Mothering as an export in the global economy. From today's Wall Street
Journal.
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Child Cares:
To Be a U.S. Nanny,
Ms. Bautista Must Hire
A Nanny of Her Own
---
She Can Send Good Money
To Her Filipino Children,
But Pays a Heavy Price
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12/18/2001
The Wall Street Journal
Page A1
CAMILING, Philippines -- The night that she left to become a nanny in
America, Rowena Bautista
knelt in the empty church of her Philippine farming village and lit a
candle.
"Please watch over my children," she prayed. "Bring us back together
soon."
More than six years later, Ms. Bautista and her children are growing
further apart. The
college-educated 39-year-old spends her days caring for the baby daughter
of Myra Clark, a
working mother in Washington, D.C. She hasn't seen her own son and
daughter in more than two
years. The last time she went home for a visit, her eight-year-old son
refused to touch her and
asked, "Why did you come back?"
Ms. Bautista left the Philippines in order to support her children. Over a
third of the residents of her
village are unemployed. Most jobs in the Philippines pay less than $5 a
day. She sends home $400
a month from her $750 monthly salary for her children's schooling, food
and clothes.
Her salary also pays for a nanny in the Philippines, Anna de la Cruz, who
cares for the two children.
Ms. de la Cruz, in turn, has a teen-age son of her own, whom she leaves
with her 80-year-old
mother-in-law while she's caring for the Bautista children.
As the global economy draws more women of the industrialized West into the
work force, it is also
pulling mothers from poor countries to take care of children in wealthier
ones. Last year, 40% of the
792,000 private-household workers in the U.S. were foreign-born, not
counting the large number of
illegal immigrants who provide child care.
These sweeping labor trends have given rise to what some sociologists call
"mothering chains,"
groups of mothers like Ms. Clark, Ms. Bautista and Ms. de la Cruz who are
linked across the world
by their children.
The chains are especially common in the Philippines, one of the world's
biggest sources of migrant
workers. More than one in 10 Filipinos has a family member working abroad.
While most of the
country's migrant workers used to be men, today more than 70% are women,
many of them mothers
working overseas as nannies. Philippine women helped send home over $7
billion to the country
last year, creating the country's second-biggest source of hard currency
after electronics exports.
The struggles of migrant mothers are fast becoming part of the mainstream
Filipino culture. Last
year's best-selling movie was "Anak," or "Daughter," the story of a mother
who returned from
working as a maid in Hong Kong and found her family torn apart by her
absence. At Sunday mass
in the predominately Catholic country, priests say a special prayer for
parents overseas and the
children left behind. Radio stations play a hit song called "Mamma," which
ends with the lyrics:
London, Vancouver or Hong Kong
Governess, housekeeper or nurse
What is to happen to us children
With mothers who travel so far.
On a recent morning in Washington, Ms. Bautista walked her employer's
baby, Noa, to a park filled
with other Philippine nannies. She met Rosa, a 36-year-old Filipina from
the island of Iloilo who left
her son back home 10 years ago and who now worries that he's skipping
school and experimenting
with drugs. Sheila, a 27-year-old Filipina, was raised by a nanny in
Manila after her mother became
a nanny in the U.S. She says she's proud that her mother's salary helped
her get a college
education. But today Sheila has joined her mother in Washington, also
working as a nanny --
leaving her own three-year-old daughter behind. Both nannies declined to
give their last names
because of immigration concerns.
Even as mother chains spread new wealth to third-world countries in the
form of remittances -- or
money sent home -- they have also created new pressures. Studies show that
children of migrant
mothers tend to underperform in school and have more health problems than
average children.
Critics also charge that mother chains may foster a new kind of global
inequity, where children in
poor countries lose their mothers to higher-paying families in the
developed world.
"Mothering becomes another export," says Rhacel Parrenas, an assistant
professor of women's
studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who first documented
care chains in Italy three
years ago. "The benefits are clear, but we haven't really considered the
social costs."
For as long as she can remember, Rowena Bautista wanted to become a doctor
and move to the
U.S. She was raised here in Camiling, a small farming village about 200
miles from Manila, where her
mother was a teacher and her father was a sound engineer. Ms. Bautista
excelled in school and
planned to enroll in medical school. "Rowena was always the independent
one," says her younger
sister, June. "She always had to do things for herself."
