9781137482112

Migrant Domestic
Workers in the Middle East

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Migrant Domestic
Workers in the Middle East
The Home and the World
Edited by
Bina Fernandez and Marina de Regt
migrant domestic workers in the middle east
Copyright © Bina Fernandez and Marina de Regt, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-48210-5
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United

States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New
York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of
the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan
Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above

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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United

States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-50301-8 ISBN 978-1-137-48211-2 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/9781137482112
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Migrant domestic workers in the Middle East : the home and the
world / edited by Bina Fernandez and Marina de Regt.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Women household employees—Middle East—Social conditions.
2. Household employees—Middle East—Social conditions. 3. Women
foreign workers—Middle East—Social conditions. 4. Foreign workers—
Middle East—Social conditions. I. Fernandez, Bina. II. De Regt, Marina.
HD6072.2.M628M54 2014
331.4'81640956—dc23 2014024785
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: December 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To all migrant domestic workers in the Middle East:
that care work may be valued and borders won’t be barriers anymore.
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Contents
1 Making a Home in the World:

Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East 1
2 Forging Intimate and Work Ties:
Migrant Domestic Workers Resist in Lebanon 27
Amrita Pande
3 Degrees of (Un)Freedom: The Exercise of
Agency by Ethiopian Migrant Domestic
Workers in Kuwait and Lebanon 51
Bina Fernandez
4 Immobilized Migrancy: Inflexible Citizenship
and Flexible Practices among Migrants in the Gulf 75
Pardis Mahdavi
5 The “Mama Mary” of the White City’s
Underside: Reflections on a Filipina Domestic
Workers’ Block Rosary in Tel Aviv, Israel 95
Claudia Liebelt
6 Creating a “New Home” Away
from Home: Religious Conversions
of Filipina Domestic Workers in Dubai and Doha 117
Naomi Hosoda and Akiko Watanabe
7 Caring for the Future in the Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia: Saudi and Filipino Women
Making Homes in a World of Movement 141
Nada Elyas and Mark Johnson
viii O Contents
8 “Shall We Leave or Not?”: Ethiopian Women’s

Notions of Home and Belonging and the Crisis in Yemen 165
Marina de Regt
Notes on Contributors 187
Index 191
CHAPTER 1
Making a Home in the World

Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East
F
or nearly half a century, the Middle East and, in particular, the Ara-
bian Peninsula has become a major migration corridor for domes-
tic workers from Asia and Africa. The large-scale employment of
migrant domestic workers began following the oil boom in 1973. As a
result of rapidly growing oil revenues, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf
states financed development projects in infrastructure, industry, and agri-
culture, which attracted migrants from neighboring Arab countries and
other parts of the world. Initially, the majority of migrants were single men,
with women migrating for family reunification. The increasing demand
for paid domestic labor led to an increase in the number of autonomous
women migrants (Castles and Miller, 2003; Moukarbel, 2009). Domestic
workers came predominantly from South and Southeast Asia (e.g., the Phil-
ippines, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Indonesia), yet in the
past decade, an increasing number of African women have also migrated to
the Middle East. Most of them come from Ethiopia and Eritrea, but there
are also women from Nigeria, Cameroon, Madagascar, Benin, and other
African countries who work as domestics. In addition, while the major-
ity of migrant domestic workers can be found on the Arabian Peninsula,
they are also present in Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Syria (before the civil
war), and Yemen (e.g., Jureidini, 2009; Moukarbel, 2009; Liebelt, 2011;
Frantz, 2008; de Regt, 2008).
The hierarchy of domestic workers at these destinations is often distinctly
organized according to class and race. Upper-class families tend to employ
Asian women and in particular Filipinas or Indonesian women, whereas
2 O Bina Fernandez and Marina de Regt
middle-class families employ South Asian or African domestics, who are

generally paid lower wages. In addition, when families employ more than
one domestic worker, there is often a clear division of labor between them:
Asian women tend more frequently to be employed to care for children and
the elderly, while African women are more likely to be employed for clean-
ing and cooking tasks. Thus migrant domestic workers are not a homoge-
neous category; they differ, among other things, on the basis of nationality,
religion, and ethnic background. In addition, not all domestic workers in
the Middle East are women, although there is a predominant preference for
female domestics. Migrant male workers may be employed as cooks and
sometimes for cleaning and caretaking, but they most often work as guards,
drivers, and gardeners within households (see Kerbage and Esim, 2011,
p. 4).
While a dominant public and media discourse has tended to focus on
the abuse and rights violations of migrant domestic workers in the Mid-
dle East, scholarly research is increasingly being positioned beyond this
frame (e.g., Frantz, 2008; Moukarbel, 2009; Moors et al., 2009; de Regt,
2010; Werbner and Johnson, 2011, Fernandez, 2011, Liebelt, 2011, and
Sabban, 2012). This book brings together the work of a group of scholars
in anthropology, sociology, international studies, and development stud-
ies researching the diversity of migrant nationalities (from, among others,
the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Sri Lanka, India, Ethiopia, Kenya, and
Benin) in equally varied Middle Eastern contexts (Saudi Arabia, Lebanon,
Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Israel, and Yemen). The initial
conceptualization of this book began at a double panel on migrant domestic
workers in the Middle East, which took place at the Middle East Studies
Association conference in 2013. Subsequently, we worked collaboratively
on the project, as each contributor to the book also peer reviewed another
chapter. The aim of the book is to move beyond the economist and inter-
ventionist policy prescription perspectives of much migration research in
the Middle East and to produce critical ethnographies that examine the
often profound transformations experienced by these women as they leave
their homes and encounter new worlds.
We frame our interpretation of the experiences of migrant domestic
workers in this collection of essays through the concepts of “the home” and
“the world.” These concepts speak to the yearnings, aspirations, fears,
and disappointments of the women and work as a metaphor for the inti-
mate relationships between the self and others. The “home” and the “world”
also allow us to engage with the ongoing feminist debate on the boundaries
Making a Home in the World O 3
between the private and public spheres. The private sphere is the “home,”
associated with the family, caring, and emotions and typically signified as
the natural domain of women; the public sphere, the “world” outside the
home, is typically assumed to be the legitimate domain of men. Feminists of
all disciplinary persuasions in Europe and North America, and increasingly
in other parts of the world, are interrogating how and why these two catego-
ries of private and public are foundationally constitutive of the economic
and political organization of societies and, as such, also of major theoretical
constructs such as liberal democracy and human rights (Scott and Keates,
2004). While we cannot provide a review of the complex feminist literature
on the public-private divide in this chapter, we first highlight ideas from
this body of work that are vital for illuminating this book’s concerns with
migrant domestic workers. Specifically, we discuss the constructed nature of
the public-private boundary and the feminist revalorization of social repro-
duction. Next, we turn to examine the critical differences in how scholars
of the Middle East have conceptualized the public-private divide, with an
emphasis on the gender-specific implications within these contexts. We
then draw on insights from the previous sections to reflect on the experi-
ences of migrant domestic workers in the Middle East. Finally, we map out
the ways in which this collection of essays invites us to rethink the catego-
ries of “the home” and “the world” as we follow the journeys of migrant
domestic workers through this terrain. We outline some of the significant
insights of the chapters in this book concerning how the dynamic and inter-
twined construction of agency, identity, and social relationships by migrant
domestic workers in the Middle East reconfigures their home(s) and their
world(s) and, consequently, our understandings of the private and the
public.
Feminist Debates on Public-Private Boundaries

The commonsense understanding of the private sphere as activities of the
home and the public sphere as everything outside the home belies the very
slippery and complicated use of both terms. The etymological root of public
in the Latin publicus suggests the population—more specifically, the free
adult male population—engaged in the conduct of the affairs of government
(Hawkesworth, 2007). Historically, females and slaves were often explicitly
excluded from this public associated with politics. Such explicit exclusions
are less frequent today, and the use of public has broadened to denote not
only the world of government but also the world of business (confusingly
called the “private sector,” to distinguish it from the government) and

civil society. Indeed, for Habermas (1989 [1962]), the public sphere is the
domain of civil society, conceptualized as bourgeois forms of social interac-
tion in urban spaces such as coffeehouses, libraries, theatres, salons, societ-
ies, and lecture halls. For him, these spaces are governed by the norms of
equality and rational, public deliberation, although he acknowledges that
these may be “imperfectly realized.” Public is also used to indicate public
action for the common or “universal good”—an ostensibly gender-neutral
benefit to all members of the population that is nevertheless authored from
an implicitly masculine position. Finally, public evokes the physical spaces
where encounters between these varied actors take place.
Feminist historians in Europe and North America have observed that
while the identification of the public sphere as male dominated and/or mas-
culine has a longer history, the identification of the private sphere of the
home exclusively with women is a more recent outcome of the transition
to industrial capitalism (Hawkesworth, 2007). With industrialization, the
household—previously also a site of production—was reconstituted as a
site of consumption. Simultaneously, women’s labor within the household
(previously recognized by the state as productive) was devalued, rendering
women dependents of the male wage worker, the “breadwinner” and head
of the household (Davidoff, 1998). The private sphere of the home came to
be regarded as the site of reproduction, sexuality, nurturing, and emotional
life—a man’s haven from the troubles of the world. For women though, as
Joan Landes observes, it was no haven but rather “a site of sexual inequality,
unremunerated work, and seething discontent,” often leading to “private
despair” and “private isolation” (Landes, 1998, p. 1). Second-wave femi-
nism’s slogan—“the personal is political”—was a fundamental challenge
to the public-private binary, a repoliticization of the private sphere that
simultaneously brought women out into the public. Feminist critiques of
the public-private binary have interrogated how the divide is socially con-
structed through regulations around behaviors, norms, duties, and interac-
tions within each sphere, as well as transgressions of the boundaries that
separate them. These inquiries have established that the boundaries between
public and private are far from absolute and that their construction is tem-
porally and contextually contingent. Importantly, the meaning of the public
sphere always depends on who has the power to construct its boundary
(Fraser, 1998). Following from these observations is the recognition that
the experience and understanding of the two spheres is constantly being
contested and renegotiated. Nowhere is the malleability of these boundaries

more obvious than in the debates surrounding domestic work.
Concomitant with the relegation of women to the private sphere was
the devaluation of social reproduction, identified by feminists as biological
reproduction—that is, the reproduction of labor power and the domestic
and caring labor required for the fulfillment of human needs. In particular,
domestic and care labor within the household has come to be viewed as a
“labor of love,” entwined with familial duty and relationships. As feminists
have observed, this ideologically devalues it as “real work,” even when it is
paid for. Despite the low value accorded to social reproduction, as Constable
(2009) points out, there has been a global increase in the “commodification
of intimacy” or the intimate relations associated with reproductive labor,
an increase that is linked to transnational migration and implicated in the
broader capitalist processes of restructuring the global economy. To capture
the multifarious aspects of this commodification, Boris and Parreñas (2010,
p. 7) propose the concept of “intimate labor” to describe a wider range
of occupations that share the attributes of “work that involves embodied
and affective interactions in the service of social reproduction” and occu-
pations that are situated at the interface between the private and public
spheres.
Feminist economists have been at pains to demonstrate that women’s
roles in social reproduction, while publicly invisible, are indispensable to
the operation of the public sphere (e.g., Folbre and Hartmann, 1988; Fol-
bre and Nelson, 2000). The social and economic importance of domes-
tic and care work became more visible, and an issue of public debate in
Europe and North America, due to the conjunction of several factors: the
increased participation of women in the labor market, the demographic
transition to aging societies, the political claims of care providers and users,
and the continued rigidities in the gender division of labor (Williams and
Brennan, 2012). In particular, the increasing number of women entering
the labor market in the 1970s in high-income countries produced what
Sassen (2008) has labeled “professional households without a wife.” Despite
this shift, women remain primarily responsible for “homemaking” (Folbre
and Nelson, 2000, p. 125), and there is little or no social or moral com-
pulsion for men to undertake domestic and care labor, which has led to
the increased commodification of such labor in these contexts. In addition,
demographic changes have affected the demand for paid domestic labor: as
a result of declining fertility rates and longer life expectancy rates, the need
for professional caretakers of the elderly has increased. Initially, feminist
advocacy for the recognition of care as a public rather than a private con-
cern resulted in increased welfare and state provisioning of care services.
However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, the pressures on social
expenditure following the shift from welfare state to a post-neoliberal,
“social investment” paradigm have produced a degree of convergence on
the marketization of care regimes across high-income states, notwith-
standing their diverse historical and institutional legacies (Mahon et al.,
2012). State policies for cash benefits and the “reprivatization” of care now
stimulate a market for care services increasingly provided by a migrant care
work force. Middle-class and wealthy families increasingly employ migrant
domestic workers, nannies, and au pairs; however, as scholars have pointed
out, in addition to being feminized, this labor is increasingly defined by
the markers of race, ethnicity, nationality, and class (see Anderson, 2000;
Parreñas, 2001; Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002; Hondagneu-Sotelo,
2007; Lutz, 2012). Similar developments are taking place in economi-
cally developed countries in Asia (see Adams and Dickey, 2003; Lan, 2006;
Constable, 2007) and in the Middle East, as the chapters in this book
illustrate.
Public-Private Boundaries in the Middle East

To what extent can the Western liberal construct of the public sphere
be said to exist or to have any analytical purchase within the context of
the Middle East? As Shami (2009) observes, Orientalists have character-
ized the Middle East as missing a public sphere, lacking the aspect of
publicness that entails the political engagement of the population. Such
perspectives have pointed to monarchical states, where the totality of eco-
nomic, political, and often even religious space has been fully subjected to
the authority of the ruler. The theoretical and empirical counterperspec-
tives of the authors in the book edited by Shami point to a considerable
divergence from this monolithic and static conceptualization of the public
sphere in the Middle East, offering nuanced readings of the organization
of the public (and, by implication, the private) sphere. Two crucial dimen-
sions common to all these studies are as follows: first, the paramount
importance of religion within the public sphere and second (and unsur-
prisingly), the significance of gender roles and identities in understanding
the shifting boundaries between the public and private spheres in Muslim
societies (Shami, 2009, p. 16).
In contrast to the centrality of liberal, rational, and secular values under-

lying the construction of “Western” public spheres, as LeVine and Salvatore
(2009) point out, in Muslim majority countries, Islam plays a constitutive
role in the construction of legitimate political authority, the public political
community, and maslaha (the cause or source of something beneficial) or
the public good. Yet, for women in the Middle East, the contours of this
public are marked by a gendered, “sacred-sexual” boundary, which is not
fixed but constantly subject to renegotiation (Thompson, 2003). Scholars
of gender relations in the Middle East repeatedly point to the importance of
situating the analysis of the public-private divide within specific historical,
social, and political contexts, emphasizing the fluidity of gender boundar-
ies over time and space. Nelson (1974), for instance, critically reviewed the
perspectives of male scholars on the division of power in pastoral and sed-
entary societies in the Middle East and argued that women had much more
power than male ethnographers had perceived. Nelson’s article was inspira-
tional for many feminist anthropologists studying the Middle East because
she showed “how the conventional Western cultural notions of power that
previously informed our understandings of politics blinded us to the ways
women participate in decision-making and the workings of society” (Abu-
Lughod, 1989, p. 291). The public/private dichotomy was also increasingly
being challenged within the broader field of feminist anthropology (see
MacCormack and Strathern, 1980; Abu-Lughod, 1989, p. 292; Kandiyoti,
1996, p. 12). Kandiyoti (1996) showed that colonial and postcolonial states
have been instrumental in the various ways the private and the public sphere
have been constructed within the region. According to Thompson (2003,
p. 65), “public and private gender boundaries in today’s Middle East are
as much products of transnational discourses, politics, and economies as
they are of internal crises in state formation and class identity.” Thompson
argues that while the conceptual framework of public and private has not
dominated Middle Eastern women’s history, the concepts may nonetheless
be useful as lenses of historical analysis.
The intertwining of the public and private spheres in the Middle East
is particularly interesting to examine in the context of the family, domestic
labor, paid work, and employment. While the boundaries between social
classes have been clearly defined in terms of the division of labor in the pre-
colonial and colonial eras, modernization and globalization have produced
major changes in the social structures of Middle Eastern societies. These
changes have accompanied changing notions of femininity and masculin-
ity—in particular, in relation to women’s paid labor and their presence in
the public sphere. Social divisions based on economic class, nationality, and
race have to a large extent replaced traditional systems of social stratifica-
tion, affecting the construction of families and households and the divi-
sion of labor, employment, and people’s social status. Particularly in the
oil-rich states of the Middle East, there has been a shift to economies driven
by migrant labor. Thus the high demand for migrant domestic workers in
the Middle East is attributable to the affluent lifestyles supported by these
states, rather than the shift to a dual wage earner economy and an aging
society (as has been the case in Europe, North America, and parts of Asia);
that is, the demand exists despite low levels of women’s participation in the
labor force and a demographic “youth bulge” and regardless of declared
policies for the nationalization of the labor force (Shah, 2004).
Historians of the family in the Middle East point to the complexity of
households throughout various epochs: the households of the elite have
been domiciles, work sites, places of production and conspicuous consump-
tion, and sites of political intrigue and active state politics (e.g., Tucker,
1985; Fay, 1997; Doumani, 2003; Keddie and Baron, 2008). They cau-
tion against facile, universalist assumptions of a monolithic “extended tra-
ditional family” that occupies the private sphere. Instead, they suggest the
diversity and flexibility of family arrangements that dynamically respond to
the demographic, political, and economic transformations of these societ-
ies (Doumani, 2003). Despite the diversity of processes of transformation
within these societies, a common change has been the increased demand for
paid domestic labor. Although local women and men had in the past under-
taken paid domestic work (being paid in kind or in cash) within house-
holds, they were less likely to need employment once the economic status
of their families improved (see de Regt, 2008; Jureidini, 2009; Moors et al.,
2009; Sabban, 2012). Moreover, they now avoid this work due to the social
shame attached to working in other people’s homes and prefer working in
the informal sector. The social, ethnic, and geographic distance of working
in the home of fellow countrymen and countrywomen has become smaller
during the past fifty years. As Hansen (1989, p. 7) states, “domestic service
can only operate smoothly when servants and employers are considered dif-
ferent from each other.” In addition, norms of gender segregation mean that
local women who work in households are viewed negatively, as they would
come into contact with unrelated males and are at risk of sexual harass-
ment. The negative valence and risks attendant on paid domestic work have
therefore shifted onto migrant women who are recruited to undertake paid
domestic work in the Middle East.
Unhomely Worlds: Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East

We begin this section with a brief description of the working conditions of
migrant domestic workers. We then discuss three significant variations that
occur in the construction of the public-private divide for migrant domestic
workers. Each of these variations is contingent on aspects of status: the first
emanates from their status as domestic workers and the fact that their work-
place is the home of their employer. The second is due to the live-in status
of some domestic workers, while the third is contingent on their status as
migrant workers. We discuss the implications of these variations for migrant
domestic workers’ experiences and for their negotiation of public-private
boundaries in the Middle East.
The working conditions of migrant domestic workers in the Middle
East vary considerably, depending on whether they are contract or free-
lance workers. Contract domestic workers enter into formal employment
contracts, usually arranged through private employment agencies (PEA)
that operate collaboratively across source and destination countries. These
contracts specify their salaries, hours of employment, duration of the
contract, and their rights. However, invariably, the contract a domestic
worker signs predeparture in the source country is not legally binding in
the destination country. In the destination country, another contract is
drawn up (a local legal obligation that is not always followed), the terms
of which may be different from the terms of the contract signed in the
country of origin. However, more important than the employment con-
tract is the residence permit or iqama. In the Middle East, the preva-
lent system of sponsorship known as the kafala requires the residence of
migrant workers (including migrant domestic workers) to be sponsored
by a kafil (sponsor) who must be a citizen. Thus the legal residence of a
migrant worker is tied to the kafil, who is in most cases, also his or her
employer. It is standard for sponsor employers to confiscate the passports
of migrant workers. Although this is technically an illegal practice, it is
in effect a powerful mechanism of control, as when migrant workers run
away, they immediately become undocumented and run the risk of being
arrested and deported. It is important to note that the kafala system is not
implemented in the same way in every country: the system is particularly
strong in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states but much less important in
Yemen (see de Regt, 2010). Observers of migrant labor regimes in the
Middle East have frequently condemned the kafala as the source of the
injustices faced by migrant workers (Chammartin, 2004; Esim and Smith,
2004; Jureidini, 2003; Longva, 1997), and governments in the Middle

East periodically announce proposals to abolish the system; however, the
system persists because of the lucrative incomes national citizens earn
from the trade in sponsorship (Hertog, 2010) and because it offers states
in the Middle East an effective mechanism of surveillance over the vast
population of migrant workers.
“Freelance” migrant domestic workers, in contrast, are workers who have
exited the formal employment contract and become irregular residents of
the host country or have negotiated with their sponsor/kafil to allow them
to work for other employers. In the latter case, their residence status is tech-
nically regular, though not officially sanctioned, since “freelancing” is not
legally allowed in most Middle Eastern countries. They often work for more
than one household and may sometimes even work in the informal sec-
tor. Freelancers earn higher wages and have greater mobility and personal
freedom than contract workers. If, however, they are irregular (i.e., have
not negotiated with a kafil to “cover” for them), they can be vulnerable to
imprisonment and/or deportation and are often trapped, unable to exit the
country without paying large fines. Nonetheless, freelancing allows migrant
domestic workers to obtain better working conditions for themselves, and
freelancers are therefore less impacted by the three variations in the public-
private divide experienced by contract migrant domestic workers, which we
discuss presently.
As paid workers in the domestic or private sphere, migrant domestic
workers provide a substitute for the unwaged labor of women within house-
holds, allowing the latter to take up more remunerative employment out-
side the household, focus on quality time with her family, and/or enjoy a
life of leisure. The employment of paid domestic workers within households
presents some difficulties for the consideration of the employer’s home as
a workplace, as it is not “public” in the way other workplaces are. While
the home is the workplace for the domestic worker, it is the private space
of the employer. As Blackett (2011, p. 5) points out, “Ironically, it is pre-
cisely because domestic workers are employed within the ‘private sphere’
that there is resistance to recognizing the domestic work relationship, and
appropriately regulating it.”
The difficulty in recognizing and regulating domestic work as work pales
in comparison to the difficulties entailed in inspecting for compliance with
regulations. These difficulties are observable in the regulation of domestic
work globally and are particularly acute in the Middle East, where domes-
tic workers are explicitly excluded from labor and social security legislation
(Kerbage and Esim, 2011). These exclusions are justified by the argument
that domestic work cannot be regulated or monitored in the same manner
as other work, because this would violate the privacy of the home (Varia,
2011). However, as Johnson and Wilcke (forthcoming) observe, sanctifying
the “privacy” of the household in this way allows states in the Middle East
to simultaneously abdicate responsibility for any violations occurring within
the household while being centrally involved in constructing and policing
the public and private divide. In the past decade, international organizations,
such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) and Human Rights
Watch, have been working on ways to protect and legislate domestic work
worldwide. The ILO Domestic Workers Convention No. 189 (adopted in
2011) is a major step forward in the process of turning domestic work into
“real work,” yet convincing governments to ratify the Convention has proven
to be a major challenge. A number of governments in the Middle East have
verbally acknowledged the importance of protecting domestic workers, yet
ratification of the convention in the near future appears unlikely.
Most families in the Middle East prefer to employ live-in domestic work-
ers, and accommodation in the employer’s residence is part of the contract.
For these live-in domestic workers, there is a further reconfiguration of the
public-private boundary. The employer’s home is their own (temporary)
home. Yet, invariably, this is “not home,” as they often do not have a space
or have free time to call their own. They often do not have a room of their
own and are forced to sleep in balconies, passageways, living rooms, or the
children’s rooms. Their time is also not their own, as there is often no clear
demarcation between work and leisure time. From the employer’s perspec-
tive, the advantage of having live-in domestic workers is that they are always
accessible; from the domestic workers’ perspective, in effect, it means being
on call 24/7. As a result, they experience a higher degree of vulnerability
to labor exploitation than freelance domestic workers who live outside the
homes of their employers, or other categories of migrant workers. In part,
the justification for this is made by referencing the specific requirements
of domestic work—particularly, the care of young children, elderly, and
sick people who need round-the-clock care. Even the ILO Domestic Work-
ers Convention has a significant caveat about the “special characteristics of
domestic work,” which implicitly refers to the need for domestic workers to
be flexibly available.
At the same time, live-in domestic workers in particular are frequently
presented by employers as “one of the family.” The extensive body of femi-
nist research on domestic workers has shown that while some women may
indeed build close personal relationships with their employers’ families, this
does not alter the fact that ultimately, they work for wages in a relationship
of subordination (Rollins, 1985; Anderson, 2000; Enloe, 2000). Indeed,
many domestic workers explicitly or covertly resist their employers’ repre-
sentations of them as being “like a daughter” or “one of the family” (Bakan
and Stasiulis, 1997), an observation that resonates with the analyses of some
authors in this book.
Thus, in the Middle East, there is an intensification of the live-in domes-
tic workers’ experience of the world of work as a totalizing private sphere,
within which they have no privacy, space for the “self,” nor relationships
with people other than their employer. Paradoxically, this leads to women
finding or creating homeliness in the world through their engagements and
encounters in public spaces. As Moors et al. (2009, p. 158) point out, “In
order to find privacy domestic workers have to leave the employer’s home
and move into the public.” This resonates with the research findings on
migrant domestic workers in other parts of the world, which documents the
multiple ways in which migrant domestic workers physically occupy pub-
lic spaces in the destination countries—parks, shopping malls, restaurants,
and churches (see, for example, Constable, 2007; Yeoh and Huang, 1998;
Parreñas, 2001; Lan, 2003; Werbner and Johnson, 2011). As several of the
authors in this book discuss, these public spaces are where domestic workers
are able to build or find their own “private spheres” in which to relax and be
themselves in the company of friends and sometimes partners.
Some reconfigurations of the public-private boundary are specific to
migrant domestic workers. First, of course, they have left behind their
homes and families. “Back home” is a common referent for most migrants,
signifying their continuing affective ties across distances not only to fam-
ily and household but also to country and culture. While they may have
strong affective ties back home, these are often ambivalent and not always
straightforwardly positive. The racism they often encounter in the destina-
tions can reinforce their feelings of foreignness as well as their attachment
to their home and country. Their sense of alienness and status as foreigners
is further reinforced through the kafala system. The sponsorship system is
particularly disadvantageous for live-in domestic workers, as they are more
isolated, with limited opportunities to enter public spaces or for social con-
tact with compatriots and other migrants.
The foreignness of migrant domestic workers in the Middle East is also
evident in their double exclusion from the public sphere as a space of polit-
ical engagement: first, as women and second, because the public sphere
is generally constituted as “out of bounds” for migrant domestic workers—

and all migrant workers (see Longva, 1997; Gardner, 2010; Seeberg and
Eyadat, 2013). Their exclusion from the entitlements of citizenship status
renders them invisible as political subjects in the public sphere. As a con-
sequence of this foundational exclusion, they are unable to participate in
“rational, democratic dialogue” or decision making in the public sphere (in
the Habermasian sense). Within the Middle East, migrant domestic work-
ers have no rights to organize into unions or engage in political activities
such as protest marches or demonstrations (see Gamburd, 2009; Pande,
Chapter 2, in this book).
Moreover, besides limitations on active engagement in the political public
sphere, in many countries in the Middle East, migrant domestic workers’ (as
with all migrant workers) mere physical presence within the public sphere is
subject to a high level of regulation and surveillance (Longva, 1997; Crys-
tal, 2005; Lori, 2011). They are subject to stop-and-search police checks
when they are in public spaces and random checks to inspect whether their
residence papers are in order. Tacit (and sometimes explicit) rules exclude
migrant workers from certain spaces (e.g., clubs, restaurants, malls) unless
they are accompanying their sponsor employers. Women migrant domestic
workers are further subject to the gendered norms regarding women’s pres-
ence in the public sphere.
Migrant Domestic Workers’ Reconfigurations of

“the Home” and “the World” in the Middle East
The collection of essays in this book evokes some of the multiple spaces
within which “the home” and “the world” are envisioned by migrant domes-
tic workers in the Middle East and provides a richly textured sense of their
experiences within and across these spaces. Strikingly apparent in all the
essays is that the significance of the spaces occupied by these women is
inextricably tied to the transformations in women’s agency and identity that
are forged through the network of relationships they construct, rather than
the physicality of the spaces per se. This interpretation draws on the insights
of Massey, who conceives of space as a configuration of social relations—an
“ever-shifting social geometry of power and signification” (Massey, 1994,
p. 3). As the preceding discussion has shown, the public and the private
spheres are mutually constitutive, with fluid boundaries, and it is impossible
to maintain oppositional distinctions between the home and the world. We
therefore argue that this set of essays demonstrates the complex ways in
which the exercise of agency and the formation of identity and relationships
constitute the boundary-making practices that distinguish migrant domes-
tic workers’ experiences of the “home” and the “world.”
To varying degrees, all the chapters in this book analyze the agency of
migrant domestic workers in the Middle East, particularly since the original
premise of this collection was to move beyond the dominant representa-
tions of migrant domestic workers as passive victims of abuse and exploita-
tion, who are acted upon or coerced. We can begin with Ahearn’s definition
of agency as the “socio-culturally mediated capacity to act,” which cannot
simply be equated with “free will” or reduced to “resistance” (Ahearn, 2001,
pp. 112–115). While the chapters by Pande (Chapter 2), Fernandez (Chap-
ter 3), and Mahdavi (Chapter 4) explicitly explore the agency of migrant
domestic workers as situated in and constrained by the economic, political,
and cultural contexts of their employment in the Middle East, in one way
or another, all the chapters in this book articulate a range of ways they can
and do exercise agency.
Perhaps the single most important dimension of agency that several
chapters address is mobility: they reinforce the point made previously
that mobility is an essential aspect of migrant domestic workers’ employ-
ment situations. While most of the nonacademic literature—such as media
reports and reports by international organizations concerned about human
rights violations—focuses on the immobility of live-in domestic workers,
thereby emphasizing their isolation and exploitation, the chapters here offer
a more nuanced reading of women’s mobility. Our interpretation of mobil-
ity as a form of agency is informed by Massey’s concept of “differentiated
mobility.” This allows for an examination of not only who moves and who
doesn’t, or when they move and how, but also how “mobility, and control
over mobility, both reflects and reinforces power” (Massey, 1994, pp. 149–
150). For most women, “leaving home” is the first act of mobility, which
is usually an intentional act, even if the decision to leave is a product of
constrained choices, as the chapters by Mahdavi (Chapter 4) and Fernandez
(Chapter 3) about Dubai, Lebanon, and Kuwait illustrate. Upon arrival
at the destination, mobility is often severely constrained by the confisca-
tion of passports, which, as we have noted previously, is a standard (but
illegal) practice of employers in the Middle East. Restrictions on mobility
are further reinforced by employers’ injunctions against women’s physical
movements outside the house in which they are employed. Pande’s chapter
(Chapter 2) about Lebanon further describes the restrictions on migrant
domestic workers’ mobility when they are outside the employer’s home; for
example, they are not allowed to enter particular spaces, such as certain cafés
or restaurants. In assessing the gendered and racialized spatial disciplining
of migrant domestic workers in Lebanon, both within the employer’s home
and in the outside world, Pande shows how they are systematically assigned
to marginal spaces, their movements subjected to various forms of surveil-
lance, and how they are often confronted with verbal and physical harass-
ment. Nevertheless, Pande’s chapter provides vivid illustrations of women’s
agency, as she describes their balcony talks with domestic workers in neigh-
boring apartments and their multiple counterstrategies for gaining greater
mobility, which sometimes extend to the act of running away from their
employer’s home.
Mobility is emphasized differently in the chapters by Elyas and John-
son (Chapter 7) and de Regt (Chapter 8), who draw on their longitudinal
field work in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, respectively, to analyze the temporal
dimensions of migrant domestic workers’ mobility, which is determined by
changes over time in their relationships both with employers and with their
own families. Also focusing on how mobility is shaped by relationships,
Mahdavi’s chapter (Chapter 4) points to the ways in which the emotional
bonds with family may sometimes immobilize migrant workers who may
otherwise have relative freedom of mobility within their employment.
An analysis of agency is incomplete without a discussion of resistance
(bearing in mind, of course, that resistance is but one form of agency).
Scott’s (1985) concept of “weapons of the weak” was used by Mahdavi
and Fernandez to identify forms of agency as covert, subversive actions,
along the lines of similar work by Constable (2007), Lan (2006), and
Moukarbel (2009). However, as the chapters by Fernandez (Chapter 3)
and Elyas and Johnson (Chapter 7) observe, it is important to recognize
that migrant domestic workers can and do also engage in openly confron-
tational forms of agency that directly contest the power of their employ-
ers. As both chapters point out, a distinct expression of confrontational
agency occurs when women run away (or threaten to do so) from their
employers. Fernandez argues that although they are able to achieve greater
individual freedom by running away, their consequent irregular status
nevertheless reinforces their marginalized structural position as vulner-
able workers within the global political economy. The discussion on more
direct forms of resistance is further developed in the chapter by Pande
(Chapter 2), who analyzes the subversive, informal collectives of domestic
workers in Lebanon that have organized to provide support resources and
to advocate for their rights.
Moving away from the idea of resistance, Liebelt’s chapter (Chapter 5)

about Filipina domestic workers in Israel offers a very different perspective
that views agency as profoundly bound up in spiritual identity rather than
resistance. Liebelt’s ethnographic study of Catholic Filipina domestic work-
ers’ devotion to the Virgin Mary in a marginalized neighborhood of Tel
Aviv uses the concept of “patiency” to analyze Filipino women’s recourse
to the Virgin Mary as an embodiment of their own suffering. Their per-
formance of a weekly prayer ritual provides these women with the com-
fort and strength to endure their working conditions and the feeling of
being restricted in their capacity to act in an arena beyond their control.
These devoutly Catholic women’s views of their own ability to act therefore
depends on their self-identification as martyrs and their belief in divine
intercession to make possible their actions.
Liebelt’s chapter (Chapter 5) and several other chapters in the book
draw attention to the way in which shared spirituality can be a significant
dimension of migrant domestic workers’ social relationships and thus,
constitutive of the ways in which they conceive of “home.” Religion and
shared spiritual community play an important role in the sense of the
“new home” that migrant domestic workers are able to create, as evidenced
in the three chapters by Fernandez (Chapter 3), Liebelt (Chapter 5),
and Hosoda and Watanabe (Chapter 6). “New homes” can sometimes be
constructed through relationships with employers founded on a shared
Islamic spiritual connection. Two chapters in the book show the depth of
intimacy that is created between women who are Muslim (in Chapter 7
by Elyas and Johnson) or women who convert to Islam (in Chapter 6 by
Hosoda and Watanabe) and their devout Muslim employers. In the nar-
rative of Hadjah Miriam, a Filipina Muslim domestic worker, Elyas and
Johnson offer a nuanced reading of how such intimate relationships may
be created through a psycho-spiritual struggle, in which Islam provided
Hadjah Miriam with a language for contesting dispossession and securing
the respect of her employer.
“New homes” are also constructed in an entirely different religious
modality through churches of various denominations. Hosoda and Wata-
nabe show how the evangelical community of born-again Christians in
Dubai provides a “new home away from home” for Filipina workers, while
Fernandez describes the social and spiritual support provided to Ethiopian
workers by the Ethiopian Orthodox and Pentecostal churches in Beirut.
These authors note that the receptivity of the host countries to religions
other than Islam may vary, from the more liberal contexts of Lebanon and
Dubai to the relatively more prohibitive contexts of Saudi Arabia and

Kuwait. Furthermore, the quality of support provided by religious com-
munities will vary depending on the denomination and size of the con-
gregation. Nevertheless, churches are important not only because they
offer spiritual support but also because of the social support networks they
provide. They offer migrants the opportunity to get together, meet each
other, share information, and assist each other, which is sometimes more
important than shared spirituality. Churches function as shelters for run-
aways, church leaders and volunteers help and advise migrant domestic
workers, and migrants can find new jobs through church-based networks.
Pande shows in Chapter 2 that churches can also be considered “spaces of
worker mobilization,” in particular for live-in domestic workers who have
limited freedom of movement. In Lebanon and in many other countries,
churches are among the few public places live-in domestic workers are
allowed to go to on their own. But while employers may regard the church
as a benign (and even beneficial) environment, where migrant domestic
workers go for spiritual support, in reality, churches are vibrant meeting
grounds where domestic workers learn about their rights, build friend-
ships and alliances, and sometimes meet their future husbands. Churches
are therefore a critical space within which the boundaries of an ostensibly
public arena are recast in more intimate ways through the relationships
between migrant domestic workers, thereby creating for them a new sense
of “home.”
The gradual transformation of what was once “not home” to a “new
home” through such social relationships illustrates an underlying tension
between “back home” and the places migrant domestic workers currently
live and work (“not home”) in, something that is central to the experiences
of migrant domestic workers in many of the presented chapters. Nostalgia
for “back home”—for connections to loved ones and family, as well as to
place and culture—permeates the reminiscences of some migrant domestic
workers. We see these ties most strongly in Mahdavi’s chapter (Chapter 4),
where two of her interviewees, Ada and Dipti, have a deep sense of longing
for “back home.” For Ada, it is longing for her beloved brother, while for
Dipti, this longing is for a place (India) rather than people, since her hus-
band and son are with her in Dubai. Yet, for others, the significance of con-
nections “back home” may decrease over time, as we see in de Regt’s chapter
(Chapter 8), where Mebrat, one of her interviewees, experienced a sense
of disconnection with family left behind in Ethiopia following the death
of her mother. Mebrat adopted an Ethiopian boy and created a new home
with him in Yemen. For others, such as Dipti’s son, who was born in Dubai
and for whom India is only notionally “home,” the physical and emotional
disconnect is total and points to the sense of alienation and displacement
second-generation migrants face (Mahdavi, Chapter 4, in this book).
Migrant destination countries in the Middle East can almost never
become long-term homes for migrants, as there are no pathways to per-
manent settlement or citizenship; despite this, different social, cultural,
and religious “worlds” meet through the process of migration, and these
encounters lead to the production of new forms of sociability, thereby
affecting subjectivities and identities. Some migrant women may build
“new homes” in the destination countries that are founded on the familial
and social relationships they develop with compatriots and other foreign-
ers abroad. New modalities of social relationships emerge when freelance
domestic workers rent “bed space” or share rental apartments that are
invariably located in marginalized neighborhoods. These rooms offer
domestic workers a private space where they can cook their own food,
practice their religion, and unwind and enjoy themselves; in these rooms,
they are able to create their own “new homes.” They are often joined in
these spaces by live-in, contract domestic workers on their days off. Celine,
the Filipina domestic worker interviewed by Hosoda and Watanabe,
speaks of visiting her friend’s bed space in Dubai: “Friday I become crazy,
because at [my employer’s] home, I can’t.” In rental apartments, friend-
ships, alliances, and sometimes intimate relationships come into being
between people of the same (and occasionally different) nationalities. As
Chapter 2 by Pande and Chapter 3 by Fernandez show, some women form
relationships with or marry men (of the same or of a different national-
ity) and create homes and families with them in the countries of migra-
tion. Marriages and relationships with men can offer women some sense
of freedom; however, the security and stability of these relationships is
contingent on the hierarchies of the man’s status (nationality, citizenship,
migration status, and class) and the nature of their relationship (formal or
informal). Furthermore, as Fernandez observes, these relationships often
lead to children; when this happens, women are confronted with a new
set of restrictions, as they become primarily responsible for these children.
The relationships of migrant domestic workers to the worlds outside
the home (whether of the employer or their own) are viewed through
two distinct lenses in this collection of essays. The first is physical public
space: along with other migrant workers, domestic workers occupy resi-
dential, religious, and commercial spaces in the countries of migration and
have contributed to the creation of vibrant migrant communities. Thus,

for instance, in addition to being “private spaces,” rental apartments are
also important organizational meeting places for domestic workers. Similar
to churches, they are spaces where migrant domestic workers meet oth-
ers, exchange information, give and receive advice, find new jobs, and offer
shelter to domestic workers in distress. Pande analyzes these “illegal unions”
in Lebanon, where semiorganized groups meet in these apartments with the
aim of supporting migrant domestic workers. Rental apartments, therefore,
offer a reconfiguration of the boundaries around what is otherwise a private
space (the homes of domestic workers), allowing for reconfigurations of
their possible relationships to the outside world.
Migrant domestic workers also play a crucial role in the development of
multiethnic neighborhoods (see Moors et al., 2009), though these are often
found on the spatial margins of the cities. These neighborhoods offer a
large array of commercial services—such as shops, cafés, restaurants, beauty
and hairdressing salons, cybercafés, phone booths, and money exchange
services—catering to various migrant communities. It is worth noting that
such local public spheres are simultaneously also transnational public spaces
(Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Szanton Blanc, 1994), nodes in the global flows
of money, people, and communication. Such spaces offer commercial ser-
vices to domestic workers and are also important sources of information and
support, particularly for domestic workers who have run away from their
employers and seek alternative job opportunities. Liebelt’s chapter (Chapter 5)
provides a particularly vibrant description of such a neighborhood in the
“underside of the White City” in southern Tel Aviv and the way in which
the procession of Marian devotees implicitly makes a spatial claim not only
to this territory but also to their right to be in the public sphere, as they
carry their statue of Mother Mary from one domestic worker’s home to the
next.
Thus the collection of chapters in this book demonstrates how migrant
domestic workers challenge conventional notions of the public-private
divide through their acts of claiming public spaces and their mobilities
within these spaces. Drawing on Massey (1994), we could say that the rela-
tionships they forge in rental apartments, churches, and neighborhoods
constitute them as active participants in the local public spheres of host
countries, even when their freedom of movement is restricted. Yet, simulta-
neously, these relationships would conventionally be considered “intimate”
and “private,” suggesting the porosity and permeability of the boundaries
between the home and the external world.
The second distinct view of migrant domestic workers’ engagements

with the world offered by a few chapters in this book is presented through
the relationships they have with the state. Migrant domestic workers are
forced to use a wide variety of methods to improve their living and working
conditions because they are excluded from formal ways of political engage-
ment within the public sphere. In the countries of the Arabian Peninsula,
migrants can never become citizens; citizenship rights are only available to
the local population. In other countries, citizenship can be obtained via
marriages with local men, such as in Lebanon, Jordan, and Yemen, but
these relationships do not automatically lead to more independence. Some
chapters in this book focus on the way in which the restrictions on citizen-
ship impact migrants’ sense of home and belonging. Mahdavi offers a pro-
vocative inversion of Aihwa Ong’s (1999) concept of “flexible citizenship”
to argue that migrant domestic workers are bound by forms of “inflexible
citizenship,” referring to restrictions that prevent migrants from attaining
the rights of citizenship in the Middle East and the right to be protected as
citizens of their origin countries. Mahdavi argues that inflexible citizenship
nevertheless requires flexible responses and creative assertions of agency by
migrant domestic workers within their private lives in order for them to sur-
vive and prosper. Mahdavi’s notion of inflexible citizenship can be usefully
contrasted with Neha Vora’s (2013) analysis of alternative forms of belong-
ing without citizenship articulated by Indians in the Middle East: crafting
belonging without citizenship is easier for the predominantly middle-class
Indian migrants than it is for migrant domestic workers.
De Regt describes the various ways in which migrant domestic workers
in Yemen responded to the political crisis in 2011 and shows that these
responses were to a large extent linked to the legal status of women and their
relationships with their families back home. Issues of legality and illegality
ensuing from the various state policies on migration and domestic work all
have an impact on migrant domestic workers. Yet legality and illegality are
fluid categories, and migrant domestic workers, like many other migrants
in the world, may move in and out of legal status throughout their lives
as migrants (see Moors and de Regt, 2008). Nonetheless, despite restric-
tive labor and legal systems, migrant domestic workers can sometimes quite
resourcefully find ways to improve their living and working conditions.
Offering another important temporal perspective on migrant domestic
workers’ relationship with the state, Elyas and Johnson’s chapter (Chap-
ter 7) observes that in Saudi Arabia, the emergent state discourse on the
“care of the elderly” is concerned with shifting the responsibility for care
provisioning from the state onto the family (read: women) and the per-
ceived need to shore up the notion of the “traditional family” against the
transformations in family structures due to globalization and new economic
systems. They argue that while Filipina domestic workers support Saudi
women in the care giving, such relationships of care are marked by the
state’s temporal delimitations on migrant workers’ legal residency in Saudi
Arabia. Thus, despite care relationships that are long term and intimate,
migrant caregivers can never envision a future where they can grow old in
Saudi Arabia.
Taken together, the chapters in this book move beyond a discussion of
the working conditions of migrant domestic workers to illustrate the mul-
tidimensionality of their lives in the Middle East. They illuminate these
women’s varied processes of “making a home in the world,” the existential
transformations they undergo, and the varied ways in which they are able
to exert agency. As Liebelt observes in this book, for these women, “home”
is not simply a distant place they have left behind, but “space(s) in the
making” in the new worlds that they inhabit. The spaces described in
the chapters disrupt and challenge existing notions of the public-private
divide, reworking them as spaces of encounters, of belonging, spiritual con-
nection, friendship, conviviality, and sociality. These relationships are not
only defined spatially but also defined to include temporal connections, as
well as migrant domestic workers’ connections with the state. Yet we cer-
tainly do not intend a celebratory positioning of migrant domestic workers
as cosmopolitan subjects “at home in the world” (Jackson, 1995), given
their marginalized positions within the lower circuits of global mobility.
What this book suggests is that, like people everywhere, migrant domestic
workers in the Middle East are engaged in finding a balance between acting
and being acted upon, between struggle and accommodation, closure and
openness, movement and stasis, and, in doing so, they have reworked our
notions of the home and the world.
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the stimulating and insightful feedback
from Mark Johnson and Maree Pardy. Errors that remain are, of course, our
responsibility.
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CHAPTER 2
Forging Intimate and Work Ties

