Filming the Care Chain: A Review Essay
In Chain of Love, a documentary film about Filipina domestic
workers in Europe, Belen looks somberly at the camera as she discusses
her decision to leave her home and her young son to find work in
Europe.[1]
She comments, "[I]t is hard here because I left my
six-month-old baby behind to look after other children. But I had to do
it for everyone, not just for myself. I had to put my feelings aside
for them. I gave the love I felt for my own baby to the child here." A
wry expression appears on her face as she struggles not to cry,
powerfully conveying the affective complexities for transnational
migrants seeking financial resources abroad for themselves and often for
families left behind. In conjunction with a growing transnational
workers' rights movement and scholarly attention to the gender
inequities of globalization, recent documentary films such as Chain
of Love are contributing to a greater awareness of how poor women of
color are faring in contemporary global economies. These films pay
particular attention to the social and affective impact of the chain of
care, which immigration scholars define as the system of caretaking
whereby migrants who leave home to work as domestics in other countries
depend on family members or other domestic workers to care for their own
families.[2]
Documentary filmmakers seeking to portray the experiences of
transnational domestic workers, many of whom face legal vulnerabilities
as undocumented migrants, confront a familiar conundrum of whether to
foreground women's victimization or their self-empowerment. Although
all of the films reviewed here provide insight into the range of
domestics' experiences, some more intentionally examine the exploitative
work conditions for poor, and often quite young, women. Vulnerabilities
resulting from the invisibility of domestic work are compounded for
migrants who face language barriers, uncertain legal status, and
dependency on employers or other powerbrokers. Contrasting this
perspective are films that emphasize workers' fortitude and
determination to create a better life despite these challenges. We can
best understand these representational strategies as different tactics
within a feminist politics of visibility, rather than as ideological
differences between the films. Such strategic emphases, however, risk
filmic representations that reinscribe western racial narratives about
Third World women, as well as reproduce heteronormative logics about
gender, mothering, and caregiving practices.
Maid in Lebanon is a particularly effective example of a film
that investigates the exploitative and abusive aspects of migrant
domestic work.[3]
At the outset, the narrative signals the social
conditions of transnational mobility by following one woman's journey
from rural poverty in Sri Lanka to the affluent streets of urban Beirut.
The film then features interviews with employment agencies and
domestics who tell of a range of experiences, from supportive employers
to stories of sexual and physical abuse. The narrative then expands to
address the widespread occurrences of employers' abusive treatment of
domestic workers throughout the region. Maid in Lebanon
concludes with a call for greater international cooperation between
nations to enforce better conditions for domestic workers. Films like
Maid in Lebanon serve an important advocacy agenda by exposing
these highly exploitative gendered labor
practices.[4] Visual and
narrative strategies, however, end up uncritically reproducing a
neoliberal rescue narrative about Third World women's victimization.
For instance, the visual emphasis in Maid in Lebanon on the
exoticism and poverty of rural Sri Lanka resonates problematically with
the ending image of a young woman optimistically preparing for her trip
to the Middle East. This narrative framing suggests that only
international intervention will protect these young women from continued
abuse and violence. Missing, though, is a broader socio-economic
perspective that could contextualize these transnational labor practices
as well as workers' own efforts to create better work conditions.
In contrast, Maid in America typifies films that emphasize
transnational stories of gender empowerment in the face of separation
from loved ones, long working hours, non-citizenship, and complex
emotional relationships with employers.[5]
The film portrays the work
conditions and affective responses of Telma, Judith, and Eva, three
Latina domestic workers in Los Angeles. Self-empowerment takes multiple
forms, from finding a positive work situation to participating in labor
activism. Eva, for instance, attends meetings
at CHIRLA
(Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles). She also
performs in a play produced by a domestic workers cooperative, designed to empower workers to
reject abuse by employers.
Beyond workplace empowerment, the film's attention to the emotional
lives of Eva, Telma, and Judith poignantly reveals some of the
complexities of migrant domestic work. For instance, Eva receives a hug
from her elderly employer when she arrives to clean her home. The older
white woman's loneliness, which appears mitigated by Eva's generous
caretaking, reverberates against a subsequent scene of Eva's sadness at
the news of her grandmother's recent death in Mexico. Similarly, at the
start of the film, Judith, who is pregnant with her fifth child and
lives with her husband in Los Angeles, expresses her anguish at being
separated from her other four children. Competing desires to improve
their lives and a longing for her absent children results in Judith's
decision to leave her husband and return to Guatemala with her infant
son. Visual contrasts between her living conditions in LA and the
impoverished housing in Guatemala foreground the complex reasonings and
excruciating choices immigrant women face. The focus on individual
experiences both enriches and limits the insights offered by this fine
film. For instance, Telma's close relationship with her employers and
their child, even participating in a big family gathering, provides
insight into her motivations, resisting a simplistic victim narrative.
At the same time, these personal stories do little to expose the
structural forces constraining these migrant women's options. This is
especially apparent in the context of a comment made by Telma's African
American employer that domestic work was a "stepping stone" for his
grandmother and other female relatives, and now for her. Despite the
film's stated critique of labor inequities and personal hardships, the
lack of attention to U.S. immigration politics and neoliberal economic
policies reshaping Central American economics leaves this narrative of
progress only partially critiqued.
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