Latina immigrant women who work as nannies or housekeepers and reside in Los Angeles while their children remain in their countries of origin constitute one variation in the organizational arrangements of motherhood. The authors call this arrangement “transnational motherhood.” On the basis of a survey, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic materials gathered in Los Angeles, they examine how Latina immigrant domestic workers transform the meanings of motherhood to accommodate these spatial and temporal separations. The article examines the emergent meanings of motherhood (...) and alternative child-rearing arrangements. It also discusses how the women view motherhood in relation to their employment, as well as their strategies for selectively developing emotional ties with their employers' children and for creating new rhetorics of mothering standards on the basis of what they view in their employers' homes. (shrink)

The social boundaries of citizenship involve relations of exclusion and inclusion within the global economy and specific nation-states. A case study of contemporary Canadian federal policy regarding the recruitment and regulation of foreign domestic workers reveals that, despite postwar trends toward liberalization of immigration policy and general advances made by Canadian workers, citizenship rights for third-world female domestics have declined. This apparently "anomalous" non-citizenship status can be better understood through an examination of the social relations and discourses that reproduce conditions (...) of bonded servitude for foreign domestics. It is argued that citizenship must be understood as a variable and unequal process shaped by global realities, state intervention, and racialized, gendered discourses. (shrink)