“Settler Maintenance” and Migrant Domestic Worker Ecologies of Care

Abstract

Oral histories of Latina domestic workers in the United States feature hybrid narratives combining accounts of illness and “toxic discourse”. We approach domestic workers’ illnesses and disabilities in a capacious, extra-medical context that registers multiple axes of precarity (economic, racial, and migratory). We are naming this context “settler maintenance”. Riffing on the specific and general valences of “maintenance” (i.e., as a synonym for cleaning work, and as a term for the practices and ideologies involved in a structure’s upkeep), this term has multiple meanings. First, it describes U.S. domestic workers’ often-compulsory use of hazardous chemical agents that promise to remove dirt speedily, yet that imperil domestic workers’ health. The use of these chemicals perpetuates two other, more abstract kinds of settler maintenance: (1) the continuation of socioeconomic hierarchies between immigrant domestic workers and settler employers, and (2) the continuation of (white) settlers’ extractive relationship to the land qua private property. To challenge this logic of settler maintenance, which is predicated on a lack of care for care workers, Latina domestic workers have developed alternative forms of care via lateral networks and political activism.

1. Introduction

Starting in 2018, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women|Barbra Streisand Center interviewed over eighty individuals who identified as having an environmental illness related to chemical exposure or other chronic illnesses.1 The collection period cross-cut the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020) and overlapped with California domestic workers’ campaign to pass legislation to redress their exclusion from existing occupational health and safety laws. Because we had conceived of the oral histories as a means to deepen the range of illness narratives that are publicly available (and that do not take the form of published literary memoirs), we partnered with the California Domestic Workers’ Coalition to procure roughly a dozen oral histories of Latina domestic workers, telling of both their care labor in other people’s homes (i.e., as cleaners, housekeepers, or maids) and their own experiences of illness and disability.

Recalling events of acute and chronic exposure to hazardous chemicals and to unsafe worksites replete with mold, asbestos, and ash debris from wildfires, these narratives undoubtedly draw upon “toxic discourse”, which Lawrence Buell has identified as a feature of environmental narratives from the turn of the twenty-first century (Buell 1998).2 Our article, however, links this toxicity to practices of “settler maintenance”—our coinage that refers to both the type of cleaning practices mediated through “strong liquids” capable of tackling extreme dirt build-up, and buttressing the boundaries between various waves of settlers (rather than those between immigrants and natives). Riffing on the specific and general valences of “maintenance” (i.e., as a synonym for cleaning work, and as a name for the practices and ideologies involved in a structure’s upkeep), this term has multiple meanings. First, it describes United States domestic workers’ often-compulsory use of hazardous chemical agents that promise to remove dirt speedily, yet that imperil domestic workers’ health. The use of these chemicals perpetuates two other, more abstract kinds of settler maintenance: (1) the continuation of socioeconomic hierarchies between immigrant domestic workers and settler employers, and (2) the continuation of (white) settlers’ extractive relationship to the land qua private property. By examining Latina women’s illness narratives archived in the Oral Histories of Environmental Illness collection,3 we see how the tensions between care—here, house-cleaning—as an economic expenditure, and care as a quotidian routine enacted with conscientiousness surface in relation to chemicals, privacy qua private property, and appropriate durations of time for care to be received well and for care to reanimate that which has been cared for.

After a brief review of the scholarship on Latina domestic workers and philosophies of care, the first two sections of our essay focus on our interviewees’ narrations of their illness experiences which originate in the paid cleaning work they have undertaken in the U.S. Unlike other illness narratives that emphasize individuals’ encounters with a state’s healthcare system while seeking diagnosis and treatment, and the elusiveness of or restitution in cure, these storytellers spoke of entangled economic, racial, and migratory precarity lying upstream4 of their bodily debilities. Not despite but because of their living under resource constraints, disabled Latina domestic workers made claims regarding how to appropriately care for humans and their domiciles that were intimately linked to sentinel cues from nonhuman kin (i.e., from plants, pets, and the health of nature).

In the second half of this essay, we turn to domestic workers’ political activism aimed to address the larger care deficit that devalued their cleaning work and imperiled their health. Part of a complex network of care that constellated around negotiations over workplace materials, these activist practices aimed to legislate more formality to their workplaces—which is to say, more policy rules akin to those governing non-residential, non-household worksites. We grapple with the end results of California Senate Bills 1257 and 686—with their being twice passed by both houses of the state legislature and twice vetoed by California State Governor Gavin Newsom. It is our argument that, despite their failure to amend the legal code in their favor, domestic workers—in the very process of organizing—forged salient avenues of self-care, with the pleasures afforded through learning, listening, and attending to more vulnerable others, ensuring robustness in their labor collectives beyond these disappointments.

2. Literature Review

The scholarly literature on care has embraced a widening of the term in the last few years. In her work on Moral Boundaries (Tronto 1993), Joan Tronto seeks to untangle care from its previous delimitations by outlining a quartet of processes that constitute it. Care wends its way from an ideational orientation dubbed “caring about”—as in recognizing that there is a need for care—toward a material and bodily practice of “caregiving”, where one comes into direct contact with the object of care. Between these two types (“caring about” and “caregiving”) is Tronto’s category of “taking care of”—that is, assuming some responsibility for the identified need, taking a logistical assessment of how to meet the need, and even perhaps paying someone else to fulfill the need in one’s stead.5 The loop is closed through feedback on “care-receiving”—the care recipient’s recompense and gratitude (or not) for the care offered.6 These are varieties—rather than developmental stages—of care that distinguish an often friction-filled relation between those who hire an independent domestic worker to “take care of” their home (the second variety of care) and the migrant Latina caregivers in our oral histories who mop, wipe, launder, dust, polish, and otherwise tidy up other people’s residences (the third variety of care).

Tronto, however, clarifies that, in highly individualistic societies, care is “devalued conceptually through a connection with privacy, with emotion, and with the needy. Since our society treats public accomplishment, rationality, and autonomy as worthy qualities, care is devalued insofar as it embodies their opposites” (Tronto 1993, p. 117). Indeed, in neoliberal societies in the Global North such as the twenty-first century U.S., “care has little status…except when it is honored in its emotional and private forms”; this is exemplified in the idealized dyad of mother and child (Tronto 1993, p. 122). Because receiving care also implies the recipient’s dependence and nonautonomy, care-receivers are viewed as “relatively helpless [with] part of the reason [for ignoring] routine forms of care as care is to preserve the image of ourselves as not needy” (Tronto 1993, p. 120). Thus, strategies to contain care involve construing it in a disdainful manner and delegating the less spiritual aspects of care work (e.g., routine cleaning) “to individuals from a lower social strata [sic] to shield care-receivers from the vulnerability associated with acknowledging their need for care” (Petterson et al. 2024).

Tronto’s analyses of care processes bring attention to its network of relations. While well-worn idealized notions of care may hold up a mother–child dyad as exemplary, a network-of-care approach would also include how nonhuman actants (e.g., the domicile and its furnishings) give care to their human users and vice versa. Moreover, quasi-human actants, such as the state and corporations, if mandating universal paid childcare or setting up daycare facilities on site for their employees, “take care of” their employees’ need for childcare. This network-of-care approach also characterizes the cleaning crew of the daycare facility as part of care relations. Taking a page from María Puig de la Bellacasa (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017), the greenery around and throughout the facility would also function as care—in the form of shade and oxygen—to the humans in the space, with said greenery becoming the recipient of children’s care practices, if, for instance, watering or seed scattering are part of their play.

