Conceptualizing the Latina Experience in Care Work

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.