Migrant Domestic Workers Resist in Lebanon
Amrita Pande
Introduction
T
he Middle East is the largest destination of migrant workers in the
world and has over 7.4 million migrant women; most are employed
as domestic workers (Oishi, 2005, p. 43). Despite the large num-
bers and diverse histories of these migrations, the existing literature about
migrant domestic work in this area tends to focus on the (often abusive)
relationship between the domestic and the employer (Abu-Habib, 1998;
Jureidini, 2010; 2011; Human Rights Watch, 2008; Zeytinoglu et al.,
1999). Lebanon is no exception, and much of the work in this region high-
lights the abuse of Asian and African domestic workers by their employers
(Jureidini, 2010; 2011; Human Rights Watch, 2008).1 In this chapter, I
address this linear narrative of victimhood by analyzing the everyday resis-
tances of migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Lebanon. These strategies
of resistance are manifested in two distinct kinds of ties: intimate (roman-
tic or conjugal bonds) and work-based ties. While the balconies of their
employers’ houses and apartments rented by freelance domestic workers are
used for forming worker dyads and alliances, more public spaces like ethnic
churches are used not only for forging work-based alliances but also for
forming intimate familial relationships. I argue that while the ties forged
in private spaces subvert the assumptions about these workers as voiceless
victims, the conjugal ties in public spaces challenge state restrictions over
the sexuality and reproduction of migrant women.
A common theme in the vast literature on migrant domestic work is
a focus on the gendered and racialized dimensions of this type of work,
28 O Amrita Pande
especially with the transfer of care from the global south to the global north.
Such scholarship has effectively highlighted the vulnerability of immigrants
working in private homes (Anderson, 2000; Chin, 1998; Constable, 1997;
Ehrenreich, 2002; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Parreñas, 2001; Raijman,
Schammah-Gesser, and Kemp, 2003). A second theme highlighted is the
everyday coping mechanisms deployed by women in their negotiations with
their (mostly female) employers (Adams, 2000; Ehrenreich, 2002; Gam-
burd, 2000; Gill, 1994; Lan, 2003; Palmer, 1989; Rollins, 1985; Parreñas,
2001). Scholarship on migrant domestic work in the Middle East often
revolves around the first theme—that is, migrant domestic workers’ vulner-
ability and victimhood. In Lebanon, the issue has recently become a cause
of much debate among the mainstream media and in reports and campaigns
by nongovernmental organizations. In 2011, a national report cited psycho-
logical disorder among Lebanese “madams” as the leading cause of violence
against their “migrant maids” (Sikimic, 2011). Another reported that every
week, one migrant domestic worker (MDW) commits suicide in Lebanon
by plunging from the balconies of tall residential buildings. A high level
of abuse, isolation, and feelings of helplessness were cited as the reasons
that drove these women to jump to their deaths (Human Rights Watch,
2008). Although critical in bringing international attention to the issue,
such reports are analytically inadequate and empirically misleading, as they
inevitably frame the women as victims of individual employers rather than
as workers within an exploitative structure of migration and work. The uni-
lateral focus on madam/maid relationships within the Lebanese household
delegates domestic work to the “private” sphere and further reifies the pri-
vate/public binary. Elsewhere, I have argued that by “privatizing” the struc-
tural problem of worker and immigrant rights violations, nation-states are
absolved of their responsibilities (Pande, 2013, 2014). Finally, such reports
render invisible the powerful attempts made by the workers themselves to
organize and resist exploitative conditions.
In this chapter, I provide an alternative to such narratives by analyzing
the creative and powerful communities and ties forged by migrant domestic
workers. I argue that these ties, though similar to the ethnic gatherings and
“weekend enclaves” analyzed by previous scholars (Evans-Pritchard, 2002;
Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994; Yeoh and Huang, 1998), are employed for two
very specific purposes: forging conjugal ties with male migrants and form-
ing alliances with coworkers. This chapter is divided into four topics: in
the first section, I describe the research method. Next, I briefly describe the
field and provide a brief history of domestic labor migration in Lebanon.
Forging Intimate and Work Ties O 29
I then move on to the empirical analysis of the ties forged in private and
public spaces. I first describe the exclusions faced by MDWs, whether inside
or outside the employer’s home, before moving on to the final sections,
in which I analyze the creative and powerful resistances employed by the
women as a way of challenging these exclusions.
Researching Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon

This chapter is based on a broader project analyzing the impact of restrictive
migration laws on the lived experiences of migrant domestic workers. Field-
work was conducted in two phases between 2009 and 2011 in Lebanon’s
two biggest cities: Beirut and Tripoli. In the first phase, I was an indepen-
dent researcher and used various approaches to gain access to migrant work-
ers of many different nationalities. I met some migrant women through my
Lebanese contacts and three others by using the snowballing method. Most
of the others I met by chance on the streets or outside their churches, ethnic
stores, and rented apartments. My “foreign” looks, Indian ethnicity, and
ability to speak English, Hindi, Bengali, and Arabic rendered me somewhat
of an insider. Sometimes it was the Ethiopian women who mistook me for
a fellow citizen and initiated a conversation. Sometimes the Bangladeshis,
Sri Lankans, and Nepalese women did the same. In the second phase of
fieldwork, I interacted with the women in my capacity as a consultant with
international protection from a nonprofit organization working on MDWs
rights in Lebanon. A translator and two research assistants helped me in the
field during the second round of fieldwork.
Over the two phases of fieldwork, oral histories were collected from a
total of 68 migrant workers of 16 different nationalities. The participants
included women currently working as live-ins, women who had escaped their
initial contracts to work as freelancers, and women with nominal sponsors.2
Apart from the first category of workers, who worked in the houses of their
legal sponsors, all other categories are considered illegal by Lebanese author-
ities. Most of the conversations conducted for the research were in English,
while some were in Arabic, French, Bengali, Hindi, or Nepali. In addition,
I also conducted directed and semidirected interviews with related actors
like lawyers, human rights and labor activists, academics, and representa-
tives at embassy and embassy-run shelters for runaway workers. Individual
interactions were complemented by focus group discussions with migrant
domestic workers from a wide range of countries, including Ethiopia, the
Philippines, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Madagascar, Cameroon, India,
30 O Amrita Pande
Benin, and Togo. The dynamics of focus groups—unanticipated responses

and counterresponses by the group—often provided data that was not easily
generated by individual oral histories. It helped migrant domestic work-
ers overcome their isolation and enabled them to discuss the shared nature
of their experiences. Elsewhere, I have analyzed the recommendations for
change that emerged out of these focus group discussions in more detail
(Pande, 2013).
In addition to individual and group interactions, participant observa-
tion was conducted for more than six months in the spaces where MDWs
gathered to spend their days off, such as churches, ethnic stores, restaurants,
cybercafés, and rental apartments inhabited by freelancers. Given the con-
tentious legal status of some of the participants in this study, consent was
obtained from all respondents, and pseudonyms are used throughout this
chapter. For workers who were not allowed to step out of the house, bal-
cony talks (conversations across balconies) were employed. I have expanded
on the advantages of using balcony talks as a method of gaining access to
the most restricted population of MDWs in another article (Pande, 2012).
Conversations across balconies, though critical for this study, were less
detailed and unrecorded, and consent was given verbally.
Sponsoring a “Sirilankiyya”: Migrant Domestic Work in Lebanon

Paid domestic work is not new to Lebanon, but the labor force has increas-
ingly been taking an “international” turn (Young, 1999). The 1970s oil
boom in the region expanded inter-Arab and Asian-Gulf migrations. While
initially, migrants were mostly male, there was an increased feminiza-
tion of this migrant labor force in the 1980s. After the end of the Leba-
nese civil war, there was a true “internationalization” of this female labor
force—“Arab maids” from Palestinian refugee camps and Kurdish refugees
and rural women from Syria and Egypt were slowly replaced by women of
(black) African and Asian origins (Jureidini, 2009, p. 77; Moukarbel, 2009,
p. 21). These women were not only less expensive, but employers often
assumed that they would be more submissive than their Arab counterparts.
The continuous influx of African and Asian women in turn lowered the
social status of domestic workers and labeled domestic work with nega-
tive racial connotations, making it a less attractive option to Lebanese and
other Arab women. Indeed, domestic work has become so racialized that
the word “maid” has been replaced by “Sirilankiyya” or “Sri Lanki”—used
by some Lebanese employers as a derogatory term when referring to their
migrant domestic workers, even if their nationality is not Sri Lankan (Jure-
idini, 2009, p. 92).
The number of migrant domestic workers currently in Lebanon is diffi-
cult to accurately estimate, since many workers do not come through official
labor schemes or they stay past what their visas allow and work without offi-
cial documents. It is estimated that in 2009, Lebanon—a country of four
million people—had more than four hundred thousand migrant domestic
workers (Human Rights Watch, 2009). Among them, the largest number
hails from Ethiopia, followed by the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka
(Jureidini, 2009, p. 77). In the past decade, workers have begun arriving
from other Asian and African countries such as Nepal, Madagascar, Cam-
eroon, Benin, Seychelles, and Togo. The workers from these countries are
potentially the most vulnerable, as their home countries often do not have
labor-sending agreements or a diplomatic presence to support their migrant
populations (Pande, 2012, p. 388). These new migrations are partly due
to the deployment ban imposed by the major sending countries like the
Philippines and Ethiopia, which ban female nationals from traveling to
Lebanon as domestic workers because of concerns over their lack of legal
protection (Menchik, Ibrahim, and Saber, 2013; Ruiz, 2011). Elsewhere, I
have labeled such protectionist bans as paternalistic and argued that these
bans are not just ineffective but also counterproductive for migrant domes-
tic workers (Pande, 2014).3 However, paternalistic state policies that are
premised on gendered assumptions about migrant domestic workers are not
restricted to the sending countries and are just as evident in the current sys-
tem of migration in Lebanon—the so-called kafala or sponsorship system.
Currently, to enter Lebanon for work, a MDW has to be officially spon-
sored by a Lebanese agency or individual employer (the legal sponsor or
kafala). The kafala system ties the MDWs status closely to that of her spon-
sor/employer. The MDW becomes legally and economically dependent on
her sponsor not only for recruitment and entry into the country but also for
daily sustenance and for remaining legal. She becomes illegal if she leaves
her sponsor without his or her consent and official release. Apart from this
restrictive immigration system, MDWs are more vulnerable to systemic
abuse in Lebanon because they are not included in the 1946 Lebanese
Labor Code and subsequently, do not receive the benefits that other Leba-
nese workers are entitled to—for instance, the minimum wage of USD333/
month, mandatory vacation days, and the right to form unions (Human
Rights Watch, 2010a). Despite these legal restrictions, workers continue
to organize and unionize in both public and private spaces. While workers
32 O Amrita Pande
who live in the homes of their employers forge these alliances across their
employers’ balconies, undocumented workers without contracts gather and
organize in rental apartments in abandoned buildings.
Exclusions within the Home: “There Was a Map She

Had Drawn in Her Head, Which I Was to Follow”
In her study of domestic employment relationships in Taiwan, Pei-Chia Lan
(2003) describes how the deployment of space within the private space of
the home “delimits and affirms family boundaries; it also symbolizes status
distinction among members present in the house” (p. 527). Other scholars
have highlighted how restrictions on the use of space, as well as sleeping and
eating arrangements, symbolize status hierarchies (Constable, 1997; Ozye-
gin, 2001). While the explicit “upstairs, downstairs” model of exclusion or
the separate “servant’s quarter” model of spatial planning observed by other
scholars is seldom possible in the typical apartment-style Lebanese home,
the “master-servant” segregation is manifested in other ways. For instance,
there is limited home space made available to a live-in worker. Her bedroom
(when available), the kitchen, the children’s room, and the balcony are the
spaces deemed appropriate for her. In cases where the MDW is assigned a
separate bedroom, it is usually smaller in size than any other room, has no
ventilation, and is often next to the kitchen.
One striking example of the effects of such sociospatial division was
reflected in the narrative of Estelle, an MDW from Cameroon who had
been working in Lebanon for three years. The long working hours and
unbearable living conditions made her quit from her first two employers.
Estelle describes her living space, or the lack of it, in both her employers’
apartments:
In the first house there was a little balcony that was shut, where they had put the
washing machine. And there was a folding bed that you had to put down to sleep
because there was no space. That means that [at the end of the day] if you [were]
tired, even if you [felt] dizzy, you don’t have the right to lie down. In the morning
you have to fold it [she slaps her hands], so there is space to put the clothes in
the machine [and] at night unfold [it again to] sleep. But in the second [house]
I didn’t even have a balcony to call my own. I was using the sofa [in] the living
room.
Abuya from Kenya was relatively new to Lebanon and fled her spon-
sor’s home three months after arriving into the country. Abuya’s narrative
resonates with Estelle’s. The restrictions on her mobility, even within the
house, constantly irked Abuya. She recalls her employer’s rules and the
“map” that sanctioned appropriate and “no-go” zones: “Don’t touch this,
don’t touch that . . . I cannot touch the fridge or [the] TV. I was not allowed
to go to her bedroom or to sit anywhere in the living room. When guests
arrived or Sir [her husband] came home, I was to serve water and leave
soon . . . and go back to the kitchen (she laughs wryly). There was like a
map she had drawn in her head, which I was to follow” (emphasis added).
For live-in MDWs, the home and work space collapses into one space, one
that is constantly under surveillance. To find privacy, live-in MDWs often
“have to go public” (Lan, 2003, p. 528; Nadasen, 2010). Public spaces can
offer an escape route and provide women with anonymity and the freedom
to be themselves. However, as urban geographers and researchers of urban
spaces have pointed out, participation in public spaces is not neutral but
constrained by gendered and racialized identities (England, 1991). In the
next section, I analyze the spatial exclusions faced by the migrant domestic
workers in public spaces. These exclusions are based on their multiple and
intersecting identities as migrant working-class women of color.4
Exclusions outside the Home: “I Don’t Have Freedom, Cannot [Be

out on] Lebanese Street[s] . . . Because of [the] Color [of My Skin]”
Within the kafala system of migration, the sponsor is held responsible for
the migrant woman. Employers often use their patron role to legitimize
confiscating the MDWs’ passport and severely restrict her freedom of move-
ment. Recruitment agencies in Lebanon legitimize and even encourage this
dependency. Some employers have revealed that their agencies advised them
to confiscate the worker’s passport and counseled them against letting the
worker interact with other MDWs in her community. In this study, only
one of the MDWs living with her sponsor was allowed access to her pass-
port. Almost all live-ins in this study said that they needed permission to
leave the house to meet friends, go to the market, or simply to step out of
the house. Some were allowed out only when accompanied by their employ-
ers, when walking the dog, or when taking out the garbage. Then there were
others who were practically prisoners in their employer’s house.
The day off is one of the most effective mechanisms to restrict MDWs’
access to public spaces. Some women were simply not given any time off
at all. Most women were allowed a few hours away from work every sec-
ond Sunday. Quite often, however, this time off was severely monitored.
34 O Amrita Pande
Employers ensured that the MDW engaged in only “appropriate” activi-

ties like Sunday church services or going to the cybercafé to communicate
with their families. Gendered forms of exclusion from public spaces are not
restricted to MDWs or their employers. The restrictions that MDWs expe-
rience in the public domain stem not only from their gender but also from
the “domestic” nature of their work, as well as their race and citizenship. As
domestic workers and noncitizens, they are not expected to venture outside
the home of their employers. Racial stereotyping of domestics means that
even on their day off, their activities are limited to sanctioned spaces.
Talisa from Benin, who has been working as a freelancer for the past
three years, succinctly describes the everyday experience of MDWs, espe-
cially the restriction that black Africans face because of their race:
They think we are like animals, [as if ] we live in a tree or something. At the
airport, already they don’t touch you, because they don’t know where you [came]
from, you [might] have diseases . . . When I go anywhere by servees (shared taxi),
the men laugh, point or even touch . . . Yanih (that is), but the women are no
good either. Women want to sit far away from us. It makes me not want to walk,
or [to] cover my face. Really [there] is no freedom . . . [it is] very painful [for
me] . . . yanih. Even sometime[s] there is no food [in her employer’s house] . . .
I can control my feeling but I don’t have freedom, cannot walk on Lebanese
street[s], you know, because of my colour.
Although Africans are more likely to face such race-based exclusions, the
concept of alien bodies being dirty and carrying “diseases” is not limited
to African MDWs in Lebanon. Other scholars have observed similar forms
of exclusions faced by migrant workers in other parts of the world. For
instance, Pei Chia Lan (2006) talks of the public fear in Taiwan that migrant
workers are carriers of contagious diseases and are therefore a public health
threat in Taiwan (p. 65). Nora, an illegal freelancer from the Philippines,
describes another type of stereotyping based on citizenship especially faced
by Nepalese and Filipino women—that of being “on the street”:
I know a lot of Filipina girls face a lot of problems [sexual harassment and racism].
I have faced a lot of trouble on the streets because they think Filipina women are
all the same—on the street. If I walk anywhere after dark, forget it [She addresses
me]. You get what I mean, right? I am sure you face that as well. You have our
color. For instance, when I walk down the street many Lebanese men stop and
say, “Hi babes, want some sex?” I mean, why, why do they do that? Why not let
me enjoy my only Sunday?
Migrant workers from the Philippines are more likely to be subjected to

such hypersexualization, partly because of their association with the West
(Cheng, 2006) and partly due to their stereotypical association with sex
tourism and mail-order brides (Constable, 1997). These disciplining tactics
are employed not only on the streets but also in other public spaces. There
are many “no-go” zones, and in general, MDWs are systematically assigned
to marginal public spaces. For instance, most churchgoing MDWs attend
churches reserved for their ethnic groups. All the churches I observed as part
of this research were explicitly assigned to marginal spaces. For instance,
in a neighborhood in Beirut, while the Catholic Church for Lebanese was
set in a magnificent sixteenth-century building, the Pentecostal church for
Ethiopians was housed in a dingy basement. In Tripoli, a similar demarca-
tion can be seen where a small room behind a massive Catholic Church has
been assigned to Filipina churchgoers.
MDWs do not mutely accept these gendered and raced exclusions. In
the next section, I analyze the work-based alliances forged on balconies and
churches. These informal unions, alliances, and networks become avenues
for challenging the restrictions imposed on MDWs by their employers and
the Lebanese state at large.
Resisting Exclusion at Home: Private

Balconies and Public Balcony Talks
Most middle-class Lebanese live in high-rises and apartments with large
spacious balconies. Many of the respondents in this study claimed these
balconies as their space—a place from where they could converse with
MDWs in apartments in adjacent buildings or with women walking on the
streets below and, in effect, form nascent worker communities for discuss-
ing their grievances. Balcony talks are literally conversations that migrant
domestic workers have across balconies (Pande, 2012). Many MDWs arrive
in Lebanon through recruitment agencies that provide them with mislead-
ing and inaccurate information. Consequently, workers arrive with very
little knowledge about Lebanon, the living conditions, job duties, and most
importantly, their rights within Lebanon.5
These balcony talks play a critical role for live-in MDWs with severe
restrictions on mobility. Across balconies, women consult each other on
the severity of restrictions to their mobility, whether they are given access
to their own passports, and the regularity of their payments. MDWs are
often advised by their allies in neighboring balconies on how to effectively
36 O Amrita Pande
negotiate days off. Gabra from Ethiopia, who has lived with her sponsor for
more than five years, describes how the balcony talks helped her negotiate
two hours off every Sunday:
I have a Sri Lanki friend in the same building. She is not really my friend but she
is also on contract. We saw each other on [the] balcony but we never got time to
talk [for] too long. She told me when she goes out to throw the garbage and, yalla
(let’s go), I went too. So we go out together and she says, “Your Madam is not
bad. Tell her you want to go on Sunday. Tell her you want to go [to the] Ethiopian
[church] service.” In Addis [Ababa], I went to church but not too much. But
Madam does not know that. I told Madam I need to go to church every Sunday
and she said OK!
Gabra forged her alliance across balconies and by coordinating throwing

out the garbage with her neighbor. She took her neighbor’s advice and
used the church as an excuse to negotiate some hours off from work. For
many MDWs with no support structures, alliances across balconies become
increasingly critical in situations where there are severe restrictions and
extreme abuse. Alliances across balconies literally sets in motion a chain
of events: where an abused MDW shares her grievances with her neighbor,
who in turn consults her own employer, a community leader, or, in some
cases, even embassy representatives.
Bella from Togo is a freelancer who has been working and living in Leba-
non for more than ten years. She is one of the few MDWs to have thor-
oughly devised a plan of escape. Her plan was partially facilitated by not just
her balcony friend but also the employer of that friend:
For one year and five months I had no salary. So I said, what am I going to do? I
don’t go out. But I know [where they keep] my passport. And I watch my pass-
port every time. I talk to people [the MDW working in the neighboring apart-
ment] . . . We used to talk and talk. She’s from Africa. She told me, “You know?
My Madam wants to help you if you want to escape. She can help you because
she likes you so much . . . and she sees how you are suffering.” I started packing
my things . . . until [eventually I had packed] everything. Then I climb[ed] over
the balcony [one] night into her [neighbor’s] apartment. She [organized] a taxi
and [gave me extra money for] some food.
In another case of extreme violations, two MDWs used the balconies to

collectively devise an escape route. I met Angel and Mariel from the Philip-
pines at a shelter run by the embassy of the Philippines. They recalled the
day of their escape:
We used to talk . . . over the wall. How [is it] for you? It was not good . . . [we had]
no phone, no Sunday off, not even [a] salary every month. It is not right! So we
started talking . . . We lived not far from the embassy, and [one] day we decided
to leave. It was a Friday. We were on the second floor. She climbed out of her
window and I from the balcony. We climbed out of the house [using] bed sheets.
We climbed from the second to the first floor. From the first floor, we jumped.
On the street, we met an African man, and he helped us to get to the embassy. We
left our papers, passport[s], everything behind. But we were out!
The balcony is often where the MDW could have more privacy and escape
the surveillance of her employers. However, for some workers, this “private”
survival strategy often crossed over into a more “public” form of networking
and forming strategic albeit informal “unions.” For these MDWs, who lived
with their sponsors, the balconies became a critical first step in forming a
community and finding broader support structures, especially in cases of
extreme abuse. For other, more fortunate live-ins, Sundays are when they
can access more public spaces like the courtyards outside their churches.
Resisting Exclusions Outside: Church Prayers,

Church Partners, and Coworkers
The Sunday service at the Pentecostal church for Ethiopians in Tripoli offi-
cially starts at 11 a.m., but the courtyard outside starts to fill up at least
an hour before the actual service. Women are dressed up in their “Sunday
best,” and many use the service merely as an excuse to get some time off
from work. Employers assume churches to be safe spaces where the MDW
can imbibe “healthy Christian values” without being corrupted by other
“immoral” workers. However, the church space is seldom limited to reli-
gious purposes. Women can be seen walking off in pairs to shop, get their
hair braided, or simply unwind with their colleagues. There is much laugh-
ter as the women inform me about the many uses of the church courtyard—
finding compatriots, sharing gossip, eating food, and meeting migrant men
from other parts of Africa.
Srilatha is a Sri Lankan worker who has been living and working ille-
gally in Lebanon for more than a decade. Srilatha is a “success” story at the
church and is celebrated by all the church members as someone who has
been able to forge a permanent conjugal relationship. Srilatha was born
to (nonpracticing) Buddhist parents in Sri Lanka but became a practicing
Christian following her arrival in Lebanon. Srilatha admits that her decision
to attend church was because she desperately needed a community and a
38 O Amrita Pande
support structure: “I look different from everyone here, maslan [that is], I
am not African. I had an Ethiopian girl, Zier, working in the same house as
me. She came two years before me and worked as [a] nanny for my Madam.
Zier brought me [to church for] the first time. She saw me crying and knew
I was not happy . . . no other Sri Lanki comes here, you know. Here I was,
crying . . . to God. Then Pastor Vanessa helped me see light.”
Other scholars have observed migrant workers’ fake or real conversion to
the dominant religion of the host nation. For instance, Fernandez (Chapter 3,
in this book) mentions the common strategy of “[outwardly] maintain-
ing . . . Muslim religious practice but [having] an internal Christian spiritual
life” among migrant domestic workers in the Middle East. This “conver-
sion” has allowed some workers to get sponsored by Muslim employees who
prefer to hire only Muslim workers (Fernandez, forthcoming). For Srilatha,
however, the visits to the church were not for enhancing her work oppor-
tunities. Srilatha met her husband David, a migrant worker from Sudan, at
the church. He was a friend of the pastor and an active community leader
for African migrant workers. Srilatha recalls her first encounter with her
David: “One day she [pastor Vanessa] came with a man, an African man.
He also spoke to us. He has his people [community from Africa] in Beirut,
and he helps them. We had tea in the courtyard, and he said he knows other
Sri Lankis like me. That is how it started.” After not being paid her salary
for more than three months, Srilatha decided to run away from her spon-
sor’s house to work as a freelancer. David introduced her to other Sri Lankan
freelancers. Srilatha lived with other Sri Lankan women for three months
and then moved in with David. They were married in a small church cer-
emony. Srilatha has been married for more than ten years now and has
two children. Despite the “illegal” and undocumented status of her family,
Srilatha does not regret getting married. She constantly reiterates that David
is a “very good” husband and father and has managed to integrate her into
not just the church community but also the wider “African” community.
Ruth, a MDW from Ethiopia working as a freelancer, also met her hus-
band (an Ethiopian migrant currently working at a cleaning company) at the
church. Ruth fondly reminisces about the initial phases of her relationship
with her husband, which flourished almost entirely in the church courtyard:
I came to Lebanon on a contract. I had a good Madam [who] paid my salary on

time and everything. But she did not let me go anywhere [except] Sunday church
(She laughs). But that was enough! Bas, both of us belong to this same church.
He used to work in a construction place and shared an apartment with other
Africans. Every Sunday he [brought] me Ethiopian food—he knew I could not

cook in the kitchen, so he cooked for me. Khubus khubus (Lebanese bread) every
day, I had got so bored . . . Wallah, our story started with sharing food right here
(points to the church courtyard).
While the church courtyard is filled with such instances of blossoming rela-
tionships, friendships, and alliances, the scene inside the church is more
somber. It usually involves a lot of singing and sudden outbursts of crying.
However, the formal service is not just an outlet for grief and grievances.
Pastor Vanessa, a former domestic worker, plans her prayers and teachings
strategically, and the service is a balance between preaching tolerance and
simultaneously emphasizing workers’ rights. Vanessa explains how these
“practical prayers” and teachings resonated with her own experiences. Van-
essa had been living in Lebanon for more than 11 years. She recalls the day
she left her sponsor’s house: “No, it was not really [a] good life there . . .
[They lock] the door and treat me like an animal inside. But I said, wait and
see, do not forget her good side . . . But that day she [the employer] raised
her shoe at me and started hitting me. That was enough. I stopped her hand
and said [respectfully] ‘You have no right [to do this].’”
Vanessa remained unemployed for a year before she was allowed to work
as a cleaner for the church. Here she started interacting with the priest,
a man who has helped several other domestic workers find employment.
With his assistance and church finances, Vanessa joined a Bible college and
became involved in church service. Vanessa emphasizes that her goal is to
empower workers so that they can bargain for their own rights. She advises
the live-in MDWs at her church to make rational, practical decisions about
escaping an abusive contract: “I am teaching them how to respect [their
employer and] at the same time [to respect themselves] . . . Don’t forget that
running away will make you [an illegal]. But tell them, with respect, they
do not have a right to shout . . . But if they hit you [or] raise a hand at you
[then] raise your hand and stop the shoe. God will not stop the shoe for you”
(emphasis added).
A lone domestic worker cannot be easily represented by others, and as
Pastor Vanessa argues, she may have to act as her own bargaining agent.
Vanessa teaches the women about their right to work in an environment
free of abuse, to not wait for divine intervention but to raise their own
hands to “stop the shoe.” She encourages them to respect their employers
and be tolerant but to confront any physical abuse instantly. Such practi-
cal strategies and a supportive community bring MDWs back to church
40 O Amrita Pande
every Sunday. Other scholars have observed similar forms of mobilizing

in religious spaces. For instance, in her study of Filipina domestic work-
ers in Israel, Liebelt (Chapter 5, in this book) argues that religion and its
ritual performance transforms migrant domestic workers into “activists with
a local and yet global agenda” rather than mere “victims of globalization.”
Fernandez observes a similar pattern in her study of migrant domestic work-
ers in Lebanon and Kuwait, where religion transforms from being merely
about spirituality to being a movement of rights (Fernandez, Chapter 3, in
this book).
Domestic labor poses challenges for organizing workers because it occurs
in decentralized private spaces. Unlike factory workers, domestic workers
(especially live-in workers) cannot easily unite with their coworkers, nor
can they gather and collectively protest outside the factory gates (Ford and
Piper, 2007; Nadasen, 2010). Across the world, including the Middle East,
labor unions have often left domestic workers behind. In most parts of the
world, formal unions and organizations for domestic workers are very recent
trends. Rather than relying on a union hierarchy to speak for its members,
live-in domestic workers often need to devise alternative forms of mobiliza-
tion (Anderson, 2010; Ford and Piper, 2007; Nadasen, 2010). In a previous
article, I have labeled such activities as meso-levels of resistances—strategic
acts that fall somewhere between everyday acts of defiance by individual
workers and organized collective action by workers unions (Pande, 2012).
The church service is only one space of worker mobilization, but it is
the one most effective for live-in workers with few avenues for meeting
coworkers. The other, more active space for worker mobilization is the space
of rental apartments. These private apartments become dynamic spaces for
mobilizing the other category of MDWs: freelancers without legal docu-
ments but with relatively more mobility than legal live-ins working for their
sponsors.
Rental Apartments, Migrant Coworkers, and Migrant Families

Scholarship on migrant communities has described “weekend enclaves” as
accessible public meeting points that draw large numbers of MDWs and
cater to the cultural and economic needs of specific groups (Lan, 2003;
Parreñas, 2001; Huang, 1999; Yeoh and Huang, 1998). Dora, a neighbor-
hood in Beirut, can be classified as such a weekend enclave. Migrant work-
ers from different communities have opened retail stores, restaurants, and
small businesses like salons and tailoring shops here. This is also the primary
residential area for (undocumented) freelancers, and some apartments are

shared by up to twenty women. These MDWs often rent the most dilapi-
dated of the buildings—bullet ridden or half-finished spaces left untouched
after the many conflicts in the region. Most apartments have some per-
manent residents and also provide temporary refuge for women who have
recently escaped their contracts. But these buildings are not only private
residential spaces; they are the prime avenues for MDWs to forge two dis-
tinct and illegal ties—with coworkers and with families.
Every Sunday, migrant workers gather in these apartments and discuss
the problems that they face in Lebanon and collectively devise strategies
for receiving assistance. Although the communities are labeled “informal”
by its members and have no official or legal recognitions as worker unions,
the members take pride in the fact that they are, in fact, highly organized
and function similarly to formal unions. Most networks that started out as
a group of runaways meeting in an apartment now have not only an elected
executive committee but also a constitution. The groups have rules of mem-
bership: members pay dues, hold regular meetings, and annually elect their
leaders. Older migrants, with a better understanding of labor laws and the
rules of deportation, are often the leaders of these networks. The leaders
have more established networks and can counsel new immigrants and fresh
runaways on how to get freelance work.
Grace, fondly called “Mother Africa” by her colleagues, is one such
leader. Grace has worked in Lebanon for the past 22 years and is currently a
freelance worker, living and working outside the house of her employment
sponsor. She explains that the idea for such a work-based network first came
about in the late 1990s, when she started receiving more and more women
from different African countries who had escaped their contracts and abu-
sive sponsors. But the turning point occurred after an African worker fell
sick and wanted to return to her country: “So when this woman was sick,
we started thinking, what shall we do? If we can contribute money, if we
can do something to help her to go. So we contribute, and we [sent] her
home. So the men and women [I had] met in the community, we started
talking [and concluded that] if we can form a group to [help when] we have
a problem . . . We don’t have anybody who can help us, [but] we can begin
to help each other.” Grace realized the need for a formal list of members,
an agenda, and most importantly, membership fees. The membership fees
and the money collected is used to help the neediest of MDWs—perhaps
to subsidize a woman’s ticket back home, supply medical aid for the needy,
and buy clothes and food for women workers in prison.6
42 O Amrita Pande
Like Grace, MDW and community leader Ruth became involved in the
worker group after she became a freelance worker. Ruth has been in Leba-
non for more than 11 years and has slowly realized that only workers can
help other workers in need:
Caritas, lawyers, consulates, yanih, they can maybe help us [to become] legal . . .
but they cannot understand [the] little problems . . . of running away from
[the] Madam, of being illegal, of running away from [the] police, of not having
papers . . . of not getting any part-time work, of hiding our children from the
police. So I say to them [humanitarian and nonprofit organizations] all, “you are
not in my mouth. I have to speak for myself. Do you know what I want? You don’t.”
It’s ourselves . . . united together . . . we have to live in a community to help each
other. If we live in a community, we will know [one another’s lives].
Ruth emphasizes the need for workers to advocate for their own rights
instead of relying on a third party or humanitarian aid. All the members
who have legal papers meet in Ruth’s apartment every Sunday to discuss
ways to help the illegal become legal. The entire community (around fifty
members) meets once a month to prepare the food of their country and
discuss possible paths to legalization. Although the meetings are mostly for
women migrating from the same country, sometimes alliances include male
migrants and even those from cross-national borders. Women recognize that
migrant men, legally employed in companies and nondomestic work, are
useful networks to cultivate. Often these groups cross ethnic borders as well
and become platforms for collective workers’ grievances. For instance, the
Malagasy community leader and Sri Lankan women often visit the apart-
ment for Nepalese women, and workers from many other African countries
frequent the apartment for the Togolese community.
The workers’ collectives are only one aspect of the “illegal” alliances and
ties forged within these apartments. Many of these apartments are the only
physical spaces for domestic workers to maintain conjugal relationships and
families in Lebanon. The kafala system of migration imposes strict restric-
tions on the marriage and reproduction of migrant domestic workers. For
instance, pregnancy is prohibited for migrant domestic workers under con-
tract in many parts of the Middle East and Asia. All the respondents in this
study who had young children or who became pregnant while in Leba-
non reported being dismissed from their legal “live-in” employment if they
wanted to live with their families. In effect, a MDW choosing to have a
family or reproduce in the host nation was forced to choose illegal status.
Aruna from Sri Lanka is married to a man also from Sri Lanka and has
been in Lebanon for ten years. Her employer threatened to replace her if
she decided to get married. Despite these threats, Aruna went ahead with
her decision to get married, and her employer promptly replaced her
with a MDW from Ethiopia. Tania from Seychelles is another illegal free-
lancer who has maintained an “illegal” family for nearly 35 years in an
apartment. The father of her children (their marriage is not legal, and Tania
does not refer to him as her husband) abandoned them during the war in
the 1980s, and she has raised her children all by herself. Her sons have been
to jail several times because of not having the correct papers. Daily, Tania
and her sons avoid places with authority (streets with police stations, police
vans, airports, and military checkpoints). This effectively restricts their
places of residence and leisure, as well as their search for freelance work.
Much like the work-based networks and communities, these marriage
and conjugal ties are exceptionally powerful acts of resistance by the MDWs.
Women’s ability to regulate their own relationships by forging intimate and
conjugal ties and reproducing are significant challenges to the state mandate
of restricting the reproductive activities of migrant workers. These relation-
ships require the women to transgress state mandates and laws that actively
discourage and prohibit marriage and reproduction by migrant workers.
Moreover, to sustain these conjugal relationships, women have to escape
their live-in contracts and instead choose the life of an illegal freelancer.
Discussion
In this chapter, I have highlighted how power relationships based on race,
gender, and nationality are manifested through spatial disciplining and the
exclusion of migrant domestic workers from public and private spaces in
Lebanon. However, migrant women, as active users of these spaces, strategi-
cally use and manipulate space to challenge these disciplining practices. The
balconies sometimes become a critical avenue for the women to “go public”
even within the monitored space of their employers’ homes. This is where
women share information on workers’ rights with other restricted live-ins,
forge strategic dyads, and devise ways to escape abusive contracts. The less
restricted live-ins forge networks and ties in rental apartments and church
courtyards.
The Sunday visits to ethnic churches are used for forging two other types
of ties and “unions”: organizing informal worker meetings and forging con-
jugal ties with African men. These ties are exceptionally powerful acts of
44 O Amrita Pande
resistance by the MDWs, as they are actively discouraged or rendered illegal

by the state and its laws. Women’s ability to regulate their own relationships by
forging intimate and conjugal ties, and by reproducing, is a significant
challenge to the state mandate of restricting the reproductive activities of
migrant workers.
Conjugal and familial ties, however, are only one type of alliance forged
by MDWs. The church and rental apartments become spaces for another
kind of networking: worker mobilization. While the service and the prayers
at ethnic churches encourage live-in workers to strategically bargain for
their own rights, rental apartments become avenues for more active worker
mobilization. Members use these spaces to advocate for their own rights,
harness their resources, form alliances across nationalities, and devise strate-
gies for becoming legal.
By analyzing these creative and often illegal ties, I have complicated the
dominant portrayal of MDWs in the Middle East as ultimate and defeated
victims of abuse. It would be facile, however, to ignore the practical con-
straints on the actual power of these resistive acts. Although the illegal
worker communities replicate the structure of union work, their roles and
capacities are currently limited—since workers are all noncitizens and often
illegal and domestic work is excluded from labor laws. Subsequently, the
worker communities receive only symbolic recognition from their consul-
ates or embassies and are not recognized by the Lebanese government. Eth-
nic churches are also limited in terms of their impact and exclude much of
the migrant population that follows Islamic, Buddhist, or Hindu beliefs—
that is, some of the most vulnerable populations from Nepal, Sri Lanka,
and some parts of Africa. Finally, the reproductive and marital strategies of
MDWs are somewhat ironic, as these conjugal ties ultimately create a class
of illegal migrant families with no citizenship or workers’ rights and limited
opportunities to ever return home (Pande, 2014).
Notes
1. For exceptions, see the following: Fernandez (Chapter 3, in this
book); Evans-Pritchard’s 2002 unpublished master’s thesis on the
social and cultural activities of long-term Sri Lankan migrant workers
in Lebanon; Lee’s 2009 unpublished thesis on symbolic and discur-
sive power of Filipina maids in Lebanon; and Beyene’s 2005 thesis on
the informal networks forged by Ethiopian and Eritrean women in
Lebanon. Also see Pande, 2012, 2013.
2. I classify a freelancer as someone who works most of her time for

several employers. Freelancers are illegal under the present system and
can face deportation. A nominal sponsor is a Lebanese individual
who (in return for a fee paid by the worker) acts as a sponsor. A nomi-
nal sponsor does not expect the worker to live or work the majority
of the working day within his or her house. Although such nominal
sponsors are becoming the norm for MDWs attempting to escape
their original sponsor, it is an illegal practice and can be penalized
under the present system.
3. In essence, the state’s attempt to act in a protectionist role further
increases the vulnerability of female workers. This has two concom-
itant effects: it (1) undermines women’s rights as citizens to make
demands on the home nation and (2) impedes their right to return
home (Pande, 2014).
4. An intersectional approach to analyzing the oppression of marginal-
ized groups focuses on the effects of the interaction between two or
more forms of subordination—for instance, subordination based on
race, gender, class, and ethnicity—and on the experiences of margin-
alized groups. An intersectional approach asserts that aspects of iden-
tity are indivisible and cannot be experienced or analyzed in isolation.
5. Technically, workers’ rights, as well as the terms and conditions of their
work, work conditions, work hours, weekly, annual, and medical or
sick leaves are explained in the employment contract that both the
employer and the individual worker sign at the notary public in Leba-
non. In reality, however, contracts either are not signed or are in Arabic
and not translated so most workers are unaware of these rights. The
contract can be accessed at http://www.mdwguide.com/pdfs/english
_informal.pdf.
6. MDWs facing severe violations are deterred from filing complaints
against employers partly because they often end up facing counter-
charges of theft. A Human Rights Watch (2010) report, Without
Protection: How the Lebanese Justice System Fails Migrant Domestic
Workers, indicates that charges against MDWs range from theft, pros-
titution, violence against the employer to carrying false identification
papers.
46 O Amrita Pande
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CHAPTER 3
Degrees of (Un)Freedom
The Exercise of Agency by Ethiopian Migrant
Domestic Workers in Kuwait and Lebanon
Bina Fernandez
Introduction
M
igrant domestic workers are a particularly vulnerable category
of workers within contemporary processes of capitalist global-
ization. In the Middle East, considerable research and policy
attention has focused on the exploitation and abuse of migrant domestic
workers and analyzed the structural sources of their vulnerability (Jure-
idini and Moukarbel, 2004; Human Rights Watch, 2010a; Human Rights
Watch, 2010b; Varia, 2011). This chapter argues that such analyses must
be complemented by studies on how women exercise agency, despite
the restrictions on their labor, bodies, behavior, time, mobility, thought
processes, and personhood. Thus, while acknowledging the enormity of
the violence and exploitation some Ethiopian migrant domestic workers
face, the primary purpose of this chapter is to explore the ways in which
they are able to exercise agency and push back against the constraints
imposed on their freedoms due to their extremely marginalized positions
in the Middle East. Such an endeavor is important for two reasons: It
allows us to look beyond the relations of domination exercised within the
employment contract itself and the view of women as “passive victims”
to observe a more nuanced portrait of the diversity of their lived experi-
ences as migrant workers. Of greater significance, however, is that such an
investigation of agency and resistance can yield an understanding of the
“weapons of the weak” and the “infrapolitics,” or hidden political strug-
gles, of severely subordinated groups when direct political confrontation
52 O Bina Fernandez
is impossible (Scott, 1985; 1990). Research on migrant domestic workers

in other parts of the world, such as Constable’s (2007) study on Filipinas
and Indonesian women in Hong Kong and Pei Chia Lan’s (2006) study
on Filipinas in Taiwan, has analyzed the ways in which women are able
to exert agency within constrained employment contexts. In the Middle
East, Nayla Moukarbel’s (2009) study of Sri Lankan domestic workers
in Lebanon used Scott’s (1985) notion of “everyday forms of resistance”
to explore the micropolitics of power within employment relationships.
She shows how Sri Lankan domestic workers’ resistance to the power and
control exercised by their employers is covert rather than openly confron-
tational and includes behaviors such as lying, stealing, evasion, and foot
dragging.
This chapter seeks to deepen the investigation of the agency of migrant
domestic workers in two ways: first, I articulate the ways in which women
may also engage in more openly confrontational exchanges with employ-
ers; second, I discuss the forms of agency women are able to exercise out-
side of the employment contract—through relationships with men and
through religion. Drawing on Ortner (2006), I argue that paradoxically,
while these forms of agency open up spheres of greater individual free-
dom, they may simultaneously reproduce and reinforce structural forms of
“unfreedom.”
The chapter draws on multisited empirical research conducted during
2009–2010 in Ethiopia, Lebanon, and Kuwait on the migration of Ethio-
pian women as domestic workers.1 The project primarily used ethnographic
methods of nonparticipant observation, informal interactions with domestic
workers, and semistructured interviews. I conducted semistructured inter-
views with women in Ethiopia who had returned from working on short-
term, temporary domestic worker contracts in the Middle East. I applied
a snowballing technique, initially contacting domestic workers working in
the homes of my friends and acquaintances in Addis Ababa. Some shorter,
more informal conversations occurred with women in the compound of
the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs in Addis Ababa while they waited
to have their documents processed. In Lebanon and Kuwait, I conducted
semistructured interviews with domestic workers and other service-sector
workers who were working on contract and those working as freelancers.
Here, too, I used the snowball technique through acquaintances. Addition-
ally, I directly approached women in beauty salons and in Ethiopian restau-
rants and churches. In both Lebanon and Kuwait, I was also invited into
the homes of a few Ethiopian women who were working as freelancers and
Degrees of (Un)Freedom O 53
sharing accommodation with compatriots. The majority of my encoun-

ters with domestic workers in these countries occurred outside the house-
holds in which they worked. I conducted interviews and conversations
primarily in Amharic, with the assistance of a translator; a few interviews
were also conducted in English.
This chapter proceeds through the following five parts. The first out-
lines key debates on unfree labor, feminist analyses of domestic labor, and
approaches to analyzing agency and resistance. The discussion is situated
with reference to Ethiopian migrant domestic workers’ structural posi-
tion in Lebanon and Kuwait and outlines the ways in which regulations
and social attitudes produce migrant domestic workers as a form of cheap
labor. The next section examines aspects of the agency exercised by con-
tract workers and freelance workers within the domain of employment.
The third and fourth sections examine women’s agency in the domains of
relationships and religion, while the fifth section offers some concluding
observations.
Conceptualizing the Unfree Labor, Agency, and