Tronto’s and Puig de la Bellacasa’s widening of care helps us situate domestic workers accounts of their cleaning-as-care practices in a context that attenuates relationality through market mechanisms, cuts necessary temporal durations, and adopts an economizing attitude toward care work and care workers. Network-of-care frameworks allow us to articulate how domestic workers can and do circumvent the employer–employee dyad by attempting to enroll legislators in their care networks and marshal support for policy changes, and by building lateral networks around issues adjacent to labor activism (e.g., the criminalization of the undocumented, the gendered strictures on how married mujeres are allowed to spend their free time).

A turning point in domestic workers’ fraught relationship to market mechanisms occurred in 1974, when paid domestic work was “brought under the aegis of minimum wage laws for the first time” (Salzinger 1997, p. 285). However, employers still found ways to extract surplus value from domestic workers. While employers paid for “fewer hours of cleaning per month” in response to the new legal imperative to pay domestic workers a minimum wage, this accompanied a demand “for the same amount of cleaning as before” (Salzinger 1997, p. 285). The enforcement of minimum wage laws and the newly formalized contractual relationship between employer and domestic worker weakened social bonds between them, making “the occupation less personal and affective and more contractually defined” (Salzinger 1997, p. 285).

While contracts are ostensibly enforced to assert the domestic worker’s status as a worker who has rights, in-home wage laborers’ rights are occluded, as they are typically seen as “part of the family” and beneficiaries of employers’ paternalism. Many Latina domestic workers encounter such drawbacks in contractually defined workplaces. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo notes the “social prices” to be paid—namely, an “ambivalent worker identity” (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001, p. 174). This unstable identity is tied to “[t]he low status and stigma” of the domestic worker’s job, the residential (i.e., private) nature of the workplace, and the gendered tasks of caring that discourage domestic workers from “see[ing] themselves as workers” (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001, p. 177). Compounding this ambivalent identity is a pervasive feeling of invisibility. As Hondagneu-Sotelo writes, Latina domestic workers “want […] to be treated with consideración, with some understanding and recognition that they are women with their own lives, aspirations, and families”, hence their turn to collective organizing (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001, p. 179).

Through their organizing efforts, domestic workers have, to some extent, won recognition for their labor as “real work”, particularly in the wake of the International Labour Organization’s Domestic Workers Convention of 2011 (Parreñas 2017). Through their politicization and activism, a paradigm shift has occurred, transforming domestic work discursively and materially, from “unskilled to skilled, from humiliating to respectable, from minimum wage to its double, from employer-controlled to worker-controlled, from ‘dirty’ work to ‘clean’” (Salzinger 1997, p. 286).

In terms of where domestic workers appear in the literature on illness narratives, they are largely invisible as home health aides—minor caregiving characters whose lives are neither radically upended by sickness (as typical of those family members devoted to caring for their ill spouses, parents, and children) nor uniquely touched by their journey with the patient (as displayed in clinical caretaker narratives).7 Grace Rosales touches on the fact that domestic work can imperil workers’ health: they report “poor quality of life” that involves certain “tolls being taken on their bodies”, but Rosales does not further investigate these findings (Rosales 2001). Of course, scholars have noted how immigration status discourages many domestic workers from seeking medical treatment: “In response to ramped up enforcement, undocumented mothers have been known to keep children away from schools after immigration raids or to more generally avoid health professionals and other service providers out of fear that they may contact immigration authorities or that their record of service-use may be cited to deny them legalization in the future” (Abrego and Schmalzbauer 2018, p. 11). But scholarship that probes Latina domestic workers’ own theorization of how working conditions endanger their health remains scant, leaving a crucial facet of their relationship to occupational health under-elaborated.

To close this scholarly gap, we attend to domestic workers’ own accounts of developing illnesses and disabilities that resulted from their exposure to chemical toxicants. This workplace hazard has been amplified by the domestic market’s sped-up pace, from the molecular level of the toxic cleaning agent that promises to remove grime in record time, to the managerial level of the cleaning agency that demands that workers clean a staggering number of houses in just one workday. Rather than tracing an evolution of domestic work from “dirty” to “clean”, to borrow from Salzinger, we argue that it is better described in terms of the proliferation of chemical toxicants and, in turn, chemical sensitivities and environmental illnesses. The harmful products that are used to maintain so-called “clean” environments are underpinned by the figurative stains of an unregulated market.

3. Endemic Exposure: A Chemical, Financial, and Climate Change Gothic

The narratives of Latina house cleaners attest to many kinds of unfair labor practices to which they are subjected, including wage theft, employer harassment, and environmental hazards. These hazards include assignments to clear toxic domiciles (with asbestos, mold, and cockroaches) that have been abandoned or are being renovated. Cleaners are asked to lift heavy furniture or wear shoe covers on slippery floors, increasing the risk of falls and sprained muscles. Despite the heterogeneity of their experiences, all interviewees emphasize the debilitating effects of chemicals in cleaning products on their health.

After working for decades as a house cleaner near San Francisco, often cleaning foreclosed properties, Raquel Alcalá, originally from a farming family in Michoacán, Mexico, can now barely clean her own home: “As soon as I smell the liquids, I feel like it makes me cough and [it] hurts me” [00:05:36]. She describes the frequent use of noxious cleaners like Clorox and Ajax to tackle the extremes of dirt at her worksites resulting in episodes of temporary laryngitis. Although she has now retired from cleaning work, Alcalá nevertheless has thrice yearly bouts of pneumonia and a “spot on her lung”. Because of these work-related ailments, she also finds herself bothered by the spray insecticides her husband uses indoors. She dreams of building a coalition between agricultural workers and house cleaners because of their shared experiences with handling unsafe chemicals (with toxicant exposure endemic to both these forms of labor as conducted in the U.S.). Similarly, Adriana Perez, originally from León, Guanajuato, Mexico, testifies to acquiring a sensitivity to Clorox and Tide from years employed at both a fast-food restaurant (Carl’s Jr.) and a cleaning-route company. Her acute inflammatory reactions to their ingredients include headaches and difficulty breathing when she’s around fumes from Clorox, and raised welts on her arms through indirect contact with Tide. She further recalls that, once, when she was at the hospital after a miscarriage, hospital staff told her that “long-term exposure to those [cleaning] chemicals [were] what caused [the miscarriage]” [00:36:41].

Domestic workers distinguish between the cleaning materials that serve their families in their birthplaces south of the border and those with which they have been armed in the U.S. When describing her mother’s experience raising ten children mostly on her own, Alcalá recalls that her family used just basic soap and vinegar. Sometimes, “we would use lemon on the clothes and the clothes would be clean. But at that time I thought that was because we had no money to buy Clorox” [00:11:20]. Similarly, Perez states that her working-class birth family had no money to buy “expensive soap” [00:27:25]. Emphasizing that “strong liquids” [00:36:35] like Clorox were simply not affordable in their birth households, their narratives nevertheless figure reliance upon brand-name chemical cleaners as a source of injury.

Training offered by grassroots labor organizations, such as Mujeres Unidas y Activas (United & Active Women, hereafter, MUA) and Colectiva de Mujeres (hereafter, Women’s Collective), encourages domestic workers to take the evidence of their bodies seriously—both their immediate reactivity to chemicals and the conditions that can develop over time. Originally from Coatepeque, Guatemala, Maria Aguilar recounts when, as “a novice” to the household chemicals available in the U.S., she mixed Clorox with Ajax.8 The resulting poisonous fumes induced immediate effects: “I started to feel like throwing up, and my breath left me” [00:15:53]. She elaborates earlier that:

When you clean a house without knowing what the product contains, you can hurt yourself. And over time, I think one develops a lot of illnesses, too, that slowly—we might not know it or we don’t feel it instantly, but then—we begin to feel many symptoms. […] I also learned which product to use and which product not to use. But of course, not all women know that; those who are not within an organization [do not know. And sometimes the people who hire us] they don’t realize it either.

