Crossing borders: Women, migration, and domestic work at the Texas-Mexico divide

This dissertation explores the temporary migration of Mexican women who reside in Mexican border cities and travel daily to American border cities to labor in domestic service. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation with domestic workers, employers, and community members in the paired border cities of Laredo, Texas and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, I study this frequent movement across international borders to analyze how this movement creates and reinforces inequalities of class, gender, and nationality in these borderlands. This study explores three distinct but interrelated themes regarding Mexican women's migration. First, I examine the pre-emigration context that drives Mexican women to temporarily migrate as undocumented domestic laborers to border cities in the United States. I do so by analyzing the social and economic conditions in Mexico that have motivated working-class women to seek employment outside their country. Second, I analyze the recurrent movement of women crossing international borders, whose legal entry into U.S. border cities is complicated by their undocumented employment in domestic service. This pseudo-legal migration creates a space wherein different areas represent "safe" and "risky" zones for the cross-border worker. Finally, I examine the (re)production of difference by domestic workers and employers. I explore how borders and boundaries in the lives of cross-border workers span the political and geographic divide that they cross daily and permeate the dynamics between workers and employers. I deploy the concept of symbolic boundaries to analyze the production of difference and how difference is negotiated in the relations between Mexican domestic workers and Mexican American employers. This study makes a contribution to the discipline of sociology by examining the temporary migration of workers which has been largely absent in the scholarship of migration. The movement of these women contributes to an understanding of the social inequalities embedded their migration and their labor as workers. It also brings attention to the inequalities of social class, gender, and nationality among co-ethnic women, who are typically essentialized in the literature and depicted as a homogeneous group.