Arlie Hochschild coined the term “Global Care Chain” to describe the process through which women leave their families and communities to care for others in richer nations, leaving a vacuum of social reproduction in their home countries. This vacuum is then filled by poorer women who assume the caretaker’s role. Thus, the macro dynamics of global commodity chains seep into family structures. Nicola Yeates provides an overview of the globalization of care and the features of the global care chain in Globalizing Care Economies and Migrant Workers: Explorations in Global Care Chains. She explains that “The emotional costs and benefits of the long-term separation of mothers and children entailed by the migration of the mothers…reproduces spatially structured care inequalities – of maternal deprivation in less wealthy sections of poorer countries on the one hand and maternal abundance in wealthier sections of poorer and richer countries on the other” (47). The schematic representations Yeates draws are useful in visualizing the geography of emotional labor and the agents involved in extracting its surplus..
However, the GCC model may not encompass all experiences of transnational care. The cartography and value of Delmi Galeano’s emotional labor cannot be mapped out in the economic and spatial terms Yeates utilizes. Delmi immigrated from Paraguay over ten years ago, leaving her two children in her home nation. Now, she works as a caretaker for a quadriplegic man. In terms of GCCs, her situation is straightforward: her children suffer from lack of maternal care in Paraguay while her employer in Spain benefits from the surplus emotional labor she cannot give to her kids. Delmi tells me a different story, however. Through the use of technology, she has remained emotionally present and involved in her children’s upbringing – there are many mothers in physical proximity to their kids that cannot say the same. For example, her employer’s family is capable of personally assuming responsibility for their relative’s emotional and physical care but outsource that work to Delmi instead.
Delmi’s maternal labor is not geographically bound. She also considers the physical work she does as her current employer’s caretaker a way of ensuring her children’s future success. The economic value of her care is returned to her children as a remittance but is not decoupled from her love for them: the reason she migrated in the first place. In speaking about her kids, she told me that she “suffers in the hope that the next generation can suffer less.” Though the emotional toll of her family’s separation is not to be discounted, it cannot automatically be assumed that a child with a physically present mother might have their emotional and material needs better met, nor is it fair to judge a mother’s decision to leave her children as a strategy of childcare. In her case, Delmi has strived to meet her kids’ needs and assured, rather than displaced, her social reproduction in her home country.
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