[00:12:33]

While Aguilar stresses that domestic workers are especially vulnerable to chemical toxicity in cleaning products, the potential harm is widespread, as the residue from these underregulated products imperil all who later return to a dwelling where they’ve been sprayed. Switching to nontoxic products accomplishes the shared goal, as Aguilar puts it, of “me [being] fine, and for them [our employers] to be fine also” [00:17:47].

Another domestic worker, Elizabeth Montiel, contextualizes her employers’ regard for brand cleaners as superior to vinegar and basic soap in relation to a modernizing ethos enthralled with technoscience’s promise to accelerate and control natural processes:

For fruits to grow bigger, they have chemicals, chemicals they spray on our animals, chickens, bulls, everything. What are they doing to produce more milk, produce more eggs? Now everything has chemicals. So people think that because it’s Windex, it’s Clorox, it’s going to leave the area cleaner quickly. And it is not like that.

[00:50:12]

Here, Windex and Clorox are one of many endpoints in applied chemistry (e.g., bigger fruit, more milk, more eggs, quicker cleaning). Biochemical manipulation enables rapid growth, enacting a logic of modernization that equates progress with technologies of mass (qua sped-up) production. It has led to the incorporation of chemical additives and biocides at various stages of food production and consumer goods manufacture. Technological enhancement lends consumer items that are infused with chemicals a reputation for improving what has gone before—the prior ways and means of growing food and clearing detritus.

Yet, this rush toward “better things for better living through chemistry” (to cite the famous DuPont9 jingle) has resulted in some “very painful consequences”, as Montiel puts it.

For that reason, you have to become aware. Every human being must be aware about both what we eat and what we use, we must think twice before using it or before consuming it… Why are there so many cases of cancer? Because most of what we are eating is chemical[s].

[00:50:00]

By alluding to environmental factors, including diet and ambient chemical exposures as key drivers of cancer, Montiel reiterates the findings of U.S. Presidential Cancer Panel Reports, published from 2000 forward, which stress the “underestimated, unknown, and covered up” risks of chemical exposures as contributors to the disease: “Studies have shown that virtually all Americans are now born with body burdens of known toxic chemicals” (Jain 2013, p. 188).10 For Montiel, the emphasis is not simply on the agricultural and manufacturing supply chains that infuse America’s food, furnishings, and other consumer products with toxicant chemicals; rather, she particularly objects to domestic workers absorbing an astringent overload—a function less of the toxic body burdens to which “all Americans are now born” and more of the hierarchical power relations between migrant domestic workers and their settler clients. The latter, to recall Tronto, “take care of” their homes by hiring someone else to act as surrogate caregiver—a domestic worker who comes into contact with objects of care and the equipment deemed necessary to carry out laundering, mopping, and polishing. Struggles over the equipment and materials contest who has authority over the care process—those who execute care but remain hired help, or those who economize, budget for, and monetarily expend for that care.

All of our domestic worker interviewees attested to job-related ailments related to chemicals in cleaners. Additionally, there were also distinctive stories of laboring in fetid conditions where the workplace itself became injurious. Perez, for instance, testifies to being placed in hazardous, sullied conditions by house-flippers:

[W]hile working for a company, my experience was that the lady for whom we worked took us to clean places that were to be remodeled. So sometimes there was asbestos, sometimes there was a lot of mold because things were rotten. I had an incident where I was injured by a rusty nail for not wearing adequate protection.

[00:09:15]

Replete with deteriorating asbestos and raised nails, Perez’s workplace is as perilous as a construction site. Yet, unlike insured and bonded workmen in the building trade, she has received neither mandated training nor protective equipment to avoid such hazards.

A domestic worker originally from Zaragoza, Michoacán, Gabrielle11 tells of being called to clean up sections of a hospital in great disrepair after a wildfire catastrophe. In October 2017, California suffered from windstorms and fires12 that burned over 100,000 acres in Sonoma and Napa counties. The three weeks of burning resulted in “24 people killed [and] 6997 structures destroyed, resulting in direct losses exceeding $7.8 billion”.13 Gabrielle worked for companies that cleaned up fire-damaged structures, including a hospital and nearby homes, where she and her coworkers removed drenched carpeting and furniture with shovels, due to the wrecked roofs and flooding in these buildings. She had to remain in that job because of her undocumented status. Here, we see a chain of aberrant caring: Big Oil’s decades-long fight to deregulate petroleum emissions contributes to global warming and climate change patterns; and that heat, dryness, and increased wildfire risk burst into flame in California from 2017 onward. Not putting human thought and action in maintaining interdependency with the ecosystem lies upstream of additional toxicant burdens foisted upon the most vulnerable—in this case, immigrant workers tasked with sweeping away the ruins.

Raquel Alcalá connects the compulsion to use astringent chemicals to the demand to quickly rehabilitate environments that are sick, so to speak, with neglect. She recounts being brought to a multi-unit dwelling where a neighbor, perhaps the apartment manager, stood aghast at the damaged state of the unit to which Alcalá was assigned:

On one occasion, I came to clean an apartment. A neighbor from the same building came to speak with [the real estate lady who hired me]. When I arrived, she arrived. And she looked at the bathroom and everything, right? Then she left. When I finished doing my job, that person came back and she couldn’t believe it. She was amazed that it didn’t look like the same bathroom. Then the lady who had hired me said, “I told you. I told you she’s good at cleaning bathrooms. I don’t have to repair [them]”. In other words, you don’t have to knock all that down to make it new, because with the cleaning, it looked good.

[00:03:45]

While endorsing Alcalá’s skill, the neighbor’s amazement indicates the degree of overhaul required by the dilapidated environment. Because she worked for a lady who “bought houses, fixed them, and sold them for more money”, Alcalá stresses that these properties were ones

that people lost in foreclosure[; they] were very abandoned, very ugly, and, above all, the bathrooms were ugly. So I did clean them with a lot of chemicals—the toilets, the tubs, the tiles—and yes, even when I finished doing that job, my voice would go away because of how strong the liquid was. […] Apart from the chemicals—these were houses that were so dirty, with a lot of mold. So, if you scrub the mold—I didn’t know … that the mold you scrub, you also absorb it, and if you don’t use a mask, it will also harm you.

[00:02:57, 00:16:26]

Her account of carving out mold, a hairy entity whose disturbed spores float undetected to inhabit the human organism (“you also absorb it, and…it will also harm you”), resonates with the ecogothic.14 Additionally, Alcalá speaks in almost cost–benefit terms of the poor trade-off to which the employer subjects her: “sometimes to earn fifty dollars, you lose…your health, which is the most important thing” [00:07:06]. Alcalá points to her low wages alongside her instructions to use aseptic cleaners as the house-flippers’ way of maximizing their property-selling profits, with the chemicals substituting for actual repair of abandoned and sometimes vandalized residences. Yet, these chemicals, in debilitating those who directly handle them, merely transfer sickness (lack of care) in the environment to sickness (depleted health) in the care worker. Alcalá tells her story to help others avoid ending up in a situation similar to hers, “so [that] they aren’t left damaged for life” [00:07:40].

These recounted narratives indicate the entanglement of settler colonialism and racialized capitalism. Settler colonialism accomplishes Land theft,15 not only through military action and coercive displacement of Indigenous inhabitants, but also through a discursive (non)recognition of cultivation, care, and stewarding practices undertaken by tribal political orders vis-à-vis Land. Using a platform of reclamation, California and the U.S. federal government nominated as unused the stolen land it then deeded to those who would make the acreage “productive”—via water drenching of swamps and water irrigation projects to (semi)arid lands to transform these ecologies into ones serving agricultural purposes (Dillon 2022; Garone 2015).

