Who Takes Care of the Nanny’s Kids?

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/article/179619/who-takes-care-nannys-kids



Blanca waits for Guido in the metallic airport lounge. When would he come? An hour passes. Then another. Blanca makes three different trips to the arrival board, ticking off the flights. She checks her texts again and again. Is her son here? She taps a note in Spanish to her best friend Gloria, who has accompanied Guido on the fourteen-hour flight from Paraguay. In response, silence.

Blanca must wait. But she is used to waiting. It has been ten years since she lived in Paraguay with Guido, who is now 11 years old. Now 44, she left him when she was in her early 30s and has supported him and her 90-year-old mother ever since then with her wages in America. When she left, Guido resembled the chubby toddler with thick little legs whom she nannies in Manhattan.

“Estoy nerviosa,” says Blanca. Finally, the tension breaks as she gets a text. They have landed. “That means they are in immigration. So close, so very close.”

As a working mother who lives across the globe from her child, Blanca is far from alone. Academics describe such arrangements as links in the “global care chain.” At one end of the chain is a woman in a developed country. She gets a job and is unable to take care of her children full time. She hires a low-wage worker from overseas. These immigrant nannies, in turn, hire even-lower-wage caretakers back home. The monetary value of women’s labor declines as one follows the chain from Global North to Global South. The chain works by separating wage earners from their dependents. University researchers studying Latina immigrants in Los Angeles estimated that 24 percent of housekeepers and 82 percent of live-in nannies have left kids behind. For Blanca, this presents a terrible choice: the price of getting her son back is substituting his middle-class life in Paraguay for poverty in America.

[Dorian Gray]

1. It's interesting

I have a regular sitter/nanny for my daughter. Her children are adult and live in Brooklyn near her. I don't see this type of situation very much here in Brooklyn. But when I lived in Hong Kong, years ago, the majority of the house keepers and nannies were Philippina. They often had left their families behind while living in a new city with the family they were working. It was a whole other arrangement, and I can't imagine how difficult it would be to leave your family behind to ensure you had money to take care of them.