Publication Category: Care Work

When a mother works as a live-in domestic, who cares for her own children? Mary Romero’s investigation of this question reveals one of the most painful contradictions of paid care work: the women who nurture other people’s families often do so at the expense of their own. This article explores the hidden costs of domestic service borne by the workers’ children — costs that are invisible to employers and absent from economic calculations of the value of care.

Through interviews with domestic workers and their families, Romero documents the strategies mothers use to maintain bonds with their children despite long separations, the emotional toll on children who grow up in the shadow of their mother’s work, and the ways class and racial inequality are reproduced across generations through the organization of care.

The relationship between a domestic worker and her employer is unlike any other labor arrangement — it unfolds in the intimate space of the home, blurs the boundaries between personal and professional, and is structured by deep inequalities of race, class, and gender. In Sisterhood and Domestic Service, Mary Romero critically examines whether feminist solidarity can bridge the divide between women who hire domestic help and the women who perform it.

Drawing on interviews with Chicana domestic workers, Romero challenges the notion that shared gender identity creates meaningful bonds across the employer-employee relationship. Instead, she reveals how the mistress-maid dynamic reproduces racial and class hierarchies even within households that consider themselves progressive or feminist.

Published in Humanity and Society in 1988, this article was among the first to apply an intersectional lens to the politics of domestic labor, anticipating debates that would reshape feminist theory in the decades to come.

In this influential study, Mary Romero examines how Chicana domestic workers in the late twentieth century actively transformed the occupation of household labor. Rather than passively accepting the traditional mistress-maid relationship, these women renegotiated the terms of their employment — setting their own schedules, defining tasks, and establishing professional boundaries that challenged the deeply personal nature of domestic work.

Romero’s qualitative research reveals a process of modernization driven from below, as Chicana workers drew on cultural resources, community networks, and strategic agency to reshape domestic service from a feudal arrangement into something closer to a modern occupation with defined roles and expectations.

Published in Qualitative Sociology in 1988, this article helped establish Romero as a leading scholar of domestic labor and laid the groundwork for her landmark book Maid in the U.S.A.

Growing up as the daughter of a live-in domestic worker, the subject of this study occupied a unique position between two worlds — the affluent household where her mother worked and the working-class community where she was raised. Mary Romero’s ethnographic exploration of these everyday boundary crossings reveals how race, class, and gender are negotiated in the most intimate spaces of American life.

The article traces how a child learns to navigate radically different social worlds, developing a double consciousness born of daily immersion in privilege that is not her own. Through careful observation and narrative analysis, Romero illuminates the emotional labor, identity conflicts, and strategies of survival that define this experience.

This research laid the groundwork for Romero’s acclaimed book The Maid’s Daughter: Living Inside and Outside the American Dream (NYU Press, 2011).

* A longer version of this paper was originally published in DePaul Law Review 52, no. 3 (2003). •• Ph.D. en Sociología de University of Colorado, Estados Unidos. Profesora de Justice Studies en Arizona State University, Estados Unidos. Correo electrónico: nnary.romero@asu.edu

Nanny Diaries and Other Stories: Immigrant Women's Labor in the Social Reproduction of American Families Mary Romero

Wanted: One young woman to take care of four-year-old boy. Must be cheerful, enthusiastic, and selfless—bordering on masochistic. Must relish sixteen-hour shifts with a deliberately nap-deprived preschocler. Must love getting thrown up on, literally and figuratively, by everyone in his family. Must enjoy the delicious anticipation ofridiculously erratic pay. Mostly, must love being treated like fungus found growing out of employer's Hermes hag. Those who take it personaïïy need not apply (McLaughlin and Kraus 2002, back cover)

Care work performed by Latina immigrants occupies a distinctive position within the American economy — essential yet invisible, intimate yet devalued, shaped by intersecting structures of race, gender, class, and citizenship. In this chapter from the Blackwell Companion to Latino Studies, Mary Romero develops a conceptual framework for understanding the Latina experience in care work that accounts for these multiple dimensions of inequality.

Romero examines how Latina domestic workers and caregivers navigate employment relationships that are structured by immigration status, language barriers, and racial stereotypes, as well as by the deeply personal nature of work performed in private households. The analysis reveals how the devaluation of care work is not simply an economic phenomenon but a cultural and political one, rooted in historical patterns of racial servitude and gendered labor.

The chapter draws on Romero’s decades of research with domestic workers to argue that understanding the Latina care work experience requires an intersectional approach that goes beyond single-axis analyses of either gender or race alone.

An analysis of the international division of reproductive labor is incomplete without acknowledging

Over the past decade, social science researchers in the area of feminism, labor, immigration, and family have written extensively on the care work crisis and globalized