MOTHERCOIN

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.