Domestic work and the global: Sri Yatun’s story

Sri Yatun cooking at home

The story of Sri Yatun illustrates the resilience and courage of domestic workers, while revealing the corrupt global networks of shared reproductive labor that harm low-income female migrants and make their lives increasingly precarious. It also demonstrates how ‘the global’ facilitates the exchange of migrant domestic labor as the underpinning of a globalized capitalist economy; in doing so, it suppresses the voices and experiences of migrant domestic workers. To understand the experiences of domestic workers we must ask: Why are their experiences rendered invisible? How is this invisibility intentional and constructed? Sri’s story is equally devastating, instructive, and revolutionary. The details of her life demonstrate how the ‘global’ leverages migrant domestic workers’ state of precarity to silence them. Experiences like those of Sri are not unintended side-effects of State Department programs; rather they are intentionally crafted, sociopolitical notions of whose lives matter and whose do not.

For migrant domestic workers, like Sri, precariousness is an embodied state of being through their experience of liminal legality: they are aware their residency in the US is fragile and potentially fleeting. As such, they embody a liminal space and a physical precarity that colors their everyday interactions, duties, and behaviors. Notions of belonging, as codified through national identity, enforce precarity in the lives of migrant domestic workers. The fear of deportation places them in an incredibly vulnerable position in employer-employee relationships, promoting their silence in the face of exploitation. For Sri, the interplay between her status of liminal legality, the powerful status of her elite diplomatic employers, and the invisibility she faced in the home, obscured the abuses she faced at the hands of Cicilia and Tigor. She was afraid to speak out, depowered by the very system that relies on her labor to function.

Sri is a survivor of mental and emotional abuse at the hands of her employers. Despite caring for their family–raising their child–Cicilia and Tigor treated Sri as a slave, frequently beating her and verbally berating her. The house in which Sri lived and worked was also the sight of a daily war, one in which she was depowered, vulnerable, and exposed. Sri was an outsider in the home she maintained. She had no way to protect or defend herself, an especially violent social existence, akin to Mbembe’s concept of the death-world. The article notes harrowingly that, “Wearing [Tigos’s] son provided a measure of protection against his outbursts.” Even this limited sense of security, however, dwindled throughout the years as the son became less reliant on Sri’s care. This utilization of the body and mind as the tools of labor, also left significant consequences for Sri’s health. She notes in the article that she “has pain in her back and knees. ‘Little things to remind me,’ she says.” Her body, then, is a tangible reminder of the verbal and physical abuse she faced at the hands of her employers–each ache, sore, and crack, a remnant of her years of exploitation.

Sri was a caretaker for many years, raising children who were not her own. Given that experience, one may assume she would be an expert in all forms of caring. Sri was not prepared, however, to be a caretaker for someone she knew affectionately and intimately. Sri’s experience caring for ‘mama’ in her old age illustrates a divide between caring as a profession and caring for your family. Her multi-faceted experiences of giving and receiving care elaborates upon the grief and loss inherent in every step of her life. As excerpted from the article:

“Sri had taken care of so many people, but it felt different to look after Mama. She’d started her career in caregiving with strangers who had felt entitled to extract what they wanted from her; she’d also cared for kind and generous people, and everyone in between. She’d mastered the domestic worker’s art of invisibility: the ability to take in everything in a home and render her own self unseen to avoid disrupting her employers’ perception of their privacy. So none of her experiences could prepare her for what it was like to care for — and potentially lose — the woman who had found her, who had truly seen her, at a gas station 14 years earlier.”

Grief shapes the lives of domestic workers in many ways: grief for elders who pass, grief of a child who moves on, grief of the family you thought you were a part of. Some workers grieve alternate employment prospects, or a stable wage. Others experience grief as they care for children a world away from their own. Many grieve the life they should have had. As such, grief cannot be disentangled from domestic work. For years, Sri’s desire to grieve–her jobs, dreams, the children she cared for a long the way–was suppressed in favor of economic survival. She had to keep going, working, and fighting for a better life. Finally, after years of this precarious struggle, Sri found someone to take care of her in her grief–the community–a radical act of communalized care in an undervalued community.

(By Alex Groth. Alex Groth believes everyone should be cared for.)