Resistance of Migrant Domestic Workers
The discussion in this section first elucidates the conceptualizations of
unfree labor with reference to migrant domestic workers before moving on
to consider some aspects of agency and resistance by drawing on the work
of James Scott (1985; 1990) and Sherry Ortner (2006).
Recent debates on contemporary forms of “unfree labor” (Anderson and
Rogaly, 2005; Banaji, 2003; Barrientos, Kothari, and Phillips, 2013; Brown
and van der Linden, 2010; Frantz, 2013; Lerche, 2007; O’Neill, 2011) situ-
ate migrant domestic workers as a particularly vulnerable category of unfree
labor. While Marx’s original conceptualization of “unfree” labor describes
the working conditions of serfs under feudalism and of slaves, which he
contrasted with the “freedom” of people to willingly enter into employment
contracts to sell their labor power under capitalism, he was clear that the
freedom to enter into contracts was a legal formalism and that labor was
never truly free under capitalism, as it was contingent on laborers being sep-
arated from the means of production, or subsistence, and being compelled
to sell their labor. Such compulsion is evident in the case of migrant domes-
tic workers who move within the lower circuits of global mobility, usually
in response to the absence of employment opportunities in their countries
of origin. Although they “voluntarily” enter into unfavorable employment
54 O Bina Fernandez
contracts in destination countries and may endure working conditions

that are exploitative and abusive, they are engaged in a form of unfree
labor. As Banaji (2003, p. 71) points out, “it is possible to argue that
no contract is free because economic coercion is pervasive under capital-
ism.” There is now broad acknowledgment of a “continuum of exploita-
tion,” rather than binary categories of free and unfree labor (O’Connell
Davidson, 2010; Doezema, 1998). Unfree labor is best viewed as a wider
category of which forced labor and slavery are subsets (Strauss, 2012).
Presently, I analyze the unfree labor of migrant domestic workers along
three dimensions: first, as a form of what O’Neill (2011) describes as
“compulsion by necessity.” Second, I scrutinize the wider institutional
structures (of the employment contract and the kafala) that underwrite
migrant domestic workers’ unfree labor in Lebanon and Kuwait. Third, I
consider the constraints produced through the deeply gendered particu-
larities of domestic work.
Contemporary forms of “unfree” labor are those work relationships
entered into due to “compulsion by necessity” (O’Neill, 2011, p. 16). This
entails examining the economic and social circumstances of the worker that
compel her to voluntarily seek out work that may be on unfavorable terms
or even exploitative. My previous research has demonstrated that the high
levels of unemployment for poorly educated young women and the strong
cultural perception of responsibility to contribute to family welfare compels
large numbers of Ethiopian women to seek employment as migrant domes-
tic workers in the Middle East (Fernandez, 2011). In challenging economic
times, migration has increasingly become a household livelihood diversifi-
cation strategy for many Ethiopians.
Although most women “freely” enter into formal employment con-
tracts, these contracts are a tacitly acknowledged fiction. Women sign
contracts that specify their salaries, hours of employment, duration of
the contract, and their rights. The contracts are arranged through private
employment agencies in Addis Ababa that are in contact with employ-
ment agencies in the destinations, and the contracts are validated by the
Ethiopian Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. However, as even Ethio-
pian government officials acknowledge, the contract signed in Ethiopia
has no legal validity in the destination country, where a second local con-
tract is drawn up (a local legal obligation not always followed), the terms
of which are usually different from the terms of the contract signed in
Ethiopia. Moreover, even when the employment contract in the destina-
tion is signed, it has limited force, as there are no mechanisms in place for
enforcement or inspection. More important than the employment con-

tract in contributing to the institutionalization of migrant domestic work-
ers’ unfreedom is the kafala system of sponsorship of migrant workers that
prevails in the Middle East (discussed in greater detail in Chapter 1). For
migrant domestic workers, the unfreedoms generated by the kafala are so
severe that they have been described as forms of forced labor and contract
slavery (Jureidini and Moukarbel, 2004). However, a more nuanced con-
ceptualization of forced labor recognizes that it can arise at the point of
entry into employment, within the work process, and at the point of exit
(Barrientos, Kothari, and Phillips, 2013, p. 1038).
Third, it is important to acknowledge the additional layer of unfree-
dom imposed on migrant domestic workers due to their responsibility
for domestic labor (including care labor). As analyses of domestic workers
in multiple contexts have shown, paid domestic work creates particularly
“sticky” constraints, because of the “intimate” nature of the work in the
private, domestic sphere; employers’ domination of employees within
this domestic sphere is maintained by the devaluation of care and the
construction of domestic labor not as “work” but rather as a “service”
and a position of subservience (Rollins, 1985; Bakan and Stasiulis, 1997;
Anderson, 2000; Constable, 2007). The tensions and contradictions of
paid domestic work are exacerbated when the employee is a live-in, as
many migrant domestic workers are. Sharing their employer’s residence
potentially renders migrant domestic workers subject to the employer’s
command 24/7, and they are often unable to negotiate clear boundaries
around hours of work and time off. Although the employment contract
stipulates an eight-hour working day and one day off per week, the major-
ity of women I interviewed typically worked between 10 and 16 hours a
day and often had one, two, or no days off a month. Employers’ lack of
adherence to contractual obligations is unmonitored due to the exclu-
sion of domestic workers from the rights and protections offered by labor
law in both Kuwait and Lebanon and indeed, globally, notwithstanding
the 2011 ILO Domestic Workers Convention No. 189 protecting the
rights of domestic workers. Even in an ideal situation, where workers do
get the stipulated hours or days off, they must still abide by the “rules
of the house” around whether and when they can leave the house, what
time they must return, and what they can do to relax both inside and
outside the house.
Despite these dimensions of unfreedom that migrant domestic workers
face, they are nevertheless able to exercise agency within the employment
56 O Bina Fernandez
context and within the larger social and cultural context. To understand
how migrant domestic workers are not merely coercively acted upon, we
can turn to a rich theoretical repertoire conceptualizing agency (and resis-
tance as a form of it) and its relationship to power and domination. As
a starting point, we can begin with Laura Ahearn’s useful definition of
agency as “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (Ahearn, 2001,
p. 112). For Ahearn and other anthropologists, agency cannot simply
be understood as individual free will but as a sociocultural product. For
instance, Giddens’s (1984) theory of structuration conceptualizes agency
as unavoidably shaped by social structures and posits that people’s actions
will reinforce these structures. In a similar mode, Bourdieu’s (1977) con-
cept of the “habitus” shows how despite the endless variations of possible
actions human beings can engage in at any given point, they are predis-
posed to act in particular ways. Both Bourdieu and Giddens are, how-
ever, more limited in their explanations of how agency can be resistant or,
indeed, transformative.
Focusing on resistance, Scott (1985; 1990) found that overt, organized
resistance to domination in peasant and slave societies was rare and that
everyday forms of resistance such as foot-dragging, evasion, false compli-
ance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, and sabotage, gossip, or rumors
were the tactics employed by subordinate groups to challenge dominant
groups (Scott, 1985). He conceptualizes resistance as a “hidden transcript”
that lies somewhere between structure and agency: “Most of the political
life of subordinate groups is to be found neither in the overt collective defi-
ance of power holders nor in complete hegemonic compliance, but in the
vast territory between these two polar opposites” (Scott, 1985, p. 136).
Scott further extended these ideas to construct a typology of the “infrapoli-
tics” of the oppressed in response to material, status, and ideological dom-
ination (Scott, 1990). These forms of resistance are particularly effective
in situations where violence (or the threat of violence) is used to main-
tain the status quo, allowing “a veiled discourse of dignity and self-assertion
within the public transcript . . . in which ideological resistance is disguised,
muted and veiled for safety’s sake” (Scott, 1990, p. 137). In contrast to
Scott, Abu-Lughod (1990) cautions against succumbing to the “romance of
resistance,” arguing that motivations for action may be complex and often
contradictory.
Departing from the binary conceptualizations of agency in opposition
to structure, or in opposition to resistance, this chapter draws on Ortner’s
insightful conceptualization of “agency as power” and “agency as cultural
project” as two distinct but necessarily interrelated “fields of meaning”

(Ortner, 2006, pp. 152–153). The former lends itself to examining
agency in terms of resistance to domination, while the latter investigates
how social actors (empowered or disempowered) play the “games of their
culture” and in doing so, reproduce or transform the game itself. This
conceptualization of agency emphasizes the existence of inherent struc-
tural contradictions that allows for the possibility of social transformation
and prevents the reproduction of the hegemonic social order from being
a foregone conclusion.
Agency in the Domain of Employment: “Of Course

You Are My Madam, but I Am Like You”
My research indicates that for migrant domestic workers on contracts, free-
dom of mobility and behavior are the two primary areas of contestation
with employers. These two freedoms are integrally linked to the structural
conditions of a migrant domestic worker’s employment—that is, the (ille-
gal but standard) confiscation of migrant domestic worker passports by
employers and their residence in employer’s homes.
Although it is illegal to do so, most employers retain the migrant domes-
tic worker’s passport to ensure she does not run away. Some employers will
also keep her iqama, or residence permit. This confiscation of papers effec-
tively limits women’s freedom to move outside the employers’ homes and
her ability to run away. The extent to which women may be “allowed” out
of the house is varied. Some women are not allowed to leave unaccompa-
nied; at best, they may go out on family outings, primarily to look after
the children. Others may be able to go out locally—to drop children off
at school, to dispose of household garbage, or to buy groceries; however,
this is usually closely monitored. It is often more difficult for women to
negotiate autonomous mobility on their “off time.” Employers’ restrictions
on women’s mobility are often justified through the problematic narratives
that it is “for their own good”—they would not “waste money,” “get into
bad company,” or become pregnant.
As noted previously, live-in migrant domestic workers’ coresidence with
employers can produce considerable pressure on the former, as employers can
constrain their behavior not only during work time but also during their off
time. Indeed, for some women, there is very little off time. Mekdis spoke
about being on call 24/7, literally only getting time off to sleep, an experi-
ence that is fairly common among domestic migrant workers. During their
58 O Bina Fernandez
off time, they may still be expected to conform to behavioral rules set by the
employer that control, for instance, the time they spend on the phone, watch-
ing television, listening to music, religious practices, or eating habits. Gelila
considered herself in a tolerable situation, because “even if she [her employer]
doesn’t let me out, I can listen to songs and watch television; in general, I
had freedom.” For Gelila, then, the absence of freedom to move outside her
employer’s house was counterbalanced by the tacit knowledge that it could be
worse—her employer could restrict her freedoms within the house also.
As scholars have noted, coresidence with employers can foster a discourse
on the migrant domestic worker as a “part of the family” or considered “like a
daughter” as a framework for understanding this relationship (Parreñas, 2001;
Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Liebelt, 2011; Moukarbel, 2009; Rollins, 1985).
This may be mutual; some women, like Amira (discussed presently), may
genuinely feel that they are “part of the family.” However, others recognize
that this is merely talk that masks the reality of the stark power differential
between employer and employee. I spent half a Sunday in conversation with
a mixed group of freelance and contract migrant domestic workers at the
apartment shared by two freelancers in the Ashrafieh neighborhood of Beirut.
Their apartment served as a hub for a wide social network of Ethiopian women
and a few men who would stop by to share some conversation, coffee, and
food. While talking about working conditions, the “hidden transcript” (Scott,
1985) of their view of this representation of the domestic worker as “part of
the family” emerged. The conversation started with Makeda mentioning that
her “madam” was nice but that the boundaries were clearly demarcated:
M AKEDA : Nice in this country means she is not “nyah-ni-nyah-ni-nyah-ni” [nag-

ging] all the time—that is nice (all laughing). You are a worker; she is the
madam.
F IKRE : In our country . . . for example, in our house [in Ethiopia] there is maid—
she is my boss. More than my mum, she cares for me, and whatever she wants,
I do for her. Here, there is no one to respect you.
M AKEDA : They will tell you “you are my daughter” (laughing) but . . . it is just to
talk. If I am her daughter, I should be able to talk on the telephone. I should
be able to take whatever I want to eat from the fridge. But no . . . (laugh-
ing) . . . so you feel uncomfortable to rest here.
This “hidden transcript” of Ethiopian migrant domestic workers, which is

articulated outside the employer’s home, is interesting not only because it
is an expression of resistance to ideological domination (the discourse of
the benevolent domestic employer who acts only in the best interests of the
employee) but also because it reproduces the same ideological trope in refer-
ence to a domestic worker employed in Fikre’s home in Ethiopia. We do not
know if the woman who works in Fikre’s home actually does feel like she is
part of that family, as Fikre assumes she does.
Migrant domestic workers engage in forms of “everyday resistance” to
counter what they consider unreasonable demands by their employers. Mou-
karbel’s (2010) rich ethnography of Sri Lankan migrant domestic workers and
their employers documents the lies, pilferage, avoidance, and foot-dragging
strategies of resistance that workers adopt. Women also tactically use weeping
and passive aggression as gendered “weapons of the weak” to wear down their
employers. While these are certainly also part of the repertoire of resistance
engaged in by Ethiopian migrant domestic workers, I would like to draw
attention to instances of more direct confrontation. Lishan, a young woman
interviewed in Beirut, spoke of having been forced to work in four houses for
the one salary: “My madam’s house, my madam’s mother’s house, my mad-
am’s grandfather’s house, [and] my mister’s mother’s house. I wake up at five
o’clock, and I go to sleep at ten or eleven o’clock.” She recounted her reaction
on one occasion when her employer refused to acknowledge her exhaustion
and expected her to smile while serving guests at a party:
When everybody comes to their house to drink coffee, they all smile and speak to
me like I am a human being. I don’t say “hi.” My employer tells me to make cof-
fee. I say “OK.” She says, “Smile.” I say, “No.” I don’t like to be forced to smile.
She says, “You smile and you talk.” I say, “No.” I said that because they are not
saying she’s tired, relax . . . I said take me back to the [employment agent’s] office.
The agent also told me to “smile”—I said no to him, too. He tells me, “You eat
too much, and you are fat.” I shout at the office man: “When I am in my country
I am fat; here I am not fat.” He helps my madam and mister. They said, “You are
fat.” I don’t smile.
In this confrontation, the employer’s expectation of “service with a smile”

was robustly refused by Lishan, who was exhausted from being overworked.
An indomitable young woman, Lishan was not cowed by the implicit threat
that she would be sent back to Ethiopia. She stayed on to complete her con-
tract, but at the time of the interview, she was working as a freelancer. In a
similar situation, where her personal dignity was at stake, Makeda recounts
how direct confrontation with her employer led to her running away:
My bathroom was very smelly. I told my employer it smells, but she didn’t listen.
She thinks I am not a person. One day she came into the kitchen and wanted to
60 O Bina Fernandez
prepare a cake. She said, “Please can you close your door.” I said, “I opened the
door to get air.” “I have a nose allergy,” she said. “Madam, do you think this smell
is perfume for me?” She said, “How dare you answer me? I am your Madam.” I
said, “Of course you are my Madam, but I am like you.”
She told me, “Go out.” I went out. I didn’t have shoes. I sat in the doorway.
She went out with her children. When she came back, I was still there, because
I didn’t have money to go in a taxi anywhere. I didn’t know where to go. When
she came back, she said, “Why didn’t you go? Why are you still here?” She had
more power because I stayed there, I sat there, and I waited for her. She had more
power. Then she came and told me, “Go to your room. I don’t want to see your
face. After tomorrow, I will take you to the agency, and he will keep you three
days; he will beat you, and after that, I will buy your ticket, and you will go back
to Ethiopia.”
I called my friend and said, “I don’t want to go Ethiopia, and I don’t have any
money.” My employer had five months of my salary. I was not sure if she would
give me the money or buy my ticket home with that money. I didn’t have money
to go to Ethiopia. My employer told me, “The door is open—go!” I closed the
door slowly, and I went out. When she came back, she didn’t find me. Like that
I ran away.
Explicit in these accounts by Makeda and Lishan is the open power struggle
between them and their employers. In both cases, the employment agency
is deployed by the employers as a threatening tactic in the power game.
Legally, both employers and employees can contact the employment agent
to effect a change in employment during the first three months of the con-
tract. However, even after this period, employment agents often collude
with employers to coerce women (sometimes through physical abuse) to
conform to the demands of employers. In both of the previous cases, each
woman resisted her employer through a strong assertion of personal dignity
and self-worth. Ultimately though, for Makeda, the preservation of dignity
meant running away, even at the high price of losing the wages she had
earned.
Like Makeda, many women become runaways to escape indignity and
exploitative and sometimes violent working conditions. Some women
will also simply run away to find better employment opportunities; many
women become runaways, leaving their employer without completing their
contract. Migrant domestic workers who leave employment contracts are
divided into two groups: those who are able to negotiate with their employ-
ers to buy their freedom and those who are unable to do so (Johnson, 2012).
Both groups work as freelancers; however, the latter group is vulnerable, as
they may be apprehended and either forced to return to their employers
or deported. The migrant domestic worker who runs away is the biggest
anathema to government officials and private employment agencies, both in
Ethiopia and in the destination countries. “Do not runaway” is one of the
key messages conveyed to prospective migrant domestic workers who attend
the half-day predeparture orientation sessions conducted by the Ministry of
Labour and Social Affairs in Addis Ababa.2 For government officials in the
destinations, women who run away become “law and order” problems as
they automatically become illegal residents and costs are incurred to find,
process, and deport them. Runaways are also financially disadvantageous
for employment agencies in the destination country, as they are obligated to
provide a replacement domestic worker to the employer if the worker runs
away in the first three months of the contract.
Some freelancers may also work in the service sector in shops, restau-
rants, hotels, or beauty parlors—or even as sex workers. As Moukarbel
(2009, p. 224) points out, the most important difference between freelanc-
ers and live-in migrant domestic workers is that the former sells only her
labor power, since when she is not working, she has a private life. The live-
in migrant domestic worker, in contrast, cannot set such boundaries on
her private time, space, or sometimes even personhood, as many employers
implicitly or explicitly may consider her to be “property” they have bought.
Thus we see that the degree of agency migrant domestic workers exercise
within the domain of employment is shaped first by whether they work on
contract or as freelancers. Contract workers in Lebanon and Kuwait are
almost invariably also live-in workers, and this is the second crucial way in
which their agency may be affected—particularly in the constraints around
their mobility outside the house and their behavior within it. Third, free-
lancers’ agency is further contingent on whether or not they have “bought
their freedom” to work from a Kuwaiti or Lebanese sponsor; if they have
not managed to do so, their mobility within the country is constrained by
their illegal residence status.
Agency in the Domain of Marriage and Relationships

Marriage and relationships with men can potentially offer migrant domestic
workers an escape route out of the employment contract. The pathways
by which women enter and exit such relationships are diverse and reveal
degrees of (un)freedom in the relative advantages conferred, in the volun-
tariness of the relationship, and in the constrained choices enforced by their
primary responsibility for the care of children.
62 O Bina Fernandez
Perceptions of relative advantage were constructed not only around

the legality of the relationship (whether or not they were married) but
also in terms of the nationality of her husband. Women who were legally
married, rather than in relationships, were considered the “lucky” ones by
other Ethiopian women. Among the married women, there was a further
hierarchy among those who were married to European, American, and
Lebanese men, in contrast to those who were married to (or in relation-
ships with) Sudanese or Syrian men. Nunu and her sister started out on
migrant domestic worker contracts in Kuwait, but both married US citi-
zens who were working at the US army base in Kuwait. At the time of
the interview, Nunu had divorced her husband because he had begun a
relationship with the Ethiopian woman she had brought as a babysitter.
Nunu was engaged in a complicated legal struggle for custody of her chil-
dren and was compelled to remain in Kuwait as long as her ex-husband
was there. Like her sister, Nunu had obtained US citizenship through
marriage but was constrained from returning to the United States or to
Ethiopia to start a new life.
In Lebanon, I met two Ethiopian women married to Lebanese men;
both had set up beauty salons catering to African women. What appeared
more common were relationships between Ethiopian women and Sudanese
or Syrian men. Amira’s marriage to Tayib, an irregular Sudanese migrant in
Lebanon, had (somewhat surprisingly) been facilitated through extensive
negotiations by her employer’s family on her behalf. Tayib was an irregu-
lar migrant who worked at a local gas station and had approached Amira’s
employers to ask for permission to marry her: “My madam’s father told me
this man—his name is Tayib—is a good man; if you marry him, he can stay
here with you; he doesn’t have to run anymore. They took his phone num-
ber, and we started to talk and got to know each other . . . After a year and
a half, we got married.” Although she was Ethiopian Orthodox Christian,
Amira married Tayib in a Muslim ceremony. She stayed with him for a week
and then returned to work in her employer’s house, but she could spend
Saturdays and Sundays with her husband. They lived this way for two years,
and then Tayib was arrested and deported. It took him several months and
USD3,500 to arrange to come back into Lebanon illegally through Syria.
Following his return, Amira negotiated with her employer to be released
from her contract but to continue to be sponsored. This enabled her to
work as a freelancer and live with her husband.
Amira introduced me to Sennait, another Ethiopian woman who was
married to a Sudanese Muslim man. We met Sennait in the apartment that
she, her husband, and their three-month-old baby shared with four other
Ethiopian men and women. Sennait had also married voluntarily, despite
the differences between her husband and herself in terms of religion and
nationality. She had met her husband through a social network of Ethiopian
women who were in relationships with Sudanese men.
In the conversation with the group of women in this apartment, I came
to understand that many Sudanese men in Lebanon were waiting for their
refugee applications to be processed by the United Nations Humanitarian
Commission for Refugees and were hoping to be relocated to a European
country. The Ethiopian women felt an affinity toward Sudanese men as
co-Africans from a neighboring country, even though they belonged to a
different religion.
While the women described previously entered relationships voluntar-
ily, others were forced into entering relationships in order to survive, par-
ticularly if they ran away from employment contracts. When a domestic
migrant runs away from her employer, she is often forced to do so without
her passport and residence papers and may not have access to social net-
works as a support system. She might end up on the street, at the mercy of
whichever male crosses her path first. Sometimes this is a taxi driver, and
if she is lucky, he will drive her to other Ethiopians—the local Ethiopian
restaurant or beauty parlor is often a point of contact. If she is less lucky, she
may end up under the “protection” of another male. For example, Hirut,
a young woman interviewed at a shelter for migrant domestic workers in
Beirut, had run away because her employer was unwilling to renew her
contract with an increased salary and wanted to send her back to Ethiopia.
She established a relationship with a Syrian man and worked freelance for
several months in Beirut. She had been apprehended and brought to the
shelter following an accident in which she fell from a bus. At the time of
the interview, she had no money, had no job, and was pregnant. She did not
want to return to Ethiopia, did not appear to want the baby, and wanted
to stay and work in Beirut but said that she faced a fine of nearly $1,000 in
order to regularize her status.
Similarly, Rahel ran away from her employer because of physical abuse.
She approached a Sudanese man who worked as a concierge in a neigh-
boring building and told him she had no place to stay. She ended up
staying with him and, at the time of interview, had had a two-year-old
daughter with him. She now wanted to leave the relationship with this
man because he abused her and did not give her any money; however, she
was multiply constrained by her lack of papers (still held by her former
64 O Bina Fernandez
employers), her lack of money to buy back her papers (which would cost
between USD3,000 and USD4,000), and a child who she needed to care
for. She wanted to return to Ethiopia, leave her daughter with her mother,
and come back to work in Lebanon but was afraid her husband would
not let the child go with her. In Rahel’s words, “I can’t stay because I have
no papers, and if I am caught, I have no one to leave my daughter with.”
Thus, despite the greater freedoms inherent in freelancing, migrant domes-
tic workers who marry or enter into relationships with men may often find
themselves constrained by another set of restrictions that are a consequence
of the gendered social assumption of women’s responsibility for children.
We see then that women may have complex motivations for entering
into relationships: emotional connections, shared African identities, to
improve their social and economic status, and to gain a measure of protec-
tion. The degree of agency they are able to exercise within these relation-
ships depends greatly on the legal status of their husband and the extent
to which that status can be conferred upon them. Importantly, we can
also observe that some women’s agency may be considerably constrained
through the gendered primary responsibility for the children born as a
result of these relationships.
Agency in the Domain of Religion: “I Depend on Angels”

Religion is not only a rich source of cultural beliefs and values, but as Ort-
ner points out, it “often has close affinities with resistance movements” but
tends to be ignored or undertheorized in accounts of resistance, including
Scott’s (Ortner, 2006, pp. 50–51). Religion plays an important spiritual
and social role in the lives of Ethiopian migrant domestic workers in both
Lebanon and Kuwait, an observation that resonates with the work of other
scholars on the role of religion in migrant domestic workers’ lives (Werbner
and Johnson, 2010; Frantz, 2010; Liebelt, Chapter 5, in this book; Hosoda
and Watanabe, Chapter 6, in this book). Ethiopian women who work in
Lebanon and Kuwait may be Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, Pentecostal
Christian, or Muslim. Many Ethiopian Christian women seek employ-
ment in Lebanon because of the higher possibility of obtaining a Christian
employer or a more liberal Muslim employer. The analysis in this section
focuses on how women are able to craft agency at individual and collective
levels and resist domination by deploying religious counterdiscourses.
At the individual level, conflicts over religious beliefs and practices may
sometimes occur between Christian Ethiopian women and their Muslim
employers. Kidist’s employer in Bahrain treated her well but wanted her to
convert to Islam, which was why she left the job. When an exit option is
not available, resistance may necessarily be deeply internal in employment
situations where women are forcibly converted to Islam by their employers.
Mekdis spoke of how her employer knew she was Christian, but says, “My
employer made me change my religion; she took me and made me do a ritual,
and they gave me a Qur’an, and she gave a mat, and I was supposed to bow
down, but I used to cry, calling, ‘My God, our Father who Art in Heaven.’”
Maintaining an outward Muslim religious practice but an internal Chris-
tian spiritual life is common for many women who pretended to be Muslim
in order to secure employment in contexts where Muslim employees are
preferred. Lemlem was a Christian woman working as a freelancer in Saudi
Arabia who observed Muslim fasts and prayed alongside her employer’s
family, saying, “I was praying to [a Christian] God, while they were pray-
ing to Allah.” It is not uncommon for Christian women to obtain (often
illegal) identity documentation that classifies them as Muslim, even when
they make employment applications in Ethiopia. Hanna, for example, had
changed her name to Salome in order to secure an employment contract
in Kuwait. When her employer found out, he took her to the police and
said that her ID had been forged. In her current position as a warden in the
women’s dormitory of Kuwait University, religion was less of an issue, and
she was free to go to church, though she still went by the name Salome.
Women on contracts, who might be open about being Christian, nev-
ertheless often struggle to negotiate time off on Sundays to go to church.
Employers are reluctant to allow women to leave the house, not only
because “domestic work is never done,” but also because they are afraid that
the woman will “fall into bad company” or run away. Some employers will
drop women off at the church only for the duration of the service, picking
them up immediately after.
Bezawit had been in Lebanon for 15 years; when she first came to Leba-
non, it was a year before she discovered the existence of an Ethiopian Pen-
tecostal church in Beirut. She became extremely distressed and depressed
when her employers continually refused to let her go to church and cried
almost every day. The conflict with her employer intensified and finally
reached open confrontation:
I know my rights and responsibilities. Most of them [other migrant domestic

workers] don’t know their rights . . . his wife came and fought with me; she took
her shoes off and threw them at me. I told her she had no right to kick me, but
66 O Bina Fernandez
she shouted saying Lebanon was her country and that I had no employment
agency and that the police [were] on her side. After a long silence, I told her,
“You are right in what you say about me not having an employment agency and
no embassy, but let me tell you as a spiritual person, some day we are all going
to die. You may depend on the police, but I depend on angels.” She said I was
too confident about Jesus and told me to get my bag and leave her house and to
go live with my friend. She knows my friend works in her friend’s house . . . I
don’t want to talk about this stuff; all I want is freedom; I don’t want to be treated
like a dog. I was feeling low . . . my friend was shocked when she saw me.
When Bezawit’s initially more passive tactic of weeping did not produce
any change, the strength of her spiritual belief became an inner resource she
could mobilize in a direct confrontation with her employer as a means to
secure greater freedom to attend church. What is interesting here is that she
expressed her agency and dignity by interlinking discourses of spirituality
with human rights. At the time of the interview, Bezawit was one of seven
elders in the Pentecostal “Full Gospel” (Mulu Wongel) Church in Beirut,
which was her vocation and livelihood (she no longer works as a domestic
worker).
Analyzing the importance of religion at a collective level, we can see how
the Ethiopian Pentecostal and Orthodox churches have created a collective
physical, social, and psychological space in which forms of mutual support
and a nascent counterculture are articulated. There are three branches of the
Ethiopian Pentecostal “Full Gospel” (Mulu Wongel) Church that organize
services in Beirut. The Ethiopian Orthodox church managed to raise funds
to construct a new church in Badaro, outside Beirut. As Badaro is less acces-
sible to most Beirut-based Ethiopian migrant domestic workers, Ethiopian
services are held in another Orthodox church in Beirut. Kuwait has no Ethi-
opian Orthodox church, but Ethiopian women attend services at the Egyp-
tian Orthodox, Catholic, and Pentecostal churches. Visits to the churches
in Lebanon and Kuwait allowed me to understand the social importance
of these sites. Hundreds of Ethiopian women and a few men gather at the
churches on Sundays, praying and singing. Outside, the church compound
is a space where women socialize, meeting friends and relatives and sharing
news and food. In contrast to Lebanon, the socializing among Ethiopians
at churches in Kuwait was much more muted, situated as they were among
Christians of other nationalities and in a political context of less religious
freedom.
Of particular note for this study is the strength of the Ethiopian Pen-
tecostal church in Lebanon. Many women who provided support to
migrant domestic workers in trouble were from this church. For instance,
Fikre’s (the freelancer mentioned previously) friends affectionately chided
her for emptying her pockets to help runaways (of any nationality) on the
streets or to help women who had been abandoned without their wages
or tickets at the airport by unscrupulous employers. Fikre was actively
involved in an informal shelter set up by the Ethiopian embassy in Bei-
rut and had also initiated a weekly one-hour radio program in Amharic,
which women could call into and ask for advice. An interview with Eleni,
a pastor of the Mulu Wongel (Full Gospel) Pentecostal Church, offered
further insight into the support provided by this church. Eleni spoke of
regular visits (two to three times a week) to women who were in prison,
either for criminal offences like prostitution or for being without official
documentation. The 10 percent tithe collected by the Pentecostal church
from its members was used in part to pay for some of these women’s legal
costs and to provide them with food. In a context where the need far out-
weighs the available support from formal institutions such as the Ethio-
pian embassy or local NGOs such as Caritas, the work of these women
attempts to bridge this gap.
The Ethiopian Pentecostal church is not unique in providing support
and a sense of community for migrant domestic workers. I met migrant
domestic workers from Madagascar and the Philippines who were also
members of Pentecostal churches and were deeply involved in reaching out
to migrant domestic workers in distress. I learned from them and from
Eleni of an annual festival of all Pentecostal churches in Lebanon, which is a
gathering of more than five thousand people from all nationalities (not only
migrant domestic workers) for a weekend in March.
The appeal of Pentecostalism to migrant domestic workers can also be
situated within its social history in Ethiopia. While the origins of Pente-
costalism in Ethiopia can be traced to the activities of Finnish and Swed-
ish missionaries in the 1950s and 1960s (Haustein, 2012), Tibebe (2009)
argues that it spread rapidly among educated youth in urban areas in the
1960s as a response to the cultural pressure of the transition to modernity.
Ethiopian youth brought up in the Orthodox church tradition were experi-
encing a deep cultural anxiety and political dissatisfaction brought about by
their encounter with Western scientific education. Tibebe suggests that the
inflexible, tradition-bound response of the Ethiopian Orthodox church to
this dissonance contributed to the countercultural movements of the period,
which included the new ideas of Marxism and of Pentecostalism. Pentecos-
talism “brought for . . . believers not only salvation, but also liberation
68 O Bina Fernandez
from traditional oppressive structures, healing, and a sense of worth in a

socio-political milieu that sustained social inequalities” (2009, p. 86).
Despite severe state repression of Pentecostalism until the mid-1990s, the
movement grew, spreading rapidly even in Ethiopian rural areas during the
past two decades (Freeman, 2012). This social history of resistance expressed
through religion, of creating a new community and connection in the face
of oppression, appears to resonate with the contemporary behaviors and
motivation of migrant domestic workers who are members of the Pentecos-
tal church, even though they are of a younger generation.
In outlining aspects of individual and collective agency generated
through Ethiopian women’s religious practices while working as migrant
domestic workers, the analysis here has attempted to show how their agency
must be understood simultaneously as a product of their personal histories
and strength of spiritual belief, but also as arising from the social and cul-
tural dynamics of a particular place and time.
Conclusion
Although it is tempting to construct well-ordered categories of degrees of
agency and resistance that can be mapped onto the continuum of levels
of unfreedom, I believe that doing so would be an inadequate account of
the complexities observed in this chapter. By way of a conclusion, then, I
draw out some implications of the empirical evidence discussed. The chap-
ter provided a feel for the texture of agency that Ethiopian migrant domestic
workers are able to exercise in multiple domains, despite their constrained
structural positions. I discussed the degrees of freedom they have as actors
within migration as a socially and culturally constituted process, without
losing sight of the larger structures that restrict (but also sometimes enable)
their capacity for action. I showed how an analysis of the gendered social
relations and practices that underpin such processes and structures is vital
to the broader project of examining their agency.
Forms of “agency as power” (Ortner, 2006) were considered within the
employment contract. Here the discussion of the experiences of contract
migrant domestic workers pointed to the “hidden transcript” among these
workers that contested employers’ representation of them as “members of
the family.” Yet, as we also saw, this was contradicted by the perception
of some migrant domestic workers like Amira (and others interviewed) who
narrated an experience of feeling like they were part of their employer’s fam-
ily. Recognition of the latter alerts us to how the web of social relationships
across cultures cannot be reduced simply to an oppositional “us” vs. “them”

view. Agency can be wrought from the intimate nature of care that domestic
work entails and can even be acknowledged and appreciated by those (such
as employers) who occupy structural positions of power (as Chapter 7 by
Elyas and Johnson also shows).
Contract migrant domestic workers engage in acts of “everyday resis-
tance” within the constraints of the employment contract, and the dis-
cussion in this chapter showed how this can occasionally be more openly
confrontational, contrasting Scott’s model of resistance as covert, subversive
actions. This is not to suggest that all migrant domestic workers would be
able to challenge their employers in this direct manner; much also depends
on the individual—her education, awareness of her rights, experience, and
personality. I also do not intend to suggest that more open individual con-
frontation necessarily increases women’s ability to effectively improve their
working conditions. Indeed, the conflict is often expressed openly prior to
the act of exit.
What then becomes interesting to reflect on is the differential power
that is derived from people’s capacity to exit from relationships (Hirschman,
1970). Runaways deploy the ultimate “weapon of the weak”—the power
to exit. For migrant domestic workers, exercising the “exit option” does
not only occur under conditions of abuse or exploitation, when recourse
to the “voice option” (speaking out, open confrontation) has failed. Some
women enter into the contract as a pathway to the exit option, knowing
that there are potentially better opportunities outside the contract, work-
ing as freelancers. Women may be forced to exit because of abuse or insults
to their dignity, but this may also be a calculated act, contingent on their
ability to access social networks as a fallback and their individual appetite
for risk. Employers’ fear that the migrant domestic worker will run away
necessitates, in their view, strict controls over migrant domestic worker
mobility by confiscating the latter’s passports. The threat of exit, however,
is always present, despite the coercion used to suppress it, and generates a
fundamental instability in the relationship. To use Ortner’s (2006) terms,
this fundamental instability is the inherent structural contradiction that has
transformative potential.
When women exit contracts and enter the arena of freelance work,
they clearly stand to gain greater personal autonomy and higher incomes.
However, although a degree of individual freedom is gained, women are
still vulnerable (to exploitation and/or deportation) because of their irreg-
ular status, and their degree of vulnerability is contingent on whether or
70 O Bina Fernandez
not they have been able to negotiate successfully with their sponsors. This
raises the broader question of “agency as cultural project” (Ortner, 2006),
as the exercise of individual migrant domestic worker agency and resis-
tance may nevertheless reproduce the structure of global labor relations.
In his ethnographic study of working-class youth in the United King-
dom, Willis (1977) illuminated how their assertion of difference ended
up reinforcing their working-class status. By running away and exiting
the employment contract, migrant domestic workers join a large pool of
cheap migrant labor that is even more marginal, disaggregated, and dis-
persed within an invisible informal economy. They cannot self-organize
for better working conditions precisely because of the disciplinary pressure
of their irregular status.
“Agency as cultural project” can also be mapped (in markedly different
ways) through relationships and religion. Ethiopian migrant domestic work-
ers enter into relationships (married or unmarried) with men of different
nationalities. These relationships allow many women to exit employment
contracts and work as freelancers; however, the employment contract is sub-
stituted with, in effect, what Pateman describes as a sexual contract (Pate-
man, 1988). Pateman argues that under the subordinate terms on which all
women enter marriage, men acquire bodily rights to women in exchange
for providing women with protection. Women’s economic independence
is therefore critical for enabling them to “contract in” on equal terms; yet
this independence may be constrained within the asymmetric vulnerability
of marriage (Okin, 1989). In the case of migrant domestic workers, we saw
how the gendered social assumption of their primary responsibility for chil-
dren became a crucial reproductive unfreedom that constrained their ability
to exit the relationship and/or seek employment. While women’s responsi-
bility for child rearing specifically and social reproduction more generally
shapes all women’s “unfreedom” within labor markets, for Ethiopian (and
other) migrant domestic workers in the Middle East, this constraint is com-
pounded by the fact that pregnancy and children are not allowed under the
terms of migrant domestic worker employment contracts. Thus, unless they
are legally married to citizens (or nonnationals with legal residence status),
the birth of children automatically results in the irregular status of both
mother and children.
Agency is articulated through religious practices at individual and collec-
tive levels. At individual levels, religion helps women construct and maintain
internal discourses of dignity and self-worth. Perhaps more important is the
significance of spiritual communities in a context where collective political
organizing (through trade unions or associations) is prohibited. In the absence

of such mechanisms for collective agency, the spiritual community not only
provides practical support to migrant domestic workers in distress but also is
the arena for a new source of collective agency in women’s lives (as Chapter 2
by Pande also observes). The emergence of this “infrapolitics” or nascent
political consciousness is evident in some of the leadership roles undertaken
by migrant domestic workers. Particularly in the case of migrant domestic
workers within the Ethiopian Pentecostal church, this resonates with the
social history of Pentecostalism in Ethiopia. Yet the “infrapolitics” observ-
able in the religious domain are inchoate and fractured across denominational
lines. Thus the extent to which such politics may contribute to a transforma-
tive political agenda remains an open question.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Pardis Mahdavi and Marina de Regt for
invaluable feedback on this chapter.
Notes
1. Since the late 1990s, Lebanon was the primary destination for Ethio-
pian migrant domestic workers. In 2006, the Ethiopian government
issued a ban on new migrant domestic worker contracts in Lebanon,
in response to reports of high levels of abuse and the exploitation of
Ethiopian women in Lebanon. Kuwait is currently one of the pri-
mary destinations for Ethiopian migrant domestic workers, along
with Saudi Arabia.
2. This is an observation at a predeparture orientation session con-
ducted in June 2009. These sessions are conducted several times
a week. Around one hundred and fifty women and a few men are
shown a video produced by the International Organization of Migra-
tion, followed by a question and answer session.
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CHAPTER 4
Immobilized Migrancy
Inflexible Citizenship and Flexible
Practices among Migrants in the Gulf
Pardis Mahdavi
W
hen Lucinda was only five years old, her mother left the Philip-
pines to work as a domestic worker in Bahrain. “I don’t know
exactly why my mom left, but I think it was because my dad
drank a lot and was always losing his job, but at that time, I didn’t under-
stand why she left my brother and I all alone,” said Lucinda, a 25-year-old
woman who now works as a domestic worker in Kuwait City. Because
Lucinda’s father had a habit of drinking and disappearing, sometimes for
days on end, her mother decided it would be best to leave Lucinda and her
brother, Pedro, in the care of their maternal aunt who lived in a neighbor-
ing village.
By the time Lucinda turned 15, she had not seen her mother in eight
years; her mother could not leave Kuwait since she had absconded from
her employers five years earlier. Lucinda had spent most of her nights living
on the streets, suffering from regular abuse in the form of muggings and
beatings on the street, as well as abuse at the home of her maternal relatives.
While the challenges were many, Lucinda had still managed to parlay her
entrepreneurial spirit into establishing a one-woman business selling medi-
cal supplies that had been discarded from hospitals to locals in the village.
This work brought her into Manila, where she met a recruiter who was
looking to employ women as cleaning staff in the hospitals of Kuwait.
It was bittersweet when, at the age of 18, Lucinda arrived in Kuwait. She
was able to find her mother, but the reunification was difficult. Her mother
had remarried, this time to an Arab migrant from Bahrain, and had another
76 O Pardis Mahdavi
new child in Kuwait. “It was tense between us at first; I didn’t realize I [was]
still angry with her for a lot of things until I [finally saw] her. And she was
feeling guilty. So at first we [were] fighting a lot,” Lucinda explained. To add
to the challenges she faced with her mother, her employer in Kuwait refused
to pay Lucinda’s wages for months on end. At a certain point, Lucinda
contemplated giving up and returning to the Philippines. “But I tell myself,
‘No, no, Lucinda, if you give up, then he [dad] wins. Then he is right; I am
a stupid person.’ So I decide, I’m going to stay, I’m going to find new work,
I’m going to work hard, and I’m going to be with my mother. I am going to
stay with her until she is ready to come home,” Lucinda said emphatically.
Lucinda absconded from her work at the hospital and was able to
find employment as a domestic worker for a local family with the help
of her mother and church friends. The first family she worked for treated
her well and paid her salary promptly. The second family, however, was
abusive toward her and frequently threatened to turn her in to the authori-
ties, since they knew she was an illegal migrant. Over time, the male head
of the household began abusing her, beating her every night, and threaten-
ing rape on more than one occasion, but Lucinda was resilient. After six
months with the abusive family, she absconded and found another family
who needed her services and began working at a Starbucks on the side, hop-
ing to earn enough money to return home more quickly with her mother.
After four years, it became clear to Lucinda that her mother had no
intention of returning to Manila. At this point, Lucinda was faced with a
difficult choice: remain in Kuwait illegally and be close to her mother or
return to the Philippines, where she would have legal status, and try to find
employment there. “Neither option seemed good to me, especially because
by then, my brother had already left to work as a sea man, and there was
nothing left for me back home,” she explained. So Lucinda decided she
would stay in Kuwait, where she found a family who would sponsor her
and help her get legal working papers. Once she became a legal migrant,
she enrolled in night classes and is currently pursuing advanced training in
computer science.
Discussions about migrant workers in the Gulf, especially those working
in the domestic sphere (or spheres) of intimate labor, tend to paint migrants
as one-dimensional in their focus on types of migrant labor or circum-
stances of migration. The trafficking debate1 in particular reduces women
to their experience of abuse, contributing to portraits of migrants’ lives filled
with violence and abuse. A focus on domestic workers highlights aspects
of their abuse rather than emphasizing the complexities of their choices,
Immobilized Migrancy O 77
further challenging the agency of those who struggle to negotiate their agen-
tive capacities due to the precariousness of working in the private sphere of
the home and being in a country wherein they cannot fully exercise their
citizenship rights. Many migrants struggle with what I refer to as “inflexible
citizenship,” denoting the structural forces in the home and host country
that challenge their abilities to attain the full citizenship rights of economic,
social, legal, and humanitarian protection. Macrostructural forces such as
globalizing capital markets and debt repayment programs in places like the
Philippines make accessing employment and education at home difficult for
people like Lucinda. In addition, when Lucinda and her mother migrated,
they were unable to access citizenship rights protection abroad. As a result,
they were challenged by inflexible citizenship, or citizenship schema not
flexible enough to meet their needs.
Here I argue that in the absence of the ability to negotiate their citi-
zenship rights vis-à-vis the state, whether home or host, Lucinda and her
mother used the space of their intimate lives and their labor to assert their
agency in flexible ways (Giddens, 1990). Inflexible citizenship necessitates
flexible responses from migrants in order for them to survive and pros-
per in ways that meet their needs and desires. It is important to recognize
the multidimensionality of migrants’ lives, since migrants are also mothers,
daughters, fathers, activists, and courageous entrepreneurs. In particular, a
focus on the family and migrants as members of families complicates the
received narratives of migrants as simply victims of globalization or their
circumstances. When looking at migrant domestic work, the story of some-
one like Lucinda might be glossed as yet another instance of a migrant
domestic worker (MDW) who experiences debt bondage and remains in
her challenging employment situation in order to repay this debt. However,
a focus on Lucinda, specifically as a MDW who is experiencing a form of
debt bondage, functions to flatten her identity. To cast her as a slave or
someone experiencing contract slavery, or to categorize her as illegal or an
absconder, is overly simplistic. Rather, if we understand the many levels
of challenges she has experienced and the creative (flexible) strategies for
survival she has employed, in addition to her dedication to her family, her
story becomes more than another catalog of abuse or violence. To focus on
ways in which she is forced to choose between her family and herself, from
her familial turbulence to her strategies for survival as a child and currently
as an adult, is to recognize her agency in the face of structural violence and
inflexible citizenship regimes.
78 O Pardis Mahdavi
In this chapter, I take the experiences of people like Lucinda and her
mother to highlight the multidimensionality of MDWs and the impact of
multiple facets of migrant identity on their mobility. I argue that attention
to the intimate lives of intimate laborers grants them agency and resists the
temptation to flatten their identity by focusing on the type of labor they
engage in or the circumstances of their migration. Furthermore, I look at
the role of the family to question the effect of kinship ties and familial duty
on the ability to control mobility, which complicates the received force/
choice dichotomy that is so prominent in discussions of human trafficking
and forced labor (Bales, 2012; Farley, 2003; and Ramos, 2011). Anthropol-
ogists have long been concerned about the interplay between structure and
agency (Ortner, 2006; Scott, 1985; Constable, 2003), and here I highlight
how migrants are forced to choose from a series of limited options struc-
tured by many different facets of their lives. Attention to the experiences of
people like Lucinda exposes the ways in which MDWs can experience their
families as a source of constraint, thereby leading to their immobility.
The chapter is organized into four sections outlined presently. I begin by
situating conceptualizations of MDWs’ mobility and immobility through
three theoretical frameworks, including debates about free/unfree labor, the
intimate lives of intimate laborers, and the effects of family on the experience
of migration. The next section examines familial duty as a source of con-
straint for migrant workers in challenging situations. The third and fourth
sections look at migrants whose mobility is restricted because of familial
bonds, such as marriage or the children of migrants born and raised in host
countries, which feel like “hostile worlds” to these young people. I end with
concluding reflections on “inflexible citizenship” and how family can be
a simultaneous source of agency and constraint. The focus on family and
the intimate lives of MDWs is intended to provide a comprehensive analysis
of the often liminal situations that migrants are able to effectively manage,
thus making conversations about challenges and opportunities for migrant
workers more robust.
Conceptualizing Multidimensional Migrants and Their Mobility

