For this week’s reading response I am choosing to attend to Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo’s, “Maid in L.A.” and Lalaie Ameeriar’s, Downwardly Global: Women, Work, and Citizenship in the Pakistani Diaspora. Initially, I was particularly struck by the notion, in both texts, that the Latina women and the Pakistani women who arrived at the imperial core, the united states and canada, respectively, had never performed the jobs they were being expected to, and perhaps even trained/conditioned to, perform. In the instance of “Maid in L.A.,” Latina women emigrated to the united states to perform domestic work which Hondagneu-Sotelo clarifies is not monolithic and distinguishes the three common types of domestic work they performed: 1. Live-in nanny/housekeeper, 2. Live-out nanny/housekeeper, 3. Housecleaner (28). In Downwardly Global, Ameeriar clarifies that “despite having migrated as ‘skilled workers,’ most of [the Pakistani women] will never enter their chosen fields again” (1).
From these texts, and our class discussion, I was deeply compelled by the key words sanitized sensorium, affect/embodiment, and human capital and thought of the instances in my life where I’ve seen these phenomena in action. Personally, I thought of my own family members who have migrated from Central America to the united states and work in the service industry and have worked in the service industry since their arrival. For example, the first job my father held in the united states was as a busboy, then a waiter, and now he owns the same restaurant he started out as a busboy at. Many of my cousins work or have worked at this restaurant and my aunts that live in the united states work as maids at hotels. These texts made me reckon with the fact that my family in the united states must engage and perform both physical labor and affective labor. From my understanding, affective labor is work that intends to elicit emotional experiences in people. So, in the context of the service industry, I’ve seen my cousins and my father, firsthand, have to be ultra charismatic and attentive and create a sense of care and trust between them and their customers. Oftentimes servers will tell their customers, “My name is ___ and I will be taking care of you tonight.” Similarly, housekeepers and maids not only perform incredibly physically demanding and exhausting work, they do so so that your space is clean, therefore making you feel happy and at peace whether in your home or in a hotel.
Furthermore, I was particularly struck by the theorization of what Ameeriar calls the “sanitized sensorium” which they describe as a “means to understand the ways that foreign bodies become legible and recognizable through particular kinds of sensorial and affective registers. [It] signals the forms of embodiment (smell, appearance, and bodily comportment) necessary for inclusion in the public sphere of multicultural Toronto. The daily practices in agencies such as the one described above serve to construct a sanitized body, and sensory perception becomes a crucial means by which that body is judged” (3). Reading this prompted me to consider the ways this exists in my own city, which I would describe as multicultural and very liberal. Even outside of the context of labor, I’ve had friends tell me that my house has a distinct smell, and that my house always smells like Indian food because of the spices and ingredients my mom uses to cook. In the context of labor, I think about the fact that all my aunts who work as maids almost exclusively wear long skirts because of their faith and how they wear them to work as well. They haven’t adjusted their appearance and their bodily comportment that Ameeriar deems necessary for inclusion in the public sphere of our multicultural, metropolitan area. I wonder, what does it mean for my Central American aunts to not conform to the sanitized sensorium? What does this mean for them as physical and affective laborers? These are questions I hope to investigate further.
Moreover, I am also compelled by, from “Maid in L.A.,” the discussion of housekeepers and nannies’ bonding with the children of their employers. While in the conext of my family none of my relatives take care of other people’s children, I still consider how the labor they perform in the service industry has affected their own ability to spend time with their kids and their families, that they would have otherwise not had to deal with if they were employed in their birth countries. In addition, I wonder how the exhaustion from affective labor, and physical labor as well, has impacted my family member’s ability to express genuine care to their own children and relatives since they are so exhausted and drained.
Overall, I am really compelled by how these three phenomena interact with each other to reveal truths about the realities many immigrants who migrate to metropoles experience, including my family.
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