Land, turned into an alienable possession, has its most perversely profitable realization as a pure commodity, as a vehicle for speculative financial gain. Here, we return to Alcalá’s employer, who purchases undervalued16 buildings, fixes them up, and resells them at a price significantly greater than the sum of the distressed purchase price and cost of improvements. Racialized capital favors property-flippers, those who have generational wealth, and thereby money for down payments or outright purchase—namely, those who were propertied when that privilege was reserved for whites alone.17 While the labor of cleaners and repairmen create a large part of the appreciated value of remodeled homes, the profit realized as appreciated value overwhelmingly goes to the owner of capital. The business imperative of maximizing profit in speculative real estate thrives in proportion to underpaying for cleaning and repair services.18 Indeed, Alcalá’s employer’s self-satisfied comment, “I told you she’s good at cleaning bathrooms. I don’t have to repair [them]” [00:04:18], expresses pride in having economized precisely by avoiding a contractor’s fee and paying Alcalá a mere USD 50 instead. Any collateral damage to the domestic worker’s health is the price of doing this kind of business, but it is a cost borne solely by the laborer with the mop. In the next section, we turn, first, to domestic workers’ vocalizations of alternative ways of cleaning and their sense of the strangeness of clients’ devotion to harsh chemicals; and, second, their portraits of more-than-human networks of caregiving in which they’ve participated, and caregiving figured as valued durations of time where learning alongside family members, plants, and employers can occur.

4. Conscientious Cleaning, Sentinel Knowledge, and the Value of Time

Born in the Federal district of Mexico, 56-year-old Elizabeth Montiel first came to San Francisco after the Mexico City earthquake in 1985, but remigrated back to Tijuana and Mexicali over the years. At the time of the interview (2020), she had lived in the Treasure Island area for sixteen years, working with MUA for the past six. With regard to toxic cleaning products, Montiel observes that

they [give you the] Windex [or] Clorox […] because they truly realize the situation [of dirtiness] in which their home is. And they have the belief that with bleach or Windex it is much better to remove all that dirt the first time. And it is not like that. No chemical or natural liquid is going to remove it for the first time. It’s like everything, it takes time for that place to turn white again.

[00:20:06, emphasis added]

Either because they have not had enough firsthand experience in cleaning work or because of their embarrassment over the slovenly state of their homes,19 these clients become emotionally invested in caustic agents, outsourcing the accompanying risk of handling these chemicals to immigrants who lack rights. Montiel underscores the magical thinking characteristic of employers devoted to supposed dirt-defying chemicals—a magical thinking that plays into devaluing their house cleaners’ elbow grease and labor time (“it takes time for that place to turn white again”).

As several women with extensive housecleaning experience emphasize, when houses are cleaned regularly and often, “Y no hay necesidad de usar líquidos fuertes [there is no need to use strong liquids]” [Alcalá, 00:37:00]. In such environments, caring for the abode is coextensive with caring after the one who cleans, not something extracted wholesale from the reproductive laborer. Indeed, Montiel speaks of her own labor practice, relatively free of hazardous materials, as one of tenderness and skill:

Cleaning your home is an art, it’s a true art, because how much time goes by and those shelves aren’t cleaned? Conscientiously, that is. It’s all done superficially, yet all the time there is dust, dust, dust. But when you clean it up and you start putting things in their place or give things a little movement, it looks beautiful when that work is done. So, each person loves their own work.

[00:11:02]

Montiel depicts herself as part of a more-than-human network of care: her gentle caress of neglected shelves alongside the brief animation of their contents (“giv[ing] things a little movement”) engages the built environment as a vital nurturing space which itself needs nurture. She counters the idea of cleaning as dirty work to be avoided at all costs, claiming a devotion to the effort as well as pride in the polished results.

Taking time, allowing for the requisite duration to accomplish direct caregiving, sits at the core of what Adriana Perez desires.20 When asked what message she hopes to convey to employers, she stresses untenable time constraints as a function of navigating two kinds of caretaking temporalities. To the question “What changes would you like to see for workers?”, Perez gives a lengthy response:

Well, that they would value [our] time more, that they be more considerate of the hours we’re working, of having a break as it should be, not a hurried break driving around…. As a result of that, many people have also had stomach ulcers, gastritis, which I also suffer from, thanks to bad food and fast foods. And more [from] work, stress, [and] anxiety […For example, one time working for a company] it was my turn to see that we left at four thirty, but we couldn’t finish. It was half past five. I was in San José—heavy traffic. My daughters got out of daycare at six. I was worried because […] I had to return the car, I had to return the [cleaning supplies]. I’m not going to make it, the school is going to give me a ticket of thirty-five dollars “pay late”. All of that builds up inside us, and they, as employers or as individuals—they do not want to understand or realize. I hope that all that changes, that they understand that one also has a life behind the work.

[00:29:29]

Here, Perez’s lack of pithiness stylistically punctuates her point about having to pack so much activity—her tasks of cleaning, returning supplies, and commuting, as well as her story of being part of at least two networks of caregiving (her employer’s, her children’s)—into an undersized allotment, referring to both the insufficient number of hours predicted by the company for the job and the general listener’s preference for succinct anecdotes. In the labor situation recounted above, Perez and her coworkers work an assignment that, in clock-based temporality, formally ends at 4:30 p.m. Because the tasks take longer than estimated, the extra hour is stolen from employee breaks or commute time to drop off equipment.21

Like many mothers with second shift duties, Perez has little to no flexibility regarding the particular hour she resumes oversight of her children. She therefore pays the price for the company’s mis-scheduling, in both physical–mental strain (gastritis) and the cash fine for the late pick-up of her daughters. While Perez seeks, on behalf of her children, the care delivered by the childcare workers and wishes to honor their care by respecting their 6 p.m. hard stop, she has no options to regain the extra expended hour. As established by social science scholarship on domestic work, the undervaluing of Perez’s and her coworkers’ time—a situation compounded due to their racialized immigrant status—remains foundational to the company’s profits.

Perez does not frame potential ways to improve her situation through the use of nontoxic materials or more ample time to practice well-executed cleaning. She has only recently become “independent”, meaning she contracts directly with the representatives of individual residences rather than through a company in charge of specific “routes”. The COVID-19 pandemic threatened her new independence. More specifically, conflicting theories regarding the possible spread of this disease through indirect surface contact accelerated homeowners’ demands for disinfecting agents as a part of cleaning work. Perez recounts telling one customer, who wishes her to use Clorox wipes, that the gloves provided are not sufficient protection because inhaling the volatile emissions incapacitates her:

that day [the lady] allowed us to do the service without the Clorox, [and] her house was cleaned, but for the other service they no longer wanted us to go. And on Yelp, she posted a comment that we were good workers, but we didn’t do what she had asked. All of that also affects us.

[00:39:30]

Notwithstanding the allowance of the disability accommodation so that Perez can avoid bleach aromas on “that day”, the contracting woman posts an equivocal online review. Despite knowing that she endangers her health when using specific cleaning supplies, Perez has no choice but to do so:

[If I say] ‘okay, I’m not going to use this [cleaning product] for my own health’, they get upset because they don’t smell that specific chemical, not knowing it’s bad…. So most of the time…we have to use it not because we want to, [but]…because you can lose the customer or they ‘complain’ to the company you work for.

[00:11:03]

Perez’s interactions with homeowners are governed by larger power inequities that leave her unprotected and, indeed, vulnerable to their retaliatory grievance.

In such stories, domestic workers indicate employers’ ableist assumptions that house cleaners somehow possess innate and ongoing chemical resistance. Better networks of “crip” relationality22 would underwrite employers’ understanding that a working person’s reactivity to Clorox and Tide should not disqualify them from house-cleaning jobs. Rather, disability inheres in environments where caustic liquids and highly fragranced detergents are endemic rather than optional—or even superficial—to the work. Carving out her own disability accommodations spurs Perez to cherry-pick her clientele base, as much as her precarious independence allows, and to help retrain American sensory presumptions that associate smells of “that particular chemical” with “clean”.

