This comparative study, illustrates how motherhood materializes through the often emotionally-heavy choices that female immigrants make as they strive to take care of variably vulnerable populations often located simultaneously in different locations. In so doing, this project illustrates how domestic labor takes shape along with women’s strategies for navigating the most intimate relationships across a global stage fraught with economic and political challenges. This research is situated in relationship to transnational feminist thought by highlighting the strategies that women use to navigate motherhood within a larger context that connects their experiences and strategies across places. As such, by focusing on the employment experiences and choices of immigrant domestic workers who are part of transnational motherhood flows, furthers understandings of how emotions are entangled with understandings of personal economic failure, that are often invisible and unpaid, while relationally shaping the everyday experiences of these women. The material for this analysis is based on oral histories of female Zimbabwean immigrants working in Johannesburg, South Africa and ten in-depth interviews with Latina domestic workers in San Diego, California, including their children left behind in Mexico.

Lorena Munoz is an assistant professor in gender women and sexuality studies and American studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on the intersections of place, space, gender, sexuality, health, and race. Her transdisciplinary research agenda has been focused on Latinas/Latinos in the global south, particularly in the areas (in)formal economy, labor, health, and productive/transformative agency.