Since the early 1980s, thousands of Central American, Caribbean and Mexican women have come to the United States in search of jobs, and many of these women have left their children behind in their countries of origin. In Los Angeles, New York City and elsewhere, the first job for many of these women is as a live-in nanny/housekeeper, caring for the families and homes of those more affluent than themselves.

Caring for the families of others, however, is often incompatible with doing the daily caregiving for one's own family. In a survey conducted among 153 Latina domestic workers in Los Angeles, 40% of those with children had at least one of their children "back home" in their country of origin. These women typically experience long separations of time and distance from their children, but they sustain their mothering ties through phone calls, letters, and by sending money home to pay for their children's education and upbringing.

This contemporary version of motherhood is not entirely new. It continues a long historical legacy of people of color being incorporated into the United States through systems of labor that do not recognize family rights. Slavery and various contract labor programs serve as precedents. Transnational motherhood, encouraged by the growing demand for live-in nanny/housekeepers and current immigration policies, also dovetails with recent shifts in restrictionist rhetoric.

While allegations of job displacement and wage depression anti-immigrant arguments as recently as the early 1980s, these have been replaced with allegations that immigrants drain public resources. In this regard, transnational mothering resembles precisely what immigration restrictionists have advocated through California's Proposition 187, and are currently advocating through other legislation targeting immigrants' access to social services. While the proponents of 187 never questioned California's reliance on low-wage Latino immigrant workers, they challenged the rights of immigrant workers to live with their own families and to fulfill family needs, such as education and health services for children, in the same nation-state of employment. In many respects, transnational mothers' externalization of the cost of labor reproduction to the Caribbean and Latin America is a dream come true for proponents of contemporary xenophobia. These transnational mothers work to maintain themselves in the U.S. and to support their children-and reproduce the next generation of workers-in the Caribbean and Latin America.

The ties of transnational motherhood suggest simultaneously the relative permeability of borders, as witnessed by the maintenance of strong family ties across borders, and impermeability of nation-state borders. Ironically, just at the moment when free trade proponents and pundits celebrate globalization and transnationalism, and when "borderlands" and "border crossings" have become the metaphors of preference for describing just about anything, nation-state borders prove to be very real obstacles for many Mexican, Caribbean and Central American women who work as domestic workers in the U.S. As our society slides closer to the old South African model of incorporating disenfranchised workers without accomodating their basic needs, it's time to open the discussion of what constitutes an equitable immigration, work and family policy for the 21st century.

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo is the author of Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration (University of California Press, 1994), co-editor of Latina Challenging Fronteras: Structuring and Latino Lives in the U.S. (Routledge, 1997), and is currently writing Custom Maid L.A. Stories. She teaches in the Dept. of Sociology at USC.