Not all domestic workers face as much of an uphill battle as Perez. Some successfully tap into their clients’ more-than-human care networks to mitigate their supply-switching requests. Gabrielle tells of purchasing her own alternative nontoxic cleaning supplies and bringing them to various jobs.23 Having become reactive to Clarasol bleach and “any perfume”—both make her break out in hives and affect her nose and throat [00:20:38]24—Gabrielle “carries vinegar” to do “the green cleaning […] learning to work with chemicals that are not as strong, like carbonate. As in Mexico, we just put vinegar and soap in order not to have a reaction, [using materials] that… don’t affect our health” [00:11:32]. In the phrase “as in Mexico”, Gabrielle stresses an environmentally friendly practice basic to her premigration life, as “green” avant la lettre. Gabrielle provides nontoxic alternative supplies at her own expense, perhaps because she suspects her clients assume vinegar and carbonate’s lesser efficacy. Yet, after their homes are cleaned with green products, Gabrielle notes that, “in fact, they are surprised that their houses are cleaner. And more because they have a cat [or] dog—it is [because] they also want to look after them” that they accept the change [00:21:18]. In a reversal of what one might expect, clients prioritize their moral obligation to their pets (companion species) over that to their human domestic workers (same species). Their mutual touch and regard for nonhuman animals indirectly elicits solicitude toward their brown immigrant workers.

It is important to note, here, that the several Latina domestic workers who speak of needing to avoid specific toxicants mostly refrain from what Alexis Shotwell calls a “purity” politics—an ethos that would in memory scrub their natal homelands of toxic contaminants, as if that were possible (Shotwell 2016). Recall Montiel’s acknowledgement that “everything has chemicals”. Domestic workers exist in an already polluted world shorn of any return to a prelapsarian time–space.25

If everywhere and everything has chemicals, that also includes human bodyminds. For Perez, Alcalá, and Gabrielle, their bodies have already assimilated so many chemical toxicants that, as Alcalá puts it, they have become “allergic” to specific products. Their situations compare to those described by plastics waste scholar Max Liboiron: quantitative assessments of the resilient “assimilatory” capacities of aquatic ecologies (e.g., lakes and other bodies of water) became instrumentalized by permission-to-pollute settler regimes (Liboiron 2021). Domestic workers’ bodies have similarly tilted beyond their assimilatory capacities. As such, they are harbingers, or what science and technology studies and environmental scholarship have called “sentinel devices” (Keck and Lakoff 2013) and “alterlife” (Murphy 2017).

In their alterlife and perspective on worlds where contamination remains endemic to their lives, domestic workers know better. Their intimacy with chemical contaminants, their enormous toxic body burden (rather than purity of embodiment), underlies their expertise. This is a subtle point to grasp. Though they enact precautionary consumerism and thereby may appear to espouse “chemicals are bad and let’s be nostalgic for an Edenic return”, the narratives of domestic workers express something else. Their contaminated lives, over which they do not have “privileged irresponsibility” (Tronto 1993, p. 121), underwrites their knowledge as if to say, “We undertake caring in situations replete with constraints and this means that we are attentive to the intelligence of what our already contaminated, ill bodies—not abled, but already sick—have to tell us”.

Domestic workers’ illness narratives emphasize their sentinel knowledge as a function of their already precarious lives. Noemi Cruz voices the better knowledge derived from living in constraint.26 Originally from a rural region six hours from Oaxaca, Mexico, Cruz rendered her household free of fragrance-infused cleansers and artificial dyes in food after her son was diagnosed with autism. Her participation in Los-Angeles-area parenting and reproductive health classes apprised her of possible links between her son’s condition and her prior work as a cleaner.27 She describes having prior knowledge of the damage caused by specific brands of detergents, which she derived from observing her natal family cope with seasonal drought. That is, due to their gray-water practice of hydrating plants with “water from which we washed our clothes”, Cruz claims foreknowledge of what later environmental trainings stressed:

From the beginning before I got here, I knew that Ariel laundry soap—which smells so good, so delicious—burns plants. […] If you use scented soap, if you use Suavitel, if you use Ariel, if you use other kinds of things, the plants will burn. They can’t stand it, they can’t stand that kind of thing.

[00:50:21]

Experiential knowledge proceeding from living in non-abundance, without “excess [of] water”, means learning to value and care for nonhuman life, and to be skeptical of the sensory lures (the “so good, so delicious [smells]”—also known as fragrance additives) with which businesses infuse their products.

Cruz credits her environmental orientation to conditions of growing up as “a country person” in Mexico, “born on a poor ranch”:

Maybe you lived in a place where there is a lot of water. Maybe when you were little you never went to work in the fields. You don’t know what it’s like to have no money. […] When you don’t live in scarcity […] you don’t live to learn[;] you haven’t learned to value or care […] That is what happened, they [people with plenty] have no conscience.

[00:53:15]

Cruz frames precarity and care as onto-epistemological, with the experience of dwelling in material privation leading to developing a moral conscience—a way of knowing and relating to the world that understands one’s environment not as an endless source of free gifts. Instead, one relates to one’s environment—the land, the plants—as coextensive with human bodies.28 Those who live with what Tronto calls “privileged irresponsibility”, or access to abundant resources, do not learn from these lessons of place-based constraint. Cruz underscores that this knowledge predates her migration north. In other words, her emphasis on what she knew “from the beginning before I got here” upends the equation of life and learning in the Global North as better-because-more-modern than life and learning in the Global South.

Domestic workers’ sentinel knowledge includes their observation of employers’ tendency to associate cleanliness with the smell of chemicals (a branded liquid like Clorox or Windex) and their reflections that conscientious cleaning instead requires appropriately sized time allotments, elbow grease, and pride of work (“each person loves their own work”). These workers attend to how more-than-human ecologies and care networks can prime employers to the danger lurking in cleaning chemicals as something they should “care about” for their pets—and for their employees. Domestic workers assert their own insights from growing up in conditions of economic disadvantage, resource scarcity, and non-modernization. Our next section places these observations in the context of our framework of settler maintenance,29 a framework that, we argue, articulates the concrete and symbolic registers of the struggle over an economizing ethos (achieved through chemicals) as it further degrades the labor conditions of cleaning work.

5. Settler Maintenance Spawns Political Activism Against Historic Exclusions

Domestic workers’ testimony to their employers’ peculiar cultural devotion to harsh cleaners ought to be recognized for its rhetorical canniness. They repetitively underline the unnecessariness of brand cleaners (e.g., Windex,30 Clorox, Ajax, Suavitel, Ariel, etc.) to the work of dirt eradication. We coin the term “settler maintenance” to grasp the insistence, in the Global North, on a mistaken equation of dinginess with the absence of certain chemical smells. This locution combines specific and general meanings of “maintenance”, which include cleaning work and, more broadly, the practices, materials, and ideologies that keep a structure in place. The structures kept in place by harsh chemicals include both literal residences that are contracted to be cleaned, and epistemological and legal–economic systems linked to settler colonialism and racialized capitalism.

