January 31, 2022
Rice University lecturer Muñoz debuts with a powerful study of the relationships between immigrant nannies and their employers, their own families, and the children they care for. The book’s primary subjects are Sara, a young mother who followed her own mother to Houston from El Salvador; Rosa, a Mexican grandmother managing family on both sides of the border; and Pati, a young woman from El Salvador who knows how it feels to be a “left-behind child.” Muñoz analyzes these women’s experiences through the concept of the “mothercoin,” a complex and harmful moral contradiction in which love becomes transactional, whether in the expectation that nannies genuinely care for the children under their charge, or the substitution of money for love when parents leave their children for work in the U.S. Interviews with well-intentioned employers in the U.S. reveal how the lack of value placed on the work of mothering binds American career women as well as their nannies; Muñoz fiercely critiques contemporary feminism for being under-engaged with this issue. Balancing big ideas about the worth of motherhood and the outsourcing of gendered work in the global marketplace with intimate profiles of individual women, Muñoz offers valuable insights on a thorny social issue. Feminists and immigrant rights activists will savor this thought-provoking cultural analysis.
Starred review from February 15, 2022
Mothercoin is an intimate narrative that individualizes a collective problem: the essential yet unpaid and invisible labor of motherhood. Through years of interviews with nannies she met as a young mother at a Houston park, Mu�oz explores the personal histories of migrant women, mainly from Latin America, employed as childcare workers for American families. Their stories reveal the complicated dynamics of families back home who benefit from the money their parents earn in the U.S., yet suffer from years spent separated. Nannies deal with the tension between working to provide for their families and being the constant nurturing presence to their own children that society demands of mothers. Interviewing the nannies' families, Mu�oz further examines the complex dynamics of paid motherhood. Nannies are at once beloved members of the family and employees that can be fired. Sharing the experiences of nannies, children of nannies, and families who rely on nannies, Mu�oz lays bare how essential motherhood is to the functioning global economy. Especially in the wake of the pandemic's massive disruptions to work and childcare, Mothercoin is an affecting, essential read.
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February 15, 2022
Moving narratives from women working in "a largely invisible industry." Mu�oz, a scholar of Latin American literature and culture, makes her book debut with a sensitive investigation of the lives and work of immigrant nannies. Identifying herself as "a native Houstonian of European ancestry" who is fluent in Spanish, the author met nannies when she took her children to a local park. Beginning in 2010, she began to interview them, and she also reached out to some of their employers. Those interviews--recorded, transcribed, translated, and edited--form the basis of the text, which Mu�oz has interwoven with historical, political, and economic context. In developing countries, migration has become "a particularly feminine survival strategy" and "a singular face of hope" for girls and women who want a better future for themselves and their families. In the U.S., they easily find work as nannies, filling a need for families in which both parents work and women face "impossible expectations" of what motherhood entails. Mu�oz exposes the injustices and demands nannies encounter as much as she critiques "the false assumption that our homes and our families are held up by force of love, inexhaustible and economically inconsequential." As a society, she writes, we "have dismissed our responsibility to raise our children and care for our elderly and infirm. We have feminized this care into triviality, swept it under the rug of visibility, and left the mothers among us with little choice but to struggle and endure--or to outsource the work to marginalized others who must bear our burdens and theirs, alone." These women's stories reveal broken and unjust social, health care, and legal systems; a changing landscape of immigration policy and practice; and a feminist movement that has failed to dismantle patriarchy. "When we replace the housewife with a low-wage, publicly invisible muchacha," writes the author, "we maintain the same system of gender-based power that women have been resisting for ages." A perceptive look into a hidden world.
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