Much of the current scholarship on transnational labor and migration
focuses on the type of labor migrants engage in (domestic work, construction
work, or sex work) or the circumstances of migration (trafficking, underage,
voluntary, etc.). Beyond scholarly records, the media portrayal of domestic
workers in the Gulf countries paints a picture of women who are regularly
raped and abused. While there is no doubt that some MDWs experience
this type of violent coercion, a focus exclusively on this violence can further
victimize and deny agency to the women about whom the stories are writ-
ten as well as to all migrants engaging in domestic work. It is important to
move beyond these one-dimensional castings to look at migrant workers as
multidimensional beings with familial duties and intimate lives. Reducing
them to the type or circumstances of their labor and migration obscures
issues such as familial duty, a desire for class mobility, and other reasons
for migration or for remaining in less than desirable situations. When writ-
ing about migrant domestic work in particular, scholars tend to look at
the issues of abuse, absconding, debt bondage, or cross-cultural challenges.2
As other scholars and I have argued elsewhere (Mahdavi, 2011; Cheng,
2010; Parreñas, 2001; Anderson and O’Connell Davidson, 2003), casting
migrant labor in terms of the current trafficking debate completely removes
all agency and portrays migrant women as victims of globalization or their
circumstances.
Examining the intimate lives of MDWs who engage in intimate labor3
helps us understand the constantly iterative interplay between structure and
agency. To recognize the contours of their daily lives is to understand the
context within which they make the difficult decisions that structure their
experiences. Furthermore, an understanding of the complexity of kinship
ties and familial duty allows for recognition of the challenges migrants face
when making decisions and exercising their agency. While it is true that
some migrants experience force, fraud, and coercion in the form of physi-
cal beatings, withholding of pay, and forced entrapment, there are also a
large number of women and men who are forced and constrained by other
factors. It is often within the structures of familial duty and kinship ties
that migrants seek to exercise their agency. The necessary flexibility that
migrants employ with regard to their labor schema, movements, and rela-
tionships with family stands in stark contrast to the inflexibility of the rights
afforded to them by their home or host states. A focus on their flexibility in
the face of inflexibility highlights MDWs’ agentive capacity in reconstruct-
ing “home” in different spaces.
The effect of migration on families has been well documented. Schol-
ars and journalists have written about the challenges of parenting across
borders using technologies such as Skype and Facebook to maintain ties
and the strategic sending and withholding of remittances to various family
members. While some studies have looked at the negative impact of migra-
tion on families, focusing mostly on children left behind (Parreñas, 2001;
80 O Pardis Mahdavi
Pratt, 2009; Agunias, 2006), others have looked at family reunification in

the host country (Pratt, 2009; Benhabib and Resnik, 2009). These studies
highlight the challenges that families of migrants face in their absence or at
the moment of reunification. Fewer studies, however, have specifically con-
sidered the effect of family on the experience of migration; this work seeks
to fill this gap in our knowledge.
An analysis of migrant labor that considers both the effect of migra-
tion on families and the effect of family on the experience of migration
functions to complicate received narratives about migrants’ lives. More spe-
cifically, studies about migration and family tend to focus on the impact of
migration for the family members rather than the migrant. Here I introduce
migrant men and women, primarily those working in the domestic sphere,
such as Lucinda, whose experiences as migrants are impacted by their fam-
ily members through a sense of familial duty or the ties that bind various
family members.
A rich body of literature has emerged looking at the spectrum and con-
tinuum of “free” and “unfree” labor. Particularly, this literature is an impor-
tant starting point for looking at what Judith Butler (1997) and Nicole
Constable (2003) have referred to as “binds of agency” (Butler, 1997; Con-
stable, 2003). Writing about free and unfree labor, Bina Fernandez notes,
“There is now broad acknowledgment of a ‘continuum of exploitation,’
rather than binary categories of free and unfree labor. Unfree labor is best
viewed as a wider category of which forced labor and slavery are subsets . . .
contemporary forms of ‘unfree’ labor are those work relationships entered
into due to ‘compulsion by necessity.’ This entails examining the economic
and social circumstances of the worker that compel her to voluntarily seek
work that may be on unfavorable terms or even exploitative” (Fernandez,
Chapter 3, in this book). Here I will focus on experiences of freedom and
unfreedom rather than focusing exclusively on free and unfree labor. I agree
that freedom/unfreedom is a spectrum with many shades of gray, as people
can experience freedom in situations of unfreedom and vice versa. Scholars
such as Sherry Ortner (2006) and James Scott (1985) have looked at expres-
sions of agency and freedom within situations of constraint or unfreedom.
I have combined their research with previous work on free/unfree labor and
binds of agency in order to focus on pockets of freedom and unfreedom as
they unfold within migrants’ intimate and familial lives. I now turn to the
stories of migrants as they narrate their own experiences of freedom and
unfreedom in order to animate identities that have been flattened thus far
by hyperscrutiny on their labors.
Inflexible Families
When I met Gautam, he had absconded from his work with a family who
had not paid him his due wages for more than six months. In total, he had
been working ten months, four as a shepherd and six as a cook, without
receiving any pay at all. Though he wanted to return home to India, he had
absconded and became a freelancer to support his sisters, knowing the risks
that this would entail. While he lived daily with the fear of being deported
or sent back to the Iraqi border, his sense of familial duty outweighed these
fears and motivated him to stay in Kuwait. The day that I met him, he was
in the office of the Indian labor attaché, attempting to recover his work
papers so that he could find new work. The labor attachés were sympathetic
to Gautam’s situation but encouraged him to return to the employers from
whom he had run away to agitate for his wages. They explained that they
could facilitate contact between him and his sponsors, but Gautam did not
want to return to the family employing him. Gautam reflected on his cur-
rent situation of being an absconder and his need to now enter the informal
economy. He wanted to find new work that would pay him quickly so that
he could work for a few years and return home. He explained that he would
do whatever was necessary to be with his sisters. “[Every day] I’m thinking
about my sisters. I am thinking . . . I can go work as a shepherd, which is
very hard for me, but I can do it, just for them. I won’t go home now, but
when I do go home, I will go with my sisters, and that day, we will never
leave India again.”
Ava’s story was similar. She had left the Philippines at the urging of her
mother after her father had died and left the family in a lot of debt. Ava
graduated from college with a bachelor of arts degree in sociology. She had
wanted to begin nursing school, but her mother told her that they did not
have enough money to pay for her further education, nor did they have
enough to send her younger brother to college. “I thought it wasn’t fair
that I would go to college but not my brother,” Ava reflected. A petite
woman in her midtwenties with long brown hair that she wore in braids,
Ava talked often about how much she missed her mother and brother. “I
love my brother more than anything, anything in the whole world. So, even
though it’s hard for me to go clean homes and leave my home, I decided
that I will do it,” she explained.
After four months in Kuwait, Ava finally managed to convince her
employers to allow her to obtain a cell phone. Her employer told her that
the money for the phone would be taken out of her paycheck:
82 O Pardis Mahdavi
Always she tells me that, with everything. She is always telling me, “I [will] take
that out of your paycheck. Ava, I take this out of your paycheck” . . . even sanitary
things, pads and toothpaste, you know? I am smart; I remember in my contract,
she is supposed to buy me those things, but no. Sometimes she doesn’t buy them
at all. The first month, there was no toothpaste. The second month, [there were]
no pads. My blood is everywhere, and she is getting angry with me for making a
mess. I tell her, you don’t want a mess, buy me some pads. She says, “Okay, but
it’s coming out of your paycheck.”
“What paycheck?” Ava states rhetorically. The day she finally received her
cell phone, Ava called her brother back home to see if her wages were being
deposited into his account. Much to her chagrin, she learned that despite
having worked day and night for four months and sleeping on the floor of
her employer’s children’s room, not a single dollar had been deposited into
the account. When Ava told her church friends of her situation and her
desire to return home, her friends encouraged her to stay in Kuwait but to
go freelance. One of them even said that she knew of a Jordanian family
looking for a nanny and that they would pay well.
Ava recalled her uncertainty at the decision she needed to make. On the
one hand, she wanted to return to the Philippines to see her family again and
be near her brother. On the other, she wanted to support her brother
and make her family proud. Like many migrants I have met over the years,
she did not want to return home empty-handed, rendering her family deeper
in debt. One night, after putting the children to bed, Ava remembers hug-
ging them and taking pictures of the little boy and girl with her cell phone.
She had grown to really love the children and knew she would miss them,
but she felt that she would have to take a chance with another family, one
who would pay her well, in the hope that she would be able to return home
to see her brother more quickly.
Ava became illegal the day she ran away from her employer. At first,
things went very well for her. The Jordanian family that became her new
employer was very kind to her. They taught her how to cook and clean,
and she got along well with the two little boys who were her charges. The
male head of household, whom Ava referred to as her “Baba,”4 often com-
plimented her on her cooking and regularly told her how grateful he and
the family were for her assistance. One day, however, the female head of
household took notice of the attention her husband paid to Ava. “I think
she is angry when my Baba is nice to me, because after she heard him say,
‘Thank you, Ava,’ she told me my pay will now be 10 Kuwaiti dinars less
per month, down to 65 Kuwaiti dinars, but I didn’t know why,” she said.
After this, things went from bad to worse for Ava. When the male head of
household was away, Ava’s “madam” (female employer) began abusing Ava.
Because Ava was still being paid 65 Kuwaiti dinars per month, she remained
with her increasingly abusive madam, hoping to save enough money to
return home to repay her debt. After six months of daily harassment by the
madam and her children, Ava felt she could no longer remain in Kuwait.
“I work hard, I send a lot of money home to my brother, but I can’t stay
anymore. I called my brother and said, ‘Forgive me, brother; I hope I have
given you enough money to start college. I promise I will find a way to give
you more,’” she said. Ava ran away from her employers and sought refuge in
the embassy of the Philippines, where she had been living for more than three
months when I met her. She said she felt safe in the shelter but frustrated
because she was away from her family and not earning any money. “They are
good to me here; they take me, even though I have no papers; they take me,
and they are trying to fix my papers now,” Ava said. She was hoping to return
home as soon as possible and is determined not to leave the Philippines again
without her younger brother.
Whether we read these narratives as stories of sacrifice or tales of the
binds of familial duty, it is important to recognize that what places and keeps
many migrants like Gautam and Ava in less-than-ideal working conditions
are their familial ties. Neither Gautam nor Ava were kidnapped or forcibly
taken from their homes. However, for both of them, as for many other
migrants, their families and the needs of various family members acted as
a type of force, compelling them to migrate in order to fulfill their familial
duties. While both Gautam and Ava had been coerced in certain ways, they
were constantly exercising their agency (flexibility) as they looked for crea-
tive ways to make their situations workable so that they could earn money
to send home. Although both of them had employers who were abusive, the
major sources of constraint for Gautam and Ava were their families. It was
their need to fulfill familial duties that immobilized them and kept them
in the host country longer than they would have liked. It was their families
who compelled them to move and their families who contributed to their
immobility.
While some migrants move between home and host country out of
familial duty, others are born to migrant parents while their mothers and/or
fathers are in the host country. This new generation of migrants is growing
up without a real sense of home, as inflexible citizens of migrant source coun-
tries that they have never seen. The parents, who have decided to remain in
countries wherein citizenship is not an option, often restrict the mobility
84 O Pardis Mahdavi
of their children. The men and women who have decided to remain in host
countries have indicated that they stay in complex migratory situations,
working often in subpar positions, out of a sense of duty toward their chil-
dren. MDWs and other migrants who have children in host countries say
that they want their children to have better lives and more opportunities
than what is offered to them in their home country. The children, however,
complain that they are being raised in situations where they are seen as
second-class citizens. These ties and tensions between migrants and their
children further affect the subjectivity and agency of those involved. Many
of those with whom I spoke often discussed how family ties or familial duty
structured the decisions they make about not only staying or going but also
the type of employment they partake in. As Marchetti and Venturini (2013)
confirmed, the age of migrants and their role in their own families have an
impact on mobility patterns and choices of employment. Migrants’ status
as parents, children, or grandparents affects their mobility and, in turn,
sometimes what type of work they can engage in.
Citizens without a Home

Dilip, age 17, was born and raised in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) but
is quick to remind me that “Dubai is not home, only home for now.” His
father migrated from India to Dubai to work as a manager on a major hotel
construction project. At the time, Dilip’s mother, Dipti, stayed behind in
India to raise Dilip’s two older siblings. Dilip’s father was hardworking and
entrepreneurial. Although he started out living in a labor camp and worked
as a manager among many others, he quickly rose through the ranks and
was able to move into a small studio apartment next door to the labor camp,
in which he had been sharing a room with seven other men. After working
in the UAE for four years, Dilip’s father had made enough money to spon-
sor his wife and two children to join him abroad.
Six months after moving to Dubai, Dipti became pregnant with Dilip.
After her son was born, she and her husband decided that Dipti would have
to find work in order to help support the family. Dilip’s father was making
a decent wage, but much of his earnings had gone toward processing the
necessary fees for family reunification. Now the family needed more money
to make ends meet in the increasingly expensive host country. Unfortu-
nately, however, the family reunification visa on which Dipti had traveled
prevented her from gaining official employment. Though Dipti worked as
a travel agent back in India, she was relegated to working informally as a

domestic worker for various citizen and noncitizen families.
“I don’t like this work,” said Dipti, smoothing the wrinkles in her red
sari and brushing off the dirt that had accumulated on her clothes during
her day’s work. “I don’t like to clean houses and cook and always cook and
cook and cook. I went to school. I want to work in an office, in a respectable
job. But here in Dubai, no. It’s not possible,” she adds. Still, Dipti consid-
ers herself lucky in that she is able to bring in a steady income to help her
children and family:
I know that I am lucky. My work, it’s my choice. I don’t live with the families. I
go, clean the house, cook the food, and then leave. I come home to my own fam-
ily. And I don’t wear a uniform; I still wear my sari. I don’t want them to take that
from me. I wear my sari, I don’t wear uniform . . . so they know I am from India
and I am proud. I’m staying in Dubai until Dilip turns 18, and then we will all
go home to India, and we won’t come back here.
Dipti’s insistence on wearing her sari to preserve her identity was a com-
mon theme among many of my interlocutors. While scholars such as Neha
Vora have powerfully argued that new forms of identity are created in Dubai
(Vora, 2013), particularly within the Indian community, part of that new
identity for people like Dipti was a preservation of the old. Furthermore,
for Dipti, having agency over her attire, insisting on not living with her
employers, and setting her own work schedule was an important part of her
subjectivity. This insistence could be read as a “weapon of the weak” (Scott,
1985) or a strategy to negotiate her own sense of liminality while living in a
space that is far from home.
At the mention of the word “home,” Dilip’s ears perk up. He has been
busy helping his mother clear the dishes after a delicious meal of dosas (a
South Indian pancake). The dinner table is crammed into a corner of their
small one-bedroom apartment, which is filled with brightly colored fabrics,
pillows, and cushions decorated in a style that Dipti calls “modern Indian
chic.” The heavenly aroma of spices hangs in the air as Dipti and her hus-
band recline into the cushions on the floor, weary from a long day of work.
“Mom, I hate it when you talk about ‘home,’ always this talk of ‘going
home.’ But where is home? I’ll give you a map; you show me my home!
You say India is home, but I was born here,” Dilip says, his voice trembling
slightly. It is clear that this is a much-discussed topic in the household, and
everyone becomes uneasy at Dilip’s outburst. Dipti rises from the cushions
to walk toward her 16-year-old son, who towers over her. She takes the
86 O Pardis Mahdavi
dishes from him, motions for him to join us on the cushions, and begins
preparing the tea and dessert.
“India is my home,” Dipti says, carrying a tray of rose-scented desserts.
“It’s not perfect, not a perfect home at all, I don’t mean that. And there are
good things about Dubai,” she adds. “But you never talk about those good
things,” Dilip interjects. “You always complain of cleaning houses, being
treated badly, like second- or third-class citizens. You complain about the
food, how it’s tasteless. You complain that our house here is so small, that
your brothers and sisters are far away. So what am I supposed to think?”
Dilip says.
“Look, I know that India is hard for you. You aren’t used to it there. It
seems dirty to you, and the roads are bad. I see those things. I also see that
in some ways, I have more freedom here (in Dubai). I can do whatever I
want, no family to answer to, and in some ways, it’s safer,” Dipti says, try-
ing to calm her son. “But it’s not really safe. I never really feel comfortable
here, because I know that I’m not wanted here . . . you always tell us to look
over our shoulders. Always waiting for something bad to happen. Watch
ourselves. We have stayed a long time, but we weren’t supposed to, not if
the locals had their way,” her son responds. Dipti nods, and a silence hangs
in the air as everyone sips their tea.
“I know India is supposed to be my home, but I go there, and I feel
foreign. I don’t know the roads; I get lost all the time. And I don’t like the
food; I am always getting sick,” Dilip finally says, reflecting a sense of limin-
ality shared by many first- and second-generation migrants and immigrants
across the world. I tell Dilip that many people share his feelings—myself
included, as I grapple with a liminal sense of Iranian-Americanness. Dilip
nods but seems frustrated:
Yes, but the difference between you and I, and me and many other people, is that
we know eventually, when we turn 18, we have to leave. Or we can’t work here.
We can’t stay here. We are sent home, to a home that we don’t know. And then
we are stuck there. I have felt stuck here in Dubai all my life. [I am] angry at my
parents for raising me in a country where I’m a second-class citizen. But now I’m
worried that I have to leave.
“Where am I going to go?” Dilip asks, reflecting on a simultaneous feeling of

forced immobility while growing up combined with an imposing sense
of doom at his upcoming forced mobility.
After that night, both Dilip and Dipti referenced this thought-provoking
conversation many times. Dipti reflected on the challenges she faced as a
mother working in undesirable conditions to provide for her children. “You

don’t know how sad it makes me when I know that Dilip isn’t happy here,”
Dipti said to me the next morning as we strolled along the Dubai Creek
near the bazaar. “I sacrifice everything for them. I work on my hands and
knees; sometimes I don’t even get paid . . . sometimes the madam yells at
me so much I think she is going to hit me. And for what? For my children.
[I do it] to give them a better life here. I stay, I tolerate abuse, screaming,
working on my hands and knees for them. Of course, I want to go home;
I miss India. There I am somebody; here I am nobody,” she added, wring-
ing her sari in her hands as she stared out across the creek. A dhow full of
South Asian–looking men arrived, and they began walking past us. Dipti
motioned to the men as she spoke again. “Look at them, probably Indian,
probably from my hometown. My brothers. [They are] abused, treated like
animals. Yet we stay. We stay for our children. When they are not happy, it
is the worst of insults,” she said.
Dipti’s narrative of sacrifice was similar to what many of my interlocutors
had articulated. While some understood their sense of familial duty in terms
of sacrifice, others felt the sacrifice to be a burden, constraining their agency.
For his part, Dilip felt that he was making sacrifices for his parents as well.
“I get so mad at my mom. She always tells me that she stayed here for me.
That she hates it, but she stays for me. But it’s me who stayed for her,” Dilip
explained when I spoke with him several days later. He had finished school
for the day and was going to play soccer with his friends. On his way, he
had stopped at the mall to purchase new shoes. His father had given him an
extra allowance that week for his help around the house. He decided to use
the money to replace the cleats he had worn out many months ago:
Do you know how many times I have wanted to leave? I didn’t ever want to live in
Dubai; I got tired of always being different from the Emirati boys. Knowing that
we had to be careful, every step we took. Knowing that if we ever got in trouble,
that it would be trouble for everyone in our families. We knew we shouldn’t even
play soccer with the Emirati boys because we always had to let them win. And we
were better than them, even though they had newer shoes and uniforms all the
time. And we are always reminded that we don’t belong here. I always wanted to
go somewhere I belonged. But where? It’s not India, but soon I will be sent there
because the Emirati government thinks that is my home, but it’s not.
The conversation between Dilip and his mother, Dipti, reveals the com-
plexities faced by both migrant parents as well as this new generation of
children who are born in countries where they do not and cannot attain
88 O Pardis Mahdavi
citizenship—due to the inflexibility of citizenship regimes in places like

the UAE, where citizenship can only be attained by paternal birth right.
Although there is a vast and growing literature about first- and second-
generation migrant children, much of it does not pertain to children like
Dilip because he has been born and raised in a country where he will not be
allowed to remain. Both Dilip and Dipti have felt trapped or immobilized
at various points in their lives; both feel their choices are constrained, and
yet both experience the frustration of forced mobility—for Dipti, the force
of the choice to migrate made by her husband, while for Dilip, the impend-
ing forced mobility of being sent “home” at the age of 18. The question of
citizenship was also at the forefront of their experiences. Dipti articulated a
need to maintain her identity, to counter the inability to attain citizenship
in the country in which she had been living for almost two decades with
an insistence of her “Indianness.” For Dilip, he felt confused that he was
born and raised in a place that would not offer him any protections—legal,
economic, social, or otherwise. This lack of citizenship and its attendant
benefits colored his experience daily.
What is interesting here is that for both Dilip and Dipti (and possibly even
Dilip’s father), the environment of Dubai is rife with obstacles and hostility,
presenting challenges to their ability to exercise their full spectrum of agency
or citizenship rights. For Dipti, she must remain working in the sphere of
domestic work or not work at all. The right to choose her type of employ-
ment is not available to her, while she remains anxious that even though she
is working and contributing to the society around her, the fact that she works
is against the law. Dilip remains concerned about his status as a second-class
citizen, aware that the country in which he was born and raised is not his
home and would expel him should he make any missteps or once he turns
18. The place in which they live, the country that Dilip calls “home” and to
which Dipti has dedicated countless hours of her time and service, not only
will not protect them but also will remain hostile to their presence. Dilip
and Dipti represent what Paul Dresch describes as a type of “foreign matter”
in the eyes of the host country (Dresch, 2006), necessitating surveillance
at best. Some of this hostility is experienced by migrant workers across the
globe, while other aspects, such as the fact that they can never attain citizen-
ship, are unique to the migration regime in Dubai. Furthermore, the politics
of race, ethnicity, and class collide here with the desire to fulfill familial duty
by immobilizing parents and their children in potentially hostile locales.
Immobilized at their destination, they must recreate a sense of “home”
while abroad, even as the threat of being sent to a “not home” looms large
for the next generation of migrants.
In Lieu of a Conclusion: From Inflexible

Citizenship to Connected Lives
Aihwa Ong (1999) has written extensively about a phenomenon she has
termed “flexible citizenship,” a modern day outgrowth of globalization
and the expansion of global capitalism. Flexible citizenship refers to an
important by-product of globalization: the multiple passport holders, the
jet-setters, and the cosmopolitan movers who can take advantage of
the benefits of capitalism. What has emerged along with this cosmopolitan
figure is, as Christine Chin argues, a service class designed to move along a
particular cosmopolitan circuit that mirrors both the capital and the flexible
citizens. While Chin focuses on sex workers that move along this highway,
it is equally important to consider other types of intimate laborers, such
as domestic workers, nannies, and care workers, who also move along this
“global circuit” (Chin, 2013) for the same reasons. All the individuals whose
stories are presented here fall into this category; all have migrated within
this “global circuit” of cosmopolitan cities to follow and meet the demands
of new capital and the flexible citizens who wield it.
While the migrant workers who move along the global circuits of cosmo-
politan destinations (e.g., Dubai, Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong) have
some things in common with their employers/clients, it is their differences
that render them “inflexible citizens.” This class of migrants, like the flexible
citizens they follow, must be flexible in adapting to new environments, new
economies, and new encounters with the state. However, unlike their coun-
terparts, they do not hold multiple passports, cannot negotiate the pro-
tections of citizenship from their host country (or countries), and are not
treated as anything other than lower-class citizens in their locales of employ-
ment—in both the workplace and the nation. It is indeed their inability to
access citizenship rights both at home (in attaining gainful employment)
and abroad that makes them inflexible. It is this simultaneous inflexibility
that accompanies a need to be flexible in the type of work they do, the
amount of time spent away from home, and the new family configurations
they create. The paradox of inflexible rights coinciding with necessary flex-
ibility produces the most pressing challenges migrants face. It is in the fine-
grained analysis of the choices that migrants must make; in understanding
the multidimensionality of migrant lives, their family structures, feelings
90 O Pardis Mahdavi
of familial duty; and in the efforts to negotiate agency and citizenship that
robust responses to the needs of migrants can be found.
Thus the major challenges that migrants face involve negotiating their
citizenship and agency while attempting to balance their own needs against
those of family members. Familial duty can immobilize migrants and lead
to inflexible citizenship while simultaneously offering a platform to negoti-
ate identity and citizenship. In the absence of the ability to negotiate rights
and identity vis-à-vis the state, migrants turn to the intimate sphere of their
families to assert their agency, employ flexibility, and seek to attain their
maximum potential.
Viviana Zelizer (2005) has powerfully argued against a “hostile worlds”
approach that divides capital and intimacy into different spheres. Against
the received notions resisting the commodification of intimacy, Zelizer has
pointed to the reality of what she terms “connected lives,” which refers
to the ways that people define their rights and responsibilities when the
spheres of intimacy and capital overlap. Her work focuses on the economic
aspects of intimate lives, not only within the sphere of intimate labor, but
also within familial ties and intimate aspects of economic life. Within the
“connected lives” approach, a focus on the intertwining of economics and
family lives, duties, and protections more accurately captures the many lay-
ers of migrant experiences. Looking at how migrants turn to the sphere of
the intimate and familial realm to assert their citizenship can help animate
the lives of migrants whose identities have been flattened by discourses and
policies that adopt the “hostile worlds” approach. As the stories presented
here demonstrate, migrants make a series of complex decisions, often from
a series of limited options. For many, their own intimate lives structure their
economic potential and the choices they make. Only by recognizing these
choices, the “connected lives” of multidimensional migrants, can agency be
maintained and the complexity of their lives be understood.
Notes
1. A full discussion of the “trafficking debate” is beyond the scope of
this book. However, what I am referring to are decades-long con-
versations about conceptualizations of trafficking. The debates have
historically been categorized by “abolitionists” on one side (typically,
those who are trying to “abolish” sex work and conflate trafficking
and sex work) versus harm reductionists or workers’ rights activists
on the other. Those in the latter camp argue that not all trafficking is
in the sex industry and not all sex work is trafficked. If the definition
of “trafficking” from the United Nations’ protocol to prevent, suppress,
and punish trafficking in persons, especially women and children, or
the US Trafficking Victims Protection Act are taken into consider-
ation, trafficking is about force, fraud, and coercion. Harm reduction-
ists argue that much force, fraud, and coercion takes place in spheres
of labor such as domestic work, agricultural work, and other sectors
besides the sex industry. The hyperscrutiny on sex trafficking, however,
has eclipsed instances of abuse experienced by men and women outside
the sex industry. For more on this important topic, see the work of
Elizabeth Bernstein (2007) and Carole Vance (2010) or refer to Mah-
davi, 2011.
2. See, for example, the work of Alice Pingol, Mark Johnson, Pierette
Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Rhacel Parreñas.
3. For further reading on intimate labor as a sphere of work, see Boris
and Parreñas, 2010.
4. “Baba” is the Arabic word for “father” or “daddy.” It is not unusual
for employers in the Gulf to ask their employees to address them
as “mama” and “baba,” which is part of the rhetoric that employers
espouse about domestic workers as “part of the family.” This insistence
on referring to employers as parents is experienced as condescending
and infantilizing by many MDWs, who articulate frustration at hav-
ing to use this unfamiliar nomenclature.
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Bales, K., 2012. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy.
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Bernstein, E., 2007. Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Com-
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Boris, E., and Parreñas, R. S. (eds.), 2010. Intimate Labours: Cultures, Tech-
nologies, and the Politics of Care. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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tion and the Gulf. Abingdon: Routledge.
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versity Press.
CHAPTER 5
The “Mama Mary” of the

White City’s Underside
Reflections on a Filipina Domestic
Workers’ Block Rosary in Tel Aviv, Israel
Claudia Liebelt
Introduction
E
ach Friday, a loose network of Catholic migrant domestic workers,
almost exclusively women from the Philippines, carries a figure of
the Virgin Mary through the marginalized neighborhoods of south-
ern Tel Aviv, Israel. As the figure is carried from one participant’s home to
another of this so-called block rosary, they believe “she” (the Virgin Mary)
blesses these homes and the surrounding neighborhood, hears hundreds
of the women’s petitions, creates a community of devotees, and performs
miracles. Against the backdrop of the troubled neighborhood’s Friday night
life and the turbulence of the devotees’ own lives, “Mama Mary,” as she is
tenderly addressed, has come to stand for compassion, refuge, and protec-
tion. This chapter seeks to describe and analyze domestic workers’ Marian
devotion in a complex Middle Eastern locale. In doing so, this chapter con-
tributes to the literature on diaspora, gender, and religion and investigates
ritual performance and processes of homemaking in the context of female
migrants’ diasporic journeys and a gendered global economy based on the
international division and feminization of labor, especially in the field of
reproduction and care (Constable, 2009; Eng, 2010; Mills, 2003).
As described in much of the now extensive literature on female migrant
domestic workers from the global South, these women are often highly
educated but suffer from low wages, economic crises, and a lack of social
96 O Claudia Liebelt
security within their home countries. They pay considerable sums of money
to cross international borders and often find it difficult to maintain legal
status abroad while struggling for their rights within strategically selective
migration and citizenship regimes. They are typically sole migrants who
leave behind families but succeed in creating sociality and families abroad,
often assisting relatives to follow them (cf. Anderson, 2000; Constable,
2007; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001; Parreñas, 2001). Domestic work involves
great risks, structural abuse, and exploitation for those who engage in
it; Filipina domestic workers in Israel have likewise been found to suffer
from underpayment, passport confiscation, precarious legal statuses, sexual
harassment, dehumanizing psychological abuse, and racist discrimination.
Despite this, it has to be emphasized that migrant women are not mere
passive victims but have developed collective knowledge and strategies to
deal with or fight against the predicaments they encounter in their projects
of migration. Religious practice, as this chapter will demonstrate, forms an
important part of this process.
Religious practice, however, does not simply empower migrants. I there-
fore argue that the ritual performance of the block rosary—one of several
block rosaries and religious groups established by Filipina domestic work-
ers in Israel—should not merely be regarded as an enactment of women’s
agency. Instead, religion—understood here as gendered and embodied
practice—may provide female migrant domestic workers an idiom for mak-
ing sense of reality, transforming them into activists with a local yet global
agenda, and may well be one of the many reasons for women journeying to
a far-off land.
In the literature, female migrant domestic workers have often been
described as the victims or, according to the title of a major work on Filipina
domestic workers, “servants of globalization” (Parreñas, 2001; cf. Constable,
2007). In contrast, there is another tendency to describe migrant workers in
a celebratory undertone as creative transnationals, who by their moves resist
or at least put into question hegemonic (gender) ideologies and contempo-
rary migration regimes (Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton, 1992).
Taking seriously Filipina migrants’ descriptions of themselves as Holy Land
pilgrims and martyrs, who hope for compassion and pray to the Virgin
for miracles, means rethinking both of the previous approaches. From the
perspective of the Catholic devotees of Mama Mary in Tel Aviv, the highly
gendered and racialized niche of migrant domestic work posits itself as
one permeated by possession and suffering, one in which migrant women
keep on acting, albeit within an arena (as the women come to understand
The “Mama Mary” of the White City’s Underside O 97
throughout their journeys) that is clearly beyond their control. The focus
on religious practice and ritual performance draws attention to the fact that
a notion of “patiency” (Schnepel, 2009), rather than “agency,” is possibly
better suited to describing women’s practices and concepts of the self in an
ongoing project of migration.
In her review of the many ways agency has been conceptualized in vari-
ous disciplines, Laura Ahearn defines agency provisionally as the “socio-
culturally mediated capacity to act” (2001, p. 112).1 In anthropological
research, as Katherine Frank states in yet another review on the concept,
there has been a focus on “the paradigmatic example of agency as resistance
to power, or on the discursive contradictions and tensions that frame and
constitute subjectivity” (2006, p. 283). This, in turn, led to the reading of
“people’s tendencies to or instances of ideological conformity as evidence
of either a lack of agency or as forms of subjectification through disciplinary
discursive regimes” (p. 283). In order to avoid these common assumptions,
including following women’s narratives of themselves as martyrs, in this
chapter, I prefer the notion of “patiency” to stress aspects of suffering and
the subjective feelings of being restricted in one’s capacity to act. By doing
so, I take up Saba Mahmood’s (2005) proposal to understand agency in a
way that does not emphasize the idea of resistance and is removed from the
(ethnocentric) assumption of individual will and motivation. By sharing
their ordeals, dreams for the future, and food with one another and the
Virgin through the deeply affective ritual performance of the block rosary,
migrant women find the comfort, strength, and redemption they feel is
needed for carrying on with their lives.
Drawing from more than 27 months of field research on Filipina domes-
tic workers in Israel and returnees to the Philippines over a period of more
than six years (2003–2010), the following ethnographic account is based
on participant observation between October 2007 and July 2008 during 23
out of 36 block rosary meetings that took place in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, as well as
numerous other meetings with those involved in this block rosary.2 In the
following, I will first describe the ritual performance.
Praying the Rosary and Celebrating Weekends in Abundance

The Friday nights of Mama Mary’s respective hosts began early, and there
were many things to organize: employers had to be asked whether they
would agree to let their care or domestic worker leave early for their weekly
day off work; chairs and dishes had to be borrowed from neighbors and
friends; in the small apartments shared by up to twenty Filipina migrants in

southern Tel Aviv, furniture had to be moved in order to make space for the
many expected guests; and roommates and friends were approached to help
with the shopping and the cooking of large quantities of food. Importantly,
the figure of the Virgin had to be attended to: placed on an altar, flowers
bought and arranged, candles lit, and incense sticks burned. If the room in
which the altar was located was too small to allow for up to thirty guests to
gather and pray, the figure had to be moved elsewhere. A few times, Mama
Mary was set up in a courtyard due to a lack of indoor space, and many
times, the prayers extended into hallways and staircases. For the respec-
tive host who had approached Aida3 (the block rosary organizer) weeks and
sometimes months in advance to “book” the figure, this night was of special
significance: it was the night of farewell from Mama Mary, who for a week
had protected the host’s home and listened to her prayers; more often than
not it was also the host’s birthday or another anniversary to be celebrated
or mourned. Regardless, it was a night of social and emotional intensity for
all involved.
At around six o’clock in the evening, when during most of the year the
coastal city of Tel Aviv-Jaffa was still warm from the day’s sun, the guests
began arriving at the host’s home. As they entered, they proceeded straight
to the altar, greeting Mama Mary by touching and sometimes kissing the
figure and mumbling prayers and requests. Some of them commented on
the altar’s appearance, as when new flower bouquets had been set up, or
on the figure itself, by saying such things as “She’s so beautiful” or “She
looks a bit pale today.” If set up on an existing domestic altar, the figure
was displayed next to other icons of the Virgin—candles and objects that
attested to the vast devotional journeys of the Filipina roommates in both
Israel and the Philippines. Thus icons from Nazareth, olive branches picked
in Jerusalem or plastic bottles filled with “holy water” from the Jordan
River, stood next to prayer booklets or icons from popular Marian shrines
in the Philippines, such as Manaoag or Antipolo. In other homes, there was
no altar prior to Mama Mary’s arrival, and her invitation was part of an
evangelizing effort by the host, directed at her nominally Catholic or even
non-Catholic roommates.4
Until the most central rosary participants arrived—among them Aida,
the organizer, and Gertie from Sri Lanka, the only regular non-Filipina
attendant apart from the chapter author—the guests stretched out on sofas
to chat, exchanging news about the previous week, their families in the
Philippines, or the political situation in Israel. At times, rosary participants
attended the regular Franciscan Via Dolorosa procession in the Old City of
Jerusalem prior to the prayer meeting and in telling the others about their
trip, brought back news from Jerusalem and the church, including news of
Father Benjamin, the Franciscan priest from Ghana, who had blessed the
block rosary upon its inaugural meeting on September 8, 2007, the Roman
Catholic feast day of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The actual praying started when Aida got up, made the sign of the cross,
and welcomed everybody present. This was the last chance for devotees to
let her know of their prayer requests, which she then began reading out from
her notes. While some of the requests were rather general—for strength in
faith, health, or world peace—most related to specific events and persons.
Accordingly, the group prayed for the health of mothers or fathers or the
successful college exams of daughters or sons in the Philippines, whom
the devotees supported financially through the salaries they received in
Israel, or for the health and compassion of Israeli employers, who suddenly
fell ill or became unbearable to work with, as well as for the extension of
visas and safe travels to the Philippines. Aida then distributed photocopied
booklets with the texts of the standardized prayers and rosary chaplets. She
or the host of the figure began reciting the prayers, and the others joined in.
This ritual consisted of a highly standardized sequence of Catholic prayers
in between the reading of the “mysteries”—short biblical quotes reminding
the devotees of significant moments in the lives of Jesus or Mary. Picking
two out of four mysteries, the praying went on for about fifty minutes.
Holding the chaplets in their hands, the devotees flipped the beads between
their fingers and mumbled along—a bead per Hail Mary, the central prayer
of the rosary.5
After a while, the repetitiveness of the prayers and the clicking of the beads
created a meditative atmosphere, with the women’s voices slowly falling into
rhythm. Individual readers, having been divided beforehand among those
who felt most in need of the Virgin’s intervention, recited the ten sequences
of the two mysteries. In praying or reading aloud, women displayed a vari-
ety of emotions and employed different bodily techniques: some knelt on
the barren floor, while others reclined on sofas; some read out loud with a
trembling voice or silently wept, while others added to the repetitive char-
acter of the praying by giving their voice a calm and monotonous tone. The
solemnity of the praying was interrupted when children became bored or
cell phones rang and were occasionally answered. The final Hail Mary was
followed by the recitation of the long Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary
and the petition of the block rosary (“Keep the Filipino family! . . . Save
the Filipino family! . . . Bless the Filipino family! And the world family!”),
read aloud by all and adapted to meet the requirements of the group. Then
the host of the past week stepped forward and addressed the figure with her
farewell prayer. Reading out loud, typically kneeling, lowering her voice,
and sometimes touching the figure, the farewell resembled an intimate
good-bye to a beloved individual. Finally, two or three songs were sung, and
the atmosphere became animated after Aida clapped her hands, exclaiming,
“Good evening everyone!”
Meanwhile, a large buffet had been set up by the host’s roommates or
friends, who did not participate in the prayer. As is typical for Filipino feasts
and analyzed as central for the relationship between the mundane and the
divine in Southeast Asia (cf. Pertierra, 1988), the buffets included large por-
tions of rice, one or several meat dishes, pansit noodles, and desserts such as
fruit salad, rice cake, or the sweet puto cake. As the block rosary participants
gathered around the buffet and ate, conversations evolved, and apart from
information and jokes, goods were being exchanged. Thus Aida, who was
also active in other lay groups of the St. Anthony Parish Church in Jaffa
spread the latest parish news, distributed flyers for upcoming pilgrimages,
or sold Christmas cards and calendars prepared by the church. Known to
be a talented sewer, Lena, another regular participant, collected clothes in
need of repair to mend and return the week after in exchange for payment.
The respective host or her roommates also had side businesses, which they
promoted during the evening. Some of the hosts put on disco music, and
on a couple of nights, the women started dancing.
At half past nine at the latest, the group left the host’s flat to set up Mama
Mary in her new home. For this, the previous host dressed the figure in an
overcoat, picked her up, and held her tightly in her arms all the way to the
new flat, where she was set up on an altar prepared beforehand. In most
cases, the new home of the figure was within walking distance. If this was
the case, the group walked the streets in loose formation, headed by the for-
mer host and the Virgin next to those who carried the flower bouquets and
the golden cross that accompanied the figure from one house to the next.
If the new flat was too far to walk, Aida arranged for a driver to carry as
many women as possible in his private minivan. After a short, collectively
recited opening prayer and the singing of the Ave Maria, the prayer meeting
was over, and the group dispersed to meet again the following Friday.
Proceeding Mary through the White City’s Underside

