The Maid's Daughter: Living Inside and Outside the American Dream

by Mary Romero

Overview

A “detailed, intimate” account of a Mexican American girl growing up in the luxurious Los Angeles home where her mother is a live-in maid (Publishers Weekly).
 
Born in Los Angeles, Olivia was taken to Mexico to live with her extended family until age three. Then she returned to L.A. to be with her mother, a live-in maid to a wealthy family. Mother and daughter sleep in the maid’s room, just off the kitchen. Olivia is raised alongside the other children in the house. She goes to school with them, eats meals with them, and is taken shopping for clothes with them. She is like a member of the family. Except she is not.
 
Based on over twenty years of research, this book brings Olivia’s remarkable story to life. We watch as she grows up among the children of privilege, struggles through adolescence, declares her independence, and eventually goes off to college and becomes a successful professional. Much of the story is told in Olivia’s voice, and we hear of both her triumphs and setbacks. We come to understand the painful desire to claim a Mexican heritage that is in many ways not her own and of her constant struggle to come to terms with the great contradictions in her life.
 
In The Maid’s Daughter, Mary Romero explores this complex story about belonging, identity, and resistance, illustrating the patterns of inclusion and exclusion in Olivia’s life. Romero points to the hidden costs of paid domestic labor that are transferred to the families of private household workers and nannies, and shows how everyday routines are important in assuring that various forms of privilege are passed from one generation to the next. Through Olivia’s story, Romero shows how mythologies of meritocracy, the land of opportunity, and the American dream remain firmly in place while simultaneously erasing injustices and the struggles of the working poor.
 
“There are no inherently good and evil characters in this story—just people trying to deal with the problems that come with having too much money, or not enough.” ―Los Angeles Times
 
“Illuminates race, class, and gender in America at a peculiarly intimate intersection between upper-middle-class white families and the women of color who provide domestic labor for them.” ―Library Journal
 
“Olivia’s true story growing up in the servants’ quarters of a gated luxury suburb may evoke Upstairs, Downstairs meets Beverly Hills 90210, but the narrative is infinitely more profound.” —Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums
 
Winner, Americo Paredes Book Award for Non-Fiction presented by the Center for Mexican American Studies at South Texas College
 
Selected as an Outstanding Title by AAUP University Press Books for Public and Secondary School Libraries

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814769362
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	11/21/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Mary Romero is Professor of Justice Studies at Arizona University. She is the author or editor of many books, including Maid in the U.S.A.. In 2012, she was awarded the Julian Samora Distinguished Career Award by the Latino/Latina Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  Introduction1 Who Is Caring for the Maid’s Children? 2 Becoming the Maid’s Daughter 3 Being the Maid’s Daughter 4 Passing and Rebelling 5 Leaving “Home” 6 Making a Home  Epilogue Notes References Index About the Author 

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

This detailed, intimate investigation of domestic work from the perspective of a domestic worker's child is a significant achievement that reads like a more academic Random Family."-Publishers Weekly,

"A valuable case study and a dramatic life story, this oral history explores identity and illuminates race, class, and gender in America at a peculiarly intimate intersection between upper-middle-class white families and the women of color who provide domestic labor for them." -Library Journal,

"A moving work that deconstructs the American Dream at the fraught intersection of race, class and gender."-Kirkus,

"[Romero] transforms twenty years of recorded interviews with a woman referred to as 'Olivia Sanchez' into a highly readable book which juxtaposes Olivia’s story, as told to Romero, with sociological commentary, research and selected interviews with other children of domestic workers.  This thought provoking study raises many questions to wrestle with on both individual and societal levels… Open-minded readers may find their views transformed after reading this engaging narrative." -Englewood Review of Books,

"Mary Romero, sociology professor at Arizona State University, transforms twenty years of recorded interviews with a woman referred to as “Olivia Sanchez” into a highly readable book which juxtaposes Olivia’s story, as told to Romero, with sociological commentary, research and selected interviews with other children of domestic workers. This thought provoking study raises many questions to wrestle with on both individual and societal levels."-Leslie Starasta,Englewood Review of Books

Editorial Reviews

"The circumstances of & Olivias true storygrowing up in the servants quarters of a gated luxury suburbmay evoke Upstairs, Downstairs meets Beverly Hills 90210, but the narrative is infinitely more profound and subversive. A unique, autobiographical collaboration between two brilliant women, The Maids Daughter relentlessly interrogates every facet of privilege and subalternity to achieve a psychological complexity and irony worthy of a great novel."

Mike Davis

"Mary Romero's book The Maid's Daughter is a rich and detailed sociological account of the lives of a live-in maid and her daughter."

National Catholic Reporter - Jessica M. Vasquez

"There are no inherently good and evil characters in this story—just people trying to deal with the problems that come with having too much money, or not enough."

|Los Angeles Times

"[Romero] transforms twenty years of recorded interviews with a woman referred to as 'Olivia Sanchez' into a highly readable book which juxtaposes Olivias story, as told to Romero, with sociological commentary, research and selected interviews with other children of domestic workers. This thought provoking study raises many questions to wrestle with on both individual and societal levels Open-minded readers may find their views transformed after reading this engaging narrative."

Englewood Review of Books

"While there are numerous books examining the lives of domestic workers, in The Maid's Daughter has delved into less-studied questions...while it is often argued...that microsociological research can yield results with macrosociological implications, Romero shows this more convincingly than many."

