Maid In America Analysis

In Anayansi Prado’s Maid in America, viewers are able to see examples of the power differentials involved among caretakers in relationship with each other, their families, and their employers. The employers of all three women are shown discussing how they couldn’t have their lifestyle without the care provided by women; yet each of the women at some point discuss the limited pay they receive for the extensive hours of both physical and emotional labor. The women are also shown having to live under the limits of harsh immigration and emigration policies. As an audience, we see the contradictory truth that Martha Gimenez discusses in Global Capitalism and Women From Feminist Politics to Working Class Women’s Politics: care work, though essential to the persisting power of capitalism, is undervalued on an
This complex relationship is also tied to immigration and emigration policies in “receiving countries,” to borrow a term Joya Misra and Sabine N. Merz use in Neoliberalism, Globalization, and the International Division of Care (118). Misra and Merz argue that neoliberal economic globalization and state policies reinforce the “hierarchy of womanhood” involved in the system of caretaking (118). They thus look to larger systems and structures of power, like capitalism and the federal government, to explain the power differentials involved in the social relations of care work. This is an important idea that many of the pieces we have read this semester have supported, including each of those by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Mary E. Hawkesworth, and Stephanie