Hernan Ramirez

Masculinity in the Workplace: The Case of Mexican Immigrant Gardeners

In many parts of the United States, jardinería, or suburban maintenance gardening, has become a gendered occupational niche for Mexican immigrant men. Based on participant observation research with a group of Mexican immigrant gardeners in Los Angeles, this article examines the construction of masculinity in a workplace occupied by Mexican immigrant men. These jardineros construct, affirm, challenge, and negotiate their masculinity through their routine work activities and through their daily on-the-job interactions with their fellow workers. Moving beyond a sort of reiteration of a flat, cultural concept of machismo, jardinero masculinity stresses a more nuanced structural understanding of Mexican immigrant men’s masculinity and how it is intertwined with their performance of masculinized ‘‘dirty work’’ in private households. It is a distinctly working-class form of masculinity, which results from the interplay between very specific, localized cultural constructions, and deployment in the context of racialized nativism and citizenship hierarchy in the United States.

Connecting Men in the International Division of Domestic Work: The New ‘Father Time-Bind’, Global Divisions between Men and Gender Inequalities

While the supply of appropriate migrants to work as handymen and gardeners in the UK and USA represents one side of an international division in male domestic labour, demand on the part of households for commoditized male domestic services represents the other. The current chapter explores this dimension by drawing on the interviews we conducted with households that buy in help for stereotypically masculine jobs on a repeated basis in the UK, mainly in London. Pahl (1984) has argued that for any one household, the patterns and rationale of self-provisioning and outsourcing are dynamic, shifting as households move through the ‘domestic lifecycle’. We focus on just one stage of the domestic lifecycle — the childrearing phase — and within this on one type of household — those with a resident father. Such households consisting of dependent children and a resident father are among the most likely in the UK to outsource male domestic work (Kilkey and Perrons, 2010), and so represent a numerically important focus.1

Mexican Gardeners in the USA

Today, visitors to Los Angeles and to other leafy suburban residential neighbourhoods in California are greeted by visual panoramas of pristinely manicured lawns and the constant hum of machinery, as gas-powered blowers, mowers, and trimmers are used to prune, manage, and manicure foliage and dispose of debris around private homes. Not long ago, mowing the front lawn was a weekly chore performed without pay by the man of the house, or by a teenage son who might have received a modest allowance for the task. The family man mowing the lawn was an iconic American image seen in scores of television shows and American front lawns on Saturday afternoons. Today it is rare to see male homeowners or family members mowing or raking their lawns in the middle class neighbourhoods of California. Unpaid male family labour has been replaced by Latino immigrant jardineros, who work six days a week, and often, on Sundays too. Gardening is the masculine counterpart of interior domestic work. Latino immigrant men, most of them from Mexico, now prevail in the occupational niche of suburban maintenance gardening.

Gender Identity and Work: Migrant Domestic Work and Masculinity

Owing to its growing scale and association with various forms of exploitation and harassment, feminist analysts have focused on women working in stereotypically feminized forms of domestic work such as cleaning, caring and catering. The focus on male migrant domestic workers raises interesting parallels, but also highlights key differences. These differences have significance for understanding how the processes of globalization, migration and social reproduction are gendered, how they manifest themselves in daily life, and, in particular, on the way that varying normative gendered expectations shape decisions people make about what work to do and what work to outsource to others. Gendered social norms also shape the economic and social status of occupations, and thereby structure the well-being and opportunities of both migrant domestic workers and the people for whom they work. These norms and practices are neither uniform nor static. Rather, they change over time and space and vary by social identity, level of economic development, migration legislation and citizenship regimes, rendering specific understandings and outcomes contingent and varied. What becomes clear, however, is that while the way that ‘gender matters in a particular location … is variable and contingent’, the fact ‘that gender matters is not’ (Bair, 2010: 204).

Globalization, Migration and Domestic Work: Gendering the Debate

Our concern in this book is with the commoditization of male domestic work. We situate this process within the wider phenomenon of households’ outsourcing of social reproductive labour, an increase in which, alongside other aspects of personal and intimate life, is a marker of late capitalist service economies. In doing so, this book builds on the rich body of feminist scholarship that has examined the economic, social and cultural dynamics and consequences of the contemporary commoditization of ‘female’ areas of social reproductive labour, namely cleaning, cooking and care-giving — areas which in terms of time commitment account for the bulk of domestic work undertaken in households.1

Researching Men in the Relationship between Gender, Migration and Domestic Work

In this book, we bring together two separate but interrelated studies about the relationship between gender, migration and domestic work in the UK and the USA. A transnational comparative approach was not built into our respective research designs. Although we were aware of each others’ work, each project was conceived, planned and executed independently of the other. In the latter stages of research and analysis we realized that our transatlantic conversations generate additional insights both with respect to the substantive areas of men’s migration, work and care discussed throughout the book, and with regard to the research process — an issue taken up in this chapter. A close retrospective comparison of the two studies — grounded in different social, economic, and geopolitical contexts yet operating within similar neoliberal settings — offers a broader analytical outlook than each on its own. As a result, we carry out the discussion at two levels: at one, we reflexively engage with themes that emerged within and were distinct to each study; at the other, we pay attention to patterns of similarity and difference gleaned from the two cases.

Migrants and Male Domestic Work in the UK: The Rise of the ‘Polish Handyman’

In the first decade of the twenty-first century Polish migrant handymen in the UK and Mexican immigrant gardeners in the USA propelled the trends of globalization, migration and the outsourcing of social reproduction. In this regard, they reflect profound multi-level changes in social, economic and political spheres. Their micro level, individual and interpersonal decisions to move from comparatively less economically developed countries and regions to more affluent areas are motivated by a desire to attain a better life. This desire, centred on but not exclusive to work and employment, is the more poignant at a time when the notion of the good life is given considerable attention in the context of the financial and economic crisis originating in the finance centres in the UK and the USA, and against the background of growing inequalities in these and other countries.

Gender, Migration and Domestic Work: An Introduction

As the rich have got richer and households have become busier, demand for commoditized household services has risen, with the supply chain becoming increasingly transnational. The emergence of this international market in commoditized services is important for two reasons. First, it shows how reproduction, as well as production, has become part of the global economy. Second, it shows that individuals and households, as well as states and markets, both contribute to and are directly affected by the large-scale social processes of globalization, rising inequalities and migration that are characteristic of contemporary society. A wealth of literature has emerged on female maids and nannies, many of whom are migrants.1 In this book we consider a parallel trend — the re-emergence of male household workers, that is, men who are paid to do traditionally masculine domestic jobs in and around the houses and gardens of generally wealthier people.2 Many of these workers too are migrants, though the proportion of migrants in handyman work remains lower than the proportion of migrants among maids and nannies. Handyman work involves a wide range of small-scale jobs such as fixing shelves, decorating and small-scale repair on an occasional basis, while gardening can involve more regular work including lawn mowing and leaf blowing in extensive suburban gardens. This book investigates the experiences of suppliers and consumers of stereotypically masculine household services at the micro level, but, through its emphasis on contemporary masculinities and the gendering of paid work, the book contributes to wider-scale debates relating to globalization, migration and social reproduction.