Ethnic and Racial Studies - Elizabeth J. Clifford

"Why read it: This isn't The Help. Romero's nonfiction book relies on 20 years of research and is an anthropological study into identity politics and the myth of meritocracy."

Diverse Magazine

"For this sequel to her groundbreaking study on the social inequity of domestic work, Maid in the U.S.A., Romero spent two decades following Olivia, who was raised in between two worlds, living in an upscale Los Angeles house where her mother worked as a maid."

Ms. Magazine

"In her new book, The Maids Daughter, Romero is again the perfect scholar respectful, curious, honest about her own orientation. Shes a listener, allowing the women she talks with to guide the way in which their stories are revealed... Its very moving work; thoughtful, sensitive, the best possible use of scholarship to open our eyes."

Los Angeles Review of Books

"Twodecades of research culminate in the real-life story of a Mexican-American girl navigating issues of class, race, and identity in contemporary Los Angeles."

Los Angeles Magazine

"A page-turner. The book's remarkable protagonist tells a compelling story...with each episode, the reader cannot wait for the next. How will she negotiate high school, dating, college campus politics? Mary Romero's more than two decades of research have produced a book worth waiting for."

Renato Rosaldo

"A compelling story of how a maid's daughter moves from a girlhood of rage and resentment to a level of empowerment, as a grown woman, that will make readers want to stand up and cheer. Blending life history and cultural analysis, Mary Romero shows that it is possible to do creative ethnographic work that is of service to both the academy and society. Although the identity of Romero's protagonist must remain anonymous, her struggle will live on in this memorable book."

Ruth Behar

"While The Maid's Daughter: Living Inside and Outside the American Dream is an emotionally draining book at times - the reader is witness to the abusive treatment of others - it is well worth the depth of experience and knowledge one gains by reading it...Author Romero has successfully encapsulated the plight and struggles of domestic workers and given the reader a great deal to contemplate."

New York Journal of Books

"Readers who found the popular novel The Help annoyingly glib and superficial may find The Maids Daughter, an oral history and sociological study, astonishingly complex and often raw with emotion."

Washington Independent

"A valuable case study and a dramatic life story, this oral history explores identity and illuminates race, class, and gender in America at a peculiarly intimate intersection between upper-middle-class white families and the women of color who provide domestic labor for them." -Library Journal

“A page-turner. The book's remarkable protagonist tells a compelling story...with each episode, the reader cannot wait for the next. How will she negotiate high school, dating, college campus politics? Mary Romero's more than two decades of research have produced a book worth waiting for.”-Renato Rosaldo,co-editor of The Anthropology of Globalization: Cultural Anthropology Enters the 21st Century

From the Publisher

"There are no inherently good and evil characters in this story—just people trying to deal with the problems that come with having too much money, or not enough."

Los Angeles Times

Mexican-born Carmen settled in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s as a live-in maid with her young daughter, Olivia. Aside from occasional visits to relatives in impoverished Mexican neighborhoods, Olivia lived her childhood and teen years with Carmen's primary employer, the Smiths, who in ways embraced Olivia as one of their own—from paying for her education to, many years later, inscribing her name on a Smith family gravestone. Over the course of 20 years, social justice scholar Romero interviewed the adult Olivia about her childhood experiences. Olivia's knowledge of two disparate communities gave her broad social capital and a high degree of social confidence, but her cultural competence was muddied while growing up by her proximity to privilege, with her access to the fruits of privilege strictly limited. VERDICT At once a valuable case study and a dramatic life story, this oral history explores identity and illuminates race, class, and gender in America at a peculiarly intimate intersection between upper-middle-class white families and the women of color who provide domestic labor for them. With Romero's analysis, extensive footnotes, and a through bibliography, it will be of greater interest to scholars than to casual readers of memoir.—Janet Ingraham Dwyer, State Lib. of Ohio, Columbus

Library Journal

In this penetrating case study, Romero (Justice and Social Inquiry/Arizona State Univ.; Maid in the U.S.A., 1992, etc.) examines the life history of Olivia Salazar, a successful public relations professional who grew up in a wealthy Anglo household where her mother worked as a domestic servant.

The author followed her subject for more than 20 years, gathering data through a series of in-depth interviews that began in 1986. She organizes her analysis around actual interview segments, which she explicates with a rare combination of rigor and sensitivity. Olivia was the American-born daughter of a Mexican woman named Carmen who had originally come to the United States to find work that would allow her to support family members that lived south of the border. When Olivia was three, Carmen located a job in an exclusive Los Angeles gated community. It was here that Olivia would spend most of the next 15 years growing up as a "member" of the Smiths, wealthy family that employed Carmen. While her mother worked within the defined—and frequently exploitative—parameters of domestic servitude, Olivia occupied an uneasy interpersonal, cultural and economic middle ground. As Romero writes, "the social boundaries between 'being like one of the family' and 'the maid's daughter' [were] blurred and in constant flux." Olivia's association with the Smiths gave her access to the schooling and social connections that allowed her to eventually enter the ranks of the professional middle class. At the same time, it put her at odds with a mother unable to provide complete nurture while forcing her into anguished questioning of who she was and where she ultimately belonged.

A moving work that deconstructs the American Dream at the fraught intersection of race, class and gender.

Kirkus Reviews