been cast as dirty and socially inferior (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001: 13). Today this occupational racialization draws to a much greater extent on globalization and immigration–rather than on difference in race; paid domestic workers usually come from poor nations reflecting, thus, the subordination of nationality/immigration status.

In the present paper the place of the house is treated as the social conjuncture where the two groups meet and through every-day practices related to the organization and management of the domestic labor, old and new divisions according to gender, nationality and migrant status, are reinforced or renegotiated. Therefore, the place of the house, traditionally related to the private sphere, works as a microcosm to examine whether and how dominant concepts and discourses of the public sphere related to the migrants’ presence are reflected in the relationship between the Albanian woman and her Greek employer, also a woman. The two groups of women,