Rachel Randall’s Paid to Care brings together a series of compelling essays that explore historic, recent and emblematic cultural representations of female domestic workers in Latin America from the films The Second Mother (Anna Muylaert, 2015) and The Maid (Sebastián Silva, 2009) to the more recent and critically acclaimed Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018). The themes brought out in Randall’s book are of transdisciplinary appeal and global importance. In my opinion, there are three broad and interlocking topics that loom large throughout the text: power, justice and the politics of representation. I think, if you are interested in any one of these three themes then there will definitely be something for you to appreciate and learn from this book.
In terms of power, Randall does an excellent job of delineating how the racialised, classed and gendered structures of the colonial period have seeped into the present, informing who is expected to undertake domestic labour, under what conditions and for what recompense. In the Introduction she expertly and painstakingly traces how the exploitation of domestic labour has been pivotal to the social, economic and political fabric of post-colonial Latin American states, from the racist assumptions underpinning the idea that servitude would be the ‘natural’ destiny for Black, Indigenous and mixed-race women, to the architectural features of middle- and upper-class homes which have commonly included a space for live-in help, and the ‘unfinished sexual revolution’, which has allowed (predominantly) white, wealthy women to seek out careers and other forms of fulfilment outside of the home, while displacing responsibility for reproductive labour in the household onto invisibilised ‘others’.
The question and theme of power also runs through four conceptually rich empirical chapters where Randall excavates the politics of documenting, translating, curating and framing the voices and perspectives of domestic workers for national or international publics through the genres or forms of the testimonio, feature film, documentary and multimedia art exhibition. For example, her analysis of recent feature films depicting domestic workers shows how cinematic portrayals of paid domestic workers in Latin America still tend to be framed by critical upper- or middle-class perspectives rather than by the viewpoints of the domestic workers themselves. Randall finds that, whilst these films tend to valorise the personal sacrifices made by domestic workers, and do the important work of visibilising and humanising them, they sometimes miss out on or even deliberately omit the possibilities for problematising and/or overcoming the hierarchical social relations that characterise the relationship between the worker and their employers.
Hence, this is also a book about justice or, more accurately, about the pursuit of and obstacles to justice and equality for domestic workers. Randall offers a comprehensive and helpful overview of the incredibly slow steps towards legal and social reforms granting domestic workers the same rights and protections as other kinds of labour and the ways that this category of labour has, for centuries, been treated as a kind of exception. With great clarity and breadth of coverage that takes in a variety of countries, and bottom-up and top-down initiatives for reform, Randall traces the emergence of rights-based frameworks and national legislation that lay some of the foundation for change. But, she is careful to note that rights reforms are not and can never be a full remedy to the injustice and inequities faced by domestic workers. In Latin America (and elsewhere) it is substantive cultural change that is ultimately needed. Her argument is that cultural representations, such as the ones examined in her book, can potentially do the important work of prompting self-reflection and consciousness raising because they have the potential to denaturalise racialised, gendered and classed assumptions about who should be doing domestic work and about how paid domestic workers should be treated.
Thus, linked to power and the pursuit of justice, the politics and ethics of representation come up in different ways throughout the book. In her wide-ranging discussion of testimonios, for example, Randall revisits two internationally renowned texts – those recounting the stories and lives of the Guatemalan human rights activist Rigoberta Menchú and of the Bolivian labour leader Domitila Barrios de Chúngara. The term testimonio, for those unfamiliar with the genre, is often used in Latin American Cultural and Literary Studies to refer to a first-person narration marked by an urgency and desire to call attention to a situation of oppression, injustice and/or resistance. Testimonios have taken the form of written accounts. They have also sometimes been dramatised for the stage, television or cinema. In her framing of these texts as testimonios, Randall not only situates them as fundamental early insights into the intersections of sexist, classist and racist social structures in Latin America, but she also calls our attention to what they have to say about ‘women’s work’, highlighting that the devaluation of reproductive labour is an underspecified but nonetheless pervasive theme throughout both of the texts. This meticulous reading of the texts alone is refreshing and insightful. However, Randall also shows us that whilst testimonios have served a useful social and political function in making visible the lives of subaltern women and specifically domestic labour, this modality of storytelling is steeped in political and ethical questions over representation, authenticity and consent. Generally, the testimonials are compiled and curated by well-known literary or public figures – usually women. There has been a tendency to elevate them as authoritative visions of life as part of an underclass. In so doing, the representations they produce are sometimes exoticising, othering, and/or serve to flatten out the subjects that they seek to render visible in favour of a clarity in political messaging. Randall does a great job of getting behind the process involved with curating testimonios, hinting at the ways that these processes of data elicitation themselves can and do reinforce forms of exploitation along classed and racialised lines.
Close attention to process and methodology is a standout feature of the chapters devoted to film too. In several places, Randall interrogates and critically appraises the relationship between the index (or subject/protagonist) and the film. This is an aesthetic question relating to how subjects are depicted and what sensory or affective impressions are left by the chosen production method; but it is also, fundamentally, an ethical one. What is at stake in the representation of the index or subject? What discourses are intentionally or unintentionally reified in this process? And, what is the best way to represent subjects whose consent to be depicted and remade for an audience is limited or non-existent? These questions might seem as if they are confined to the study of subjects from the past but I think they become ever more relevant today with the auto-ethnographic turn in social scientific and humanities research, where we are sometimes prompted to make ourselves – and thus those closest to us – part of the data and/or narrative.
As I was reading Randall’s book, one of the thoughts that struck me was that writing about films, testimonios and art exhibitions is incredibly hard to do in a compelling and engaging way, not in the least because you cannot always rely on the audience or reader having accessed all of the cultural texts themselves. There is thus a kind of metapolitics of representation at play in how the analyst brings the texts to life, carries the audience along and with what intentions they do so. In Paid to Care, not only does Randall do a great job of introducing, describing and bringing the various texts into conversation, she does so with great sensitivity and clarity. The way the book is written and the way it is organised are beautifully accessible. As a result, I can foresee the essays in this book becoming highly influential as teaching texts across a number of subdisciplines from Film Studies and Literature to Latin American Politics and Gender Studies.