Yet by the time she graduated, Ms. Bautista's family was struggling to
send all five children to
college and couldn't afford medical school. She tried engineering college
but dropped out after
three years. Ms. Bautista then began a winding and difficult journey that
eventually led her to the
U.S.
Venturing to Manila, Ms. Bautista was working in a travel agency when she
got her big chance in
1987. A local job recruiter told her about an engineering job in Taiwan
paying over $350 a month --
four times her salary in the Philippines. She signed up, borrowing $1,000
from her grandmother for
the recruiter's fee.
A day before she was scheduled to leave, Ms. Bautista discovered that the
recruiter was a fraud.
The agent gave her a fake passport in someone else's name and a Taiwan
tourist visa. Ms. Bautista,
bent on repaying her grandmother, boarded the plane to Taiwan and took on
a new identity.
For five years, she evaded the Taiwanese immigration authorities and
worked odd jobs for under
$150 a month. She cleaned houses, walked dogs and worked as a nanny. She
found steady work on
the night shift of an electronics plant, assembling television plugs.
One Sunday in 1990, while eating lunch with some friends, Ms. Bautista met
a Ghanian
construction worker named Kingsley, and they started dating. The next
year, in a cold, makeshift
clinic, she gave birth to a girl named Princela. A year later, on the same
day as the U.S. presidential
elections, she had a son, and proudly named him Clinton.
On Princela's first birthday, Kingsley was detained by immigration. He and
Ms. Bautista and the
two children were deported, and they returned to Camiling to live with Ms.
Bautista's family. Jobs
were scarce and after a few weeks of looking for work, Kingsley left for
South Korea. Ms. Bautista
soon followed, but she was detained at the South Korean airport and sent
back to the Philippines.
Ms. Bautista grew despondent. "What good was I if I couldn't even support
my own family?" she
recalls. She baked cakes and sold them on the street but was barely making
enough to buy a bowl
of rice each day for the two kids. In late 1994, a cousin called with the
answer to her problems: a job
in America.
The work, as a nanny in Washington, paid $600 a month and included room
and board. Ms.
Bautista quickly accepted. Tucking Clinton and Princela into bed one
night, she told them she was
planning to leave. "I said, `I'm doing this for you. For your future.' I
think they were too young to
understand."
As Ms. Bautista drove to the airport on the evening of her flight,
Princela buried her head in her
mother's lap and cried. Clinton sat alone in the back seat. As she kissed
her daughter goodbye
before boarding the plane, Princela looked up and asked "When are you
coming back?"
"Soon," Ms. Bautista said. "Hopefully soon."
Myra Clark is a rising star at the offices of Oglivy Public Relations
Worldwide in Washington. The
32-year-old University of Texas graduate was recently named an account
director and handles
some of the company's biggest clients, from multinational companies to
foreign governments. With
her husband and her two-year-old daughter, Noa, Ms. Clark lives in a
stately brick house in one of
Washington's nicest neighborhoods.
Because her husband works for a foreign embassy, the Clarks were able to
hire a legal nanny
without paying the usual U.S. taxes or wage and benefit requirements. She
first heard about
Rowena Bautista from another diplomatic family who was moving, and she
hired her immediately.
With her first employers' diplomatic work visa, Ms. Bautista had little
trouble entering the U.S.
"She is incredible," Ms. Clark says. "When I'm at work, I can focus
completely on work because I
know Noa is in the best care. I trust her completely." She adds, "Rowena's
made an incredible
sacrifice for her children and I know that. But I can't imagine making
that sacrifice with my daughter
. . . . I don't think I could."
Ms. Bautista also feels fortunate, since she is legal, is treated well,
and is being paid $750 a month.
She spends her weekdays living with the family in a spacious basement
bedroom. On the
weekends, she sometimes works at a nightclub stocking bottles and stays at
a small apartment she
shares with another Filipino family. She keeps four photos on her dresser:
Clinton, Princela, Noa
and Yahni, a boy she cared for from a previous family who still calls and
asks if she's coming back.
The pictures of Clinton and Princela are from five years ago, "because new
ones remind me how
much I've missed."
Ms. Bautista, like many mothers in a mother chain, has grown close to her
employer's child. She
calls Noa "my baby" and rushes to her crib every morning at 7:00 a.m. to
begin the day. They take
walks in the park, visit the playground, go to reading hours at the
library, and in the afternoon, curl
up together for a nap. One of Noa's first words was "Ena," short for
Rowena. Noa has started
babbling in Tagalog, Ms. Bautista's first language, while Ms. Bautista, in
honor of the family's
Jewish tradition, has started singing children's songs to Noa in Hebrew.