At the most concrete level, “settler maintenance” refers to a culturally specific mode of cleaning invested in branded formulas and astringent, volatilizing liquids, sometimes infused with “delicious” masking scents that endemically maim those who handle them.31 Associated with reclamation of ruined or neglected shelters—alternatively, ecologies set to proliferate fungal growth—these chemical cleaners sanitize bacteria and dirt so as to set up a boundary between the outside, primitive environment and the inside, domestic space that house “civilized” subjects—also known as those invested in private property enclosures (see Guerrero 1996; Wolfe 2006).32

By noting the ways in which their mothers in Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere cleaned without these harsh chemicals, domestic workers not only contest chemical use as sound maintenance, but they also trouble hierarchies of knowledge, among which are hierarchies between earlier settlers, on the one hand, and more recently arrived (not-yet) settlers, on the other. Tronto’s claim is useful here: that receiving care in highly individualistic societies becomes associated with vulnerability because it tacitly admits the recipient’s dependency. Though employers of house cleaners regard themselves as caretakers, insofar as they “take care of” their furnishings and built environment by hiring cleaners, they also function as care-receivers, in their roles as representatives and inhabitants of the residential unit to be tended. Assigning caregiving to “individuals from a lower social strata [sic]” partially acts as a shield for care-receivers against the vulnerability that comes with admitting a need for care (Petterson et al. 2024). The social hierarchy, from this aspect, does psychic work for the benefit of the hiring party. When domestic workers speak of the lesser-known chronic health effects of underregulated ingredients in detergents (or alert others to the acute poisonous gasses that result when Ajax meets Clorox), they exhibit literacy about cleaning products and good management practices that exceed the expertise33 their employers may expect of or appreciate from them. This superior knowledge can perturb the social hierarchy between settler employers and immigrant domestic workers. Our interviewees recount that clients do not always welcome and, indeed, have grieved cleaners’ suggestions to switch or refrain from using specific products. When low-status care workers declare harsh chemicals’ irrelevance to cleaning, they upset the valuation and knowledge hierarchies between settler employers and immigrant employees. The second meaning of “settler maintenance”, then, emphasizes the maintenance of hierarchy between settlers—those who are property-holding citizens—and immigrant laborers—those who are not-yet-settlers under threat of deportation, and who are figured as undeserving of healthcare services34, even as they contribute to the wellbeing of these earlier settler citizens.

While we have emphasized the knowledge hierarchies and the psychic illusion of lesser dependency that are kept in place by settler maintenance, socioeconomic hierarchies precede and pervade the continued use of chemical cleaners, especially in cases where aseptic agents applied to neglected environments substitute for repetitive attention over lengthier durations. That is, the more frequent the labor (as in the quotidian acts of caring after a space), the less opportunity for mildew and grunge to collect and harden. Here, we address the economizing logic—the unspoken trade-off between debris accumulation and the labor-time to address it—that propels some employers to use chemically enhanced formulas. With their “tough on grime” tagline, marketers of harsh cleaners implicitly sanction a carelessness in letting rubbish build. Put another way, their pitch is that you will need this specially formulated solvent because vinegar and brush cannot handle your schmutz. We can also imagine an alternative public service message devoid of the above marketing imperative. This advertisement would acknowledge that, if you are pressed for time in your domestic chores, a cleaning person can assess your situation and even perform routine cleaning in your place. From their years of experience, they will let you know that deferring these daily chores will cost you dearly later on. Yet, this message must rise above what the marketing both sells outright and leaves omitted. What is sold: you will not pay dearly, for chemicals not only allow you to be careless in regularly attending to your abode, but they also allow you to be careless in remunerating your house cleaner in adequate time and recompense for the lengthy amount of time needed to tackle dirt-upon-grime. Chemicals will make it no work at all. What is omitted: you will not mind that industrial strength concentrations are perilous to handle because you will not be around to breathe in the fumes. You have thieved care from a chemically sickened housekeeper.35

Recent decolonial scholarship usefully frames North American settler states as extensions of business enterprises.36 Emphasizing the speculative financial (and resource-extractive) enterprises selfsame with settler colonialism, we suggest that an ideology that normalizes attenuated, cold-cash relationality—one that is devoid of care and that is instead marked by parasitically accelerating precarity for a more vulnerable party to the gain of a more privileged one—spreads with settler maintenance. Put slightly differently, the “free market” imperative of facilitating economic trade and profits gained through such exchanges justifies all sorts of uncaring.37 Rather than prioritizing healthy interdependence of relations—as in valuing and stewarding the metabolic longevity of our caregivers—a “saving time, saving money” ethos reigns supreme.38

The third meaning of “settler maintenance”—the most abstract and open to revision—speaks to the coupling of business enterprise (the so-called “private sector”) and disregard for the health of Land, which refers not strictly to territory but to the unowned and sacred planetary commons that Indigenous people have stewarded, and to the coupling of business enterprise and disregard for the health of populations connected to Land. Land as kin—as source of maize and ancestor who still provides for (e.g., Indigenous Maya) to this day—is very different from land as alienable commodity, through which one can extract trading value via real estate speculation.

To clarify this point, we pause here to give background on the political campaigns which many of our interviewees discussed. The “Health and Safety for All Workers Act”—also known as California SB 1257 (2019–20) and its successor, SB 686 (2022–23)—would have ended the historic exclusion of domestic workers from occupational health and safety laws. This exclusion is a legacy of racializing and assimilating tactics that deny Black and Indigenous people the employment protections owed to other laborers. From Jim Crow to the Civil Rights era, low-wage domestic service was one of the few occupations open to African American women (see Branch and Wooten 2012; Haley 2018). O ne of the earliest reports on Black domestic workers, Isabel Eaton’s 1899 “Special Report on Negro Domestic Service”, exposed the wage theft, sexual harassment, and harsh treatment through which white employers exploited domestic workers in conditions reminiscent to those under slavery. In 1938, when Congress signed the Fair Labor Standards Act into law, granting minimum wage and overtime pay to laborers in the U.S., “Southern lawmakers refused to pass the Act unless two key groups of workers were excluded: farmworkers and domestic workers” (see California Domestic Workers Coalition n.d.). By excluding service in private households from “work for hire”, to which minimum standards of pay and safety were owed, Congress essentially extended the afterlife of slavery for Black domestic workers in the American South for another thirty years.

With regard to Native Americans, the notorious boarding school system that was ostensibly designed to “civilize”—read: assimilate—Indigenous children to settler–colonial culture and industry ended up transforming Native American children into an “unpaid workforce” that was placed into white homes and homesteads to do menial work (for boys) and domestic service (for girls) under the guise of “uplift” (Pfaelzer 2022).39 As historian Margaret Jacobs clarifies, contributing to the demand in the Bay Area for Indigenous women to fill this occupational sector was the fact that large numbers of Black women did not migrate West until the 1940s, and that Exclusion Laws, directed at Asian immigrants from 1882 forward, reduced Asian men’s availability to serve in low-wage domestic work. The expansion and continuation of settler colonialism occurred through the “outing” system, where matrons working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent Indigenous young women into Bay Area white settler homes as domestic workers. To this day, California still excludes household domestic service from the definition of employment—also known as work for hire.40

Against this background, the California Domestic Workers Coalition (CADWC) set about educating “employers, politicians, and [other] domestic workers about the value and dignity of domestic work”. In 2006, CADWC began its first campaign aimed at passing Assembly Bill 2536, titled “Household Worker Bill of Rights”. Despite passing both legislative chambers, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill.41 Nevertheless, domestic workers had their first unqualified success with the passing of Assembly Bill 241 in 2013–2014, which provided overtime protections for personal attendants. Then, in 2016, a revised Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, guaranteeing overtime pay for domestic workers, was signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown.

Many of our interviewees spoke of their current campaign in 2020 to pass the “Health & Safety for All Workers Act” (SB 1257). Labor activism, selfsame with telling their illness narratives, has been a primary vehicle through which Latina immigrant care workers have enrolled legislators and the wider public in “caring about” and “taking care of” them—recognizing the need to overturn their historic exclusion from workplace health and safety laws. While SB 1257 passed both houses of the state legislature, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill, citing a “potentially onerous and protracted ‘investigation by letter’ procedure between Cal-OSHA and private tenants and homeowners”42 and his desire to protect “the privacy of an individual’s private residence”.