As a ritual practice, the rosary is deeply informed by Roman Catholic
notions of the family and the home as holy but nevertheless in constant
need of sanctification through the act of praying. The performance of a
block rosary extends this idea of sanctification in a social and spatial sense,
in that a group of neighbors blesses their neighborhood and strengthens
their community by rotating among them a figure of the Virgin Mary. The
Tel Avivian block rosary stresses this idea even further, in that it was carried
out by a group of Catholic migrant domestic workers, who lived dispersed
in the metropolitan area of Israel’s cultural capital of Tel Aviv.6 As a result,
and as the following will show, Mama Mary came to sanctify not only a
specific group of people but also a distinct urban space.
In their analysis of Tel Aviv and Jaffa (which merged into a single munic-
ipality in 1950), Sharon Rotbard (2005) and Mark Levine (2005) chal-
lenged Tel Aviv’s founding myth as the White City, built on empty sand
dunes in the “clean” and “rational” international style according to the ideals
of European modernity. Moreover, they document the city’s structural divi-
sion into a northern part, inhabited by bourgeois European immigrants,
and a proletarian southern part, inhabited by the White City’s Other.
Built on orchards and villages bought or expropriated from Palestinian
owners rather than on sand dunes following the founding of the state of
Israel in 1948, southern Tel Aviv was created as a buffer zone between north-
ern Tel Aviv and the Palestinian seaport of Jaffa. In its first decades, southern
Tel Aviv was used to accommodate large numbers of Jewish immigrants of
Middle Eastern origin (so-called Mizrachi Jews), who within Israel’s system
of ethnic stratification, continue to be marginalized in terms of socioeco-
nomic status, access to education, upward social mobility, and employment
(Shafir and Peled, 2002; Kemp et al., 2004).
By the time Mama Mary began to circle the neighborhood streets, south-
ern Tel Aviv was a rather “unhomely” home to diverse marginalized groups,
among them thousands of migrant workers from all over the world, new
Jewish immigrants from Ethiopia and elsewhere, Palestinian citizens and
noncitizens, as well as a growing number of African refugees. In spite of
southern Tel Aviv’s infrastructural neglect, pollution, and social exclusion,
this was the area where most Filipino domestic workers lived and that they
claimed as “theirs” in Israel.
On Friday nights—when other Jewish residential neighborhoods turned
quiet as shops closed, traffic came to an near standstill, and families gathered
in their homes for the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath—a vibrant street life
characterized parts of southern Tel Aviv: hundreds of Filipinos and other
migrant workers now arrived at the central bus station to celebrate their
weekends off from work; Asian pawn shops, Internet cafés, and karaoke bars
opened their doors; street vendors sold homemade Filipino dishes, English-
language newspapers, or Tagalog movies; and groups of friends took to the
local parks to play basketball, gamble, or barbecue, giving rise to the smell of
roasted pork in the air. In this hustle and bustle, the small group of women
carrying a figure of Mama Mary aroused little attention. Only a few times
did Israelis approach the participants and ask what kind of strange ritual
they were engaged in, or simply tried to flirt with individual participants.
Nevertheless, every week, the rosary group witnessed or heard stories of dra-
matic events in the neighborhood, often connected to robberies or raids by
the migration police. On one occasion, the women almost became involved
in a fight between an obviously drunk Filipina and her Israeli boyfriend;
during another, they only narrowly escaped arrest by a team of migration
police at the apartment of Mama Mary’s host.
In the process of walking through southern Tel Aviv, the procession often
dissolved, with participants meeting acquaintances along the way, thereby los-
ing the others in the crowd and arriving long after Mama Mary had been set
up at her new home. To avoid the trouble of the more crowded areas and
as she came to know her way around southern Tel Aviv, Aida increasingly
led the procession through calmer backstreets, cutting across parking lots or
construction sites. Against the background of this urban geography, the pro-
cession took on the character of a troubled necessity—the transportation of
the figure from one house to another—rather than a proud presentation
of the Virgin to the public. Nevertheless, by traveling the neighborhood, the
devotees believed, Mama Mary still sanctified neighborhoods in dire need of
healing and redemption.
Another significant locale for the block rosary was the Catholic
St. Anthony Parish Church in Jaffa, to which both Filipino block rosary
groups currently existing in Tel Aviv were bound institutionally through
the icon’s consecration by Father Benjamin, a former St. Anthony priest.
Within St. Anthony Parish, as well as St. Peter Parish (also located in Jaffa),
a multitude of Catholic lay groups had been established by migrant work-
ers, among them pilgrimage groups (cf. Liebelt, 2010) and sections of Fili-
pino groups such as Couples for Christ and the charismatic El Shaddai
movement (cf. Wiegele, 2005).7
One Friday night, the new St. Anthony Parish priest invited Aida and
her block rosary group, as well as another Filipino block rosary group, to the
church. The women were clearly nervous about the invitation and agreed to
go there after their prayer meeting only, fearing that the priest—an “Arab,” as
was emphasized—would object to their devotion. Only recently had Father
Benjamin, who had supported the women’s idea of a block rosary and was
especially popular among the many Filipinos who attended St. Anthony
Parish, been transferred to serve in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in
Jerusalem. With the arrival of the new priest, Filipinos felt their position
in the church weakened. While there was no open conflict among the
congregants or with the clergy, the block rosary group’s regular driver, a
Catholic Palestinian from Jaffa, affirmed their apprehension that among the
Palestinian congregants of St. Anthony, resentment of Filipinos—who had
appropriated their church in growing numbers and introduced their own
styles of worship—was on the rise.
Now the new Arab priest, so the women feared, as an Arab, would like-
wise be critical of Filipino Catholics in St. Anthony and, being loyal to the
Palestinian congregants, would reprimand the Filipinos for their unchurched
devotion, which would possibly be considered foreign in the eyes of local
Catholics. In order to persuade the priest of their loyalty to the church,
Aida and the others arrived at St. Anthony with illustrated documentation
of their prayer meetings, well-prepared arguments (“this is a form of private
devotion, very common in the Philippines”), and St. Louis de Montfort’s
treatise on the rosary, which they knew to be sanctioned by the church.
It turned out, however, that the priest had mainly been concerned about
the two groups’ reported rivalry. Concluding his address with the remark
that he himself had never understood the meaning and salience of the rosary,
the alerted women eagerly and unanimously defended their cause, and Aida
offered to read to the priest her worn-out copy of St. Louis de Montfort’s
treatise. Aware of their precarious position as migrant domestic workers not
only within Israeli mainstream society but even within “their own” church,
the devotees were obviously ready to fight for their devotion of Mama Mary,
which had become so crucial to their everyday lives in Israel.
On Gendered Woes and Sacred Journeys: The Devotees and the Icon
Mama Mary’s devotees were almost exclusively Filipina domestic workers,
who had arrived in Israel as part of the large influx of migrant workers fol-
lowing the ousting of noncitizen Palestinians from the Israeli labor market in
the early 1990s. Alongside eastern European—and later Sri Lankan, Indian,
Nepalese, and Chinese—women, Filipinos had been recruited by private
manpower agencies as caregivers of the elderly and handicapped, which was
encouraged by the Israeli government’s decision to support geriatric care in
private homes to lower state-provided welfare costs. As non-Jewish so-called
foreign workers, they were excluded from citizenship in Israel, and their
work and residency permits were temporally restricted and tied to specific
employers (Kemp and Raijman, 2008).8 In most cases, Filipina caregivers
lived in the private homes of their employers for six days a week and shared
a rented apartment with conationals on the seventh day, typically a Friday
to a Saturday or a Saturday to Sunday night.
Among the devotees of Mama Mary, the situation was more com-
plex, since many had entered on (and overstayed) tourist visas, or had left
the state-prescribed role of a live-in caregiver and arranged to live away
from their employers, or else engaged in part-time cleaning, babysitting,
or housekeeping jobs—even if this implied undocumented legal status in
Israel. Some of them had given birth to children in Israel, but most were
unable to secure legal status for themselves or their children because the
children’s fathers, too, possessed no citizenship in Israel or the relationship
remained unregistered (cf. Kemp, 2007; Willen, 2005). To sum up, most
of Mama Mary’s devotees suffered from a precarious legal status and lived
in constant fear of the migration police, who patrolled the streets of (espe-
cially southern) Tel Aviv, occasionally entering migrants’ shared apartments
in search of “illegals.”
The fact that all hosts of Mama Mary and most of those present dur-
ing the prayer meetings were middle-age women reflects both the composi-
tion of the Filipino community in Israel, in which more than 90 percent
are female and on average about forty years of age, as well as the fact that
devotees of the Virgin in the Philippines are also predominantly middle-age
to elderly women. All of them send large portions of their salaries as cash
remittances to family members in the Philippines and—according to the
dominant state and media construction of female overseas migrants in
the Philippines (cf. Tyner, 2004)—describe themselves as “martyrs” for their
families (cf. Liebelt, 2011a; 2011b).
All devotees in Israel were Roman Catholic, but within the broad con-
fines of what Filipinos called being “Romano,” they represented a wide array
of Catholic orientations. Accordingly, there were members of lay catechist
groups affiliated to the Franciscan St. Anthony Parish Church in Jaffa men-
tioned previously and charismatic Catholics who belonged to the Philippine
mass movement El Shaddai, which, according to Wiegele (2005), is deeply

influenced by the American-Evangelical prosperity gospel. There were also
nominally Catholic but completely unchurched women or those who told
me that in the Philippines, they had hardly ever attended church but had
come to do so throughout the migration process.
Among the most regular attendants of the block rosary was “Mami”
Rita, a widowed mother of six grown-up sons from rural Bulacan, who
belonged to one of the many religious brotherhoods formed around spiritu-
ally powerful leaders in rural Philippines (cf. Love, 2004).9 Mami Rita was
a devoted follower of Mama Mary and in an interview, emphasized that
it was the Virgin herself who had brought her to Israel. Thus it happened
that, back in the Philippines, whenever the spirit of the Virgin entered the
body of the leader of Rita’s brotherhood during prayer sessions, the Vir-
gin addressed and pitied Mami Rita. The Virgin pitied Rita for the fact
that after her first husband died, so did her second husband, leaving her
alone with six children and too much work; that Rita had not been able to
send her eldest sons to college because she could not afford the tuition fees
from her meagre salary as a primary school teacher; and that the decreas-
ing price of rice on the world market and the unemployment of her sons
made it increasingly difficult for this family of rice farmers to make ends
meet. When one day a local recruiter put together a group to go on a pil-
grimage in Israel—promising that once there, visas could be overstayed and
well-paying jobs found—the Virgin, according to Rita, “didn’t let me in
the Philippines—she wants to be with me in this pilgrimage.”10 Rita was
convinced that with the Virgin Mary’s help alone, the many obstacles to
going abroad—receiving leave from her teaching job, organizing a loan to
pay the almost USD4,000 required by the agency as a placement fee, and
being granted a visa for Israel—would finally be overcome, and she entered
Israel in 2000. By the time I met her in 2007, Rita—who had had to bury
a third husband, this time the elderly Israeli she had taken care of and later
married—attended her former husband’s synagogue, rather than Catholic
Church. Her devotion to the Virgin, however, was as strong as ever, and
Rita joined the block rosary every week, in spite of the risk this implied for
her as an undocumented domestic worker in Israel.11
In contrast to Mami Rita, the block rosary organizer, Aida, spent most of
her free time at the St. Anthony Parish Church. Since she lived out of her
employer’s house in southern Tel Aviv, she was able not only to attend the
church’s Saturday night mass, frequented by hundreds of Filipino Catholics
employed in the Tel Aviv area, but also to pray there before and after her
working days. Aida was also convinced that the Virgin had had a consider-
able influence over her life, even before she first came to Israel in 1997. The
Virgin had been there when Aida ran away from home with a young man
her parents did not approve of, had comforted Aida during the unhappy
year of an early marriage, and had softened her parents’ hearts when she
returned to their house, separated from her husband but pregnant. Later in
her life, when Aida found it increasingly hard to make ends meet as a single
mother, the Virgin had heard her prayers to be granted visas to work abroad
in Taiwan first and then in Israel. One of the biggest miracles the Virgin had
worked for Aida, she believed, was when after her deportation from Israel in
2004, she led Aida to Israel a second time—even though, during a stopover
in Hong Kong, several members of the Filipino group she had been travel-
ing with were detected as having been deported from Israel before and were
subsequently denied entry. For Aida, the block rosary was the fulfillment of
a vow she had given to the Virgin in exchange for her return to what she
regarded as the Holy Land.
Like Aida and Rita, each of the block rosary participants had their
own stories to tell about their personal relationship with the Virgin Mary.
Throughout their lives and during the migration process, their religious
engagement had undergone significant changes but was typically narrated
as an increasingly intense bonding with Mama Mary. Even though most of
the women met each other in Israel and came from very diverse regional,
social, and educational backgrounds in the Philippines, they soon got to
know each other better and in the process of transporting the figure of
Mama Mary from one house to another, increasingly shared their problems
and confided in each other the predicaments they faced as migrant domestic
workers in Israel.
According to Catholic doctrine and their own conceptualizations of
themselves, they were “sinners” for having left behind their families, some
of which included small children, for having separated from unfaithful or
abusive husbands, and for widely engaging in romantic relationships in
Israel. Therefore, for them, the praying of the rosary meant the forgiveness
of sins. Reciting the rosary in a church, pious association, or block rosary (as
Aida was eager to point out from the St. Louis de Montfort treatise) resulted
in a temporary “plenary indulgence,” which meant immediate entrance into
Heaven after death (de Montfort, 1976, p. 124).
Rather than being about indulgence alone, however, the Tel Avivian
block rosary was about the veneration of a specific figure of the Virgin. The
figure of Mama Mary was a 24-inch vinyl composition made in China,
available online at a retail price of about USD80. It was a depiction of

Our Lady of Fátima, also called the Our Lady of the Rosary, who accord-
ing to Roman Catholic doctrine, appeared before three shepherd children
at Fátima, Portugal, in 1917, promising personal and—in the context of
World War I—world peace and salvation if the rosary was said daily. Unlike
La Madonna of the Italian Harlem that Robert Orsi writes about (2002,
p. 167) or the Our Lady of Charity of the Cuban Catholic exiles in Miami
(Tweed, 1997), the Tel Avivian Mama Mary did not share her devotees’
history of migration to Israel. Rather than being an obstacle to their venera-
tion, this fact was appreciated by the devotees, who claimed that the figure
was especially powerful since she had been purchased in the Old City of
Jerusalem, a center of global Christianity.
Moreover, unlike some of the most venerated icons of the Virgin Mary in
the Philippines, Mama Mary did not resemble her devotees in appearance,
in that she was blond, blue-eyed, and of an unnatural white complexion.
This did not seem to bother the devotees in Israel either, who often com-
mented on how “beautiful” this specific figure of Mary was and who, like
many migrant women I encountered in Israel, were keen on keeping their
skin as light as possible, thereby widely sharing Filipino norms of beauty
that idealized European or mestiza looks (cf. Anderson, 1998, p. 230).
Behind the image of Mary, as Turner and Turner remind us, stands an
entire semantic field, “an area of multivocality, the ‘referents’ of which were
drawn from the most disparate sources” (1978, p. 145). Marian devotion in
the Philippines is likewise polysemic and adopts “as many forms as there are
versions of the Blessed Mother herself ” (De la Cruz, 2009, p. 460). In her
attempt to investigate the distinctiveness of Marian devotion in the Philip-
pines, as well as “the undue supremacy of Mary among Filipino Catholics”
(p. 460), De la Cruz cites the high social status of women and feminine men
when the Spanish colonizers introduced Catholicism to the archipelago in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: “When the Spaniards unpacked their
pantheon of saints and the figure of Jesus Christ, performed their panoply
of strange rites, and attempted the inculcation of monotheist dogma utterly
alien to the populace,” she writes, “it was the Virgin Mary that bore the clos-
est structural resemblance to any figure that had previously existed” (p. 460).
In contemporary Filipino popular understanding, Mary has kept her gen-
dered profile and is (still) a “site of struggle” over gender roles and relations
(cf. Wiegele, 2005, p. 125), embodying female strength and power, on the
one hand, and motherly care and humility, on the other.
On the background of the polysemy of Marian devotion, even within

the Philippines and in spite of their own diverse backgrounds, the Tel Aviv-
ian block rosary participants negotiated their own ritual practice. This was
facilitated by their shared experience of migration as a collective and trans-
formative devotional journey to the Holy Land and by the fact that they
saw Mama Mary assist in the development of her own distinctive agency.
Thus, rather than seeing the figure of Mama Mary as just another image of
the Virgin’s power, the block rosary participants’ belief in Mary’s power to
intercede with God was regarded as intimately bound up with the particular
image they prayed to. As the block rosary continued to meet, pray, and cir-
culate this image, they increasingly commented on Mary’s changing mood
and appearance, which they interpreted as reflections of her inner state, also
bringing her gifts, taking care of her, and beginning to recount the miracles
she worked.
Among them, Aida came to have an especially intense and almost physi-
cal bond with Mama Mary. When during the procession in May, one of
the two little plastic doves at Mary’s feet broke off, and she lost her crown;
Aida claimed to have horrible headaches, as if she herself was wearing a
heavy crown on her head. Waking up in full horror the following Friday
morning, she rushed to the phone to immediately call Leah, another block
rosary regular, to tell her that during the night, she had seen an apparition
of Mama Mary standing in her room and looking angry. Aida urged Leah
to rush to Jerusalem instantly and buy a new crown for Mama Mary. Since
Leah, in contrast to the other devotees, worked for a Filipino family of
embassy employees rather than for Israelis, her request for taking a day off
in order to fulfill the mission was granted, and she managed to acquire the
requested crown, albeit at a highly inflated price. When the women gath-
ered that night, Leah recounted how she must have looked in horror at the
Palestinian vendor when he suggested that if the price he demanded for
the crown was too much for her, she could simply buy a new figure at
almost the same price. Aida, however, continued to feel pain in her right
leg until someone finally managed to fix the dove that had fallen off from
beside Mama Mary’s right leg.
As to the miracles, Mama Mary did not work in any spectacular sense,
but there were stories of fulfilled prayer requests almost every week. Lita,
for example, invited Mama Mary to her house because she was experienc-
ing a state of great crisis. During the entire week of Mama Mary’s presence,
Lita, who lived out of her employer’s home, kneeled in front of the altar
and prayed the rosary mornings and nights. A married woman of three
children in the Philippines, Lita had been working in Israel for more than
seven years. Due to a couple of family tragedies and the stress of taking care
of an elderly Alzheimer’s patient, Lita was desperate to return to the Philip-
pines but knew that her family continued to depend on the remittances she
sent. Therefore, she hoped that her daughter would agree to replace her as
a domestic worker abroad and in the role of the family’s breadwinner; how-
ever, her daughter refused. After a week of praying and after Lita had put
pressure on her daughter by telling her about the invitation of the Virgin
Mary to her house and switching off her cell phone for several days, Lita’s
daughter finally changed her mind. For Lita and the women, this once more
proved Mama Mary’s compassion for them and her power to intercede. Out
of gratitude, Lita sewed an embroidered coat for Mama Mary, which from
then on, she was made to wear during the processions. From other grateful
devotees, she received a blue cape, a handmade rosary, and even a red plastic
heart, which was attached to the figure shortly before Valentine’s Day.
Conclusion
Over the course of one year’s devotion as described in this chapter, the
heterogeneous group of devotees—mostly Filipina (single) mothers, (sepa-
rated) wives, widows, and daughters, often from rural areas in the culturally
diverse Philippines—negotiated and created their own form of devotion to
the Virgin Mary. In the process, the figure came to change its appearance
and meaning for them. When devotees set the Virgin up on altars that bear
witness to the their religious journeys and spiritual endeavors, light candles,
kneel, and pray in front of her, Mama Mary continues to be there, tran-
scending physical distance and embodying, as it were, a heart in a heartless
world. Against the ordeals they face as migrant domestic workers far from
their own families, the shared devotionalism the women engaged in created
a sense of sociality and belonging and gave them an idiom for expressing
and sharing their hopes and desires.
In Our Lady of the Exile, Tweed (1997) likewise stresses the translocative
and transtemporal aspects of the Marian devotion he studied among Cuban
exiles in Miami. Similar to the Cuban exiles’ devotion of Mary, the Filipino
block rosary in Tel Aviv functioned as an embodied performance of affective
power for devotees in the dislocating process of migration. However—and
in contrast to the rather privileged Cuban exiles, for whom their Mar-
ian devotion functioned to express fervent diaspora nationalism—from
their position as marginalized migrant domestic workers and residents of
southern Tel Aviv, the women of the block rosary were concerned with the
healing of their own afflictions and the sanctification of their own homes
and families, rather than the nation of the Philippines. Accordingly, it is of
consequence that Mama Mary, purchased in the Old City of Jerusalem, was
a local from the “Holy Land”—a place many had dreamed of reaching long
before they actually did—rather than a figure that shared their history of
migration from the Philippines.
This chapter investigated diasporic religion in a specific urban setting,
stressing the importance of analyzing migrants’ religious practices not only
in their performative, narrative, emotional, and aesthetical dimensions (cf.
Smart, 1996) but also as realized in a specific spatial context. Situated within
the so-called White City of Tel Aviv, migrant domestic workers’ block rosary
did not accidentally take place in a marginalized urban area, where Filipi-
nos are one among many groups that are in different ways excluded from
national belonging and citizenship. In this place, the parading of a figure of
the Virgin Mary is more than an assertion of faith from a specific subject
formation. It is a collective effort for the appropriation (and sanctification)
of space, for the creation of new homes away from home, and for being
healed from afflictions the women all felt they suffered from.
The discussion shows that ritual performance may be a tool for helping
female migrant domestic workers cope with the predicaments they face; as
such, it has to be viewed as a form of collective action for change. However,
if for the many devotees of the Virgin Mary among Filipina domestic work-
ers in Israel acting means to surrender to the divine and pray for the Virgin
Mary’s intercession, what does this tell us about female migrant domes-
tic workers’ concepts of the self and their agency in the process of migra-
tion? While each of the women described previously unanimously ascribed
agency to Mama Mary, they were more skeptical about their own power to
enact choices in their lives. Describing themselves as martyrs, who sacrifice
for the well-being of their families and draw sociality, comfort, and faith
from religious practice and ritual performance, Mama Mary’s devotees’ sub-
jectivities were deeply informed by the (Catholic) ethics of subordination
and suffering. Therefore, the analysis of the Tel Avivian block rosary enacted
by a group of migrant domestic workers, I argue, draws attention to the
fact that the notion of patiency, rather than agency, may be better suited to
describe their experiences and self-concepts.
Writing about Dinka religion and their experience of divinity as an exter-
nal power that takes possession of the body, Godfrey Lienhardt notes that it
is significant “that in ordinary English usage we have no word to indicate an
opposite of ‘actions’ in relation to the human self” (1961, p. 151) Therefore, he

uses the word “passions” or passiones to describe those nonactions that, for the
Dinka, befall humans enacted upon by these external, divine powers. Coined
by Schnepel (2009) in reference to Lienhardt, the term “patiency” draws atten-
tion to the fact that the experience of suffering and possession are often seen as a
prerequisite for the ability to act in an arena that is beyond one’s control. Pushed
into a specific niche within the highly gendered and racialized global economy
of care and as postcolonial subjects who cannot easily cross international bor-
ders, Catholic Filipina migrants see themselves in need of the Virgin Mary’s
intercession to make things possible against all odds. Informed by their lived
religion’s emphasis on submission and suffering, they are acting deeply upon the
dialectics of agency and patiency in shaping their own lives.
Nevertheless, by moving to Israel and earning a living not only for them-
selves but also for extended families that depend on their cash remittances,
migrant women not only beat the odds involved in living in the Philippines
but also actively challenge dominant gender roles and concepts. Along the
way, they transform the places they travel to—staying on in Israel in spite of
restrictive migration regimes, negotiating the meanings of their ritual with
Palestinian Catholics as well as others, and creating new homes within a
place that is often unhomely for them. In an edited volume on the relation
between “home” and “migration,” Ahmed et al. (2003) illustrate that the
dynamics of uprootings and regrounding are enacted “affectively, materi-
ally and symbolically” (p. 2). From this relational perspective, “it is not
possible . . . to even define or describe the nature of homing and migrating
as either separate or combined processes” (p. 2). Setting up a figure of the
Virgin Mary on altars in a diasporic movement, within a ritual performance
that they enact with newly found friends, “home” for these women is not
simply a faraway place left behind, but a space in the making. Rather than
being bound by a physical location, home for them may as well be a place
in the future where, following Michael Jackson’s definition and in contrast
to the women’s current situation, “what we do has some effect and what we
say carries some weight” (1995, p. 123).
Notes
1. The term “agency” is defined in numerous ways and has been dis-
cussed in various disciplines and theoretical traditions (cf. Ahearn,
2001; Frank, 2006; Mahmood, 2005). However, providing an over-
view of these debates is beyond the scope of this chapter.
2. I was invited to participate in the ritual as a non-Catholic researcher

and over the course of a year, turned from a merely observing par-
ticipant taking notes while others were praying to a more active
participant, who came to memorize the songs sung and the prayers
recited and sometimes mumbled along. Still, I refrained from tak-
ing a more active role, such as inviting the icon to my own home or
reading out requests and “mysteries,” as the other participants did.
3. The names of interlocutors have been replaced by pseudonyms
throughout this chapter.
4. As in the Philippines, the vast majority of Filipino migrants in Israel
are Roman Catholic. However, evangelical churches are on the rise
in both the Philippines and its diaspora, and a significant number of
migrants have been found to convert during the migration process
(cf. Liebelt, 2011b).
5. The full text of the prayer reads as follows: “Hail Mary, full of grace,
the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed
is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray
for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.” According
to Catholic iconography, each bead signifies a rose. Roses, in turn,
signify both sensual aesthetics—beauty, fragrance—as well as pain,
potentially caused by its thorns (cf. de Montfort, 1976, p. 11). Finally,
thorns signify the torture of Jesus Christ during his final ordeal before
crucifixion. By praying the rosary, the believer commemorates Jesus’s
suffering while at the same time, being cured from suffering more
generally through Jesus’s sacrifice (ibid.).
6. Manalansan (2001) describes a block rosary performed by Filipino
migrants in New York similarly extended to compose the entire city.
7. According to estimates by the head of the St. Anthony parish, a small
community of fewer than 1,000 local Catholics in the early 1990s
has since been joined by more than 22,000 Roman Catholic migrant
workers, the majority of them Filipinos (cf. Ben Ami and Skoblinski,
2009).
8. While there is a lack of reliable statistics on the number of (Filipino)
migrant workers due to the significant number of undocumented
persons, during the period of research, estimates for Filipinos in Israel
varied between thirty thousand (Philippines embassy) and sixty thou-
sand (Israeli NGO Kav LaOved).
9. In his ethnography of one such brotherhood, Love calls them a deeply
syncretistic form of “peasant religion,” engaging in shamanistic
rituals that church officials typically consider non-Catholic. Never-

theless, “The poor and ignorant who are engaged in these devotional
activities . . . are in no way that they can see reacting to the church or
against the church. What they are doing is Romano whether inside
or outside the church” (2008, p. 29).
10. Personal interview with Rita in Tel Aviv, Israel, on March 4, 2008.
11. Rita’s status in Israel was “undocumented” in spite of the fact that she
had been legally married to an Israeli citizen; the Ministry of Interior
revoked her residence permit due to the fact that her husband died
before the marriage had resulted in a permanent residency status for
her. Rita blamed her husband’s children, who were worried about
their inheritance, for this having happened. Also, she did not have
the means to consult a lawyer.
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CHAPTER 6
Creating a “New Home”

Away from Home
Religious Conversions of Filipina
Domestic Workers in Dubai and Doha
Naomi Hosoda and Akiko Watanabe
Introduction
T
his chapter examines the process of religious conversion among Fili-
pina domestic workers in Dubai and Doha, with a special focus on
the transformation of their social networks and, in particular, the
reconstruction of “home” during their sojourns. Filipino migration to
the Arab states of the Persian Gulf (the “Gulf states”) has generally been
viewed and discussed among scholars in the context of international labor
migration. The contractual labor system used in the Gulf states engages
Filipino and other migrants in the region’s economy while excluding them
from public social and cultural scenes. As noncitizens, their religious activ-
ities are either banned, which is the case in Saudi Arabia, or limited to
the confines of their personal spaces, which is the case in the United Arab
Emirates (UAE) and Qatar. These religious restrictions have largely been
overlooked by migrants and by the officials of their governments, because
both groups are comparatively more interested in solving economic and/or
human rights problems related to migrant workers.
Recently, however, there has been increased scholarly interest in the reli-
gious beliefs and practices of domestic workers in the Middle East, includ-
ing those of Filipina workers. This field of study has focused on several
themes, and of note among these are ethnographic works that consider the
role of religion as the central component or expression of individual identity
118 O Naomi Hosoda and Akiko Watanabe
(Tondo, 2011), as the basis for the formation of a community with affec-
tive ties (Bonifacio and Angeles, 2010; Fresnoza-Flot, 2011), and as a set of
beliefs and practices that enables migrants to alleviate the effects of various
forms of oppression and/or to reinvent personhood (Cruz, 2010; Liebelt,
2011). Yet the literature on Filipina (and Filipino) migration has primarily
investigated the rites and communities of Roman Catholics, because it is the
predominant religion in the Philippines. This tendency ignores many Fili-
pina migrant workers; not only do those with religious backgrounds other
than Roman Catholicism migrate abroad (e.g., Johnson, 2011; Liebelt,
2008), but also Roman Catholic Filipinas may convert to other religious
denominations while staying overseas (e.g., Pingol, 2011).
Religious conversion, defined as the process whereby an individual incor-
porates a different religious group’s doctrines, faith, rituals, and practices
(Lacar, 2001, p. 39), is an unexplored but important topic when discuss-
ing Filipina domestic workers’ experiences and lifestyles abroad. Religious
conversion is a phenomenon not specific to migrant domestic workers (e.g.,
Angeles, 2011). However, Ahmad (2011) maintains that, at least in Kuwait
(where she did her fieldwork), it tends to occur more often among female
domestic workers than among other types of migrant workers. According to
Ahmad, the latter group is likely to interact mostly with compatriots in their
workplaces and in their houses, while female domestic workers mostly inter-
act with their employers “who are invariably of different ethno-national
backgrounds” (Ahmad, 2011, p. 102).
Although only a small percentage of research has considered religious
conversion among migrant Filipinas, a few pieces of ethnographic study
have examined this aspect in relation to their diasporic identity (Pingol,
2011; Constable, 2011; McKay, 2011). What remains largely ignored is
how religious conversion does or does not influence domestic workers’
everyday social relations as well as their social spaces. While the recent lit-
erature highlights different facets of domestic workers’ lives, including their
religious practices in order to form “new, alternative worlds of fun, piety
[and] intimate relations” (Johnson and Werbner, 2011, p. 2), this chapter
is particularly concerned with the ways in which they reconstitute a sense
of “home” and intimate relations in the new setting through their every-
day encounters. We follow Al-Ali and Koser (2002) and define “home” in
terms of “its relation to the outside” as well as in terms of belonging and
identity (Al-Ali and Koser, 2002, p. 7). We assume that “home” is a place
where fear, danger, the unknown, foreign and alien places and traditions,
Creating a “New Home” Away from Home O 119
and unfamiliar faces and habits are absent; in other words, “home” is where
the opposite of these conditions predominates in a safe, familiar, and com-
fortable space.
In response to the disruption and disorientation that Filipina domes-
tic workers experience in their destination countries, where there are large
nonhome environments within their social spaces, we ask how these women
respond and cope with their situations. Their departure to the Gulf states
as migrants working for foreign families may also alter or strain their rela-
tionships with their family members remaining in the Philippines. How
are their family ties affected during their sojourns? This chapter focuses on
these questions by analyzing the dynamics of Filipina migration, religious
conversion, and home.
Furthermore, this chapter brings to light aspects of the phenomenon
of religious conversion among Filipina domestic workers in Dubai and
Doha—namely, from Roman Catholicism, the dominant religion in the
homeland, to Islam or, alternatively, to the Pentecostal charismatic denomi-
nation within Christianity popularly known as “born-again Christianity”
among Filipinos. Many migrant domestic workers experience a sense of
marginality, isolation, discrimination, and vulnerability, the intensity of
which varies depending on the characteristics of their employers. Our aim
is to determine whether the multicultural environment of the two cities has
any effect on their encounters with new people, ideas, and spaces, as well as
the impact of these encounters on subsequent religious conversion.
Methodology
The data used in this chapter were collected using ethnographic research
methods during a five-month period between 2009 and 2014 in Dubai and
Doha. We conducted in-depth interviews with Filipina domestic workers
who had converted from Roman Catholicism to either born-again Christi-
anity or Islam. The interviews were conducted during visits to places where
the interlocutors regularly gathered and where they participated in their
religious activities. Both of the researchers have been conducting ethno-
graphic research on Muslim and Roman Catholic migrant communities in
Metro Manila for more than 15 years. Therefore, it was relatively easy to
locate Filipinas who were working in Dubai and Doha through existing
contacts in the Philippines.
However, finding study subjects in public spaces proved to be an ardu-
ous undertaking because a high proportion of Filipina domestic workers,
particularly newly converted Filipina Muslim domestics, were rarely given

days off and were therefore rarely out in public. Thus the interviews with
newly converted Filipina Muslim domestics were conducted rapidly in
Islamic centers. We met with those women who had obtained permission
from their employers to go to an Islamic center and often conducted the
interviews between or after Islamic classes. Some of the interviews were
conducted while the women waited for service vehicles or their employer’s
car to take them home. With the assistance of Filipino personnel from five
Islamic centers, we carried out in-depth interviews with seven newly con-
verted Filipina Muslim domestic workers in Dubai, 16 in Doha, as well as
interviews with other types of workers. Each interview lasted from twenty
minutes to about one hour.
Most of the interviews with the domestic workers who had converted
to born-again Christianity occurred after the church’s prayer meetings and
either at the meeting places or in nearby restaurants. Several of the inter-
views were conducted while we strolled in the city with interlocutors on
their days off; many of the interlocutors had at least one day off in a week,
and many of them were comfortable participating in a casual interview,
since we had already established rapport with them. We visited three differ-
ent Filipino born-again Christian churches in Dubai and interviewed ten
domestic workers; we also interviewed other church members and pastors.
The interviews with these interlocutors also lasted from twenty minutes
to about one hour, and some of the subjects were interviewed more than
once.1 The languages we used while conducting fieldwork were Tagalog and
English, depending on the context in which an interview occurred. Tagalog
is the first language spoken by people in Manila and its vicinity, is a second
language for most people in the Philippines, and is also the basis for Fili-
pino, the Philippine national language. To acquire general and large-scale
information on the issues, we also interviewed Philippine embassy officials,
Filipino religious leaders, Filipino community leaders, and journalists in the
UAE and Qatar. In keeping with professional practices, we have provided
pseudonyms for the interlocutors and the names of born-again Christian
groups to protect the identities of the research participants.
Filipina Domestic Workers in Dubai and Doha

The six countries constituting the Gulf states—namely, Bahrain, Kuwait,
Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—are known in the world as oil-
producing monarchical countries. Lately, however, each of these states has
had to grapple with overdependence on hydrocarbon reserves, which has led

them to pursue multifaceted postoil diversification projects. Dubai, one of
the seven emirates of the UAE, and Doha, the capital of Qatar, may repre-
sent the most rapidly changing and intriguing models of this type of eco-
nomic development and global integration among cities in the Gulf states.
These two rapidly growing cities have other common characteristics:
their levels of wealth are similar, and both are dependent on a demographi-
cally dominant foreign labor population. In the UAE, six million expatri-
ates are working at various job sites, constituting more than 80 percent of
the country’s total population. In the case of Dubai, this proportion is close
to 90 percent (Horinuki, 2009). In Qatar, more than 1.2 million expatriates
compose almost 88 percent of the country’s total population. Accordingly,
a large portion of the employers of domestic workers in the two countries
are not only local nationals but also middle-class or upper-class expatriates.
In fact, a significant proportion of Filipino domestic workers—if not, the
majority of them—is employed by expatriates from the West, from other
parts of the Middle East, and from Asia.
In terms of the religious tolerance in the cities of Dubai and Doha, while
the UAE and Qatar are both Islamic states, their official positions on non-
Islamic religious practices among their foreign residents are considered
moderate compared to Saudi Arabia, the country where the government
sponsors Wahabism, a strict form of Sunni Islam. On the other hand, in
the UAE and Qatar, Islam—which is their state religion—represents these
nations’ internal social and cultural cohesion and is often used as a reference
point with the Shari‘a (i.e., Islamic law; Mednicoff, 2012). The two states
also generously provide assistance to making their religious stances known
by erecting numerous mosques, operating Islamic centers for converts, and
conducting the propagation of Islam while strictly prohibiting other reli-
gious groups from evangelistic activities.
Even so, these two states are tolerant of their non-Muslim popula-
tions, permitting them to engage in their non-Islamic religious rituals not
only in private places such as their homes but also in churches or temples
built on land leased from the country’s rulers free of charge. Regarding its
non-Muslim foreigners’ religious practices, Dubai is in the most liberal
emirate among the seven emirates. Currently and most noticeably, in the
Karama District of Dubai near Deira, two Christian churches stand side by
side—St. Mary’s Catholic Church for the Roman Catholics and Holy Trin-
ity Church for the Protestant denominations. Both churches claim tens of
thousands of believers who regularly gather there for worship (Moors et al.,
2009, p. 161; Holy Trinity Church, 2014). It is worth noting, nonetheless,

that in both the UAE and Qatar, non-Muslim foreigners give special con-
sideration to the state and show restraint by limiting their public presence
to a modest level (e.g., making the exterior design of the religious buildings
plain and without obvious religious symbols) so that they will not exceed
the acceptable “religious tolerance” level of the government and the local
citizens.
In sum, Dubai and Doha today demonstrate an interesting balance
between rapid economic development that relies on global investment and
events, on one hand, and the maintenance of their traditional value sys-
tems, on the other, between the privileged few locals and the less-privileged
but overwhelmingly populous foreign workers (although some are wealthy
enough to employ foreign domestic workers), and between propagating
Islam as the state religion and allowing spaces for the diverse religious prac-
tices of their expanding non-Islamic foreign population. This complex pic-
ture is the social, cultural, and religious arena to which Filipino domestic
workers fly when starting their new lives as domestic workers.
The UAE and Qatar are countries where many Filipino overseas contract
workers are found. They are called Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) in
the Philippines.2 Domestic work is one of the major occupational categories
of OFWs living in the Gulf states. In 2010, domestic workers made up
30 percent of the total number of OFWs employed in the UAE and 27 per-
cent of the total number of OFWs employed in Qatar (Philippine Overseas
Employment Administration, 2011).
Foreign domestic work is appealing to a number of Filipino women and
is the easiest entry-level job to find for many of them. While it is widely
known in the Philippines today that working as a domestic in the Gulf
states offers only a modest salary, despite being alone abroad and possibly
the victim of some forms of abuse, there is a seamless flow of women from
the Philippines to the Gulf states. This is because it is relatively easy to find
job openings as domestics compared with other types of job categories avail-
able abroad and also because the salary is likely higher than what they could
make if they remained locally employed in the Philippines.
There are primarily two legal statuses of Filipina domestics in the UAE
and Qatar. The first category consists of those with legal work permits who
live with their sponsoring families and are referred to as having an “employ-
ment visa.” The second group consists of those with legal work permits but
who work for families other than the sponsoring families. Locally, they are
termed as being on a “free visa” or as “part-time workers.” These domestics
pay a certain amount as a “sponsor fee” to the sponsor, but they live inde-
pendently while working for other families. They find prospective employ-
ers by person-to-person referrals, and they personally negotiate the terms
and conditions of their paid services. Many of these domestics rent “bed
spaces,” or one bed of a bunk bed in a run-down crowded apartment build-
ing converted into dormitory-style lodging, located in the downtown areas.
Access to public spaces is an important part of Filipina domestic workers’
lifestyles and their abilities to interact with people outside of their employ-
ers’ families. However, this may be difficult for them to achieve. First, the
public transportation systems in Dubai and Doha are limited to certain
areas. Although public buses and railway systems (known as the Dubai
Metro) operate in the city proper of Dubai, a car is required for moving
from one place to another immediately upon leaving the city center. The
situation is worse in Qatar, where there is only limited public bus service.
While taxis are available in both cities, they are normally more expensive
than buses (or the train in Dubai); thus many domestic workers prefer to
use buses or trains rather than taxis, especially for long-distance trips.
Second, Filipina domestic workers’ freedom of mobility in the two cities
depends on the attitudes of their employers toward them. Those who have
employers who allow them a weekly day off find it easy to go to public spaces
such as shops, food courts, churches, and parks, provided that public trans-
portation systems are available and that they are familiar with these systems.
They can then easily exchange information, including local knowledge spe-
cific to the destination countries, and can reach out to Filipino compatriots’
support networks (Hosoda, 2013). For others, however, moving outside of
their employer’s house is almost impossible when employers prohibit them
from leaving without accompaniment or do not allow them any days off.
In cases where employers control their domestics’ mobility, access to pub-
lic spaces may cause problems between domestics and their employers; yet
many domestics refrain from directly contesting or attempting to negotiate
with their employers because their sponsors are their employers and they
fear losing their jobs.
During our fieldwork in Dubai and Doha, we found support for the
notion that a considerable number of OFWs, including Filipina domes-
tic workers in the two metropolitan cities discussed herein, had converted
to Islam or born-again Christianity (Hosoda and Watanabe, 2013). While
no official figures regarding Filipino religious conversions are available,
newspaper articles and talk among the Filipino people living in these cit-
ies indicated that religious conversion is so common among Filipinos in
the two countries that an average Filipino worker has a least a few friends
or acquaintances who have converted to one or the other of the two reli-
gions since coming to the Gulf states. Many Filipinos who are born-again
Christians or newly converted Muslims are associated with religion-based
community groups. However, domestic workers tend to be in the minority
in such groups and are less likely than Filipinos of other occupations to be
involved. A few domestics, however, may assume leadership roles according
to the level of devotion, depth of knowledge, or the extent of their experi-
ences with certain religious practices. In the following sections, we present
detailed case studies for each of the two groups of newly converted Filipina
domestic workers in relation to the social contexts in which they made their
religious conversions.
Becoming a Muslim: Fatima’s Case

On a Friday morning, men in long sleeves and long pants or in white kan-
dooras (long dresses for men) and women in black abayas (overcoats for
women) walked into a three-story Islamic center in Doha. As the public
transportation system was underdeveloped, more than a hundred students
from several districts came here by service vans provided by the center,
by chauffeur-driven family cars sent by their employers, or by taxi. They
were divided by gender, learning level, and nationality, such as Filipino, Sri
Lankan, Chinese, and British. When the Tagalog beginner class was finished
at 11:00 a.m. in the female section, the students were catered a free lunch
provided by the center and usually supplemented with some Filipino dishes
made by other students. Chatting in various Filipino dialects, they engaged
in the buying and selling of Filipino cosmetics, discussed their troubles with
their employers, and sought advice from experienced domestic workers. It
was a short break for them before the noon congregational prayer. Several
of the women would need to return to their accommodations or to their
employer’s home to resume their work for the afternoon. This was the case
for nearly half of the Filipina who gathered there, as is exemplified presently
by the experience of Fatima.
Fatima was born as Felna in the early 1960s into a Roman Catholic fam-
ily in a small town in southern Mindanao, where Muslims and Christians
lived alongside one another.3 Felna was a humble housewife blessed with
two children until her husband passed away in 1988, leaving no provision
for his family. Eventually, Felna could no longer afford schooling fees for
her children. Knowing this, her older sister, who had worked in Doha as
a domestic, asked her if she wanted to go abroad to work. Desperate for

survival, Felna agreed. Within a month, her sister had prepared the docu-
ments and changed Felna’s name on her passport to the Muslim “Fatima.”
She was told that it was easier to be hired as a domestic “if you are Muslim
in the Middle East.” Fatima migrated to Doha in 1990 in the predawn era
of Qatar’s use of domestics from the Philippines. She has been working as a
domestic for the same Qatari family for 22 years. Since the Qatari preferred
Muslims in the beginning, some Muslim Filipinas migrated to work there
while some Christians did so by converting to Islam, either by marriage
or by speaking out the shahada (i.e., the confession of Islamic faith; Wata-
nabe, 2012).
Fatima’s becoming a “Muslim” was not entirely deceitful because she
made a shahada prior to leaving the Philippines. Up to that point, Fatima
had not been an ardent Roman Catholic anyway. Moreover, she saw how
Muslim neighbors lived and had little objection to assuming a Muslim name
in order to pursue a larger goal. Fatima began by serving as an all-around
worker, covering everything from cooking to child care to cleaning for a
Qatari family. Three other domestics were working in the household—two
Sri Lankans and a Filipina. All of them were told to cover their hair with
hijabs (Muslim headscarf ) while working inside the house, which Fatima
found uncomfortable in the beginning. Fatima learned that the other Fil-
ipina worker was Muslim born, even though she wore “sexy” attire and
took off the hijab when she left the house on her rare days off. Meanwhile,
Fatima observed her employer praying five times a day and regularly listen-
ing to and reciting the Qur’an. She tried fasting during Ramadan without
knowing the significance of the ritual. She took these actions because she
received a gentler approach and tone from her employer when she practiced
Islam in her presence.
In 1995, Fatima took her first vacation to the Philippines to attend her
daughter’s high school graduation. By then, she had grown accustomed to
wearing the hijab in public, and she felt uneasy when she did not put it on.
A neighbor in her hometown criticized her for appearing to be a Muslim
simply to get a job. Fatima was offended, and she made up her mind that
she would become a serious Muslim. After returning to Qatar, Fatima con-
fessed to her employer that she wanted to learn more about the Islamic faith,
because she was a recent convert and did not have much knowledge about
Islam yet. Her employer was happy to hear of Fatima’s interest, and she gave
her some booklets on Islamic teachings published by an Islamic center in
Qatar. Fatima read these booklets during her free time in the house. The
employer also began to discuss Islam with Fatima and later took Fatima on a
pilgrimage with some Qatari friends, leaving the other “Muslim” domestics
behind in the house. From then on, Fatima was thought of as different from
the other domestic workers, who did not show piety.
Fatima became her employer’s favorite, which resulted in a change of
responsibilities. She took over care of the family’s young son and no lon-
ger did other chores. In 2003, she was told to accompany her employer
to a charitable activity at the Islamic center. For the first time, Fatima met
a Filipina convert, who had become a teacher for other new Muslim women.
The teacher encouraged Fatima and asked permission from her employer
for Fatima to join the class. A new social world was opened to Fatima.
Starting that year, she attended classes in the Islamic center. In 2009, with
the blessing of her employer, she began volunteering at the center on Fri-
days to greet newly converted Muslims, mostly Filipinos. Since 2012, her
service has become a daily routine, and she has earned the respect of other
Filipinos. When a newly converted Muslim had a problem, such as dealing
with an employer, adjusting to the foreign environment as a domestic, or
confessing her conversion to her family in the Philippines, Fatima was the
person to consult. The issue was only brought to the teacher, director, or an
eligible intellectual at the center if she could not solve it.
Meanwhile, Fatima has become the oldest and longest-serving domes-
tic in the household of her employer. She enjoys a strong bond with her
employer’s family and implied that she had earned a place in Doha. She
said, “Never did I imagine staying with this family for such a long time
when I first arrived here. My boy [who was only one month old when she
began serving the family] will be getting married two months from now,
inshallah (If it is God’s will),” referring to her employer’s son in familial
terms.4 Fatima has not returned to the Philippines since her third visit in
2005. Both of her biological children are married now, and she has fulfilled
her obligations to her Filipino family. She hopes to live her life in Doha as
she wishes.
Creating a New Home in the Household