"I give Noa what I can't give to my children," she says. "She makes me
feel like a mother."
Yet surrogate motherhood only goes so far. On a recent morning while
feeding breakfast to Noa,
Ms. Bautista received troubling news from home. Her father told her on the
phone that Clinton had
a high fever and had lost his appetite. Princela, who's allergic to a wide
range of foods, had broken
out in hives. Ms. Bautista asked to talk to the two of them, but they said
they're too tired.
A few minutes later, Ms. Clark called and asked if Ms. Bautista could take
Noa to the doctor for a
possible sprained foot. Staring out the kitchen window, Ms. Bautista's
eyes shined with tears. "I
should be with my children when they're sick," she said. "That's what a
mother does."
In a third-grade classroom of the Camiling Elementary School, teacher
Josefina Cabatic glanced at
her latest discipline problem: Clinton Bautista. The high-energy
nine-year-old has trouble paying
attention in class and often distracts other students with his toys. "His
mother sends them," Ms.
Cabatic said. "Clinton is always very proud of the things his mother sends
from America." This
morning, while the other students worked on math books, Clinton passed
around a comic book.
Down the hall, in the fourth grade, Clinton's sister Princela has
different problems. With the African
features of their father, Clinton and Princela are often called "Aetas,"
local slang for the
dark-skinned indigenous people of the Philippines. The teasing has turned
Princela into a shy
student. She refuses to read aloud with the other students and sometimes
eats lunch alone with her
teacher.
With their mother gone, and their father abroad and largely removed from
the family's life, Clinton
and Princela are growing up fast in their struggling town. Camiling is no
longer the peaceful farming
community it was when Ms. Bautista was growing up. Decades of economic
decline under corrupt
leaders in the Philippines have brought drugs, crime and homelessness.
Most days, the streets are
lined with jobless, shirtless men loitering in doorways. Cows and dogs
amble along the roadside.
Rows of cardboard shacks are sprouting up along the river bank for the
growing ranks of homeless.
Someday, Ms. Bautista hopes to get her green card and bring Clinton and
Princela to the U.S. For
now, they're crowded together with 12 other family members, including
eight kids, in the same
four-bedroom house where Ms. Bautista was raised. Several of their cousins
who live in the house
also have mothers in the U.S. Their grandmother has become their mother
figure.
Princela has also grown attached to their nanny, Anna de la Cruz, who
arrives at 8 a.m. every
morning and helps cook, clean and care for the children. When she's not
visiting her friend's
mother in the market, Princela sometimes takes walks with Ms. de la Cruz
or helps her with the
laundry.
Big families like the Bautistas are common in the Philippines, leading
many to argue that relatives
can easily fill the role of parents when mothers go overseas.
"We have lots of grandmas, aunts or uncles who are there to take care of
the kids," says Ricardo
Casco, deputy director of the Philippines Overseas Employment
Administration, which handles
overseas workers. "If you ask most Filipinos, they'd say migrant families
are the lucky ones. They
have so many material benefits."
The $400 a month that Ms. Bautista sends home is more than the salary of
Camiling's main doctor
and is undoubtedly helping the children. Aside from their school, clothes
and food, the money
helps pay for luxuries like a washing machine and refrigerator. She hopes
to pay for an addition for
the house next year, so Clinton and Princela can have their own room.
Yet studies show that families pay a price for migrant work, and that
relatives don't always make the
best parents. A survey of over 700 young children by the Scalabrini
Migration Center in Manila in
1996 found that children with mothers working overseas performed worse in
school, were more
likely to be sick and were more likely to show signs of anger, confusion
and apathy than children
with mothers living in the country. The problems are compounded by
Philippine culture, which
discourages men from raising children.
During Ms. Bautista's last visit in 1999, she spanked Clinton for throwing
a tantrum. He screamed
back: "Why did you come back? Just to hit me?" Discipline has become a
problem: Ms. Bautista
often asks them to go to church and study harder, but they refuse. She
also worries about their
growing materialism: During a recent phone call, Clinton said little
except to ask his mother for a
computer and a scooter.