Newsom worried that employers of domestic workers lacked knowledge of the safety hazards present in their households and of the protective measures needed to mitigate the same. In response, domestic worker organizations formed an advisory committee including employers, workers, non-profit advocates, and health and safety experts to develop “voluntary guidelines and policy recommendations for domestic workers’ health and safety” (see Office of the Governor 2020; SB 321 Advisory Committee 2022). This committee and its testimony to Congress and media campaigns effectively educated state assemblypersons about deficits in chemical regulation, fall risk prevention, overtime and minimum wage policy enforcement, and hazardous material posting. These hazards continue to occur under the “cover” of privacy (the dyad of mistress and house cleaner), even as domestic workers can be employed by parties who never reside in the units being renovated for private profit. This advisory committee, authorized by Senate Bill 321 (2021), published its findings in December 2022, with its recommendations incorporated into a new Senate Bill 686 (2022–23), also called “The Health and Safety for All Workers Act”, which State Senator María Elena Durazo presented in February 2023. Despite again passing both houses of the legislature in 2023, Newsom vetoed the bill, citing reasons of equity (i.e., that low-income and elderly households who might hire domestic workers would be economically unable to implement safety standards).43

Newsom’s stated concern to protect “the privacy of an individual’s private residence” most tellingly speaks to settler maintenance upholding prior (white) settlers’ accumulative privileges through furtherance of land-as-commodity practices. That is, private property holders’ rights are prioritized, and those with established financial means to buy more property (e.g., during foreclosure proceedings) gain more in this arena. Their (house-flipping) businesses capitalize upon their workplace’s “privacy” exemption that excludes them from scrutiny of the cleaners’ working conditions, under which they garner renovation value. Recall, here, Alcalá’s narrative of working for employers who obviate actual repair of grimy bathrooms because she can make them shiny again. Significant also are the extremely dirty environments and open construction sites that domestic workers are tasked with rehabilitating; residential units bought by financial speculators capitalizing on the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis did not serve as “private” spaces of inhabitation. Rather, these built environments functioned as both the workplace and the workplace product—the commodity in a private business enterprise.

Newsom’s veto, while disappointing, accords with the economic flourishing of the state’s largest industry sector as of 2020 (i.e., “Finance, Insurance, Real Estate, Rental, and Leasing”, which accounts for 19% of the state’s GDP).44 Settler maintenance upholds the hierarchy between earlier settlers and their low-wage caretakers, coupled with business imperatives that disregard both the health of Land and the health of populations connected to Land. It upholds and protects (white settler) private property interests over and against the health and welfare of those racialized through historical exclusions of land ownership, unfairness in mortgage financing, and those the state attempts to assimilate through (household service) domestication and Land thefts.45 Under the cover of protecting “privacy”—as in the domestic sphere associated with reproductive supports and familial care—Newsom actually protected private enterprise and profits derived from broken relationality to labor.

The vetoes demonstrate the state’s limitations (despite California’s liberal and progressive reputation) as a remedial body to erode settler maintenance.46 Nevertheless, we caution against overinvesting in the end result of the SB 1257 and SB 686 campaigns, rather than in the process of collective organizing itself, as a salient avenue of domestic workers’ self-directed care web. Though Newsom stymied, in the short run, these women’s efforts to persuade the state to “take care of” those who clean in private residences, domestic workers expanded and deepened their networks of lateral caregiving and care-receiving for themselves in the collectivizing process undertaken in pursuit of SB 1257—a topic to which our next section turns. To offer a final summation of our framework of settler maintenance, we note that settler maintenance bespeaks a material–discursive hybrid: the matter of chemicals, which substitute for adequate durations for scrubbing, plus social histories of racialized labor exploitation and the attenuation of Indigenous sovereignty through cleaning jobs in white settler households. Latina domestic workers—as they become inserted into this material–discursive hybrid of settler maintenance—make it perceptible to themselves and others by way of their labor activism and illness narratives.

6. Lateral Networks, Political Organizing, and Other-Directedness

As previously recounted, several domestic workers practiced self-care by supplying themselves with nontoxic “green cleaning” materials rather than relying on their employers to do so. Maria Aguilar notes two incidents in her early years in the U.S. that sparked her interest in political organizing. The first involved her being hired to work from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., not being given a meal during the workday, and receiving a mere USD 60 at its end. If not for the Women’s Collective’s training in self-advocacy,47 Aguilar would have returned to Guatemala (she told her husband they must do so immediately after this experience). The second incident involved mixing the Clorox and Ajax provided by a jobsite cleaning company and becoming ill from the poisonous fumes. Aguilar credits the Collective with offering trainings on “what I should use and what I should not use”, so that “at this time during the period that I am working, I no longer have problems with [toxic products]” [00:17:47].

Health and safety training comprised the first stage of improving her situation. These learning opportunities also enabled Aguilar to ask her employers to supply less-toxic products. As clarified by another domestic worker, at the trainings, members of the collective receive “materials so that one can continue reading” about the known dangers in cleaning products “and if one also has trust with an employer, one can share that information” [Alfaro, 00:29:14]. Now working to train others about dangerous cleaning products, Aguilar initiates a longer process of lateral caregiving by educating her peers. This virtuous circle of care resolves with Aguilar now working in a paid position with the Collective as a “health and safety training organizer”.

Feeling and witnessing their women’s collectives as not only a channel to improve their own knowledge—a means for learning—but also as an interactional space of generosity and compassion arises in several other interviewee narratives. Evelin Alfaro highlights an atmosphere of conviviality and appreciation at her very first MUA meeting, where

they received me in a very, very good way, very welcoming, very accepting, and [with the spirit of listening] to all the other companions…. When a new member arrives, they have a custom of asking her name, who invited her or how she found out about the organization, and they give them a welcoming applause for being in that space. And then they invited me to continue participation…. And that was what I liked, to be able to continue learning.

[00:31:00]

Delivering a loud ovation for those orienting toward being “active and united”, the organization performs a kind of caregiving that new members may not know they were lacking. In North America’s highly individualistic settler societies, giving one’s time to caring for and alongside “crip” others is a “radical [act]” that deserves applause (Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018, p. 33, quoting Erickson).48

Whereas Aguilar stresses the propositional knowledge she acquired at her activist organization (i.e., what products to use and what not to use), Alfaro emphasizes styles of interacting that occur within the meetings themselves as most valuable. She highlights their training protocols on how to listen to and give advice:

What did I learn? I learned a lot. [laughs] I learned […] that sometimes we make comments or give a suggestion to someone who has a problem. […] Perhaps by nature we […] desire to give advice. However, we first have to ask because we don’t know how the person feels or how they are going to take it. So that’s what I liked, asking the person for permission first, if they agree to listen and that we are doing it with good intentions…. That caught my attention.

[00:32:00]

Asking for permission to give advice enacts solicitousness as to whether an intended type of caregiving will be well-received or not. By deliberately incorporating reflexivity into the caregiving and care-receiving process, these lateral networks foster their own robustness and longevity.

Though a comparatively less long-lived member of her collective (three years) compared to the seven plus of other interviewees, Gabrielle’s story emphasizes the uplift she experiences when attending a regional meeting in Las Vegas, during a period that overlapped with her husband falling ill and seeking medical tests (he eventually is diagnosed with cancer of the lymph):

There [were people] from across the country, of all races…. Color, language, age, sex—nothing mattered…. And you see in those groups, you see every story, every face, with different needs, different abuses they say they have lived through.

[00:35:53, 00:37:00]

…When I went to Las Vegas, I felt, well, sick, because I was spending everything to find out about my husband, every day. And when I arrived and saw different faces, different languages, men and women, of different colors and everything, that was when I decided how beautiful it is to help one another and fight for the same reason. And I have always talked with my colleagues at the Center that we have to be united, to work for ourselves, because we are working for the benefit of all.

