Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo

Domestica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence

In this enlightening and timely work, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo highlights the voices, experiences, and views of Mexican and Central American women who care for other peoples children and homes, as well as the outlooks of the women who employ them in Los Angeles. The new preface looks at the current issues facing immigrant domestic workers in a global context.

OVERCOMING PATRIARCHAL CONSTRAINTS: The Reconstruction of Gender Relations Among Mexican Immigrant Women and Men

This article examines how gender shapes the migration and settlement experiences of Mexican immigrant women and men. The article compares the experiences of families in which the husbands departed prior to 1965 to those in which the husbands departed after 1965 and argues that the lengthy spousal separations altered (albeit differentially for each group) patterns of patriarchal authority and the traditional gendered household division of labor. This induced a trend toward more egalitarian conjugal relations upon settlement in the United States. Examining the changing contexts of migration illuminates the fluid character of patriarchys control in Mexican immigrant families.

Introduction Gender and Contemporary U.S. Immigration

This article discusses the trajectory of scholarship as it has moved from the “immigrant women only” approach, one closely aligned with sex-role theory, to one that examines both men and women as g...This article discusses the trajectory of scholarship as it has moved from the “immigrant women only” approach, one closely aligned with sex-role theory, to one that examines both men and women as gendered actors in migration and that recognizes key institutions as distinctively gendered. Early proclamations of immigrant womens emancipation have been reassessed, and the consequences of immigrant womens employment on gender equality in the family no longer seem as straightforward as they once did. New arenas, such as gendered transnational communities, the geographical and spatial contours of immigrant occupational sex segregation, and the inclusion of youth and children in gendered analysis of immigrant communities are also changing the landscape of the gender and immigration literature.

Regulating the Unregulated?: Domestic Workers' Social Networks

Drawing upon participant-observation and in-depth interviews, this article examines the responses of Mexican undocumented immigrant women to the organization of paid domestic labor as “job work,” where a domestic worker cleans house for many different employers on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Job work exacerbates the privatized nature of both the work itself and the negotiation of the employer-employee relationship, and it also confronts domestic workers with having to secure multiple employers. The women in this study dealt with these challenges by informally collectivizing and sharing information through social networks. What appears to be an extremely atomized labor relation for the domestic workers is in fact mitigated by a work culture transmitted through many social interactions. These network resources are both enabling and constraining.

Feminism and Migration

The second wave of U.S. feminism and the reconstitution of the United States as a country of immigration gained momentum in the 1970s. Recent manifestations of both feminism and immigration have left indelible changes on the social landscape, yet immigration and feminism are rarely coupled in popular discussion, social movements, or academic research. This article explores the articulations and disarticulations between immigration and feminism; it focuses particularly on the intersections of migration studies and feminist studies.

The Resources of Poverty: Women and Survival in a Mexican City.

1. The Resources of Poverty. Urban Households, Survival and Reproduction. 2. Guadalajara and Working-Class Households. Characteristics and Differences. 3. The Domestic Cycle. 4. Patterns of Consumption. 5. The Household: A Contradictory Unity. 6. Working-Class Women in Guadalajara. 7. Single-Parent Households. 8. The Penalties of Social Isolation. 9. Self-Construction, Self-Urbanization: Political Cooptation.

Dress Matters Change and Continuity in the Dress Practices of Bosnian Muslim Refugee Women

Dress serves as a discursive daily practice of gender, and this article explains the dress practices of Bosnian Muslim refugee women living in Vermont. These dress practices tend toward elaborate, carefully cultivated styles for hair, makeup, and dress. Based on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and secondary historical sources, the authors seek to explain the meanings and practice of these dress practices. They argue that gendered dress practices reflect agentic processes that are situated within the flow of time and are rooted in relational processes that occur at the macrostructural level of history and nation and at the micro world of social interaction and lived experience.

Intersectional Dignities: Latino Immigrant Street Vendor Youth in Los Angeles

In Los Angeles many Latino immigrants earn income through street vending, as do some of their teenagers and younger children. Members of their community and external authorities view these economic activities as deviant, low status, and illegal, and young people who engage in them are sometimes chased by the police and teased by their peers. Why do they consent to do this work, and how do they respond to the threats and taunts? Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with street vending children and teens, the authors argue that an intersectionalities perspective can help explain both why the youth engage in this work and how they construct narratives of intersectional dignities to counter experiences of shame, stigma, and humiliation with street vending. Intersectional dignities refers to moral constructions based on inversions of widely held negative stereotypes of racial ethnic minorities, the poor, immigrants, and in this case, children and girls who earn money in the streets. By analyzing how they counter stigma, one learns something about the structure of the broader society and the processes through which disparaged street vendor youth build affirming identities.

Beyond “the longer they stay” (and say they will stay): Women and Mexican immigrant settlement

While many Mexican undocumented immigrant families have become increasingly committed to building family and community life in the United States, the ways people make settlement happen has not received much attention in the literature. Based on ethnographic research conducted in a Mexican immigrant settlement community in California, this article looks at settlement processes by bringing women to the foreground. Putting women and their activities at the center of analysis highlights their contributions in three arenas that are key to settlement: creating patterns of permanent, year-round employment; provisioning resources for daily family maintenance and reproduction; and building community life.

Why Advocacy Research?: Reflections on Research and Activism with Immigrant Women

This article discusses some of the common problems that arise in fomenting participatory research, and proposes that some form of advocacy research may be a more accessible alternative. The advocacy research alternative is distinguished from the pure model of participatory research by several factors: 1) the people being studied do not control the research; 2) advocacy research recognizes that it is not always possible to know in advance precisely what research findings will in fact be “useful” as a tool of social change; and 3) advocacy research is realized through political action, but not necessarily in the same community in which the research was conducted. I discuss advocacy research by relating some of my research experiences in a Mexican undocumented immigrant community in northern California, and how I utilized some of the research materials in an outreach program aimed at Latina immigrant domestic workers in Los Angeles.