Fatima’s case is an example of the way a Filipina domestic worker can find
new faith in the alien setting of the Gulf states and gradually earn a secure
place in the household where she lives and works. Although Dubai and
Doha are cosmopolitan cities, some domestics hired by Arab Muslim nation-
als and middle-class or upper-class Arab Muslim foreigners remain isolated
from the outside world. Most of their time is spent inside their employer’s
home, exposed to their Muslim employer’s culture, and surrounded by an
Islamic environment. Yet, even with no or only a few days off, limited com-
munication tools, and poor access to public spaces, they have managed to
adapt to their new situations. In time, some of these women have embraced
Islam and abandoned Christianity.
The practice exhibited by domestic workers of converting to the religious
affiliations of their employers in the Gulf states is not rare (Abu-Habib,
1998; Ahmad, 2011; Gamburd, 2000). Ahmad (2011) has offered two
notions for explaining domestic workers’ conversions to Islam in Kuwait:
utilitarianism and indoctrination. The former proposes that it is “either
their self-interested, calculated attempts to wrest better remuneration or
treatment from their employers or as coming about due to the pressure,
implicit or explicit, brought to bear upon them by the families with whom
they work” (Ahmad, 2011, p. 93). The latter is attributed to Islamic da’wah
(propagation) and reform movements that reach out to the non-Muslim
population and promote the Islamic practices of Kuwaiti families and
households (Ahmad, 2011, p. 94).
Utilitarian factors do seemingly play an important part in conversion to
Islam. Some Filipino domestic workers expressed to us that non-Muslims
were seen as inferior in the societies of the Gulf states. They told us they had
worked in Arab families where the children took it for granted that it was
acceptable to belittle them and speak to them using bad language because
they were kafir (nonbelievers). Others said that there were invisible barri-
ers between them and their employer’s family, despite the length of their
working years. There were also rumors among the Filipinos that they would
receive gold were they to become Muslim.5 In this setting, where domes-
tic workers have meager resources and little freedom to come and go as
they please, they have utilized the religion’s dimensions of social capital,
as stressed by Wuthnow and Hackett (2003), to negotiate unfamiliar situa-
tions and gain security and acceptance.
On the other hand, Filipino domestic workers who were exposed to
Islamic environments in the household were more likely to embrace Islam,
the process Ahmad identifies as indoctrination. The Filipina domestics
observed the daily religious performances of their employer’s family mem-
bers. They grew accustomed to daily and yearly Islamic practices. In many
houses, mention of Allah and the prophets frequently occurred; their
employer’s lifestyle without drinking alcohol and smoking, free from host-
ing raucous parties, and special clothing demands was all based on Islamic
rules. These practices caught the attention of Filipino domestics who had
doubts about Christianity and/or preexisting anti-Islam sentiments that
had been forged back in the Philippines.
Yet these theories do not explain how Filipina domestic workers come
to create a home in the households of Gulf states. One key phrase that
indicates the construction of home is that a domestic was “treated as part of
the family” in her employer’s house, although this might have been subjec-
tively perceived. Some Muslim converts described using the same plates that
the family used, watching television together, planting vegetables with their
employers, being provided with a personal cell phone, or being entrusted
with a credit card to buy groceries. One of the interlocutors described that
she was patted on her head in a similar fashion as the children and that she
chatted frankly with her employer, sat at the same table with the family, and
was often asked if she wanted anything to buy or to send to the Philippines.
She even mentioned that she did not need a day off because she had been
accepted into the family as an “adopted daughter.”
Gamburd (2000) stressed that a domestic worker could become an inti-
mate part of the family, where the children may come to love her despite
her being of a different religious affiliation. Another interlocutor in Dubai,
who had recently become a Muslim after 12 years of service to the family,
could not tell us whether she had gained trust and felt comfortable in the
household because of her conversion to Islam or because of her long length
of service. The lengths of service of the newly converted Muslims may vary
according to an individual worker’s position in her Philippine family. Still,
other interlocutors explained that they felt a great distance from the fam-
ily if they did not belong to the same faith; not only did being of the same
faith gain them a certain amount of respect from the family, but they could
also talk about Islam on equal footing with family members and have many
more things in common with them in their everyday lives.
To the extent that commonalities give a sense of home, the Islamic center,
where people deepen exchanges, may be regarded as home to some newly
converted Muslim domestic workers. Indeed, it can operate as a security net
for them. Yet most of the Muslim Filipino domestics would not consider an
Islamic center as home due to its school-like characteristics. The domestics
at the center are students of certain classes, and they must graduate within a
three-month period. They must have both communication and transporta-
tion tools in order to keep in touch beyond this point.
Becoming a Born-Again Christian: Celine’s Case

One Friday evening in Karama District in Dubai, a three-star hotel func-
tion room was filled with roughly fifty people—mostly Filipinos, both men
and women—sitting on chairs. Some were dressed in business suits, but
the majority wore casual clothes. The room had been rented by a group
of mostly Filipino born-again Christians called Praising Blessings of Lord
Church (PBLC). At 8:00 p.m., their biweekly prayer meeting began. With
an upbeat, modern style of worship music, they stood up and danced. After
ten minutes, their “music band” appeared in front, all its members dressed
in colorful costumes, and carried out a series of dance performances accom-
panied by spiritual music. As the music continued, some people began cry-
ing and singing with their eyes closed. Then the music stopped, and the
leading pastor of PBLC began preaching in a laid-back manner, mostly in
Tagalog but sometimes in English. Around 9:30 p.m., after more upbeat
gospel songs had been played, the meeting was over, and the participants
left the hotel one by one before dispersing in different directions by taking
public buses and taxis.
It was Celine, our decade-long friend from Manila, who took us to that
PBLC meeting. Prior to the meeting, she had taken us to a bed-space room
where she and her church friends, or her ate and kuya (sister and brother,
respectively, in Tagalog), usually spent Friday afternoons together. Celine
came to Dubai in 2009. She was born in Manila during the late 1970s, and
she has 11 siblings. After graduating from an IT technical school, while
staying home with her family, Celine applied for various jobs, but the work
she managed to get was only temporary, each position lasting no more than
six months. At the age of 28, she learned from her older sister who was
working in Dubai that a Lebanese Muslim family was looking for a domes-
tic worker. She agreed to work for the family and flew to Dubai with the
expectation that she would be able to help her family financially.
Initially, Celine had difficulty performing the household chores accord-
ing to the specifications of her scrupulous female employer. However, she
found that her employer was a patient teacher; therefore, she also tried to
exercise patience while trying to adjust to the employer’s expectations and
gradually learned how to cook basic Arabic dishes, how to clean the rooms
in the ways the female employer required, and so forth. Her monthly salary
for the first year of employment was AED700 (USD190); this increased
to AED1,300 (USD350) the following year and was up to AED1,500
(USD410) two years later. Thus she was able to remit AED500 (USD140)
to her family in Manila each month.6
Celine’s free time also increased. From her arrival in Dubai, she was
allowed to have a cell phone, her own room in the employer’s condomin-
ium, and one day off per week. After half a year, she was also allowed to use
her own laptop computer. Because the two children of her employer were
13 and 11 years old, they required no special care from Celine. The husband
worked for a multinational insurance company and often traveled to Africa
for business reasons; his wife worked for a telecommunication company
from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekdays. Having learned her household tasks,
Celine now has time of her own around noon as well as after 10 p.m.,
which she usually spends communicating with her family and friends via
the Internet.
Celine gradually found new friends in Dubai and began to explore the
city. Her two sisters were working as party company staff and lived about
thirty to forty minutes away from Celine’s employer’s house by taxi, or two
hours away by public transportation. Her sisters had Mondays or Tuesdays
off, meaning Celine was alone on her day off, which was Friday. Celine was
afraid to go out by herself. Eventually, she met Nelly, a Filipina who lived
in Celine’s condominium complex and worked for an Egyptian-American
family. Nelly was outgoing, and she often took Celine with her and her
Filipina friends to shopping malls, supermarkets, small catering businesses,
and public parks.
One day on their way home from St. Mary’s Catholic Church in 2011,
Celine, Nelly, and two of their close friends—one working as a domestic
for an Australian family and the other as a domestic for a Swedish family—
unexpectedly met a pastor of PBLC who at the time was driving their taxi.
While driving along, the pastor asked Celine and her friends, “Do you know
Jesus by heart or by words?” Although the four were Roman Catholics, they
were unable to answer. Celine recalled, “I was shocked to hear the question,
and I just couldn’t forget it. I cried when I remembered that question in my
room. I never paid any attention to born-again groups’ activities and never
read the Holy Bible seriously, but here [in Dubai], I became interested in
learning more about Jesus.” The four women contacted the pastor and then
began attending Bible studies, seminars, and prayer meetings. One by one,
they were converted and joined PBLC as formal members.7
PBLC was established in 2005 by a group of born-again Christian Fili-
pinos living in Dubai. At present, it has approximately five hundred mem-
bers, mostly Filipinos, although some members come from other countries
including India, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Ghana. The church has branches
in Sharjah, another emirate in the UAE, as well as in Muntinlupa, part of
Metro Manila, in the Philippines. The Filipino PBLC members work in
diverse fields such as retail, hotels, restaurants, offices, and private houses.
Members are expected to donate 10 percent of their incomes to assist with
church expenses (e.g., renting rooms for meetings and the construction of
other campuses in the UAE). The church also rents a villa where pastors and
several members live and where others can visit at any time. The residents
of the villa host parties a few times a month and serve homemade Filipino
dishes and provide outdoor sports activities during these events.
According to the leading pastor and some members of PBLC, there are
dozens of domestic workers in the church group; however, they remain a
minority in terms of occupational categories. In the opinion of the pastor
and other church members, the main reason for this is domestic workers’
lack of freedom of mobility. Domestics who attend their meetings are those
who can take a day off or those who work part time.8
As mentioned previously, Celine spent her Friday afternoons in other
members’ bed spaces, sleeping and cooking Filipino food with other church
members. Celine stated, “I found my home here,” and added, “Friday I
become crazy, because at [my employer’s] home, I can’t [behave this way].
My madam will say, ‘Celine, what happened to you?’ if I laugh like this.
I am very quiet in front of my madam.” Celine believes that her relation-
ship with her Muslim employer has not changed because of her conversion
to born-again Christianity from Roman Catholicism and states that her
employer allows her to attend Christian meetings even in the evening, say-
ing that “my madam always tells me ‘as long as you do your work right, you
are free to go to church.’”
Celine indicated that her conversion to born-again Christianity and
membership in a Christian church could be temporary; she acknowledged,
“I’m the first one in my family who has converted. If my parents learn that
I have converted and [attend] a born-again church, I am afraid my parents
may get angry at me, so I am not sure if I would remain born-again when I
go back to the Philippines.”9
Creating a New Home with Church Members

Celine’s case demonstrates how she has reconstructed her idea of home and
how she has adapted to her new environment. In Manila, her home was with
her biological family (i.e., parents and siblings). Upon arrival in Dubai, her
plan to reunite with her sisters was not entirely realized as she had imagined
it would be prior to her arrival, because the sisters lived far from Celine’s
residence and their days off were different from Celine’s. During the free
time provided by her employer, Celine began to make new friends; eventu-
ally, she met a group with whom she now feels at home.
The reasons that former Roman Catholic domestic workers like Celine
join born-again Christian groups instead of attending the Roman Catho-
lic mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church or becoming involved with Roman
Catholic community groups are interesting. Two social conditions may be
relevant to this phenomenon.10 First, as has also been stressed in other stud-
ies on migration and religion (Asis, 2008; Constable, 2011), the journey
from the Philippines to Dubai or elsewhere abroad can provide migrants
with opportunities to rethink the spiritual dimensions of their lives. Many
of our born-again Christian interlocutors—both domestic workers and
other workers—stressed that in their homeland, the Roman Catholic prac-
tices they had known, such as attending mass on Sundays and celebrating
certain Christian rites in the community, were a part of their everyday lives,
and they paid little attention to them. However, on arriving in a foreign
land far away from home, they began thinking about themselves, God,
home, family, discernment, hope, and faith. “I read the Bible for the first
time in Dubai” is a phrase we heard repeatedly from our born-again Chris-
tian interlocutors.
Second, the size of the born-again Christian groups may attract migrants.
Born-again Christian groups tend to be relatively small, numbering between
thirty and one hundred members attending meetings and events regularly.
The small size can create a relatively more familial and close-knit atmo-
sphere. This is unlike the atmosphere at the Roman Catholic mass and the
interaction in large Roman Catholic communities. A few pastors confided
to us that Filipino born-again Christian groups in Dubai tend to remain
small; once the numbers increase beyond a certain point, the group splits,
and a splinter group forms. By keeping the number of active members
small, churches lessen their visibility; with this smaller presence, they are
better able to avoid negative repercussions for their activities from the local
authorities.
Unlike those who convert to Islam, Filipina domestic workers who
become born-again Christians experience little outward change in their
relationships with their employers. Among our interviewed domestic work-
ers, not one had an employer who belonged to their born-again Christian
groups. A born-again Christian who was not a domestic worker commented
to us that, although her conversion had made no difference in her rela-

tionship with the employer, attending born-again Christian group activities
gave her the feeling of having a social bond with others. She also said she
gains the spiritual boost that she needs to keep on working in Dubai, where
everything is temporary and the uncertainty of her future is much higher
than in the Philippines.
Finally, although our data on the longevity of Filipina domestic work-
ers’ sense of belonging to born-again Christian groups is not yet complete,
judging from their reported views on their religious identities upon return-
ing to the Philippines (such as Celine’s described previously), we assume at
this stage that some Filipina may remain born-again Christians for a long
time, regardless of where they live. Others are likely to be uncertain about
their religious futures, partly because of their precarious employment sta-
tuses. The latter group considered church members as their closest friends
and almost like family, yet they conceded that belonging to a born-again
Christian community might be temporary, lasting only for the terms of
their sojourns.
Conclusion
This chapter examined the process of religious conversion among Filipina
domestic workers in Dubai and Doha, with a special focus on the recon-
struction of their social networks and, in particular, what they call “home.”
We have described the cases of two Filipinas who converted from Roman
Catholicism—one who converted to Islam and one who converted to born-
again Christianity. Here we first compare the two types of conversion expe-
riences with a special focus on their employers’ characteristics. Then we
compare and summarize Filipina domestic workers’ subjectivity in conjunc-
tion with the dynamic relations between their migration experiences, reli-
gions, and the home-like social spaces that they establish for themselves in
the host countries.
Our field research findings on religious conversion among the Filipina
domestic workers that we interviewed revealed that each domestic worker’s
particular working conditions, as well as the religious and cultural backgrounds
of her employer, greatly influenced her conversion experience. The difficul-
ties and indignities of working as a domestic in a foreign country, together
with the experienced distance from immediate family and other kin, often
generated a reexamination and questioning of spirituality and the Roman
Catholic traditions with which these women were familiar. Yet the working
and living conditions that each of them faced differed widely and depended
on the particular employer’s personal attitudes toward domestic workers and
his or her religious and cultural backgrounds. The Filipinas’ legal status—that
is, whether they were on an “employment visa” or a “free visa”—was also
important. Most of the Muslim converts we met were employed by and lived
in the houses of local nationals or middle-class to upper-class Arab Muslim
expatriate families. These domestics had few or no days off, and their freedom
of access to public spaces, especially at the initial stages of employment, was
limited. Because of their confinement in the houses with the families, they
were constantly exposed to Islamic precepts and practices in relation to their
household work. On the contrary, our interlocutors who became born-again
Christians had weekly days off and much more free access to public spaces
where they met fellow Filipinos and other members of the community.
Regarding domestic workers’ religious transformation, first, we maintain
that the transformations are the result of unplanned and gradual processes
in their everyday encounters and experiences, as pointed out by Ahmad
(2011, p. 102). As we focused on looking into the process of conversion, we
found that in most cases, both “utilitarian” and “indoctrination” aspects—if
we are to use Ahmad’s terms—were present (Ahmad, 2011, p. 94). Part of
the reasons for their religious conversion that our interlocutors mentioned
were their efforts to create social relationships with people around them,
such as employers and compatriots, and to make spaces in the destination
countries more comfortable and homelike. At the same time, many of them
stated that they experienced encounters and transformation, either spiritual
or nonspiritual, which led them to formulate new outlooks of the world and
grow accustomed to new ways of life.
Second, we argue that participating in faith group meetings at Islamic
centers or in born-again Christian prayer meetings had a special impact on
the conversion processes. What is common between the two groups is that
both Islamic center meetings and born-again Christian meetings offered more
than simply the opportunity to learn the Qur’an or the Holy Bible. Filipina
domestics were also able to mingle with other Filipinos, enjoy Filipino dishes,
and engage in conversation in Tagalog or other Filipino dialects. In addition,
for Muslim converts, visiting the Islamic center was their one opportunity to
leave their employers’ homes and to be in a culturally familiar group. For the
born-again Christian converts, their churches, including the church villa and
church members’ private rooms, gave them a sense of being home.
However, whereas a born-again Christian found her church itself to
be the new home, a Muslim convert was likely to consider the employer’s
household to be her new home, at least, after a certain period of time. In

other words, it was the domestic worker’s level of intimacy in her relation-
ships with others that tended to change during the course of her religious
conversion that indicated to her what and where her home was. Muslim
converts found their ties to their employers’ families deepening as they
embraced the Islamic faith of their employers. Born-again Christian con-
verts grew closer to their compatriots as their faith and commitment to the
church solidified. In both cases of religious conversion, we are presented
with the subjective creation of comfortable homelike spaces and family-
like social relationships with others. Filipinas used this process to counter
the isolation, marginalization, and uncertainty that they faced as domestic
workers in the Gulf states.
In Dubai and Doha, two rapidly transforming multicultural cities, one
can witness no unified or even mainstream course of religious conversion
among its significant migrant population, including migrant domestic
workers. The cities’ steady development, the movement of people in and
out of both cities, the various religious activities of different denominations,
as well as the social groups and spaces of the individuals living there are
changing dynamically. We have situated the religious conversion phenom-
enon of Filipina domestic workers in this context of growth and change
and illustrated this occurrence using two specific cases. For most of these
migrants, even when the primary motive of the journey to the Gulf states
had been economic, in cities where a wide variety of encounters are likely to
happen, we may assume that meeting the household employers or compa-
triots on the street can influence future religious identity.
Acknowledgments
Field research in the UAE and Qatar was supported by the Japan Society for
the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Kakenhi Grant no. 20401007 (2008–2010)
and 23401014 (2011–2013). An earlier version of this chapter was pre-
sented at the Workshop on Gulf Migration, held at the Centre for Develop-
ment Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India, on August 27, 2013, and
at the 47th Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, New
Orleans, Louisiana, on October 12, 2013. The authors wish to thank the
participants of these conferences as well as Marina de Regt, Claudia Liebelt,
and Bina Fernandez for their insightful comments. We are deeply grateful
to our Filipino interviewees in the UAE and Qatar for having shared their
everyday lives and views with us.
Notes
1. Neither of us are born-again Christian or Muslim.
2. According to the Commission on Filipinos Overseas, the overseas
Filipino population in 2012 was presumed to exceed ten million—
nearly 10 percent of the total population of the Philippines (CFO,
2014). Most Filipinos with permanent resident status live in North
America; most Filipinos with temporary resident status live in the
Middle East, particularly in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, which
accounts for 56 percent of the total number of Filipinos temporarily
living overseas (CFO, 2014).
3. Interview with Fatima in Doha on March 3, 2012.
4. Interview with Fatima in Doha on March 3, 2012.
5. This was also reported by nondomestic Filipino workers employed
by companies. They said they felt less privileged than their Muslim
coworkers, who were allowed time to pray during their hours of
work, given goods and money at every opportunity, invited to vari-
ous events, approached in familiar ways, and most of all, had a greater
likelihood of contract renewal or being introduced to a prospective
employer at a different company.
6. Interview with Celine in Dubai on February 26, 2011.
7. Interview with Celine in Dubai on March 8, 2013.
8. We interviewed members of two other Filipino born-again groups,
and they told us the same thing regarding the types of domestics who
were active in their groups.
9. Interview with Celine in Dubai on March 8, 2013.
10. Unconfirmed reports suggested that born-again Christian groups
around the world actively seek out migrants as new converts, which
can be another factor that explains this conversion phenomenon. It
may be that born-again Christian groups make a deliberate effort to
reach out to migrants who are easier to approach and, being separated
from their own social networks, may be more easily persuaded to try
new things when compared to nonmigrants.
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CHAPTER 7
Caring for the Future in the

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Saudi and Filipino Women Making
Homes in a World of Movement
Nada Elyas and Mark Johnson
Introduction
T
his chapter explores the ways in which the care of the elderly in
home settings in Saudi Arabia involves ongoing reformulations
of home and family, as well as the increasing negotiation of forms
of intimate labor between citizens and migrant women in that country.
Specifically, we draw together two bodies of recent research: Elyas’s (2011)
study of the care of the elderly in Saudi Arabia and Johnson’s (2010) and his
late colleague Alicia Pingol’s (2010) study of migrant Filipino Muslims liv-
ing and working in that country.1 We show how encounters between Saudi
and Filipino women in this caregiving situation are concurrently shaped by
a number of processes: kinship, gender and generational dynamics in Saudi
Arabia and the Philippines, Saudi and Filipino women’s mobilities and their
changing relational positions across the life course, the different legal and
economic status that each woman occupies, and the invocation of Islam in
Saudi and Filipino women’s talk about and negotiations of intimate labor
within the home.
Care creates kinship (Borneman, 1997). The ethical bonds of mutual
care are not a natural or exclusive property of familial relations but
rather may be found in relations between all sorts of people who are not
deemed kin conventionally: understood in this way, family are the peo-
ple we care for. This insight has been extremely productive in opening up
142 O Nada Elyas and Mark Johnson
our understanding of the possibilities and limitations of care when con-

ceived heteronormatively in terms of putative “blood” or marital “affinity”
(e.g., Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004) thereby further extending feminist cri-
tiques concerning the way that care and caregiving have been gendered his-
torically (Hochschild, 1995; Ungerson, 2000). However, it leaves open the
question of whether or not and how and under what conditions an ethics of
care can create kinship for people involved in paid relationships of caregiv-
ing and the circumstances in which an ethics of care may be practiced with-
out entailing as its corollary a sense of affiliation (Constable, 2009). Studies
of paid relations of caregiving generally demonstrate that while the use of
kin terms provides a useful language for describing the affective exchanges
between caregiver and recipient, it does not fundamentally alter the rela-
tionship between them or obscure the wider processes that structure those
relationships (see, for example, Kay, 2013). Migrant caregivers who work
and live in the home of the person or people they are paid to care for further
experience the ambivalence of this caregiving relationship that may often
be characterized by disaffection and social distance, as well as by affective
attachment (Manalansan, 2010).
In this chapter, we attend to Moors and de Regt’s (2008) invitation to
further explore migrant care and domestic workers’ relationships in the
home with those they are employed by and care for, a subject that we still
know little about in the context of the Middle East and particularly in Saudi
Arabia. In doing so, we partially bracket both the sending states’ produc-
tion of their citizens as careful and caregiving labor and the receiving states’
involvement in the construal of migrant caregivers as members of the fam-
ily thereby abdicating responsibility for migrant domestic workers as paid
employees working in the home (see Rodriguez, 2010; Johnson and Wilcke,
forthcoming). Rather, we explore other processes that structure the rela-
tionship between, in this case, migrant women who provide paid care, the
elderly women they are paid to care for, and the other women, married
daughters-in-law involved in and managing the former’s intimate labors.
Migrant women and men also care for elderly men, but this paper focuses
primarily on migrant women who care for elderly women.
First, the chapter examines the way in which the care of the elderly in
Saudi Arabia is central to and discloses the processes of social change and
the retraditionalization of home, kinship, and gender norms in the country.
Second, the chapter focuses on migrant women involved in care and domes-
tic work and explores both employers’ and employees’ ways of talking about
their encounters within the home. Third, we recount one Filipino woman’s
Caring for the Future in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia O 143
account of her experience while caring for an elderly woman in Saudi Ara-
bia, which draws together some of the ways in which differently situated
women’s lives intersect as they craft and struggle to achieve their aspirations
of home and belonging in a world of both spatial and temporal movement.
In the conclusion, we return briefly to consider the way in which the Saudi
state, in particular, shapes and intervenes in the processes and relations of
intimate labor.
Throughout the chapter, we highlight both Saudi and Filipino women’s
movements and changing statuses across the life course as sisters, daughters,
wives, mothers, and grandmothers (Gardner, 2009). At marriage, Saudi
women often move away from the parental home and natal locale into a
marital home, which is likely to be in close proximity to, if not the actual
residence of, their husband’s parents, who they are expected to take on car-
ing responsibilities for as the parents grow older. Migrant Filipinas—and
it is migrant Filipino women rather than men that we are concerned with
here—leave husbands, children, siblings, and parents temporarily to take on
paid caring responsibilities for other people, their children, and/or elderly
parents. In this way, the Saudi and Filipino women who encounter each
other within the home, whether as kin or as employers/employees, not only
have experienced different types of movement away from their home but
also are positioned as caregivers in the households that they enter, though
the conditions of their entry, their investment in those homes, and the basis
on which they are able to establish and maintain their position are clearly
different. They are also broadly subject to gender regimes that place them in
a relationship of dependency and subordination to men.
The title of this chapter, “Caring for the Future in the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia,” also refers to the fact that for both Saudi and Filipino women, the
future is a significant part of the way in which they talk about the care they
take on and provide as wives/daughters-in-law and paid caregivers, respec-
tively. In the case of the latter, work abroad as a caregiver, which is often
described as a sacrifice in the present, is tied to future aspirations for them-
selves and their families—parents, siblings, and children especially. In the
case of the former, Saudi women’s care of elderly parents—and in this case,
elderly mothers-in-law in particular—is linked both to aspirations about
the making and reproduction of a good and honorable family and in antici-
pation of their shared position later in life with the older women that they
care for and eventually will come to replace in the home.
The parallels we draw in this chapter between Saudi and Filipino women
do not diminish the social differences that structure their encounter in Saudi
Arabia. Rather, as Lan (2006) has persuasively argued in her ethnography

of migrant domestic work in Taiwan, it is both the continuities and the dif-
ferences between and among women that can help us better understand the
dynamics of the relationships between them. Both Lan and, nearer to the
situation described here, de Regt (2009), writing about migrant domestic
worker employers in Yemen, disclose that one of the key issues for the latter
is to ensure that their employees are close but not too close. This dynamic
of both closeness and distance is best understood, we suggest, by accounting
precisely for similarities that, notwithstanding the objective social divisions
between employer and employee, not only occasion acts of identification
and ethical practices of care across the divide but also enable and engender
acts of distinction-making between them. In sum, in talking about Saudi
and Filipino women making homes in a world of movement (Rapport and
Dawson, 1998), we foreground not only their movements to and caregiv-
ing practices across different homes and families but also their struggles for
belonging across those homes that are frequently articulated in and through
claims to religious beliefs and appeals to a divinely inspired ethics of care
(Hooks, 2009).
Saudi Women Caring for Each Other across the Generations

We begin with Elyas’s (2011) study of seven elderly women and their families
in Medina that composed part of her research on the care of the elderly in
Saudi Arabia. Additionally, Elyas investigated the care of twenty elderly
women in a state-run care home. Our focus is on the care provided in a
family setting: with little state provision historically and virtually no private
or third-sector involvement, the family remains the primary locus of care
for the overwhelming majority of elderly people in Saudi Arabia. All but
one of the women had been widowed. The families were relatively wealthy,
and the women’s children were in general well educated and in professional
occupations. With the exception of one woman, who lived alone apart from
her housemaid, all the elderly women in the family settings lived in some
form of multigenerational arrangement—either in the same apartment/villa
or adjacent in the same building or its grounds. Of these six, four lived with
sons- and daughters-in-law; one lived with a temporarily resident son, as
well as their divorced daughter and her children, who had returned to the
parental home; and one lived in a home adjacent to her married daughter
and family. All the participating families employed one or more domestic
workers, a common practice in Saudi Arabia (Al-Tuwaijri, 2001) that we

discuss in further detail presently.
Processes of sedentarization, urbanization, and more contentiously,
“Westernization” have been associated with the decline of the extended fam-
ily and its replacement by nuclear family households in Saudi Arabia and the
wider region. However, as is evidenced by these seven families, the process is
variable and complex: household composition and residential location dif-
fer not only according to rural and urban boundaries but both historically
and contemporaneously according to class, occupation, religious affiliation,
and the like (Abu-Lughod, 1988; Doumato, 2000; Doumani, 2003; Eick-
elman, 2002). In writing about Riyadh, Al-Haddad (2003) contends that
although the number of nuclear families has increased, that does not negate
the affiliation of nuclear families to their extended families at both the rela-
tional and ideological levels.
In analyzing patterns of care among elderly women living in extended
family settings in Saudi Arabia, it is necessary to make two distinctions.
The first is the distinction between caregiving relatives (son, daughter, and
daughter-in-law, especially) and employees (housemaid, nurse). The sec-
ond is the division of caring roles (Froggat, 1990). Financial matters and,
where necessary, provision of a home were generally the contributions of
sons (Altorki, 1986; Qureshi and Walker, 1989). All the women in Elyas’s
study had at least one son, who either provided accommodation or handled
the elderly woman’s financial affairs, ensuring that bills were paid and so on.
Day-to-day personal care was managed and provided by female relatives,
predominantly daughters-in-law, with the assistance of migrant workers. In
keeping with conventions of patrilineality and patrilocality, coupled with
increased mobility and the relative infrequency of parallel cousin marriage
practices, married daughters often moved away from the parental home. It
is thus as “in-marrying” wives and daughters-in-law in particular that they
are most likely to take on caring responsibilities for older parents (see, for
example, Lan, 2006, for an analogous situation in Taiwan).
In three cases, a son’s responsibility for his elderly mother predated his
marriage; after marriage, his wife immediately became a cocaregiver. The
fact that marriage would potentially necessitate living with and taking on
practical caring responsibilities for the son’s parents was reportedly accepted
by the women. In fact, two of the women had long-term relationships of
coresidence and care with their mothers-in-law, one for 11 years and the
other for 26 years. Reflecting on the time spent together and the involve-
ment in day-to-day care, one woman said, “Sometimes, when I see her eyes
expressing upset, I ask him, ‘What’s wrong with your mother?’ He says,
‘Nothing, she’s fine.’ After 11 years of staying with her, I’ve come to know
her [better] than her son. While he goes to work, I spend most of the time
with her, eat and drink with her, so I know her better than [anyone else].”
While the relationship between mother and daughter-in-law has no
doubt been important historically (Altorki, 1986), it has perhaps become
even more significant as a site of contest and negotiation as a result of
broader social transformations. Eickelman (2002) notes the changing sta-
tus of women in the home as a corollary of the overall trend in the region
toward separate housing for nuclear families, even when living in close prox-
imity or in the same building or compound. The strengthening of the con-
jugal bond means that wives become more dependent on their husbands in
nuclear households but, at the same time, acquire higher status, a greater
role in decision making, and more involvement in their husbands’ activities.
The contradictory effects of these changes to women’s status in the home
reflect and are in turn shaped by broader social processes. Silvey (2004,
pp. 254–256) contends, for example, that the Saudi state has simulta-
neously encouraged women’s inclusion in higher education and “differential
participation” in the work force while, at the same time, reinforcing gender
normative ideologies and traditions that restrict women’s physical move-
ment and circumscribe their public roles (Doumato, 2000). Those contra-
dictory processes shape not only women’s demand for and relations with
migrant domestic workers but also their relationships with their mothers-
in-law by having increased status and potentially greater decision-making
power over care arrangements but still being subject to the intensification
of state-sanctioned discourses that position women as primary caregivers in
the home. Both are evident in Elyas’s observations.
One older woman, who said she saw less of her elder son than of her sec-
ond son, reported that her eldest son’s wife was apparently not on good terms
with her in-laws. Similarly, among the reasons given for entry into institu-
tional care was the reported conflict between a woman and her daughter-in-
law. One of the elderly residents in Elyas’s study had a son who was reportedly
willing to give her a home, but his mother rejected his offer because she did
not want to be “controlled” by her son’s wife. A member of the staff in the care
home told Elyas about another case that had attracted her attention:
Her son came to visit her for the first time in seven years . . . He had [been] mar-
ried and came to introduce his wife to her. After two months, he came to get her
out [of the care home] to stay with him in his house . . . He brought her back
[at her own request] after only two days because she was worried and refused to
stay in his house. I asked [her], “Why did [you not] stay in your son’s house?”
[She] replied, “My son’s wife was scared of me. She put the food in front of
me without speaking and went away, then my son took [the plate] back to the
kitchen. She put me in a separate room when she received her friends. When her
family visited her, she left me sitting with dates and coffee, away from them!”
It is significant that in this situation, recounted to Elyas secondhand,

the son reportedly visited his mother once in seven years and then only
after being married, at which point he considered the possibility that she
should live with him in their home. His wife was not entirely amenable to
this but in this case, she was only able to contest the care arrangement indi-
rectly. The perceived breakdown in the relationship between herself and her
mother-in-law and the violation of bonds of affiliation was deemed, by the
mother-in-law, to be the daughter-in-law’s fault rather than her son’s fault.
The previous accounts disclose the contradictory demands made on
women. They also highlight elderly women’s changing position during their
lifetime and their attempts to assert agency in the face of their altered status
in relationships with others, daughters-in-law included. While the role of
wife might be ended abruptly by widowhood, the role of mother remained—
but in altered form. Children grow up and move away, and mothers may
be brought into shared households with their son’s wives (or vice versa),
and gradually, caregivers become the cared for, with the mother’s right to
impose parental authority restrained by the reality of her dependence on
her son and daughter-in-law (Altorki, 1986). While in some cases older
and/or widowed women might still provide care for their offspring directly,
their role as caregivers is more often facilitated through relationships with
daughters-in-law and grandchildren. One of the women in Elyas’s study, for
example, had volunteered to care for her grandchildren in order to enable
her daughter-in-law to work.
Elderly women were likely to perceive themselves—and to wish to be
respected—as the teachers and advisors of less-experienced younger women.
Dutiful daughters-in-law would comment appreciatively on an older wom-
an’s patience and understanding in teaching them recipes and helping them
with chores they found difficult or distasteful. At the same time, comments
by some elderly women showed that they expected and appreciated tra-
ditional virtues in their daughters-in-law, including a degree of deference
toward themselves. In asserting these values, the women reconfirmed their
own identity as “good wives” who knew how things should be done and
maintained a measure of authority in the household.
Perceived favoritism on the part of the elderly woman, or unequal divi-

sions of care, could cause jealousies and resentments—not necessarily
toward the elderly woman herself, but among other family members, espe-
cially between daughters and daughters-in-law. In one case, a daughter-in-
law described to Elyas a daughter’s jealous outburst over the fact that the
latter’s mother had spent her final days living with and being cared for by
the former. In another case, a woman, who as daughter-in-law was the regu-
lar “live-in” caregiver for her husband’s elderly mother, disclosed to Elyas her
jealousy and resentment of the woman’s married daughter, who lived some
distance away: “I used to feel [that] she [her mother-in-law] treated me like
a daughter, but she soon changed . . . when her real daughter came to visit
her . . . although I [have dealt] with her throughout her life . . . [when her
real daughter came to visit] I told myself, ‘I’m not her real daughter.’”
In general, the care relation between mothers and daughters-in-law creates
tension and conflict but also bonds of affection that are in part born out of
the recognition of the shared positions that they have passed through or will
come to occupy in the process of claiming status and belonging in homes and
among people that they must make their own. On the one hand, daughters-
in-law recounted especially the forbearance shown to them as new brides and
the encouragement they received as new entrants into a family household. One
woman tearfully recalled how she had benefitted from the comfort and wis-
dom of her “big-hearted and broad-minded” mother-in-law, who had died
one month earlier. On the other hand, women talked openly about futures in
which, as one woman put it, “in the days to come, I will be in her position” and
more proverbially in the sense that, as other women put it, “you reap what you
sow” or “do as you would be done by.” As another elderly woman’s daughter-
in-law put it, “I have a duty to look after her, she is a trust . . . Then, if I have
sons, if I treat her badly, my daughters-in-law will treat me worse later.”
To a great extent, the giving of care was an expression of love and of
gratitude for the care previously given by the parent or the parent-in-law. In
some cases, this went beyond the apparent and tangible reciprocity of help
with childcare and housework to a more intangible sense that an elderly
woman’s presence was in some way responsible for the general good fortune
of the family and that in caring for her, one was caring for not just a future
self but also the future of one’s home: “God sent us an open-ended bless-
ing on our home, like giving us healthy children, plenty of food, and my
husband’s success in expanding his business . . . because of the blessing of an
old woman inside our house who . . . is continuously praying, supplicating
for us, there’s light in our home.”
Migrant Care Workers in Saudi Arabia

The increasing reliance on migrant workers to stand in for and supplement
family care for older people, especially women, is by no means unique to
Saudi Arabia. However, people who provide paid care for the elderly are
generally recruited, employed, and sponsored as domestic workers rather
than as caregivers. In practice, women who are recruited as domestic work-
ers may, simultaneously or sequentially, be expected to undertake any num-
ber of different jobs in the home, ranging from cooking and cleaning to
caring for children and older people. One consequence of this is that it is
impossible to determine precisely how many migrants in Saudi Arabia are
involved directly or indirectly in providing care for the elderly in home
settings.
We should add that migrant men hired as drivers and gardeners may also
be involved in this type of care. Elyas recalls precisely such a situation when
her mother was taking care of her elderly grandfather. Elyas’s grandfather
was a trader by profession, so in order to keep him active, Elyas’s mother
organized a small “shop” in the house. The migrant driver assisted the
elderly man and kept a watchful eye over him while Elyas’s mother would
keep stock and fill the shelves. As his condition deteriorated, both the driver
and the housemaid were directly involved in his personal care under the
watchful eye of her mother. The relationship Elyas recalls discloses both
the ways in which people employed in the home may be drawn gradually
into care work and the ways the affective relationships between caregivers
and the people and families that they provide care for develop over time.
We further discuss some of the dynamics of this relationship presently by
drawing both on Elyas’s interviews and encounters with older people and
migrant domestic workers in home settings and on Johnson and Pingol’s
broader ethnographic work and encounters with domestic workers in Saudi
Arabia and the Philippines.
“Remember before God That She Is a Human Being”

As indicated previously, all the households in Elyas’s study employed at
least one and, in some cases, two or three housemaids, while two of the
families employed qualified nurses to meet the needs of elderly women for
more specialized medical monitoring and care. One of the women worked
as a freelancer, having absconded from her previous employer. The women
employed in these households were all either Indonesian or Filipina. From
what Elyas was able to observe during visits to the elderly women’s homes
and based on what was reported to her by five migrant domestic workers,
as well as one migrant nurse that she interviewed and talked to more infor-
mally, the families who participated in her study appeared to be both good
and generous employers.
Five of the six migrant women working in these homes were married.
Two women were accompanied by their husbands, who were employed as
drivers, as well as their children, who lived with them. Others had relatives
working in the same household or nearby, and visits between members of
the employing families provided opportunities for their employees to social-
ize, too. In one case, a couple had actually met while in service together and
had asked their employer for permission to marry. In this case, asking the
employer for permission to marry was an acknowledgment by the migrant
woman that her employer had become a surrogate family in the absence of
her own parents, who died before she had migrated. Though unacknowl-
edged, it also confirms the position conferred by the state on employers,
men in particular, as guardians with authority over and responsibility for
the dependents in their household, including wives, children, and migrant
domestic workers. The worker told Elyas, “When I wanted to marry our
Filipino driver, I told [my employers]. Then the father and mother of this
family, who [act] as my parents, arranged our marriage, then they celebrated
with a party . . . a grand wedding, and everyone brought me a special gift. I
couldn’t believe that it [had happened to me].”
As Johnson (2010) and Pingol (2010) also found for Filipino migrant
women in Saudi Arabia, being accompanied by husbands and, where pos-
sible, children not only enhances one’s status in the eyes of employers and
among fellow migrants but also practically facilitates movement in public
outside the home/workplace. As for Saudi women, this level of mobility
can be extremely difficult to obtain without an accompanying male relative.
That does not, of course, mean that an accompanying husband is unequivo-
cally positive for all migrant women. One of the migrant women in Elyas’s
study, whose employer sponsored her husband to join her in Saudi Arabia
to work in their home at her request, disclosed that she had found her
husband troublesome; she eventually divorced him, and he subsequently
returned home.
While the migrant women Elyas met in her study seemed to have gener-
ally experienced good working conditions, the self-confessed “escapee” from
another household that worked for one family is a reminder that other work-
ers experience low wages and poor working conditions. As far as migrants
are concerned and as they readily acknowledge, attaining a position with
a good employer—who pays decent wages on time, limits the number of

hours worked daily, provides regular days off, enables and facilitates contact
with family at home, and generally treats their employees with respect—is
a matter of luck rather than a legally enforced expectation (Johnson and
Wilcke, forthcoming; Silvey, 2004; Fernandez and de Regt, Chapter 1, in
this book). For the majority of migrant women in domestic work, even
those with relatively good employers, undertaking paid employment as a
foreign resident in someone else’s home is a relationship that is filled with
ambivalence and contradictions.
We noted previously that the elderly women in Elyas’s study had to fre-
quently negotiate changing relationships and statuses across their life course.
One role asserted by these women that also shifted over the life course was
as employer and/or household manager, guiding and directing housemaids
in their work. Older women appeared to enjoy being seen to make deci-
sions and commanding obedience, if only in something small such as the
clearing of a tray. At the same time, the elderly participants in Elyas’s study
had grown up and married in the days before the employment of domestic
labor became commonplace. They were used to looking after themselves
and others and, to the extent that it was possible, wanted to remain active
and useful. It was a point of honor for them not to leave all the work to the
housemaid. By sharing some responsibilities—“I wash, and she irons,” one
woman stated—they retained a part of their former identity.
Older women were as likely to refer to their migrant domestic care
workers as “companions” as much as “housemaids,” and they frequently
expressed affection for them. One older woman who lived alone with her
housemaid—an Indonesian woman who had worked for the family for
23 years—said of the latter, “She is my daughter, very dear to me” and
went on to speak of her absolute trust in the woman concerned, “[I trust
her] with my whole house when I travel.” Another woman had cared for
her driver’s wife, who was also a domestic worker in the home, during her
pregnancies and had nursed his daughter when the latter had asthma. The
values underlying this care were articulated by her as follows: “Good dealing
is the key [to] life. This includes the housemaid; you have to respect them
and don’t [look down on her]—remember [that] before God . . . she is a
human being.”
Caregivers also expressed considerable affection for the elderly women
in their care. These feelings were clear in their responses concerning their
appreciation for the kindness and consideration shown to them on the part
of their employers. As one Filipina explained, “I love my job because they
are kind and pleasant to me. She [the old lady] speaks to me softly and
nicely, which makes me love them and be kind to them.” Interviewees com-
monly referred to their employers in terms such as “our mother” or “Mama,”
and while this may to some extent be a conventional form of reference to
acknowledge the older woman’s status in the household, it also appeared
in some cases to reflect a sense of identification with the employing family,
where the older woman being cared for reminded the caregiver of her own
parents left behind; in this way, employers became partial surrogates for the
women who take care of them. One of the Filipino caregivers employed as a
nurse told Elyas, “Sometimes I wish I could take care of my mother like I do
for ‘Mama,’ and sometimes I cry about it when I talk to my [own] mother,
and [I tell her] ‘I’m very sorry, mother.’”
The use of familial terms of reference and descriptions of migrant
domestic workers as being “part of the family” is widely reported in the
broader literature and has also been widely critiqued (Moors, 2003). On
an everyday level, Ayalon (2009) describes how Israeli families who employ
Filipino home care workers treat the migrant as “part of the family” on one
level but nevertheless simultaneously maintain a certain distance that pre-
serves the status and independence of the care recipient. Thus few migrant
workers, she found, develop truly intimate relationships with their employ-
ers. Liebelt’s (2011) ethnography of Filipina care workers in Israel further
complicates routine claims about care workers being “one of the family” in
disclosing how migrant employees reported that bonds of affection did not
conceal the power that employers wielded and may in fact pose dangers
for them when drawn into or becoming a source of conflict among family
members who may be jealous or resentful of a paid caregiver usurping their
own position. Moreover, “The warning that one should retain a ‘profes-
sional emotional distance’ from employers and their families, which was
propagated by many long-term carers, often stemmed from severe disap-
pointments and emotional injuries” (Liebelt, 2011, p. 87).
The social distance between employers and employees reported else-
where was likewise observed by Elyas in both home and institutional set-
tings and was also reported by Filipino domestic workers to Johnson and
Pingol. Boundaries were created and maintained in implicit and explicit,
as well as gentle and extreme ways, which reinforced and sometimes chal-
lenged the social divisions and hierarchies between employer and employee.
One example of the way social distance is reinforced is during Eid celebra-
tions. Eid celebrations following Ramadan distill many of the ambivalences
women face as paid domestic workers/caregivers in the home and reveal
the parallel but divergent positions occupied by them, as well as the set of
demands faced by Saudi and Filipino women that draw them together but
also divide them as employers and employees in the home. Eid al-Fitr is not
only an important religious occasion but also a key event during which to
“display”—that is, not simply to do the things that make families but to be
seen doing the things that families are meant to do (i.e., publically perform-
ing the often stereotyped ideals of affection and solidarity; Finch, 2007;
Dermott and Seymour, 2011). In the Saudi context especially, this entails,
in Faubion and Hamilton’s terms (2007), performing sumptuary kinship—
that is, consumption events that display the material success and solidarity,
attributed to divine blessing and providence, of extended families across
the generations. These ritual occasions place enormous demands on women
as wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law who are responsible for organiz-
ing and orchestrating these events, with the behind-the-scenes preparations
carried out largely by domestic workers. The migrant workers that Johnson
and Pingol spoke to routinely stated that their employers’ demands were
the greatest at this time of the year, and they all reported being called upon
frequently to work long hours for days at a stretch without a break; migrant
advocacy groups report that there is a noticeable increase in the number
of absconding domestic workers during Ramadan. Muslim domestic/care
workers, however, report that they are more likely to take on the extra work
during festivities without complaint both because it confirms their devotion
as Muslims and because of their own nostalgic longing for celebrations in
their home place among family and friends.
Gatherings and social visitations between Saudi families and friends dur-
ing religious festivities also provide occasions for domestic workers to leave
their employer’s home and enjoy conviviality among other domestic work-
ers who may be coethnics, if not kin, in the homes of their employer’s rela-
tions. However, just as Saudi employers’ celebrations are divided spatially
in the home by gender—men in one room and women in another—and/
or for the host in particular, shuttling back and forth from the kitchen to
oversee preparations, so too are employees’ celebrations divided by unwrit-
ten and largely unspoken but nonetheless observed boundaries that sepa-
rated employers and employees in the home, with the latter’s celebrations
confined spatially and temporally subject to the requirements of the former.
The boundaries between employers and employees are further imple-
mented and marked in the custom of Eid gift giving. Employers reportedly
gave generous gifts to their employees at Eid, but the giving was deemed
an act of benevolence or charity toward a subordinate rather than a mutual
exchange of gifts and was not reciprocated. As one elderly woman’s house-
maid told Elyas, “Oh! No . . . I am [too] poor [a] woman to give her [gifts].
She doesn’t need it; she has everything.” Migrant domestic workers did have
their own obligations to give gifts to their own family and friends at home
in the Philippines: for them, as for their Saudi employers, Eid is an impor-
tant occasion to “do” and “display” family, though at a distance. If social
hierarchies and divisions between employer and employee were effectively
reestablished at this important event, it was also—in keeping with the struc-
ture of rituals in general—an occasion for subordinates to articulate among
each other those “hidden transcripts” of disaffection and resistance through
gossip about the people they worked for and criticism of what some deemed
the material excesses of their employer’s festivities, which they compared to
their own more modest but no less spiritually blessed celebrations.
Making Home and the Struggle for Belonging: One Woman’s Story
In the final part of this chapter, we recount the story of one woman whom
Johnson met in Manila in July 2008. The story draws together a num-
ber of the themes we have discussed concerning the spatial and tempo-
ral movements that shape women’s lives variously across the life course. It
demonstrates the way that homes and families are literally and metaphori-
cally constructed and lived through regular and repeated sojourns across
the world. It speaks to the possibilities and limitations of the affective rela-
tions created in a commoditized caregiving situations and is a testament to
individual persistence and fortitude, as well as the way in which women’s
capacity to act is both enabled and constrained by the demands of and their
commitments to family, parents, siblings, and children (see also Mahdavi,
Chapter 4, in this book). Finally, it demonstrates the way in which religion
(and Islam, in particular) provides a language for contesting dispossession
and asserting ethical claims to care, as well as establishing a sense of belong-
ing and recognition—all of which are significant, especially for people in
contexts where they have few legal rights and little or no recourse to formal
means of redress.
Hadja Miriam is a Filipino Muslim woman from Basilan in the Southern
Philippines. Hadja Miriam and her husband now live in Manila, follow-
ing her return from several sojourns abroad as a care worker and domestic
helper, first in Saudi Arabia and later Qatar, from the mid-1980s to the
late 1990s. After an initial three-year period working as caregiver for an
elderly woman in Dammam (discussed presently), Hadja Miriam returned
to the Philippines to pursue a nursing degree. She subsequently gave this

up to look after her own children as well as those of her sister when the
latter departed to work in Saudi Arabia as a nurse. Her sister’s training as a
nurse had been partially paid for by Hadja Miriam’s previous work in Dam-
mam. A couple years later, with Hadja Miriam’s daughter now in school,
she initially returned to Riyadh but absconded from her employer after four
months because he had withheld her wages. She then found employment as
a domestic worker in a large household in Qatar, where she stayed until her
return to the Philippines in 1997. Hadja Miriam conveys a sense of pride
in her achievements as a former migrant worker as well as a sense of regret
that she was unable to fulfill her ambition to complete her own nursing
studies. Hadja Miriam’s ambitions were only realized vicariously through
her younger sister the nurse and, more recently, through Hadja Miriam’s
daughter who works as a medical technician in Asir.
Hadja Miriam’s first job at the age of 23 was as a care worker for an
elderly woman, the widowed mother of a wealthy businessman in Dam-
mam. While her primary responsibility was to provide care for the older
woman, she also undertook other work in the home. As she put it, “Kasi
[because] you are there to work, you have to [do what you are told], what-
ever your employers ask.” Hadja Miriam traveled with the family to the
United States and Europe where they stayed in grand hotels and homes.
Though she recalls those travels with nostalgia, her life and work were not
without incident, as she disclosed when asked her about her relationship
with the woman she cared for:
At first she hated me so much. For one month, two months, she didn’t like me.
She said I was just a converted Muslim, not a real Muslim. She didn’t even want
me to touch her clothes. “You are dirty, I don’t want you.” But I just prayed,
“Lord please . . . Ya Allah! Ya Allah!” Then every time I finished my work, I would
sit down on the sofa beside the family. I read my Qur’an. I cried and said, “I want
to go back to the Philippines.” I asked them, “Why are you like this? Why is your
grandparent like this? I came to Saudi . . . I am a poor Filipino; I wanted to work
for you because . . . you are the . . . model of Islam. You are Arab people. The
Qur’an came down here in Saudi Arabia, and you know the law of Allah very
well. So why do you treat your helper like this?” They just laughed at me and said,
“You are not a Muslim.”
One day, I read Suratul Waqi’ah when the old woman passed, she had woken
up, around ten o’clock. I remember, I read that word. She asked me, “What did
you say?” I said, “Mama”—By then I had already learned a little Arabic—“Mama,
it’s a word from . . .” “The Qur’an?” she asked. I said, “Yes! I am reading from the
Qur’an.” She didn’t speak English, she only spoke Arabic. I said, “Yes! I am a real
Muslim. I am not a fake Muslim, I am not a converted Muslim, I am a Muslim.

