Gender and migration from invisibility to agency: The routes of Brazilian women from transnational towns to the United States

SynopsisIn the late twentieth century, thousands of Brazilians left for the United States to “make it in America,” inserting Brazilians into the new international labor flows. Brazilian women, like other Latin American immigrants, became concentrated in housecleaning, a labor market that is segmented by gender, class and ethnicity. Housecleaning became a female emigration strategy that allowed women to circulate through the globalized world and insert themselves in transnational migration. This article analyzes how the configuration of “the housecleaning business” and the organization of domestic labor redefined or problematized gender identities. The data comes from an ethnographic study conducted in Brazil and the New England region of the United States. As housecleaners in the United States, men and women are confronted with redefinitions of identities that may or may not imply changes in gender relations.