(Photo Credit: Washington Post / Barbara Davidson)

 

ICE is the super spreader agency

The Washington Post reported that more than 8 percent of individuals held in migrant detention centers have contracted the coronavirus, proving that ICE is the super spreader agency. This update comes months after aCongressional Oversight Committee found that migrants died after receiving inadequate medical care in detention centers. In fact, in 2020 ICE detention centers had the highest annual death toll of people in ICE custody since 2005, with 21 deaths—8 of which were caused by COVID-19. Just this week, 47 children tested positive for coronavirus at a temporary migrant facility in Long Beach. Overall, deaths in detention have increased sevenfold since 2018, despite a marked decrease in the population of migrants living there.

Why is ICE the super spreader agency? Why is ICE unable, or unwilling, to protect the health of migrant detainees? The state of COVID-19 in prisons, jails, and detention centers is an illustration of state necro politics at work. Achille Mbembe describes necro politics as, “the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die.” This framework questions: Who lives, who dies, and how are state actors implicated in the outcome?

In the US, the pre-existing structural vulnerabilities faced by migrants are compounded by statuses of illegality that further restrict access to healthcare and community-based services. In detention, migrant health is deprioritized due to their criminal status. The state weaponizes social notions of (il)legality by asserting visibility or invisibility, presence or absence, according to its interests. In the case of transnational migrants, the state’s absence is felt through neglect and invisibility, ignorance and intentional abandon. ICE enforces large-scale detainment while failing to account for the health and safety of those confined.

Clearly, carceral spaces are particularly susceptible locations for COVID-19 transmission. And yet, ICE continues to detain migrants in large numbers. The agency does not even have enough spaces in detention for all the migrants it imprisons. Overcapacity further complicates health promotion measures, especially in relation to COVID prevention. A lack of resources leads to inappropriate medical responses to health emergencies. The underdevelopment of medical capacities and frequent documentation of “health emergencies” in detention proposes the question: Does ICE even try to protect migrant health and limit COVID-19 transmission? If it really intends to protect migrant health, wouldn’t the logical approach be decarceration? After all, incarceration is the antithesis of social distancing.

Migrants in detention are subject to intersecting sources of acute violence: the violence of COVID-19 and exposure to illness are compounded by the violence of incarceration. The inability to exert bodily autonomy—to isolate, protect, and remove oneself from sites of COVID-19 exposure—is another source of violence. The fear of potential exposure to the virus, without any way to fully protect yourself, is paralyzing. Despite being the most recent and publicized threat to migrant safety, COVID-19 exposure is just one danger to migrant health. Suicide rates continue to rise in detention centers. Research shows that detention centers are dangerous for women’s health and rights. Trans women are particularly vulnerable to abuse, illness, and death in detention centers. Why is the criminalization of migration prioritized over the safety of migrant bodies?

The dehumanization of migrant communities correlates to their danger in detention. Each day, new facts and statistics regarding a rising number of migrants crossing the border arise in the media. A “number of unaccompanied children,” “US border surge,” or a new “wave of migrants” are coming to the US in “record” numbers. How does our rhetoriccontribute to the dehumanization of migrants? Should we use these words to describe human beings? “The rhetoric framing immigration prisoners as criminals disassociates prisoners from those who may influence their wellbeing, leading to treatment of confined migrants as dangerous and disposable.” Through this rhetorical process, the state “creates illegality,” inviting mistreatment and exclusion for a community depicted as criminal.

This rhetorical framing manifests in the poor quality of care and abuse prevalent in detention centers. How much more compelling is it to describe a “wave of migrants” as a “group of persecuted, oppressed vulnerable men, women, and children seeking economic, social, and political security from a neighboring country”? Perhaps even this description fails to sensitize opponents. Nonetheless, it is our responsibility to put names to the “waves” and “surges” in an attempt to acknowledge the grief experienced by communities of color across the United States—migrants whose loved ones were not “martyrs” but casualties of state policy and carceral beliefs: Anthony Jones, Felipe Montes, Jesse Dean, Roxsana HernandezMaria Celeste Ochoa Yoc de Ramirez, Johana Medina Leon, and many more.

(By Alex Groth: Alex Groth, a young advocate, is passionate about deconstructing migrant detention centers and promoting safer, more dignified alternatives to incarceration.)

(Image Credit: Alex Groth)