My great, great grandparents were Muslim. I am a Muslim!”
She hugged me tightly and said, “You are a Muslim. You are a very good
woman, you can read the Qur’an, unlike me, I cannot read the Qur’an.” She
kissed me, and then she cried. She said, “You are my daughter.” Then she invited
all her friends, older women to come to a party. She bought me a dress to dress up
in. Then when the party started, she called for me to come and meet her friends.
She told everybody that I was her second daughter. “She is a Muslim, she is a good
Muslim, she can read the Qur’an,” she said. From then on, she would not let me
sleep in my own room. She wanted me to sleep in the bed beside her, but because
I was only a helper, I was not comfortable sleeping in her bed. Instead, once she
was asleep, little by little, I would slip down to sleep on the floor. It was not very
comfortable. In the morning, she threw money around the room. I gathered all
the money together and put it in one place, and when I left the room, I said,
“Mama, your money is there.” That’s my experience [laughs gently].
There are a number of points that can be drawn from Hadja Miriam’s
moving account of her early experiences. The first is that for migrant Mus-
lim Filipinos like Hadja Miriam, the denial of their faith is felt and experi-
enced as a fundamental challenge and violation of their personhood. The
humiliation and righteous indignation occasioned by this denial serves as
both a catalyst for and a means of expressing social agency in these diasporic
situations where they might otherwise simply comply with and bear the
everyday humiliations of subordination.
The second point relates to Hadja Miriam’s strategic use of space within
the home. The account she gives of her actions and her claims to recogni-
tion are not, in Scott’s (1990) terms, “hidden transcripts,” though that is
a regular feature of migrant domestic workers’ everyday acts of resistance
(Constable, 2007): rather, her actions and claims are direct and unmistak-
able. She sits on the sofa beside her employers, cries openly, and expresses
her desire to return to the Philippines—that is, a thinly veiled threat to leave
the family and walk away from her place of employment. As a guest and a
stranger from another country (“I came to Saudi, I am a poor Filipino”), she
suggests that there is a not unreasonable expectation that they might treat
her accordingly—that is, with both the Arab cultural norms of hospital-
ity and the ethical demands of Islam. In effect, she returns their challenge
by indirectly asking them to demonstrate that they are actually genuine
Muslims. Though she is at first rebuffed, her repeated recitations from the
Qur’an forces recognition: these verses relocate the intimate space of
the home within the sacred space of revelation and resituates their encoun-
ters and the glaring inequalities of power within a moral universe where
Hadja Miriam, no less than others, is entitled to be treated in accordance

with Allah’s will.
Hadja Miriam clearly enjoyed recounting how the elderly woman finally
conceded defeat and publically endorsed Miriam’s claims to be a Mus-
lim, in the process, admitting that she herself was unable to read from the
Qur’an. Miriam was also moved by the elderly woman’s claim to adopt
her as a second daughter. Miriam explained that the elderly woman had a
son, with whom she lived, and a married daughter who had moved some
distance away to her husband’s home in Qassim. The older woman missed
her daughter very much. Her literal and metaphorical embrace of Miriam,
who at the time had been a young woman, the gifts of clothing, as well as
the invitation to share her bed/room might reasonably be interpreted as
evidence of a nostalgic desire to reenact and again experience some sort of
close affective, if not maternal, bond. Miriam’s acknowledged discomfort at
sleeping in the same bed and her caution about the money suggests more
ambivalent effects. For Miriam, the older woman’s embrace was significant
because it was finally an acknowledgment of Miriam’s presence. However,
she also subsequently recalled how she traveled with the woman to live in a
palace in Paris and the shared pleasures of long summer days spent walking
in the gardens together. The older woman, she disclosed, also sheltered her
to some extent from the demands of the rest of the household and from her
son’s first wife in particular; reading between the lines, we might surmise
some strained, if not antagonistic, relationship between the older woman
and her son’s first wife, played out over control of Miriam’s labor in the
home.
Though the practical protection and delimitation of Miriam’s work
had no doubt been significant, this was no fairy-tale ending. Becoming an
adopted daughter refigured but did not completely transform her situation:
she was still, as she contended, an employee. Miriam cared for the woman
for a period of three years. She said she left because her employer, the wom-
an’s son, reneged on a promise to give her leave to make the pilgrimage to
Mecca. Miriam, like the woman she cared for, was in law, as in practice,
subordinate to the authority of the woman’s son. Miriam recounted how
for many years after her departure, the woman still sent gifts to her at Eid.
However, she did not regret leaving. Some years later, her employer in Qatar
helped her make the hajj and visit her sister who had, in the meantime,
begun working as a nurse in Mecca. She returned for good to the Philip-
pines following the death of her mother shortly thereafter.
Conclusion: Divided Futures and the State

In this chapter, we have examined some of the dynamics of caregiving rela-
tionships between Saudi and Filipino women in the home, focusing on a par-
ticular group of Saudi and Filipino women caregivers. It should be noted that
there are others who do not conform to the sort of heteronormative vision
conventionally expected and presented here. Our aim in disclosing the conti-
nuities and divisions that separate these Saudi and Filipino women’s gendered
positioning in caring relations is to account more fully for both connection
and care, as well as for boundary marking and distinction-making practices
that reinforce and extend hierarchies of nationality, race, and class.
In keeping with the global care chain literature (Hochschild, 2000;
Parreñas, 2008; Yeates, 2009), though inflected in socially specific ways,
both Saudi and Filipino women share gender normative expectations about
women’s caregiving roles and, for different reasons, with different resources
and different affects, leave one set of familial attachments and responsibili-
ties in order to take on another. Saudi women leave natal families to take
on caring responsibilities in their husband’s extended family as mothers for
their children and as daughters-in-law for elderly parents—work that they
in some cases do in addition to paid employment outside of the home. Fili-
pino women leave families in the Philippines—parents and siblings, as well
as husbands and children—in order to take on paid care work in another’s
home in Saudi Arabia. While distanced socially and spatially, especially in
the case of Filipinas, neither set of women permanently leave their natal
families. Both retain ongoing ties, obligations, and caregiving responsibili-
ties of one sort or another even at a distance; recent work on transnational
motherhood among Filipinos has considerably complicated some of the
original assumptions in the care chain literature about the impact of sepa-
ration on migrants’ “left-behind” families and has disclosed the rich and
varied ways that migrant women do and display family, enabled partly by
new forms of media (McKay, 2007; Madianou and Miller, 2012). The latter
includes not only monetary and other material remittances but also regular
and often daily involvement in children’s, partner’s, and parent’s lives via cell
phones and, where accessible, interactions via the Internet.
The crucial difference between Saudi and Filipino women is the spa-
tial and temporal disjuncture between the pasts and the futures that each
are invested in and caring for. Migrant domestic/care workers enable Saudi
women—as wives, mothers, daughters and daughters-in-law, in particular—
to take up their position and care for their own and others’ futures in the
home, a place that is meant and intended ideally for them and that they
can make their own. As we have suggested, while the ambivalence between
daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law in this situation is evident, it is pre-
cisely the recognition of both their shared pasts and their future positions
that creates the conditions for mutuality of care, even if it is not always
forthcoming or realized in practice.
Migrant domestic care workers may also partially experience these forms
of recognition in employer’s homes, though this appears to be more often
the case from older women they care for rather than from women who are
more proximate to them generationally—that is, older mothers/mothers-
in-law/grandmothers rather than Saudi women employers who are wives,
daughters, and daughters-in-law. There is some evidence that domestic care
workers may identify with older women as a kind of surrogate parent, while
older women, as seen for example in a number of the cases described here,
may nostalgically embrace their caregivers as surrogate daughters in the
physical absence of their own. As we have indicated here and as others have
observed, those bonds are always contingent and do not obscure the broader
conditions of work under caregivers’ labor or under the broader social divi-
sions and prejudices of race and class that in Miriam’s case (detailed previ-
ously) were only ever partially overcome by recognition, which had been
compelled by the force of her convictions, of her shared faith and sense of
entitlement to belonging. Crucially, however, the relations between Saudi
and Filipino women are not future oriented; the caregiver-cum-surrogate
daughter is never intended to occupy the position of the woman cared
for, precisely because her future as a wife, mother, and daughter-in-law is
deemed to lie—and indeed, from the perspective of both the citizen women
and the state especially, must always lie—elsewhere.
As others have observed (Silvey, 2004), the state has facilitated the entry
of domestic/care workers and ensured conditions of employment that are
overwhelmingly weighted in favor of employers and against the interests of
employees in ways that ensure the ongoing retraditionalization of kinship,
family, and gender by means of paid reproductive and affective care. Else-
where, the gendered consequences of the privatization of care for women in
particular have been attributed to the rise of neoliberalism and the rollback
of the welfare state (Ungerson, 2000; Misra, Woodring, and Merz, 2006).
In Saudi Arabia, where state responsibility for the care of the elderly has
only recently been added to the agenda, government discourse that seeks to
“strengthen the role of the family in care of the elderly” is less about out-
sourcing the care of its aging population than, as the Riyadh Declaration
(Health Ministers’ Council, 2009) puts it, the need to “stir up the family
coherence” in the face of perceived threats to the family from globalization,
the Internet, and new economic systems.
Likewise, the temporal and spatial disjuncture between Saudi and Fili-
pino caregivers’ futures is a specific outcome of state policy. On the one
hand, the separation that most migrant caregivers experience from family,
husbands, and children in particular (Anderson, 2000; Bakan and Stasiulis,
1997) is the product of migration policies that are class differentiated. On
the other hand, relations between employers and employees—even when
relatively long term, close, and characterized by an ethics and mutuality of
care that may be taken as a condition and hallmark of kinship (Borneman,
1997)—are divided by the temporal delimitation on migrant workers in
general in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. To date, no official age limitation
has been placed on migration, and migrants can theoretically work for as
long as a Saudi sponsor is willing to employ them and sponsor their employ-
ee’s stay in the country. However, only 1 percent of nonnationals are age 65
and over (Gulf Labour Markets and Migration, 2013). In a situation where
citizenship and, to a large extent, permanent residency continue to remain
tied to blood (jus sanguinis) and marriage, migrant caregivers are likely to
remain foreign residents, never immigrants, just as they must remain forever
fictive daughters, never daughters-in-law, who, through choice and compul-
sion, look toward a future of growing old and receiving care back in the
Philippines in the only place that they are able to call home.
Note
1. Elyas’s doctoral investigations are described further presently. John-
son’s and Pingol’s research was part of a larger project titled, “In the
Footsteps of Jesus and the Prophet: Sociality, Caring and the Reli-
gious Imagination in the Filipino Diaspora” (Johnson and Werbner,
2010). The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council, United Kingdom, within the framework of the Diaspora,
Migration and Identities Research Programme (grant ref. AH/
E508790/1/APPID:123592). As part of the broader research project
with migrant Filipinos from all walks of life, Johnson and Pingol met
with and talked to more than eighty people in Saudi Arabia and the
Philippines who were currently or previously employed as domestic
laborers or related professions in private homes in Saudi Arabia.
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CHAPTER 8
“Shall We Leave or Not?”

Ethiopian Women’s Notions of Home and
Belonging and the Crisis in Yemen
Marina de Regt
Introduction
T
he political events that have taken place in the Middle East and
North Africa since 2011 have had a significant impact on popula-
tion movements in the region. An unprecedented flow of refugees
has left Syria since the start of the civil war; Tunisian and Egyptian youth
have increasingly tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea, and the Libyan
Tuareg people moved to Mali when Gaddafi’s regime fell. Migrants and ref-
ugees from outside the region, residing in countries where the Arab Spring
took place, were also affected but received much less media attention. When
the political crisis broke out in Yemen,1 I thought about what would hap-
pen to the migrant domestic workers whom I had interviewed for my post-
doctoral research.2 Yemen has been a recipient of migrants and refugees
from the Horn of Africa since the 1990s, and a large majority of Somali,
Ethiopian, and Eritrean women in Yemen work as domestics (see de Regt,
2008a, 2009, 2010). On the Internet, I read about the large-scale dismissal
of domestic workers after the violent crackdowns on peaceful demonstra-
tions in Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, in March 2011 (IRIN News, 2011). Many
Yemeni families employing domestic workers moved back to their villages
to escape the violence in the city, and expatriates left the country because
international offices and businesses had reduced their staff. It reminded me
of the situation in Lebanon during the 2006 war, when migrant domes-
tic workers were victims of the war, left behind in apartments when their
employers went abroad to escape the violence.
166 O Marina de Regt
Concerned, I called two Ethiopian domestic workers with whom I

had remained in touch. They were happy to hear from me and reassured
me that they were fine. The situation in Yemen was not good, but they
assured me that they had not personally been affected by the violence.
The biggest problem was the economic situation; everything had become
expensive, and their salaries were falling short. Haymanut told me that
she would leave Yemen in a couple of months to get married in Ethiopia.
She had been living in Yemen for more than ten years, and it was time for
her to get settled. I was surprised that she could leave the country, as she
had been in Yemen undocumented for years and would have to pay a large
penalty in order to obtain an exit visa. Mebrat, on the other hand, said
that she would stay in Yemen regardless of what happened. She considered
Yemen her second home and had nothing to go back to in Ethiopia. With
a permanent residence permit and a relatively good job, she had no reason
to leave.
In this chapter, I will describe and analyze the impact of the Yemeni crisis
on Ethiopian domestic workers with reference to the key notions of this
book—namely, “the home” and “the world.” I argue that notions of home
and belonging have changed over time and that this becomes particularly
clear in times of crisis. While most of the women initially saw Yemen as a
place of temporary work and residence abroad and held onto the idea of
returning home (to Ethiopia) one day, the longer they stayed, the more
Yemen became their second home. I link their notions of home and belong-
ing to their employment status as contract workers or freelancers and to
their legal status as documented or undocumented migrants. Freelancers
had better control over their working and living conditions and were able
to build a (social) life outside of their workplace, affecting the extent to
which they felt at home in Yemen. In addition, they were often undocu-
mented and therefore forced to remain in the country for longer. With the
advent of the political crisis in Yemen, it became easier for undocumented
migrants to leave the country. In this chapter, I show that the Yemeni crisis
did not affect women working as domestics equally; whether or not women
decided to leave depended on their employment status, which was in some
cases, related to their residence status, which in turn affected their notions
of home and belonging.
I will begin with a short theoretical section on the notions of home and
belonging, in general, and among migrant domestic workers, in particular.
I will then provide background information on Ethiopian women’s migra-
tion as domestics to Yemen. This is followed by a section in which I present
“Shall We Leave or Not?” O 167
a number of women and the various ways in which they responded to the
crisis. In the fourth section, I describe how women’s employment status
(as contract workers or freelancers) impacted the ways in which they were
affected by the crisis. In conclusion, I return to the theoretical notions of
home and belonging. The chapter is based on longitudinal research follow-
ing a number of Ethiopian women over a period of ten years (2003–2014)
and on four short fieldwork trips to Ethiopia and Yemen in the 2011–2014
period.3
Changing Notions of Home and Belonging

In the past two decades, a large body of literature has seen the light about
migrants’ notions of belonging and their conceptions of home (see, for
example, Rouse, 1991; Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Szanton Blanc, 1994;
Brah, 1996; Ahmed, 1999; Al-Ali and Koser, 2002). It has become clear
that “home” is much more than a physical and fixed place, more than “the
place where one lives, the place where one’s family lives or one’s native
country” (Ahmed, 1999, p. 338). The meaning of home is closely related
to notions of belonging; being at home is a matter of how one feels or how
one might fail to feel (p. 338). Most studies about notions of home and
belonging use a transnational perspective, emphasizing the long-distance
relationships that migrants maintain with their home communities and
families and the ways in which these relationships change over time. In
these studies, home is often perceived as a space between “here and there”
(Rouse, 1991; Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Szanton Blanc, 1994; Al-Ali and
Koser, 2002, p. 6).
Some scholars emphasize the possible empowering and liberating
aspects of the increased international circulation of people, goods, and
ideas and point to the creation of new transnational cultures, identities,
and communities. Others question the overly positive interpretations of
transnationalism and emphasize the reproduction of social inequalities
in migration. Guarnizo and Smith (1998, p. 6) make a plea for studying
transnationalism from below “to discern how this process affects power
relations, cultural constructions, economic interactions, and more gener-
ally, social organization at the level of the locality.” One of the contribu-
tions of the study of transnationalism from below is that it has become
clear that transnational mobility is not equally accessible to all migrants
(Mahler, 1998, p. 78; Moors, 2003, p. 387). Many migrants are unable
to stay in touch with their families and communities back home, let alone
return home. This affects their conceptions of home and their notions
of belonging. In addition to transnational fields and practices, migrants’
living conditions before and after migration should be taken into account
when studying concepts of home and belonging (Al-Ali and Koser,
2002, p. 6).
Within the study of migrant domestic workers in the Middle East, very
little attention has been paid to migrant domestic workers’ relationships
with their relatives “back home” and domestic workers’ notions of belong-
ing. The emphasis in most studies has been on the living and working
conditions of domestic workers. An exception is Gamburd’s (2000) work
on the transnational ties of Sri Lankan domestic workers who worked in
the Middle East, but her focus is more on the impact of migration on
families back home and on returned women than on women’s notions
of belonging. In research on Filipina domestic workers in Asia, a much
stronger transnational perspective can be discerned (see, for example, Bar-
ber, 1997; Constable, 1999; Yeoh and Huang, 2000; Asis, Huang, and
Yeoh, 2004). Asis, Huang, and Yeoh (2004, p. 199) argue that the migra-
tion of domestic workers has distinctive characteristics because they leave
their own families and households to take up paid work in the families
of their employers. This affects the ways in which they themselves and
their families renegotiate family ideals, gender identities, and family rela-
tionships (p. 199). Their transnational relationships, however, are affected
not only by the fact that domestic workers work inside the homes of their
employers but also by their legal status and the conditions in which they
are employed. Contract workers may, for example, be less able to maintain
transnational ties than freelancers because they may have less access to
cell phones and the Internet. Yet contract workers are oftentimes allowed
to return home at the end of their contracts, while undocumented free-
lancers are oftentimes stuck in the country of migration because they are
unable to obtain an exit visa.
The different meanings migrant domestic workers attach to the concept
of home and the ways in which these notions can change in times of politi-
cal change can clearly be discerned in Constable’s article on Filipinas in
Hong Kong (1999). The official announcement that Hong Kong would
become part of the People’s Republic of China on July 1, 1997, created sig-
nificant anxiety among Filipina domestic workers. Although the authorities
reassured them that they would be allowed to stay, many of them were wor-
ried about the future and feared losing their legal status. One of their main
concerns was economic: if they were forced to return to the Philippines,
they would lose their source of income. Another worry was whether or not
they would fit in socially if they returned home; they had been overseas for
years and were afraid of feeling alienated in the Philippines. More impor-
tant, however, many of them had begun to feel at home in Hong Kong and
did not want to leave the place where they had lived and worked for so long.
They had gained a certain degree of economic and personal independence;
they had made new friends and in some instances started relationships; they
had carved out new identities. Their feelings about returning home were
oftentimes ambivalent.
I found Constable’s article inspiring for my own analysis of the ways
in which Ethiopian domestic workers responded to the crisis in Yemen.
Although the women I present in this chapter were less explicit about
their ambivalent feelings toward a possible return home, their stories
show that their notions of home and belonging were not clear-cut but
had changed over time depending on the context. Before elaborating on
Ethiopian domestic workers’ notions of home and belonging, I will pro-
vide some background information on their employment as domestics in
Yemen.
Ethiopian Domestic Workers in Yemen

While Yemen had once been mainly known as a sending country in terms
of migration, this has changed since the early 1990s when the coun-
try began turning into a receiving country. The political and economic
changes that took place in Ethiopia and Somalia led to the arrival of large
numbers of migrants and refugees in Yemen.4 Somalis fled the civil war,
crossing the Gulf of Aden in smuggling boats.5 Ethiopians were mainly
coming to Yemen as labor migrants, making use of the constitutional
freedom of movement implemented by the regime of Meles Zenawi in
1991.6 Somali refugees often aspired to move on to the oil-rich countries
on the Arabian Peninsula or to Europe and North America but got stuck
in Yemen for long or short periods of time. A large majority of Ethiopi-
ans were women who came to Yemen as domestic workers, intending to
return home one day.
The increasing demand for paid domestic labor in Yemen was, among
other things, the result of the developing of a middle class, changing fam-
ily structures, and changing notions about female domesticity. In addition,
employing migrant domestic workers became an important status sym-
bol for the new middle classes (see de Regt, 2008a). The large majority
of Somali and Ethiopian women in Yemen were working as part-time or

full-time cleaners, cooks, and nannies for middle- and upper-class families
in urban areas. Somali women were always working as live-out domestic
workers, whereas Ethiopian women were, in most cases, employed on a
live-in basis. In addition, a small number of Asian women worked as domes-
tics for elite families and the upper class (see de Regt, 2008b).
The number of Ethiopian women migrants in Yemen increased in the
mid-1990s. Historically, there have always been close relations between
Ethiopia and Yemen, which has also affected the employment of Ethiopian
women as domestics. Yemenis of mixed Yemeni-Ethiopian descent started
to bring Ethiopian women as domestics to Yemen when the demand for
paid domestic labor increased (Destremau, 2002; de Regt, 2008a). There
was no bilateral agreement that regulated labor migration between Yemen
and Ethiopia, as the number of labor migrants had been relatively small. In
the 2003–2006 period, there were only two recruitment agencies registered
at the Yemeni Ministry of Social Affairs and Labour, yet many agencies
were active without an official license. The ministry lacked the facilities to
systematically control the activities of these agents, while the financial and
political interests that accompanied the irregular immigration and employ-
ment of young women workers also hampered attempts at regulating it
(Moors and de Regt, 2008, p. 158).
The story of Haymanut is representative of many Ethiopian women
who migrated to Yemen as domestics. Haymanut came to Yemen in
1999, when she was in her early twenties, on a contract arranged by a
friend. She had finished tenth grade of secondary school, which was not
sufficient for her to continue her education. In addition, she was more
interested in going to an Arab country than continuing her studies. Hay-
manut first worked as a live-in domestic worker in Ta’izz, a city in central
Yemen, before moving to the capital, Sana’a, where she became a cook for
a Yemeni family. In Ta’izz, she had been employed as a contract worker,
but in Sana’a, she became a freelancer, responsible for arranging her own
permits. She neglected to do so and was undocumented when I met her
in 2003. Returning to Ethiopia was almost impossible because Haymanut
would have been forced to pay a high penalty for having been undocu-
mented.7 When I interviewed her in 2005, she said, “I thought that I
could leave Yemen with an exit visa, but now you need a residence permit
to get an exit visa. It was not like that before.” She longed to see her fam-
ily but had no plans to stay in Ethiopia: “There is no work in Ethiopia, so
there is no reason for me to stay there.”
Despite the stricter immigration policies, Haymanut had been able to

arrange work for more than ten of her relatives and friends, all of them
young unmarried women from the same area south of Addis Ababa. She
had been functioning as an informal recruitment agent, supplying employ-
ers with domestic workers and Ethiopian women with jobs. “Sometimes it
works out well,” she told me, “and they are thankful to me, but sometimes
there are problems, and the girls resign.” The women who had a day off
shared a room together where they spent their Fridays. They would go to
church, have lunch, make Ethiopian coffee, and visit friends and relatives.
Haymanut was a central figure in the Ethiopian community of Sana’a, well
liked and well connected, and often assisted others.
When Haymanut told me in April 2011 that she would leave Yemen to
get married in Ethiopia, I was happily surprised. She had often mentioned
that she was going to marry her fiancé, Mesfin. She had known him since
her late teens and had been engaged to him for more than ten years. Mesfin
worked in a hotel in Abu Dhabi; they regularly talked to one another on
the phone and sent each other letters. Yet I had had little confidence in this
long-distance relationship. Many Ethiopian women I met in Yemen told
me that they were planning to get married and return home one day, but
I thought that this was wishful thinking. They were often stuck in Yemen,
unable to pay the penalty for having been undocumented or forced to con-
tinue working because their families back home depended on their salaries.
Yet Haymanut was serious and even mentioned the date of her departure
and of the wedding. She invited me to attend the wedding, an invitation
that I happily accepted.
In August 2011, I went on a short fieldwork trip to Ethiopia and trav-
eled to the small town where Haymanut celebrated her wedding. It was a
three-day event in her parental home, based on local traditions and attended
by hundreds of people. Six of her Ethiopian friends from Yemen were also
present; three of them were her bridesmaids, and the other three attended
as guests. Ayeletch, one of her best friends in Yemen, had not been able
to receive leave from her employer but was represented by her sister. It
was clear that Haymanut’s closest friends were those with whom she had
shared her life in Yemen and that their friendship was so close that they
had arranged leave to be able to attend her wedding. When I asked them
about the situation in Yemen, they told me that the living costs had increased
and that there was less work available. Yet they still had jobs and would
return to finish their contracts, even though the situation in the country
was not that good.
The day after the wedding, I visited Haymanut in her hotel room.
She was happy but also exhausted from the wedding and its preparations.
“Ethiopian weddings are very demanding,” she said. We spoke Arabic,
and even though Haymanut could speak English, she explained that
she missed speaking Arabic: “I haven’t spoken Arabic in more than two
months; I am really happy that I can speak Arabic with you.” She added
that she still missed Yemen and became teary-eyed: “I don’t know anyone
in Ethiopia; all my friends are in Yemen.” She also missed the church and
her social life on Fridays, but she was very happy that she did not have to
work as a domestic anymore. I asked Haymanut how she had been able
to leave Yemen, and she told me that she had in fact left the country two
years earlier but had returned to work for another two years. I asked if she
had paid the penalty, and she said, “No, I went to the Ethiopian embassy
and told them that I had arrived by boat and had no passport.” They had
given her a laissez-passer, which allowed her to return to Ethiopia. In
Ethiopia, she applied for a new passport using another name and birth
date and had gone back to Yemen. She laughed when she told me the
story, and I realized again how little I understood about the clever ways
in which migrant women (and men) make use of the options available to
them. However, Haymanut told me she would not return to Yemen again.
She was tired of domestic work and would stay in Ethiopia. Mesfin had
bought a piece of land and had built a house in a city between Addis and
her hometown. He would continue to work in Abu Dhabi and provide for
her while she stayed at home.
Homes in Crisis
Haymanut’s return to Ethiopia in June 2011 is insightful for three reasons.
First, it is insightful because she had been able to leave Yemen after having
been undocumented for years. While I thought that she would be stuck in
Yemen, unable to pay the high penalty, she had cleverly arranged a way out.
This highlights the agentic power of migrant domestic workers—and, in
particular, of undocumented migrants—to find solutions to their problems.
Second, Haymanut did not leave Yemen because of the political and eco-
nomic crisis but because she was getting married and would be settling in
Ethiopia. The crisis may have accelerated her return, but according to her,
there was no relation; the main reason for marrying in the summer of 2011
was because the construction of their house was finished and her husband
had saved enough money to pay for the wedding gifts.8 Third, the fact that
Haymanut’s friends returned to Yemen after the wedding shows that there
was still a demand for paid domestic work in Yemen, even though the eco-
nomic situation had deteriorated.
Interested in the changes that had taken place in Yemen’s domestic
labor market as a result of the crisis, I went on a short fieldwork trip to
Yemen in February 2013. It was one-and-a-half years after Haymanut’s
wedding, and almost all our mutual friends had returned to Ethiopia.
The only two friends that were still working in Sana’a were Ayeletch and
Mebrat. Ayeletch had migrated to Yemen twenty years ago, following the
birth of her son. She had not been married, and when the relationship
with the father of her child came to an end, she decided to go to Yemen.
Her son was brought up by her older sister, to whom Ayeletch sent money
regularly. Ayeletch had always worked at the residence of an ambassador.
She had a good job, with a relatively good salary (USD300/month), Fri-
days off, and a residence and a work permit arranged by her employer.
Every two or three years, she would go on vacation to Ethiopia on a ticket
paid by her employer. Ayeletch planned on returning to Ethiopia at some
stage, but for the time being, her home was Yemen. Yet she had never
really felt at home; she had to work very hard and had had little freedom
of movement at the ambassador’s residence. During my visit to Yemen,
I was unable to meet her because her work was too demanding and she
could not arrange time off to see me.
Mebrat was a different case. She was one of the first domestic workers I
befriended in Yemen in 2003, and we have stayed in touch ever since. We
had met each other at the Ethiopian community center, where Mebrat used
to earn money making coffee, and she had invited me to her home. She
was sharing an apartment with Haymanut and a number of other women,
and their house became one of the main sites of my fieldwork. When she
was 16 years old, Mebrat had migrated to Djibouti, where her aunt had
been working as a cleaner in the Ethiopian embassy. Her aunt found work
for her as a cleaner for the ambassador of former South Yemen.9 When
North and South Yemen united in May 1991, the ambassador returned
to Aden and took Mebrat with him. She worked for him another seven
years, even though he did not treat her well. She earned a good salary
and was able to build a house for her mother in Addis. Mebrat went
back to Ethiopia for three months but decided to return to Yemen. She
moved from Aden to Sana’a, worked for Yemeni and foreign families, and
also did domestic work and other service jobs, such as hotel cleaning
and waitressing. She had intended to return to Ethiopia to settle down,
but then her mother died. “The whole world collapsed when my mother
died. She was everything to me,” Mebrat told me in 2004. In the begin-
ning, she continued to send money to her sisters, but she severed contact
with them because “all they wanted was money.” She had not gone back
to Ethiopia since. “Yemen is my country now. I don’t know Addis any-
more.” In 2007, Mebrat adopted a child, who survived the shipwreck of a
smuggling boat that had crossed the Gulf of Aden. The child was brought
to the Ethiopian community center in Sana’a, and Mebrat had adopted
him. She became a single mother and was happier than she had ever been.
Yunus, her son, gave her life new meaning and strengthened her feelings
of belonging in Yemen.
When I met Mebrat in February 2013, she had received me enthusi-
astically in the apartment she shared with a friend. She told me that she
was working for a rich sheikh who treated her well. She knew him from
her time in Aden and had always stayed in touch with him. Her son was
nine years old; he went to school in Sana’a and spoke both Arabic and
Amharic. Mebrat has been able to support herself and her son despite the
deteriorating economic situation in Yemen. She was well connected and
worked for upper-class families who paid her well, enabling her to arrange
her residence permit. She considered herself part of Yemeni society and
had experienced the crisis in Yemen like many other Yemenis. Returning
to Ethiopia had never been an option for her. Mebrat’s story highlights
the ways in which migrants and domestic workers can become integrated
into the country of migration and gradually lose contact with their coun-
try of origin. In addition, it is a strong example of the importance of
having family back home; migrants may lose interest in returning home
when their loved ones die. Continuous pressure from relatives to send
money can also lead to further familial distancing (see also de Regt, 2010,
p. 253).
I also met women who had hesitated about returning to Ethiopia dur-
ing the crisis. Desta, Tigist, Zemzem, and Rosa were four young Ethiopian
women who shared an apartment in Safiya, a poor neighborhood in Sana’a
known for its large migrant and refugee population. I had met Rosa at the
office of an international organization where she was working as a cleaner
and a cook, preparing lunch for the staff. She was willing to introduce me to
her housemates and invited me home when her working day was finished.
In the taxi, she told me that she had been in Yemen three years and that her
aunt had arranged her visa. She had first worked as a live-in domestic before
securing her current job as an office cleaner and cook. When we arrived at
the apartment, I was welcomed warmly by her housemates, who had all
only just returned home from their respective jobs. In the living room, they
prepared Ethiopian coffee and told me about their backgrounds and experi-
ences. They were related to each other, came from the same town, and all
four of them worked for international organizations. Desta had migrated
to Yemen ten years before and had arranged work for the others. Tigist had
been in Yemen eight years, Zemzem six years, and Rosa three years. Some of
them had first worked as domestics. They all spoke Arabic fluently and felt
at home in Yemen. Yet, when the crisis broke out and the violence increased,
they had often discussed whether or not they should stay. They gave vivid
and detailed descriptions of their experiences during the height of the
crisis and laughed a lot.
When the heaviest fighting broke out in August and September of 2011,
Rosa and Desta were living in an apartment next to the ring road.10 They
were very scared and decided to move in with Tigist and Zemzem, who
lived in a quieter part of the city. All of them had thought of returning to
Ethiopia, but only Desta had done so. The others had stayed on in Yemen,
even though the international staff had left Yemen, because they did not
want to run the risk of losing their jobs. They were very happy with their
jobs at international organizations; their salaries were relatively high,11 and
they worked regular office hours, in contrast with domestic workers who
hardly had any time off. Their stories show that they made conscious deci-
sions about whether to stay or leave Yemen. They were not simply victims
of the crisis who lost their jobs and were forced to return home or travel
to another country. Instead, they carefully weighed the pros and cons of
staying and made decisions based on careful considerations. This ties in
with the discussion about domestic workers’ agency and the ways in which
women can exert power over their living and working conditions and resist
the various systems of oppression (see Pande, Chapter 2, and Fernandez,
Chapter 3, in this book).
According to Tigist, many domestic workers had left Yemen in 2011:
“Half of the women crossed the border with Saudi Arabia when the crisis
broke out in Yemen, and the other half returned to Ethiopia with the help
of the Ethiopian embassy or because their contracts had finished.” The
Ethiopian embassy had come to an agreement with the Yemeni Ministry
of Interior that undocumented migrants could leave Yemen without pay-
ing the penalty. They would get a laissez-passer12 and had to apply for a
new passport in Ethiopia. Tigist said that very few people were willing
to leave Yemen via the embassy because applying for a new passport in
Ethiopia was expensive and those who returned in this way would not be
allowed back into Yemen for a period of five years. Only people who were
desperate to leave had therefore accepted the embassy’s offer. According to
Tigist, women who were working on a contract stayed in Yemen because
they did not want to lose their passport and residence permit. In the fol-
lowing section, I will elaborate on the impact of the crisis on the labor
market for domestic workers and link this to their employment and legal
status.
Contract Workers, Freelancers, and the Yemeni Crisis

The stories presented previously show the various ways in which Ethio-
pian women felt at home in Yemen. It is important to note that none of
them had been working as a contract worker recruited by an employ-
ment agent and employed as a live-in domestic. This may have affected
their notions of belonging. In the literature on paid domestic labor, a dis-
tinction is often made between two types of employment status: contract
workers and freelancers. Contract workers are recruited in the country of
origin and migrate via a recruitment agency, which arranges their migra-
tion and employment. These workers are in most cases employed as live-in
domestics. Freelancers have no contract; they arrange their own employ-
ment and are not dependent on recruitment or employment agents.
They mostly work as live-out domestics. These two types of employment
are often linked to legal status: contract workers are likely to be docu-
mented, while freelancers tend to be undocumented. In reality, there is
much more diversity, and the boundaries between legality and illegality
are often blurred (see also Moors and de Regt, 2008). Contract workers
who have been recruited and employed via illegal recruitment agencies
do not automatically have a residence and work permit, whereas women
who migrated on a tourist visa may have the right documents to stay
legally in the country of migration. In addition, freelancers can work as
live-in domestics even though they do not have a contract. The blurring
of these boundaries is particularly visible in Yemen because government
control of migration status and work status is relatively weak, which has
resulted in a multitude of ways of being employed and residing within the
country.
Interested in the impact of the crisis on the demand for domestic work-
ers in Yemen, I visited one of the two official recruitment agents during my
fieldwork in February 2013. I had interviewed the owner in 2005 and was
curious to see if the agency was still operating. The office was located on the
fourth floor of an apartment building; the sign board was still outside, and
luckily, the door was open. The receptionist introduced me to the manager,
who was not the same man I had met in 2005. He told me that he had
taken over from his brother, who had moved to Addis Ababa.13 The crisis
had affected their business: they had only been able to recruit one or two
women per month in the 2011–2012 year, but the number had increased to
four to five women per month in February 2013. Many businessmen had
left Yemen during the crisis, but government officials and army leaders
had stayed, and they formed an important part of the agency’s clientele.
Those who employed domestic workers had continued to do so, regardless
of the economic and political crisis. The agent had his own opinions about
Ethiopian domestic workers’ willingness to leave Yemen during the crisis:
in his view, contract workers had not wanted to return to Ethiopia because
they worked inside the house and “were used to hearing gun shots in the
air.”14 They had preferred to stay in Yemen because they would not be able
to find work Ethiopia, where the economic situation was also very bad. He
did not mention the fact that contract workers were unable to leave Yemen
because their contracts tied them to their employers and that breaking their
contracts would work against them. Contract workers had therefore little
choice but to stay in Yemen.
Although the demand for domestic workers may not have decreased
among the Yemeni upper classes, the number of Ethiopian domestic work-
ers is currently smaller than before the crisis. Ethiopian women who were
undocumented and unemployed returned home or moved on to Saudi Ara-
bia, while women who were documented decided to go back to Ethiopia at
the end of their contracts. As mentioned earlier, only women who had rela-
tively good jobs or had nothing to return to in Ethiopia stayed in Yemen.
Most of Haymanut’s friends returned home once they had finished their
contracts. Some of them want to go abroad again, but they do not want to
go back to Yemen because the economic situation is too difficult and the
salaries being paid are too low. In her study on Filipina domestic workers
in Israel, Claudia Liebelt (2008; 2011) describes how her informants “move
on and on” instead of “back and forth” between the country of migration
and their home country. The Filipinas she encountered had often worked
in other countries in the Middle East and made use of these experiences in
order to obtain a job in Israel (2008, p. 574). From there on, they planned
to migrate to Europe. Following Werbner (1999), Liebelt argues that these
women can be seen as “working class cosmopolitans” because they develop
cosmopolitan subjectivities as a result of their serial migration (Liebelt,