[00:39:00]

Although Gabrielle initially went to the Graton Labor Center to find work for herself and only later took the training on chemicals in cleaners, she found through ALMAS an other-directed “beautiful” form of mass struggle through which to help others and, at the same time, “work for ourselves”.

Similar to Gabrielle, Elizabeth Montiel stresses the gratification that comes when showing up in mass numbers to assist others. In the case where a woman whose undocumented husband was being detained at an immigration center, Montiel recounts it as if explaining how they would mobilize under any situation:

A group of women from all the organizations can join forces and stand outside immigration to show that we are with that person. […] We are up to around fifteen women who can go and stand outside immigration on Sansome [Street], here in San Francisco. And at that moment, it is not just one organization, it is up to three…. the deportation was stopped because the organizations also have lawyers who came in at that same moment to see his case, and the deportation was suspended.

[00:41:30, 00:43:40]

Montiel speaks specifically of worrying over what would happen to this woman and her children if her breadwinning husband were to be deported.

While the trainings on toxicant chemicals make sense as an intervention to support women who work as cleaners, Montiel stresses the unique mass movement of which she is a part as also addressing a larger structural issue faced by Latinx immigrants in the U.S.:

I am happy to give my time for other people. DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], TPS [Temporary Protected Status]. We have gone to Sacramento to speak with senators, with legislators. We have gone to Washington to meetings, the organizations, as many as possible to fight the[se] causes that we want turned into laws for a general amnesty. Because obviously all of us who are here—are often undocumented.

[00:40:02]

She notes being “fascinated” by the power of their mass organizing to support undocumented immigrants who are criminalized for having arrived later than prior settlers, even though—through their labor—they are continually producing value and maintenance for those settlers with papers (visas, green cards, citizenship).

Also a member of ALMAS, Socorro Díaz, living in Santa Rosa, California for the past seven years and originally from Oaxaca, Mexico, similarly attests to “learning a lot” from her labor organizing, and liking it so much that she initially had to “sneak out to [organizing] event[s]” because her husband “strongly disagreed” with her participation in marches and demonstrations. She recollects his initial resistance: “What are you doing in the streets? We’re here at home and you’re over there. What are you doing?” [00:24:40]. Her narrative stresses the public “streets” where domestic workers assemble as a caregiving and care-receiving space, in contradistinction to her spouse’s view of the home as the reproductive site where her efforts should lie. Díaz describes ALMAS as

a very small organization, but we are learning a lot. There are no men because the typical Mexican man has in his mind, “What are they doing?” It is such an ugly machismo that a person who has not lived it cannot understand it…. Then one day I rebelled, I told [my husband], “I am a rebel. I am in this country because, look, at fourteen I left my house. I was a girl and I left and rebelled against my parents… And now you want to have me under your control? No. We are going to put everything as it should be or we are going to have to take other decisions”.

[00:25:12]

Díaz’s oral history indirectly testifies to how lateral labor-based pathways of distributing care sustain her differently, and perhaps more so, than a nuclear familial one. Though Díaz, prior to her receiving instruction and encouragement at meetings, may not have thought she needed to join a community organization connected to political activist goals, the education she receives about her work life apprises her of her right to fair and different treatment from both her employers and her husband. Moreover, through recollecting her daughter’s pride in her mother’s activist work, Díaz, similar to Gabrielle and Montiel, stresses the other-directedness of the learning and care she gives and receives in ALMAS:

My daughter, one day walking downtown, saw my face there in a newspaper, in a newspaper box, and it said, “Socorro Díaz, an active ALMAS leader, traveled to Sacramento and is in the Labor Center”. And my daughter [said] “Ma, […] I am proud of you. Thank you for showing me everything you have done for the community, and I know that you will be able to make more changes […] because I know that you are not fighting for yourself. You are fighting for other women who are also immigrants. And you are giving me an example that unity is strength”.

[00:50:15]

These accounts illustrate the benefits and pleasures that labor activism brought to participants. Care came in the form of informational trainings that, in turn, helped them negotiate better work conditions with their employers. It also came by way of orienting toward the other in instituting protocols for welcoming new members and speaking at meetings, assembling regionally with racially diverse sister organizations, and showing up for the more vulnerable. Finally, these lateral networks of caregiving and care-receiving also allowed members of these women’s labor collectives to renegotiate their own household’s gendered strictures on appropriate uses of time and to receive verbal affirmation from family members on the value of their political activism. By catalyzing multiple and various cross-circuits of care-receiving and caregiving, these labor collectives—as social and political infrastructures—successfully designed themselves to persevere regardless of the disposition of any one specific political campaign.

7. Conclusions

Remarking on the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment during the first administration of President Donald Trump, Ines Lazarte, originally from La Paz, Bolivia, speaks of the irony whereby U.S. citizens who are enrolled in a revived white supremacist movement either do not realize or choose to deny:

[I]mmigrant people are the mainstay of this country. Immigrant people—not just Hispanics. People worldwide—Chinese, African Americans—have come to lift this country up. Immigrant people are the mainstay of this country and [Trump] doesn’t realize that immigrant people maintain [the houses of those in] government. So he should be more conscientious with immigrant people…More than anything [that] Republicans change their perspective on immigrant people. They come home, they forget about the domestic worker. They come home, they sit at a clean table, well-set, to eat, to have breakfast, to sleep in a well-made bed, well-cleaned, smelling freshly-washed, but nevertheless they do not realize who does that work.

[00:33:45]

Forgetting that there is a she who has made the bed, washed the clothes, plated the breakfast, and cleaned the table enables non-obligation to that person, or, much the same thing, equating the lean fees for those services as the only obligation. The immigrant worker disappears, nonexistent in their own need for reproductive supports and, at the same time, continually providing for the comfortable maintenance of prior settlers’ wellbeing. This disappearance constitutes the magical feeling of self-sufficiency and mystified independence for (white) settlers. As ecofeminism also underscores, settler–colonial men’s fantasies of independence qua freedom not only denigrate the life-sustaining work of brown women and immigrants whose own lives need support, but they also remain convivial with a similar devaluing of the planetary environment—what Indigenous studies scholars outline as Land as kin and its rights to receive care (see Atleo and Boron 2022).

As we have asserted, upstream chains of business relationality (e.g., white settler commodification of land as well as petroleum extraction, carbon emissions, and climate change) render as acutely sick particular environments (i.e., foreclosed properties and burned hospitals) where Latina domestic workers have been sent as clean-up crews. Their own debilitated health—which they expressly link to long-term exposure to the cleaning chemicals required by settler maintenance—emerges as adjacent to the care deficits wreaked upon Land. Living with chronic illness from chemical exposure, domestic workers contest employers’ mystified belief in harsh cleaners as an antidote to these scales of environmental neglect and position themselves, alongside plants and pets, as sentinels attuned to the damage—not always or not yet discernible to others—ensuing from chemical injury. They tie their epistemological insights regarding better maintenance—the robust support for caregivers and the health of nature—to growing up in conditions of economic disadvantage, resource scarcity, and non-modernization. In short, Latina domestic workers’ illness narratives, while serving their collective organizing, aim to improve occupational health, and advance disability justice and environmental justice.

Drawing on the Oral Histories of Environmental Illness archive, we echo Nadia Kim’s observation that “what society might see as the improbable mountain movers—the of color, low-income, first-generation, undocumented immigrants, many of whom are women and mothers—have in fact been on the front lines of influential grassroots community movements of all kinds” (Kim 2021, p. 8). In this way, we redress the scholarly tendency to overlook these environmental health justice advocates. Finally, we introduce a framework of settler maintenance that articulates the concrete and symbolic registers of the struggle over an economizing ethos (achieved through chemicals) as it further degrades the labor conditions of cleaning work and prevents the flourishing of low-wage women of color’s bodyminds.