Raising Brooklyn

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo1

Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Community.Tamara Mose Brown. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

The amount of research devoted to nannies, transnational motherhood,and migrant and immigrant women doing all kinds of paid household work con-tinues to grow. In this increasingly saturated field, which generates internationalconferences in Asia, Europe, and North and South America, what is left to tell?After all, it’s now been nearly 30 years since the publication of Judith Rollins’sgroundbreaking ethnography Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers(Temple University Press, 1985). That book, probably more than any other, setthe standard for fine-grained, ethnographic analysis between domestic workersand their employers, and dozens of excellent monographs have followed.

Tamara Mose Brown’s new book, Raising Brooklyn, continues with thishigh-quality research and extends the analysis to new spheres. The author, agraduate student and mother of toddlers when she did the research, conductedparticipant observation and interviews over a period of 3 years with 25 WestIndian nannies in a gentrifying neighborhood of Brooklyn. She also interviewed10 employers of nannies, but we don’t hear too much about them. The authorgrew up in a Trinidadian immigrant household, and identifies as mixed race; yetshe recognizes that like many of the West Indian immigrant nannies she studied,she is racially identified by others as black. All of the research subjects workedas live-out nannies in the neighborhood where the author lived as a resident, andthe park benches in the local public parks provide one of the main places ofstudy.

This is a beautifully observed ethnography, focusing on the positive andnegative spaces of everyday life. As a mother of young children herself, Brownfocused not just on the highs and lows of the nannies’ daily joy and conflict, butshe took quite seriously the boredom and monotony of everyday work of childcare, especially in looking after babies and toddlers. I think that’s a hallmark ofexcellent ethnography, observing the mundane and what is not there. Shehighlights how work becomes meaningful for these nannies when it serves as anoutlet of collective cultural expression, and here is where the urban and thespatial is highlighted. In this respect, she enhances a sociological study withspatial and urban analysis. As in Rollins’s book, the focus is “between women,”but it’s not between the employers and domestic employees, but between theWest Indian nannies, the “sitters.”

1 Department of Sociology, University of Southern California, 851 Downey Way, HSH 314, LosAngeles, CA 90089-2539; e-mail: sotelo@usc.edu.

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As job structures have changed, more of the nannies’ employers are nowworking at home, often in modest-sized condos and apartments. This means thatprivate child care now moves out of the domestic domain, to the streets and thepublic parks. This is felicitous for the ethnographer, and for the nannies, too,who find respite from the numbing isolation that can occur when taking care ofyoung children in private homes. As the nannies push baby carriages down thesidewalks, and meet up in the public parks, they develop a West Indian commu-nity constructed through food sharing, cell phones, and rotating creditassociations.

New technology is a dual-edged sword in this social world. Brown showshow new communication tools enhance surveillance and social control byemployers, as well as community building by the nannies. The book jacketfeatures an arresting photo of a West Indian nanny with a baby carriage sport-ing a placard that proclaims “Our site is your sight,” inviting strangers to visit“HowsMyNanny.com,” to report a potentially misbehaving nanny (I just nowvisited the website, which is still up and reports that it has been featured on GoodMorning America and other radio and TV outlets). Brown also discusses web-sites and blogs where strangers may post what they saw nannies doing in thepark. More developed in the book is the important role of cell phones amongthe nannies. The cell phones bind the nannies together, even when they are notphysically together. Here’s a great description: “If you ever saw Irene walkingon the sidewalks of the neighborhood she worked in, you would see her wearinga Bluetooth earpiece that allowed her to constantly connect with other providersthroughout the day. She would tell you that the only way she could get throughthe day was to have her ‘ladies’ to speak to while she was working. Bluetoothalso helped her to stay connected to her family members” (p. 46). The nanniesare constantly talking to one another, calling their own children (either in NewYork or in the Caribbean), and using the phone to pay bills. The cell phones,however, are not all life-enhancing social mechanisms, but are more like the“washing machine in its pseudoliberatory effect” (p. 104), allowing for the simul-taneous management of work, family, and community. Like e-mail, these pro-mote work speed-up and pile-up. Cell phones enable the employers to contactthe nannies with new work requests, even with odd chores, such as when ateacher calls to instruct her nanny to boil eggs for the students in her classroom.With cell phones, the nannies build and strengthen their own family andcommunity ties, but they are also now triple tasking.

Other excellent chapters examine the role of cooking and food in the crea-tion of community, rotating credit associations, and the organizing efforts ofDomestic Workers United. This is a rich book. The study is beautifullyobserved, written in a calm affect, hitting the right pitch. We sociologists don’tusually evaluate this aspect of writing, but tone sets the scene for both ethno-graphic description and analysis. This book shows an important part of urbanlife in Brooklyn that goes beyond the media’s glossy portrayal of Brooklyn asiconic hipster neighborhood.

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