2008, p. 582). They obtain knowledge about rules and regulations, as well
as of living and working conditions in various countries, and use this knowl-
edge in their migration projects.
In contrast to Filipinas, Ethiopian women’s migration as domestics
is much more recent and has impacted the ways in which women have
obtained “experiential knowledge” concerning migration and employment
as domestics. Yet in the past ten years, this knowledge has clearly expanded,
as Ethiopian women are also increasingly “moving on and on.” Many free-
lancers I interviewed in Yemen between 2003 and 2005 had first been
employed as contract workers. At the end of their contracts, they went back
to Ethiopia for a couple months and then returned to Yemen on a tourist
visa or a visa arranged by relatives and friends. In doing so, they would no
longer be dependent on agents and employers. When I asked them why
they did not go to another country in the Middle East, they answered that
they preferred Yemen because of the freedom of movement and weak gov-
ernmental control. Even though the salaries in Yemen were lower than in
other Arab countries, they could live relatively independent without fear of
being arrested and deported.
However, since the start of the crisis in 2011, Ethiopian women who
had worked in Yemen no longer returned once they had left the coun-
try; if they wanted to migrate again, they often decided to go to another
Arab country and made use of the cultural and linguistic capital they had
obtained in Yemen. The recruitment agent I interviewed in Sana’a con-
firmed that it was very hard to find women willing and able to migrate
to Yemen as domestics—in particular, in Addis Ababa. According to him,
Ethiopian women are no longer interested in migrating to Yemen due to
the negative stories they have heard about the economic, political, and
security situation. He now recruits women from the countryside who are
not aware of the situation, which underlines the importance of “experien-
tial knowledge” and cultural capital in the recruitment of domestics (see
Fernandez, 2010).
In March 2014, I again visited Haymanut in Ethiopia. She had made
friends in her area, among others, with two women who had also worked in
the Middle East and felt much more at home. Her husband had promised
to return to Ethiopia in a couple of months to stay for good, and she was
looking forward to having him around. We talked a lot about Yemen, about
mutual friends and acquaintances, but it was clear that Yemen was now a
finished chapter in Haymanut’s life. I also met Ayeletch again. She was on
leave in Addis because her father had suddenly died. Ayeletch was the only
one of the group of friends who still worked in Yemen, and when I visited
her in the house of her sister, a number of her old friends who had returned
to Ethiopia also came over to the house. They had settled in Ethiopia
and had no plans to migrate again. Ayeletch also planned to return to Ethio-
pia for good; she was very tired of working in Yemen and wanted to settle
down back home. She had bought a condominium, and she intended to set
up a small business with her savings. Her biggest concern was her son, who
had finished secondary school but was “doing nothing.” He had quit the
university after a couple of months and was being supported by his relatives.
“I have sacrificed twenty years of my life so that my son would have a future,
but he is wasting his time.” Nonetheless, she would return home and make
sure that she would enjoy her own life.
Haymanut and Ayeletch had both worked for a long time in Yemen.
Over the course of 15 years, Haymanut had moved from being a contract
worker, who had initially considered her stay abroad temporary, to a free-
lancer, who felt at home in Yemen, to a returned migrant, who had dif-
ficulty adjusting in her country of origin, to finally being a settled woman
integrated in her “home society.” Although her work in Yemen had not
brought her much financial gain, she cherished the memories of this part
of her life because it had exposed her to having new experiences and mak-
ing new friends. In contrast, Ayeletch worked twenty years as a contract
worker in Yemen, employed at the residence of an ambassador. She had
earned more money than Haymanut, but her experiences of living and
working in Yemen were less positive, and she longed to return to Ethiopia.
The fact that she had always been a contract worker with a heavy work-
load and limited freedom of movement affected her notions of home and
belonging. She had stayed in Yemen because she had to provide for her
son, in contrast with Haymanut, who did not have any family respon-
sibilities in Ethiopia. In addition to the different ways in which they
were employed in Yemen, their family situations in Ethiopia were also
different.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have analyzed the ways in which Ethiopian domestic work-
ers’ notions of home and belonging came to the surface during the political
crisis in Yemen. I started with a number of theoretical insights, inspired
by a transnational perspective from below. Migrant domestic workers are
a strong example of a group of migrants whose transnational mobility is

often restricted—in the first instance, because they work inside the house
of their employers and therefore have limited freedom of movement and
second, because migrant domestic workers are in many cases employed on
temporary contracts, which affects the ways they can become an integrated
part of the countries of migration. This is particularly true for a number of
countries in the Middle East, where citizenship rights are inaccessible to
migrants—for example, in the oil-rich countries of the Arabian Peninsula.
Third, migrant domestic workers are often employed on contracts that limit
their opportunities to travel home once every few years, or they are undocu-
mented freelancers that have little to no chance of leaving the country of
migration without paying a high penalty.
The case of Yemen is interesting because it shows the various ways
in which migrant domestic workers can be employed and reside in the
country of migration by moving beyond the standard division of doc-
umented contract workers who work as live-in domestics and undocu-
mented freelancers who work as live-out domestics. I have argued that
Ethiopian women’s notions of belonging in Yemen were more related to
their employment situation as contract workers or freelancers than to
their legal status as documented or undocumented migrants. Freelanc-
ers had more opportunities to establish “a home away from home.” They
created a home in the rooms they rented with their relatives and friends
and were able to go to church and have a social life on their days off.
For contract workers without any time off, it was harder to feel at home
in Yemen. They were completely dependent on the treatment of their
employers, who made decisions on the extent to which they were allowed
to create a home inside their (the employer’s) home. Another factor that
affected the ways in which women could feel at home in Yemen was family
and friends. Arranging work for relatives and friends was one of the ways
in which Ethiopian domestic workers brought part of their “home” to
Yemen. These relatives and friends contributed very strongly to their feel-
ings of home, and they often stayed in touch with them after the domestic
workers had returned to Ethiopia.
The turmoil that followed after the violent crackdown of peaceful
political demonstrations in Yemen led to economic instability and insecu-
rity, affecting the lives of Yemenis and migrants alike. Ethiopian migrant
workers were not worried that they would be forced to return home, but
they were concerned about their lives in a politically and, in particular,
an economically unstable country. Their main concern was their job, and
those who were employed, in most cases, decided to stay in the coun-
try. This highlights the fact that the meaning of “crisis” is not given but
contextual. Ethiopian women migrated abroad because of the economic
crisis at home, where no jobs were available, a crisis that weighed heavier
than the political instability in Yemen. Only women without jobs and
especially those who were undocumented decided to return to Ethiopia or
move on to Saudi Arabia, crossing the border over land. Live-in domestic
workers who were employed on the basis of a contract often stayed in the
country.
Constable (1999) referred to the ambivalent feelings Filipina migrants
experienced about returning home. They were afraid of not fitting in
after having lived abroad for so long and feared the loss of their inde-
pendence and freedom. The women I presented in this chapter did not
express ambivalence about returning home; most of them intended to
go back to Ethiopia at some stage and settle there. Their notions of
belonging to Ethiopia were very strong. Yet their return to Ethiopia may
nonetheless be ambivalent in other ways; the large-scale migration of
young women to the Middle East and the numerous stories about their
exploitation and abuse have affected public opinion in Ethiopia about
migrant domestic workers. They are seen as victims, but they are also
stigmatized and looked down upon because they have lived outside of
the control of their families and communities. In addition to the lack
of job opportunities in Ethiopia, this may be another reason for women
to migrate again.
Acknowledgments
I am thankful to Mark Johnson and Bina Fernandez for their inspiring com-
ments on earlier versions of this chapter.
Notes
1. In February 2011, Yemeni youth took to the streets to oust Presi-
dent Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had been in power since 1978. He
was blamed for the large-scale unemployment, corruption, and eco-
nomic stagnation in the country. On March 18, 2011, a peaceful
demonstration was violently cracked down on, intensifying divisions
within Yemeni society. Saleh only stepped down in November 2011,
in exchange for immunity for himself and his relatives.
2. From 2003 to 2006, I carried out postdoctoral research about migrant

domestic workers in Yemen.
3. In December 2012, I spent two weeks in Ethiopia; from February to
March 2013, I spent two weeks in Yemen; and in February/March
2014, I was in Ethiopia and visited a number of women who had
worked in Yemen.
4. In May 1991, the dictatorial regime of Colonel Mengistu was over-
thrown in Ethiopia, while in Somalia, a civil war broke out following
the ousting of President Siad Barre. Exact numbers of Ethiopian and
Somali migrants and refugees residing in Yemen are not available, but
estimations vary between tens and hundreds of thousands.
5. Yemen is the only country on the Arabian Peninsula that has rati-
fied the 1951 UN convention relating to the status of refugees and
its 1967 protocol, and Somali refugees are accepted on a prima facie
basis.
6. During Mengistu’s regime, labor emigration was restricted: only
highly skilled people with connections to the regime were able to
obtain a passport. In addition, large numbers of Ethiopians left Ethi-
opia as refugees.
7. In 2005, the penalty was 100 Yemeni rial per day (around USD0.85).
8. Wedding practices in Ethiopia differ according to region and ethnic
group. In Haymanut’s case, the groom presented his wedding gifts
(such as clothes, shoes, jewelry, and household utensils) to the bride’s
family on the evening before the wedding. The family of the bride
organized the wedding in her home village or town. The family of
the groom would organize a wedding party following the formal
wedding day.
9. Until May 1990, North and South Yemen were two separate states.
Former North Yemen was called the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR)
and former South Yemen the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen
(PDRY).
10. In August and September 2011, there were heavy fights in Sana’a
between the army supporting Ali Abdullah Saleh and defected army
leaders representing different parties within the conflict.
11. They were all earning USD300 per month, while domestic workers
earned on average between USD100 and USD150.
12. This laissez-passer was similar to the one that Haymanut obtained
when she told the embassy that she had lost her passport.
13. This could be related to the fact that he had been prosecuted for the
sexual abuse of a number of migrant women who were employed
through his office in 2005.
14. The number of weapons in Yemen is one of the largest in the world.
Shooting into the air is very common during weddings and other
celebrations.
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Notes on Contributors
Marina de Regt is an assistant professor at the Department of Social and Cul-

tural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her research
focuses on gender, labor, and migration in the Middle East and particularly in
Yemen. From 2003 to 2006, she carried out postdoctoral research on migrant
domestic workers in Yemen, with particular focus on Ethiopian women. In
addition to academic publications, she coproduced the documentary Young and
Invisible: African Domestic Workers in Yemen (Arda Nederveen Visual Produc-
tions). She is the author of Pioneers or Pawns? Women Health Workers and the
Politics of Development in Yemen (2007).
Nada Elyas completed her PhD in social policy at the University of Hull, United
Kingdom, in 2011. Her work Care of Elderly Women in Saudi Arabia: A Comparison
of Institutional and Family Settings is the first in-depth empirical study in its field:
the adoption of ethnographic and feminist approaches is novel in the Saudi context.
She is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences and deputy dean
for the Institute for Research and Consultations, Taibah University, Medina, Saudi
Arabia, as well as a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Hull.
Bina Fernandez is a lecturer in development studies in the School of Social

and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, with research interests in
gender, migration, care labor, and social policy. Her book Transformative Policy
for Poor Women: A New Feminist Framework (2012) presents an innovative new
feminist framework for the analysis of policy in developing countries. Since
2009, her research has focused on the migration of Ethiopian women as domes-
tic workers to Lebanon and Kuwait. Papers drawing on empirical work for this
project have been published in Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, Gender &
Development, International Migration Review, and other edited books.
Naomi Hosoda is an assistant professor of anthropology at International

Office, Kagawa University, Japan. Since 2000, she has conducted research on
the cultural dimension of migration of Samarnon people from Eastern Visayas,
188 O Notes on Contributors
Philippines, and lately on Filipino diaspora in the Arab Gulf countries in com-
parison with that in Southeast Asian countries. Her current research interests
include migration, community transformation, religion, care work, and human
security. She has published, among others, in the Journal of Arabian Studies and
Philippine Studies.
Mark Johnson is a reader in social anthropology in the School of Social Sciences

at the University of Hull, United Kingdom. He has done research on migrant
Filipinos living and working in Saudi Arabia focusing on people’s imaginings,
experiences, and encounters in that place and investigating the ways that reli-
gion not only constrains and disciplines but also provides a language and affec-
tive inclinations to understand and contest the meaning and limits of freedom.
Recent publications include Diasporic Journeys, Ritual, and Normativity among
Asian Migrant Women (2011).
Claudia Liebelt is a lecturer of social anthropology at the University of Bayreuth,

Germany. Her research interests include urban anthropology, migration and
citizenship, the Filipino labor diaspora, ritual and religion, pilgrimage, gender,
global care and domestic work, as well as the anthropology of the body. She has
conducted fieldwork in Morocco, Turkey, Israel, and the Philippines. She has
published, among others, in Feminist Review, Critical Asian Studies, Asian and
Pacific Journal of Anthropology, and Ethnos. She is the author of Caring for the
“Holy Land”: Filipina Domestic Workers in Israel (2011).
Pardis Mahdavi is an associate professor and chair of the Department of

Anthropology at Pomona College in Claremont, California. Her research inter-
ests include gendered labor, human trafficking migration, sexuality, human
rights, youth culture, transnational feminism, and public health in the context
of changing global and political structures. Her first book, Passionate Uprisings:
Iran’s Sexual Revolution, was published with Stanford University Press in 2008,
and her second book, Gridlock: Labor, Migration and “Human Trafficking” in
Dubai, also Stanford University Press, was published in 2011. Her third book,
From Trafficking to Terror: Constructing a Global Social Problem, was published
with Routledge in 2013.
Amrita Pande is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the Uni-

versity of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research focuses on the intersection
of globalization with reproductive labor. She is the author of Wombs in Labor:
Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India (2014). Her work has appeared in
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Gender & Society, Critical Social
Policy, International Migration Review, Qualitative Sociology, Feminist Studies,
Notes on Contributors O 189
Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Reproductive BioMedicine, and in several edited

volumes. She is also an educator-performer and is currently involved in a multi-
media theatre production, Made in India: Notes from a Baby Farm, based on her
ethnographic work on commercial surrogacy in India.
Akiko Watanabe is a lecturer of faculty of international studies at Bunkyo Uni-

versity in Chigasaki, Kanagawa, Japan. Since 2000, she has conducted ethno-
graphic research on the transition of Muslim Filipino migrant communities in
Metro Manila and expanded her study on Filipino diaspora in the Gulf coun-
tries, especially from the spirituality standpoint. Her main areas of work are
migration, transnational families, religious conversion, intermarriages, social
change, and predeparture programs. In 2014, she published English articles,
among others, in the Journal of the Faculty of International Studies Bunkyo Uni-
versity, 24(2), 25–45.
Index
abuse, 2, 14, 27–28, 36–37, 39, 44, 46– block rosary, 95–97, 99, 101–3, 105–6,
47, 51, 69, 71, 73, 75–77, 79, 87, 108, 110, 112
91, 122, 136, 181 born-again Christian, 16, 119–20,
Addis Ababa, 52, 54, 171, 177–78 123–24, 129, 131–36
African, 34, 37–39, 43 Bourdieu, Pierre, 56, 72
African countries, 1, 36–38, 41–42, 44, brother, 75–76, 81–83, 86–87, 129, 177
130 Butler, Judith, 80, 92
African migrant workers, 38
African women, 1–2, 62, 187 Cameroon, 1, 29, 31–32
age, 75, 84, 88, 104, 129, 155, 160, 162 capitalism, 53–54, 89
agency, 13–16, 20–22, 51–53, 56–57, care, 2, 6, 20–22, 26, 28, 55, 58, 61, 64,
60–61, 64, 66, 68–70, 77–80, 95, 97, 105, 107–9, 111, 141–45,
83–85, 87–88, 90, 96–97, 110–11, 147–49, 151–52, 154–55, 158–60,
113, 115, 170, 175, 177 162–63
collective, 68, 71 ethics of, 142
as power, 56, 68 mutuality of, 159–60
agents, 59, 85, 170, 177–78 personal, 145, 149
Ahearn, Laura, 14, 22, 56, 97, 111, 113 caregivers, 104, 142–43, 147, 149,
alliances, 17–18, 27, 32, 35–36, 39, 42, 151–52, 154, 159
44 caregiving, 21, 142, 146–47, 158
Anderson, Bridget, 6, 12, 22, 28, 40, care labor, 5, 55, 187
46, 53, 55, 71–72, 79, 91, 96, 107, care work, 5–6, 48, 149, 158, 163, 188
113, 160–61 care workers, 89, 151, 154–55, 159
Arabian Peninsula, 1, 20, 169, 180, 182 caring, 3, 25, 73, 114, 141, 143, 145,
Asian Domestic Workers, 1–2, 46–47, 147–49, 151, 153, 155, 157–61,
170, 183 163, 184, 188
Catholic Church, 35, 105, 137
Bahrain, 23, 75, 120 Catholicism, 99, 101, 104, 107, 112,
Bangladesh, 1, 29, 31, 162 118–19, 130–33
Basch, Linda, 19, 22, 96, 114, 167, 183 celebrations, 153, 183
bedroom, 32–33 cell phones, 81–82, 109, 130, 158, 168
bed space, 18, 123, 129, 131 children, 18, 42–43, 57, 60–62, 64, 70,
Beirut, 23–24, 29, 35, 38, 40, 59, 63, 77–80, 82–85, 87–88, 91, 104–5,
66, 72 124, 127–28, 130, 143–44, 147,
Benin, 1–2, 30–31, 34 149–50, 154–55, 158, 160, 173–74
Bernstein, Elizabeth, 91 children’s rooms, employer’s, 11, 32, 82
192 O Index
Chin, Christine, 28, 46, 89, 92 contract workers, 10, 53, 166–68, 170,
Christian, 37, 65–66, 124–25 176–80
Christians, born-again. See born-again cook, 2, 18, 39, 81–82, 85, 129, 170,
Christian 174
church courtyard, 37–39, 43 crisis, 108, 165–67, 169, 172–78, 181
churches, 12, 16–17, 19, 29–30, 35–39, political, 20, 165–66, 177, 179
44, 52, 65–67, 72, 99–100, 103,
106, 113, 121, 123, 131–32, 134– daughter-in-law, 144–48, 153, 158–60
35, 171–72, 180 daughters, 58, 64, 77, 99, 109, 125, 143,
church friends, 76, 82, 129 145, 148, 151, 156–59, 162
church group, 131 married, 144–45, 148, 157
church members, 37, 120, 131, 133–34 debt, 77, 81–83
church service, 39–40 demands, 5, 8, 45, 60, 89, 146, 153–54,
cities, 19, 29, 47, 101, 112, 119–21, 123, 157, 170, 173, 176–77
130, 135, 165, 170, 172, 175 denominations, 16–17, 135
citizens, 9, 20, 26, 45, 70, 84–85, 93, destination countries, 1, 9, 12, 14, 18,
141–42 54, 61, 71, 88, 119, 123, 134, 168,
flexible, 89 174, 176–77, 180
second-class, 84, 86, 88 devotion, 16, 103, 105, 109, 124, 153
diaspora, 95, 112, 114, 160, 183–84
citizenship, 18, 20, 26, 34, 44, 83, 88–
dignity, 56, 59–60, 66, 69–70
91, 104, 110, 114, 160, 188
Doezema, Jo, 54, 72
flexible, 20, 25, 89, 92
Doha, 16, 117, 119–26, 133, 135–36
inflexible, 20, 77–78, 90
domestic worker contracts, 62, 71
citizenship rights, 20, 77, 88–89, 180
temporary, 52
civil society, 4, 47
domestic worker employers, 121, 144
class, 1, 6, 18, 44–45, 47, 76, 89, 114,
domestic worker employment contracts,
126, 128, 145, 158–60 70
coercion, 69, 72, 79, 91 domestic worker mobility, 69
Commission on Filipinos Overseas domestic work relationship, 10
(CFO), 136–37 domination, 51, 55–57, 74, 93, 163
communities, 33, 37–38, 40–43, 67, 95, drivers, 2, 100, 149–50
101, 115, 118–19, 132, 134, 167, Dubai, 14, 17–18, 84–89, 119–23, 126,
181, 189 128–33, 135–37, 188
companies, 12, 42, 136 Dubai’s Indian diaspora, 26, 93
compatriots, 12, 18, 37, 53, 118, 134–35
compulsion by necessity, 54, 80 earnings, 83–84, 111
conflict, 59, 64–66, 69, 114, 148, 152, Ehrenreich, Barbara, 6, 23, 28, 46
182 Eid, 152–54, 157
conjugal ties, 27–28, 43–44 elderly parents, 143, 158
connections, 17, 68, 90, 158, 182 elderly women, 104, 142, 144–45, 147,
constraints, 44, 51, 54, 61, 69–70, 78, 149, 151, 161, 187
80, 83 embassy, 29, 36–37, 44, 66, 83, 175–76,
contracts, 9, 11, 18, 32, 36, 38, 41–42, 182
45, 52–54, 57, 59–63, 65, 69, 72, employees, 55, 58–60, 91, 142, 144–45,
82, 168, 170–71, 175–78, 180–81 150–54, 157, 159–60
Index O 193
employers, 8–12, 14–19, 23, 27–28, exit option, 65, 69

32–37, 39, 43, 45, 55, 57–67, 69, exit visa, 166, 168, 170
74–76, 81–83, 104, 118–20, 123– expatriates, 121, 165
35, 149–57, 159–60, 173, 180 exploitation, 14, 51, 69, 71, 74, 96, 181
good, 151
employer’s home, 10–12, 14–15, 29, 57– faith, 99, 110, 115, 118, 128, 132, 135,
58, 108, 124, 127, 153, 159 137, 156
employment, 7–10, 14–15, 39, 54–55, familial, 18, 80, 90, 132
57, 60, 64–65, 70, 76, 84, 88–89, familial distancing, 174
101, 129, 134, 151, 155–56, 158– familial duty, 5, 78–81, 83–84, 87–88, 90
59, 169–70, 176, 178 familial terms, 126, 152
domestic worker’s, 57 familial ties, 44, 78, 83, 90, 158
employment agencies, private, 9, 54, familial turbulence, 77
60–61, 66 families, 7–8, 10–12, 15, 17–18, 20–23,
employment agents, 59–60, 176 41–42, 72–73, 76–87, 90, 96,
employment contract, 9, 45, 51–55, 60– 104–6, 109–10, 122–24, 126–35,
61, 63, 65, 68–70 141–45, 147–56, 158–63, 167–68,
formal, 9–10, 54 170–71, 180–82
employment relationships, 52 abusive, 76
domestic, 32 display of, 154, 158
employment situations, 14, 65, 77, 180 employer’s, 62, 65, 68, 126–27
employment status, 166, 176 extended, 111, 145, 153, 158
women’s, 167 foreign, 119, 173
engagements, 12, 20–21 illegal migrant, 43–44
escape, 36–37, 43, 45, 165 left-behind, 158
Esim, Simmel, 2, 9, 11, 23–24, 72 local, 76
Ethiopia, 1–2, 17, 29, 31, 36, 38, 43, 52, middle-class, 2
54, 58–65, 67, 71, 73, 101, 131, natal, 131, 158
166–67, 169–82 noncitizen, 85
Ethiopian embassy, 67, 172–73, 175 nuclear, 145–46
Ethiopian migrant workers, 16, 38, 51, sponsoring, 122
53, 58–59, 64, 68, 70–71, 180 surrogate, 150
Ethiopian Orthodox, 62, 64, 66–67 transnational, 189
Ethiopian Pentecostal, 65–67, 71 treated as part of the, 11–12, 58, 91,
Ethiopians, 36, 46, 54, 63, 66, 68, 70, 128, 152
165–66, 169, 177, 179–80, 182 upper-class, 1, 6, 134, 170, 174
Ethiopian women, 29, 52, 54, 62–64, 66, family members, 68, 79–80, 83, 90, 104,
68, 71, 167, 170–71, 174, 176–78, 119, 128, 148, 152
181–82, 187 father, 38, 43, 65, 77, 81, 83–84, 87, 91,
migration of, 52, 187 99, 150, 173, 179
social network of, 58, 63 female domesticity, 169
Ethiopian women’s migration, 166, 178 female migrant, 95–96, 110
ethnic churches, 27, 43–44 Filipina, 16, 18, 21, 40, 52, 96–97, 103,
ethnic stores, 29–30 109–10, 117–19, 123–26, 128,
European immigrants, 101 130, 132–35, 149, 151, 158, 168,
exit, 10, 55, 61, 69–70, 73 177–78
194 O Index
Filipina care workers, 104, 152, 160 gender, 22–25, 34, 43, 45–47, 72–73,
Filipina churchgoers, 35 91, 93, 95–96, 114, 124, 137, 141,
Filipina domestic workers, 16, 25, 46, 153, 158–59, 161–63, 184, 187–88
73, 114, 117, 119–20, 122, 125, Giddens, Anthony, 56, 72, 77, 92, 162
127–28, 133–34, 137–39, 152, gifts, 108, 154, 157
163, 168, 184, 188 globalization, 7, 21–22, 25, 48, 74, 77,
79, 89, 92, 115, 160, 163, 188
Filipina domestic workers’ block rosary,
victims of, 40, 77, 79
95, 102–3
governments, 3–4, 10–11, 117, 122
Filipina Muslim, 16
grandchildren, 147
converted, 120 grandparents, 84, 155–56
Filipina women, 34, 48 Gulf countries, 22–23, 26, 72, 75–76,
Filipino Catholics, 103, 105, 107 91–92, 138, 161, 184, 189
Filipino diaspora, 160, 188–89 Gulf Labour Markets and Migration
Filipino family, 99–100, 126, 183 (GLMM), 160, 162
Filipino migration, 117, 119 Gulf states, 9, 117, 119–22, 124, 126–
Filipinos, 49, 101–4, 110, 112, 114, 28, 135
117–24, 126–27, 129–30, 132,
134, 136, 152, 155–56, 158 health, 99, 162
Filipino women, 122, 141, 144, 158 Health Ministers’ Council (HMC), 160,
Filipino workers, nondomestic, 136 162
Holy Land, 25, 73, 96, 106, 108, 110,
Folbre, Nancy, 5, 23
113–14, 138, 163, 184, 188
food, 18, 34, 36, 41–42, 58, 66–67, 85–
Holy Trinity Church (HTC), 122, 137
86, 97–98, 147–48
home, 1–5, 7–25, 32–35, 41, 43, 52,
foreigners, non-Muslim, 121–22 75–77, 79, 81–89, 101–2, 110–14,
foreignness, 12 117–21, 123, 127–35, 137, 141–
Frantz, Elizabeth, 1–2, 23, 53, 64, 72 60, 165–69, 171–76, 178–81, 183
fraud, 79, 91 back, 12, 17, 168
freedom, 18, 33–34, 48, 51, 53, 55, domestic worker’s, 19
57–61, 63–69, 71, 73, 80, 86, 127, elderly women’s, 149
134, 181, 188 a home away from, 16, 180
experiences of, 80 husband’s, 157
women’s, 57 leaving, 14
freedom of mobility, 57, 123, 131 marital, 143
freedom of movement, 19, 33, 173, 178 new, 16–18, 100, 102, 110–11, 117,
119, 121, 123, 125–27, 129,
freelancers, 10, 29–30, 34, 36, 38,
131, 133–35, 137, 139
40–42, 45, 52–53, 58–62, 65, 67,
parental, 143–45, 171
69–70, 81, 149, 166–68, 170, 176,
private, 28, 104, 160
178–80 returning, 85, 166, 169, 174, 181
undocumented, 180 sponsor’s, 32
freelance work, 10–11, 18, 27, 41, 43, unhomely, 101
58, 63–64, 69, 73, 82, 92 home communities, 167, 179
friendships, 17–18, 21, 39, 171 home countries, 31, 45, 96, 119, 132, 177
Full Gospel Church, 66–67 homemaking, 5, 95
Index O 195
hometown, 87, 125, 172, 182 Islam, 7, 16, 65, 119, 121, 123, 125–28,
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette, 6, 24, 28, 132–33, 135, 138, 141, 154–56,
47, 58, 73, 92, 96, 114 161
Hong Kong, 89, 106, 168–69 Islamic center, 120, 124, 126, 128, 134,
hospitals, 75–76 143, 145–46, 148, 151, 154–55,
host, 77, 98–100, 153 157
host countries, 10, 16, 19, 77–78, 80, Islamic environments, 22, 127, 183
83–84, 88–89, 133 Israel, 1–2, 16, 25, 40, 48, 73, 95–99,
employer’s, 33–34, 38–39, 58, 62, 101, 103–7, 109–15, 138, 152,
105, 123, 128 161, 163, 177, 184, 188
households, 2, 4–5, 8, 10–12, 23, 53, 76, Israeli families, 152
82–83, 85, 125–28, 135, 143, 147, Israelis, 108, 114–15
149–50, 152, 157, 161, 168
Human Rights Watch, 11, 27–28, 31, Jaffa, 100–104, 114
45, 47, 51, 73 Jerusalem, 98–99, 108, 114
husband, 17, 33, 38, 43, 62–64, 80, 82, jobs, 63, 65, 75, 85, 123, 125, 129, 149,
84, 88, 105–6, 124, 130, 143, 146, 151, 171, 174–75, 177, 180–81
Jordan, 1, 20, 23, 72
148, 150, 154, 158, 160, 172
Jordanian family, 82
identities, 3, 6, 13–14, 18, 22, 24, 45– Jureidini, Ray, 1, 8, 10, 24–25, 27, 30–
31, 47, 55, 73, 139
46, 73, 77–78, 80, 85, 88, 90, 92,
114, 118, 120, 147, 151, 163
kafala, 9, 12, 31, 33, 42, 48, 54–55
religious, 133, 135
kafil, 9–10
illegality, 20, 176
kin, 133, 141, 143, 153
ILO. See International Labour
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 141, 143,
Organization
145, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157,
ILO Domestic Workers Convention, 159–61, 163
11, 55 kinship, 78–79, 113, 141–42, 159–62
immobility, 14, 78, 83 Kuwait, 2, 14, 17, 40, 52, 55, 62, 65–66,
India, 1–2, 17–18, 29, 81, 84–87, 131, 71, 75–76, 81–83, 118, 120, 127
135, 189
indoctrination, 127, 134 labor, 2, 5–8, 10, 30, 51, 53, 77–80, 91,
Indonesia, 1–2 95, 159, 163, 187–88
industry, sex, 91 division of, 7–8
Inflexible families, 81 domestic, 1, 5, 7–8, 40, 53, 55, 151,
infrapolitics, 51, 56, 71 161, 169–70, 176
International Labour Organization forced, 54–55, 78, 80
(ILO), 11, 23–24, 72–73 unfree, 53–54, 72, 80
Internet, 130, 158, 160, 165, 168 women’s, 4
intimacy, 16, 22, 48, 90–91, 93, 113, labor camp, 84
135, 161, 163 laborers, domestic, 160
intimate labor, 5, 24, 48, 76, 79, 90–91, labor market, 5, 70, 176
141–43, 162 domestic, 173
iqama. See residence permit labor migrants, 78, 169–70
196 O Index
Lan, Pei Chia, 6, 12, 15, 24, 28, 33, 40, migrant labor, 8, 25, 30, 70, 76, 79–80
48, 144–45, 162 migrant labor regimes, 9
language, 16, 22, 113, 120, 142, 154, migrant nurse, 150
188 migrant parents, 83, 87
law, 22, 26, 43–44, 74, 88, 114, 155, migrant populations, 31, 44, 135
157 migrant source countries, 20, 31, 83–84,
Lebanese, 28, 30, 34, 45, 62 169
Lebanese workers, 31 migrate, 83, 88, 176–79, 181
Lebanon, 1–2, 14–17, 19–20, 27–32, migration, 18, 20, 22–23, 25–28, 31,
35–45, 48–49, 52, 55, 62–66, 71, 68, 71–72, 78–80, 91–92, 96–97,
165 108–11, 113–14, 137, 160, 162,
legality, 20, 62, 176 167–69, 176, 178, 183, 187–89
legal status, 20, 64, 76, 96, 104, 134, countries of (see destination countries)
166, 168, 176, 180 history of, 107, 110
legal work, 122 migration police, 102, 104
liminality, 85–86 migration process, 18, 105–6, 110, 112
limited freedom of movement, 17, migration status, 18, 176
179–80 miracles, 95–96, 106, 108, 115
living conditions, 35, 134, 166, 168 mobility, 10, 14–15, 19, 22, 33, 35, 40,
Longva, Anh Nga, 10, 13, 25 51, 57, 61, 78, 83–84, 91, 123,
love, 23, 81–82, 105, 112, 114, 128, 131, 150, 163, 184
148, 151–52 forced, 86, 88
women’s, 14, 57
marginalized groups, 45, 101 money, 19, 23, 41, 60, 63–64, 76, 81,
Marian devotion, 95, 107–9 83–84, 87, 96, 136, 156–57, 172–
marriage, 18, 20, 22, 42–43, 61–62, 64, 74, 179
70, 78, 113, 125, 143, 145, 150, Moors, Annelies, 2, 8, 12, 19–20, 25,
160–61, 171 121, 139, 142, 152, 163, 167, 170,
martyrs, 16, 96–97, 104, 110 176, 184
Massey, Doreen, 13–14, 19, 25 mother, 17, 48, 64, 70, 75–78, 81, 83,
Mecca, 157 85, 87, 92, 99, 109, 143, 146–50,
meetings, 42, 97, 129, 131, 135 152–53, 157–59, 173–74
migrant caregivers, 21, 142, 160 mother-in-law, 145–48, 159
migrant care work, 6 Moukarbel, Nayla, 1–2, 15, 25, 30, 48,
migrant communities, 19, 40 51, 55, 58–59, 61, 73, 184
migrant domestic/care workers, 158 movement, 15, 17, 19, 21, 33, 40, 68,
migrant domestic workers (MDWs), 1–3, 79, 135, 141, 143–44, 150, 162–
6, 8–10, 12–22, 24–45, 47–48, 51– 63, 169, 173, 178–80
61, 63–71, 73–74, 77–79, 91–92, multidimensionality, 21, 77–78, 89
95–96, 109–10, 118–19, 138–39, Mulu Wongel. See Full Gospel Church
149–50, 162–63, 165–66, 168–69, Muslim, 7, 16, 38, 64–65, 124–25, 127–
179–84 28, 134–36, 153, 156–57
migrant driver. See drivers converted, 124, 126, 128, 155–56
migrant employees, 152 Muslim domestics, converted Filipina, 120
migrant Filipinos, 118, 143, 160, 188 Muslim domestic workers, 126, 153
migrant identity, 78 Muslim Filipinos, 128, 141, 156, 189
Index O 197
neighbor, 36, 97, 125 Pingol, Alicia, 92, 118, 139, 149–50,
neighborhood, 19, 35, 40, 101–2, 174 152–53, 160, 163
Nepal, 1, 29, 31, 44 police, 42, 65–66
Nepalese women, 29, 42 politics, 3, 7, 25–26, 71, 88, 115, 138–39,
networks, 13, 35, 41–42, 46, 95 162, 183
nonmigrants, 136 power, 4, 7, 13–15, 43–44, 48, 52, 56,
norms, 4, 8, 45 60, 69, 71, 73, 92, 97, 107, 109–10,
North and South Yemen, 173, 182 152, 156, 175, 181
notions of home, 166–67, 169, 179 Praising Blessings of Lord Church
nurse, 145, 152, 155, 157 (PBLC), 129–31
prayer meetings, 99–100, 103–4, 129–30
OFWs. See Overseas Filipino Workers prayers, 39, 44, 98–100, 106, 112
older migrants, 41 praying, 65–66, 96–99, 101, 105–6,
organizations, international, 11, 14, 108–10, 112, 136, 148
174–75 privacy, 11–12, 33, 37
origin countries. See migrant source private employment agencies, 9, 33, 35,
countries 54, 61, 104, 170, 176
Ortner, Sherry, 52, 56–57, 64, 68–70, private spaces, 10, 18–19, 31–32, 43
73, 78, 92 private sphere, 3–8, 10, 12–13, 26, 28,
Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), 77
procession, 19, 102, 108–9
122–23
public-private boundaries, 3, 6, 9, 11–12
public spaces, 12–13, 19, 27, 29, 33–35,
parents, 80, 83–84, 86–87, 91, 106, 131,
37, 119, 123, 127, 134
143, 148, 150, 152, 154, 158
public sphere, 3–8, 12–13, 19–20, 23,
Parreñas, Rhacel, 5–6, 12, 22, 25, 28,
25–26, 139
40, 48, 58, 74, 79, 91–92, 96, 115,
158, 163
Qatar, 2, 117, 120–23, 125, 138, 154–55,
passport, 9, 14, 33, 35–37, 63, 125, 172, 157
175–76, 182 Qur’an, 65, 125, 134, 155–57
pastors, 38–39, 67, 120, 130–32
patiency, 16, 97, 110–11, 115 race, 1, 6, 8, 34, 43, 45, 88, 114, 158–59
Pentecostal churches, 66–68 racial stereotyping of domestics, 34
Pentecostal churches in Lebanon, 66–67 recruitment agency. See private
Pentecostal church for Ethiopians, 35, 37 employment agencies
Pentecostalism, 67–68, 71–72 refugees, 63, 165, 169, 182
People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen regulating domestic work, 10
(PDRY), 182 regulations, 4, 10, 13, 53, 178
Philippine Overseas Employment familial, 141
Administration (POEA), 122, 139 relationships, 12–21, 38, 43–44, 52–53,
Philippines, 1–2, 29, 31, 34–36, 75–77, 56, 58, 61–64, 69–70, 100, 104,
81–83, 95, 97–99, 103–12, 115, 131–33, 135, 142–44, 146–47,
118–20, 122, 125–26, 128, 131–33, 149, 151, 155, 157, 168, 173
136–39, 154–58, 160, 168–69, 188 intimate, 2, 5, 16, 18, 27, 42–43, 118,
pilgrimages, 100, 105, 114–15, 126, 138, 152
157, 188 long-distance, 167, 171
198 O Index
relatives, 66, 96, 150, 168, 171, 174, salaries, 9–10, 12, 36–38, 54, 59–60, 67,
178–81 76, 81–82, 99, 104, 122, 155, 166,
religion, 2, 6, 16, 18, 24, 40, 52–53, 171, 173, 175, 178
63–66, 68, 70, 95–96, 114–15, 117, Sana’a, 165, 170, 173–74, 178, 182, 184
124, 132–33, 137, 139, 154, 188 Saudi Arabia, 1–2, 9, 17, 20–21, 65, 71,
religious activities, 117, 119, 135 117, 120–21, 141–45, 149–50,
154–55, 158–61, 175, 177, 181,
religious affiliations, 127–28, 145
187–88
religious conversion, 38, 114, 117–19,
Saudi employers, 153–54
123–24, 126–28, 131, 133–36, 189
Saudi families, 153
religious practices, 38, 58, 65, 68, 70, Saudi women, 21, 143–44, 150, 158
96–97, 110, 118, 121–22, 124 Saudi women employers, 159
rental apartments, 18–19, 27, 30, 32, Saudi women’s care of elderly parents,
35–36, 38, 40–44, 58, 62–63, 102, 143
165, 173–75 Scott, James, 3, 15, 26, 52, 56, 58, 64,
reproduction, 4–5, 27, 42–43, 57, 95, 74, 78, 85, 93, 156, 163
143, 167 second-generation migrant children, 88
social, 3, 5, 70 sending countries. See migrant source
Republic of Yemen, 46, 161, 183 countries
residence, 9, 43, 57, 143, 166, 173, 176, service, 5, 36–37, 39, 44, 46, 55, 65–66,
179 76, 88, 123, 126, 128, 150
sex work, 78, 90–91
residence permit, 9, 57, 113, 170, 174,
shahada (confession of Islamic faith), 125
176
shelters, 17, 19, 29, 36, 63, 83
resistance, 10, 14–16, 25, 27, 40, 43–44,
Sirilankiyya. See Sri Lankis
48, 51–53, 56–59, 64–65, 68–74, sisters, 62, 81, 86, 125, 129–30, 132,
93, 97, 154, 156, 163, 184 143, 155, 157, 171, 174, 179
responsibilities, 20–21, 28, 54–55, 65, sociality, 21, 96, 109–10, 160
90, 126, 150–51, 158 social policy, 164, 187
women’s, 64, 70 social relationships, 3, 16–18, 68,
restaurants, 12–13, 15, 19, 30, 40, 61, 134–35
120, 131 societies, 3–4, 7–8, 88, 127
return home, 44–45, 76, 81–83, 150, sojourns, 117, 119, 133, 154
168–69, 171, 175, 177, 179–80 solidarity, 153
rights, 9, 13, 15, 17, 35, 39–40, 42–45, Somali women, 170
54–55, 65, 69, 72, 79, 90, 96 son, 17, 43, 84, 86, 99, 105, 144–48,
157, 173–74, 179
women’s, 45
South Yemen, 173, 182
rights violations, immigrant, 28
spaces, 4, 7, 11–13, 18–19, 21, 25, 30,
ritual, 26, 65, 74, 99, 102, 111–13, 118,
32–33, 35, 40, 43–44, 47, 61, 66,
125, 137–39, 154, 162, 188 77, 79, 110–11, 119, 122, 134–35
ritual performance, 40, 95–97, 110–11 religious, 6, 40
Rollins, Judith, 12, 25, 28, 48, 55, 58, 74 spheres, 4, 6, 52, 76, 88, 90–91
Roman Catholicism. See Catholicism domestic, 55, 76, 80
rosary, 99, 101, 103, 106–7, 112–13 spiritual communities, 70–71
runaways, 17, 60–61 spirituality, shared, 16–17
Index O 199
sponsors, 9, 31, 33, 36–37, 40, 45, 70, violence, 28, 45, 51, 56, 76–77, 79, 165–
76, 81, 84, 123, 160 66, 175
nominal, 29, 45 Virgin Mary, 16, 95–111, 113, 115
sponsorship, 9–10, 48, 55 visas, 31, 99, 105, 174, 178
Sri Lanka, 1–2, 29, 31, 43–44, 98 tourist, 104, 176, 178
Sri Lankan domestic workers, 23, 25, 29, vulnerability, 28, 45, 51, 119
31, 37–38, 48, 52, 59, 72–73, 104,
124–25, 168, 184 wages. See salaries
Sri Lankis (Sirilankiyya), 30, 38 wedding, 171–73, 182–83
state religion, 121–22 weekend enclaves, 28, 40
states, 4, 8, 10–11, 20–21, 24, 43–45, Werbner, Pnina, 2, 12, 26, 64, 74, 118,
73, 77, 89–90, 101, 108, 120–22, 136–39, 160, 162, 177, 185
138, 142, 150, 158–59, 162, 182 White City. See Tel Aviv
status, 9, 12, 18, 56, 63–64, 84, 88, 146, wife, 5, 65, 84, 130, 145–47, 157, 159
150, 152, 182 wives, 80, 109, 143, 146, 150, 153,
irregular, 15, 69–70 158–59
strategies, 26–27, 39, 41, 44, 49, 77, women’s caregiving roles, 158
women workers, 41, 170
85, 96
worker mobilization, 17, 40, 44
subordinate groups, 56
workers, 10, 27–31, 35, 37–40, 42–46,
subordination, 12, 45, 110, 143, 156
49, 51, 54–55, 58–59, 61, 68, 80,
Sudanese, 62–63
90, 112, 114, 120, 125, 132, 145,
support, 17, 19, 31, 66–67, 71, 81–82,
150
123, 174
domestic/care, 159
spiritual, 16–17
freelance (see freelancers)
survival, 77, 114, 125 workers experience, domestic, 119
Syrian, 62–63 working conditions, 10, 16, 20, 53–54,
58, 60, 69–70, 83, 150, 168, 175,
taxis, 36, 60, 123–24, 129–30, 174 178
Tel Aviv, 16, 19, 95–99, 101–11, 113–15 workplaces, 10, 89, 118, 166
threat, 43, 56, 69, 88–89 work relationships, 54, 80
touch, 33–34, 128, 155, 166–67, 173–74, world, 1–5, 7, 9, 11–15, 17–21, 23–25,
180 27, 34, 40, 81, 86, 113–14, 118, 120,
trafficking, 78, 90–91, 188 127, 134, 136, 143–44, 154, 163
sex, 91–92
transcripts, hidden, 56, 58, 68, 74, 93, Yemen, 1–2, 9, 18, 20, 144, 165–67,
154, 156, 163 169–84, 187
transformations, 2, 8, 13, 21, 117, 134 Yemen Arab Republic (YAR). See Yemen
transnationalism, 47, 137, 163, 167–68, Yemeni crisis, 166, 176
183–84 Yemeni families, 165, 170
Yemeni Ministry of Social Affairs and
UAE. See United Arab Emirates Labour, 170
unfreedom, 52, 55, 68, 70, 73, 80 Yemenis, 173–74, 177, 180–81
unions, formal, 40–41 Yemeni society, 174, 181
United Arab Emirates (UAE), 2, 25, 49, Yeoh, Brenda, 12, 26, 28, 40, 49, 168,
84, 88, 117, 120–22, 131, 138 183, 185

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Migrant Domestic

Workers in the Middle East

First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United

ISBN 978-1-349-50301-8 ISBN 978-1-137-48211-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: December 2014

1 Making a Home in the World:

8 “Shall We Leave or Not?”: Ethiopian Women’s

Making a Home in the World

Bina Fernandez and Marina de Regt

middle-class families employ South Asian or African domestics, who are

Feminist Debates on Public-Private Boundaries

called the “private sector,” to distinguish it from the government) and

contested and renegotiated. Nowhere is the malleability of these boundaries

Public-Private Boundaries in the Middle East

In contrast to the centrality of liberal, rational, and secular values under-

Unhomely Worlds: Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East

2004; Jureidini, 2003; Longva, 1997), and governments in the Middle

is generally constituted as “out of bounds” for migrant domestic workers—

Migrant Domestic Workers’ Reconfigurations of

Moving away from the idea of resistance, Liebelt’s chapter (Chapter 5)

Dubai to the relatively more prohibitive contexts of Saudi Arabia and

have contributed to the creation of vibrant migrant communities. Thus,

The second distinct view of migrant domestic workers’ engagements

Doumani, B. (ed.), 2003. Family History in the Middle East: Household,

Forging Intimate and Work Ties

Researching Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon

Benin, and Togo. The dynamics of focus groups—unanticipated responses

Sponsoring a “Sirilankiyya”: Migrant Domestic Work in Lebanon

Exclusions within the Home: “There Was a Map She

Exclusions outside the Home: “I Don’t Have Freedom, Cannot [Be

Employers ensured that the MDW engaged in only “appropriate” activi-

Migrant workers from the Philippines are more likely to be subjected to

Resisting Exclusion at Home: Private

Gabra forged her alliance across balconies and by coordinating throwing

In another case of extreme violations, two MDWs used the balconies to

Resisting Exclusions Outside: Church Prayers,

I came to Lebanon on a contract. I had a good Madam [who] paid my salary on

Africans. Every Sunday he [brought] me Ethiopian food—he knew I could not

every Sunday. Other scholars have observed similar forms of mobilizing

Rental Apartments, Migrant Coworkers, and Migrant Families

residential area for (undocumented) freelancers, and some apartments are

resistance by the MDWs, as they are actively discouraged or rendered illegal

2. I classify a freelancer as someone who works most of her time for

is impossible (Scott, 1985; 1990). Research on migrant domestic workers

sharing accommodation with compatriots. The majority of my encoun-

Conceptualizing the Unfree Labor, Agency, and

contracts in destination countries and may endure working conditions

enforcement or inspection. More important than the employment con-

project” as two distinct but necessarily interrelated “fields of meaning”

Agency in the Domain of Employment: “Of Course

M AKEDA : Nice in this country means she is not “nyah-ni-nyah-ni-nyah-ni” [nag-

This “hidden transcript” of Ethiopian migrant domestic workers, which is

In this confrontation, the employer’s expectation of “service with a smile”

Agency in the Domain of Marriage and Relationships

Perceptions of relative advantage were constructed not only around