Conceptualizing the Latina Experience in Care Work

In this essay I compare and contrast the frameworks that social science researchers select for their analysis of Latina women employed in domestic service. Academics' approaches to labor and immigration relate to the ongoing debate over explaining the Latino population as an immigrant population - thus focusing on ethnicity, culture, assimilation, and acculturation - rather than racial conceptualizations that identify forms of domination, subordination, and privilege. One approach takes European immigration as the point of comparison; the other centers on the racialized experiences of non-whites, including Blacks, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans and American Indians, as their point of comparison. This essay investigates how each of these paradigms affects the theoretical understanding of Mexican American, Mexican, and Latina immigrant women employed as private household workers, nannies, caregivers and maids.