For María Gutierrez, who cares for the eight-month-old baby of two hardworking professionals (a lawyer and a doctor, born in the Philippines but now living in San Jose, California), loneliness and long work hours feed a love for her employers’ child. As Maria told me:
I love Ana more than my own two children. Yes, more! It’s strange, I know. But I have time to be with her. I’m paid. I am lonely here. I work ten hours a day, with one day off. I don’t know any neighbors on the block. And so this child gives me what I need.
Not only that, but she is able to provide her employer’s child with a different sort of attention and nurturance than she could deliver to her own children. ‘I’m more patient’, she explains, ‘more relaxed. I put the child first. My kids, I treated them the way my mother treated me’.
I asked her how her mother had treated her and she replied:
My mother grew up in a farming family. It was a hard life. My mother wasn’t warm to me. She didn’t touch me or say ‘I love you’. She didn’t think she should do that. Before I was born she had lost four babies—two in miscarriage and two died as babies. I think she was afraid to love me as a baby because she thought I might die too. Then she put me to work as a ‘little mother’ caring for my four younger brothers and sisters. I didn’t have time to play.
Fortunately, an older woman who lived next door took an affectionate interest in María, often feeding her and even taking her in overnight when she was sick. María felt closer to this woman and her relatives than she did to her biological aunts and cousins. She had been, in some measure, informally adopted—a practice she describes as common in the Philippine countryside and even in some towns during the 1960s and 1970s.
In a sense, María experienced a pre-modern childhood, marked by high infant mortality, child labour, and an absence of sentimentality, set within a culture of strong family commitment and community support. Reminiscent of fifteenth-century France, as Philippe Ariès describes it in Centuries of Childhood (1962), this was a childhood before the romanticization of the child and before the modern middle-class ideology of intensive mothering (Hays 1996). Sentiment wasn’t the point; commitment was.
María’s commitment to her own children, aged twelve and thirteen when she left to work abroad, bears the mark of that upbringing. Through all of their anger and tears, María sends remittances and calls, come hell or high water. The commitment is there. The sentiment, she has to work at. When she calls home now, María says,
I tell my daughter ‘I love you’. At first it sounded fake. But after a while it became natural. And now she says it back. It’s strange, but I think I learned that it was okay to say that from being in the United States.
María’s story points to a paradox. On the one hand, the First World extracts love from the Third World. But what is being extracted is partly produced and ‘assembled’ here: the leisure, the money, the ideology of the child, the intense loneliness and yearning for one’s own children. In María’s case, a premodern childhood in the Philippines, a postmodern ideology of mothering and childhood in the United States, and the loneliness of migration blend to produce the love she gives to her employers’ child. That love is also a product of the nanny’s freedom from the time pressure and school anxiety parents feel in a culture that lacks much of a social safety net. In that sense, the love María gives as a nanny does not suffer from the disabling effects of the American version of late capitalism.
If all this is true—if, in fact, the nanny’s love is something at least partially produced by the conditions under which it is given—is María’s love of a First World child really being extracted from her own Third World children? Yes, because her daily presence has been removed, and with it the daily expression of her love. Even though the nanny herself does the extracting, both she and her children suffer a great loss. As one young woman from the Dominican Republic who was left behind from the age of twelve to fourteen reflected, ‘I kept feeling, “couldn’t we do this together?” And now I’m 33 and I think those were two years we can never re-live. They are lost’. Such separations are, indeed, globalization’s pound of flesh.
But curiously, the employers in the North know very little about it. A Mexican nanny’s love for her American employer’s child is a thing in itself. It is unique, private—we could even say ‘fetishized’. Marx talked about the fetishization of things, not of feelings. He might note how these days we make a fetish of an SUV, for example—we see the thing independent of its context. We disregard the men who harvested the rubber latex, the assembly-line workers who bolted on the tires, and so on. But just as we mentally isolate our idea of an object from the human scene within which it was made, so, too, we unwittingly separate the love between nanny and child from the global capitalist order of love to which it very much belongs.
