Domestic workers talk explores an underrepresented labor group within a multilingual context, focusing on a cleaning company where Lusophone domestic workers interact with Anglophone customers. It offers an ethnographic study with unique methodological features, examining embodied communication, semiotic repertoires, and post-humanistic applied linguistics. The research goes beyond language, aiming to understand communication between English-speaking customers and non-English-speaking workers. It highlights the resourcefulness of interlocutors without a shared lingua franca, emphasizing the roles of multimodality and embodiment in communication. The authors employ a mixed-methods approach, integrating mobile, critical, and post-structural longitudinal ethnography to align with the evolving sociolinguistic paradigm. Within this methodological approach, while observing essential sociocultural and linguistic phenomena allows for a rich, contextualized analysis, the dynamic nature of the research setting, combined with the complexity of mixed data and the element of time, may pose significant challenges.
The authors’ unrestricted access to participants, documents, and materials is noteworthy, largely due to one author's relationship with Magda, Shine's manager, and long-standing connections with other participants. The researchers-authors employed interviews, field notes, observations, and shadowing while reflectively being mindful of their positionality. Authors focus on aspects of particular interest, such as Magda's multifaceted identities as a woman, migrant, and business owner. By examining her personal and professional identities, the authors illustrate how language has influenced her life—from her migration from Brazil to the USA to her professional endeavors. Through a psychological lens, they use Goleman's emotional intelligence model to demonstrate how her self-awareness, self-regulation, and empathy toward employees manifest in her exceptional, no-nonsense business leadership style. Then they shift focus to Magda's role in language brokering, where the non-dominant Portuguese language gains linguistic authority by being associated with positive attitudes toward ethical Portuguese female cleaners. The authors show how she leverages her intercultural, multilingual, and communicative competencies to mediate interactions among employees and between employees and Anglophone upper-(middle)class clients. This positions her in an exceptional managerial role, allowing her to control communication in various ways. By highlighting the socioeconomic, racial, and linguistic differences between Magda, her staff, and customers, the authors reflect on how she manages power relationships and implements language-related policies within her small professional community. Additionally, it explores how a multilingual company challenges the decapitalization and devaluation of migrants’ linguistic capital, representing a counterexample where migrants orient toward another local migrant group rather than the host language linked to economic and educational capital.
While preliminary studies have explored language learning, use, and commodification within domestic labor, there remains a significant lack of sociolinguistic scholarship on domestic work and the ‘home’ as a fieldwork site. Distancing itself from previous sociological gender studies that primarily utilized intersectional analyses of power relations involving gender, race, and class, this book focuses on common language, cultural components, and trust issues. It aims to understand how factors such as multiethnic communities, deportation vulnerabilities, social networks, time spent in the host country, and language use in various settings contribute to situations where some of Shine's employees have lived in the US for over twenty years without learning English.