She's tried telling her mother to be stricter with the children, but her
mother says "it's harder if
they're not your own children. I could be strict with Rowena, but not my
grandchildren." What's
more, Ms. Bautista's mother works from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. as a teacher.
Alone in her room in Washington on a recent night, Rowena arranged a pile
of dried flowers she
has collected to make a wreath for her children. "Sometimes I think that
all the things I send them . .
. it's just to fill the space," she said. "What good is it if my children
have problems later? What if I
don't know them anymore?"
Anna de la Cruz once had the same choice as Rowena Bautista, but she took
a different path. A
slight, soft-spoken 44-year-old with little education, Ms. de la Cruz was
struggling to raise her
family in the early 1990s when she got an offer to become a nanny in
Kuwait. The job paid over
$300 a month, more than 10 times the amount her husband was earning as a
rice sorter. She
accepted, and after packing her bags and saying goodbye to her family, she
started heading out
the door.
"I saw my four-year-old son crying," she recalls. "I couldn't leave."
Ms. de la Cruz called the recruiting agent and canceled. When the
recruiter threatened to send
agents to force her to go, she says, "I had a friend call them and say I
had a heart attack and died."
Later, a friend told her about the job with the Bautistas, and she
accepted. For the first few months,
Ms. de la Cruz, who lives in the rice paddies about a half-hour from town,
stayed at the Bautistas'
and returned home only for occasional weekends or holidays. But she missed
her family. In
mid-1994 she quit, saying she would prefer to stay home with her own
family.
The Bautistas persuaded her to return, and now she commutes every morning
by pedicab from her
bamboo hut to the Bautistas' house in Camiling. She leaves at 5 p.m. every
day and gets weekends
off. The wage of $50 a month is lower than the Kuwait job, yet she can
spend evenings and
mornings with her youngest son, Johnny.
"Anna's been a big help to the family," says Ms. Bautista, who gave Ms. de
la Cruz a raise when
she returned home to visit two years ago.
Ms. Bautista sees herself and Ms. de la Cruz as being in the same boat --
nannies struggling to
support their own children. "We both clean toilets and change diapers for
a living," says Ms.
Bautista. "The only difference is, I get paid more."
A lot more. On a recent evening, Ms. de la Cruz returned home from the
Bautistas with her family's
dinner -- a baggie of rice and two small, day-old fish. Johnny, 14, waited
with Ms. de la Cruz's
80-year-old mother-in-law, who takes care of the boy when Ms. de la Cruz
is working. Their hut has
no electricity or running water, and they sleep on straw mats on the
floor.
With her salary, Ms. de la Cruz can barely support her family. Her husband
is often unemployed
and rarely helps out. Her brother-in-law suffers from mental illness, and
her mother-in-law has high
blood pressure, though they can't afford treatment. Ms. de la Cruz says
she hopes to hang on to
her job with the Bautistas until her youngest son is old enough to start
work.
"I have my job and my kids," Ms. de la Cruz said, stirring a pot of rice
over an open fire. "I'm
lucky."
At the St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in Rockville, Md., the Rev. John
Macfarlane stepped to the
podium and began Sunday mass. Ms. Bautista slid into a pew at the back of
the church, tired after
working until 4 a.m. at the bar. This morning, she had another worry: Ms.
Clark and her family are
moving overseas.
With the family planning to leave within months, Ms. Bautista has little
time to find another
employer -- and another work visa. She has a few offers, but the change in
schedule means she
probably won't be able to return to Camiling to see her children for
Christmas. What's more, she'll
have to say goodbye to Noa. "It's like leaving my own children again," she
says.
Kneeling at her pew, Ms. Bautista said a prayer for Clinton and Princela,
and prayed for Noa,
"wherever she may travel."
In October, Noa and her family moved to Israel. After trying unsucessfully
to find another family to
work for, Ms. Bautista took a job doing clerical work at a Washington bar
and restaurant, where her
employer is sponsoring her for an eventual green card. She keeps a photo
of Noa on the her
dresser and talks to her on the phone every few weeks.
In the Philippines, Clinton and Princela are still struggling in school.
Because of immigration
restrictions which require her to remain in the U.S. while she is applying
for a green card, Ms.
Bautista won't be able to return home to see her family for Christmas --
the second year she hasn't
been home. She sent the kids a box of presents but during a recent phone
call after her 10th
birthday, Princela was largely silent and said: "We're getting used to
birthdays and Christmas
without you."
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