Abstract
Zilah Mendoza and Kathryn Meisle shared the final bow in Second Stage Theatre’s 2003 premiere of Living Out.1 There is nothing remarkable about such a curtain call. The two actors shared most of the stage time, and they portrayed the protagonists in the play about a nanny and her employer. Director Jo Bonney’s choice recognized the two performers’ collaborative and comparable labor in bringing Lisa Loomer’s script to life. The two bodies bowing together also emphasized Living Out’s parallel structure and this particular production’s interest in parallel staging. The bow, like the two-hour play before it, encouraged the audience to consider the partnership forged by domestic workers and their employers. The production explored the complications and injustices of a relationship based on skewed power dynamics while stressing the intricate connections and intimacies that exist between a predominantly white, upper-middle class in the United States and an immigrant workforce.
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Notes
Linda S. Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 116. To be sure, Bosnia k believes t his idea is too simplistic: “Citi zenship is not a single currency that is transferred from some women to others in zero-sum fashion” (103).
Lisa Loomer, Living Out (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2005);
Milcha Sánchez-Scott, with Jeremy Blahnik, Latina, in Necessary Theater: Six Plays about the Chicano Experience, ed. Jorge Huerta (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1989), 76–141;
and Octavio Solis, Lydia (New York: Samuel French, 2010). References to these plays will be noted parenthetically and abbreviated LO, LA, and LY, respectively (all italics appear in the original scripts).
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
On changing demographics of immigrant labor, see Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, introduction to Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy, ed. Ehrenreich and Hochschild (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 1–13. To narrow the scope of the chapter, I do not delve deeply into questions of gender, focusing instead on questions of labor vis-à-vis immigration status. This said, a discussion of domestic work necessarily implicates gender. How that work “counts” ties into a long history of devaluing the labor of women. As immigrant women care for homes and children, they participate in perpetuating constructions of gender in the United States. At the same ti me, because t hey are breadwinners working outside their own homes and their own countries, domestic workers also challenge cultural stereotypes.
Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica, 8, 14–18. On occupational ghettoization, see also, Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A., 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 57.
Shannon Gleeson, “Labor Rights for All? The Role of Undocumented Immigrant Status for Worker Claims Making,” Law & Social Inquiry 35, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 561–602.
Karen Shimakawa, “Staging a Moving Map in Byron Au Yong’s and Aaron Jafferis’s Stuck Elevator,” in Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations, ed. Lara D. Nielsen and Patricia Ybarra (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 103.
David Bacon, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), 23.
On the economic forces compelling women to migrate, see also Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000); and Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman.
Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 117.
See Peggy R. Smith, “Organizing the Unorganizable: Private Paid Household Workers and Approaches to Employee Representation,” North Carolina Law Review 79, no. 1 (2000): 45–110; Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica, esp. 21;
and Linda Burnham and Nik Theodore, Home Economics: The Invisible and Unregulated World of Domestic Work (New York: National Domestic Workers Alliance, 2012).
Linda Saborío, Embodying Difference: Scripting Social Images of the Female Body in Latina Theatre (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012), 35.
Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), 186. I paraphrase John B. Thompson’s introduction to Pierre Bourdieu’s Language & Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, ed. Thompson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), to describe a mask of control (24).
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 21.
Rhacel Salazar-Parreñas, The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 1.
Jorge Huerta, “A Comic and Sensitive Look at Undocumented Nannies: Living Out by Lisa Loomer,” Gestos 36 (November 2003): 185; Michael Quintanilla, “Domestic Drama,” Los Angeles Times, 1 March 2003, E26; and Alys Marshall and Shalini Dore, “Theater Crowd Fetes ‘Living’ Stage Birth,” Daily Variety, 5 February 2003, 11.
Sau-ling C. Wong, “Diverted Mothering: Representations of Caregivers of Color in the Age of ‘Multiculturalism,’” in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994), 69.
Milcha Sánchez-Scott, introduction to Roosters, in On New Ground: Contemporary Hispanic-American Plays, ed. M. Elizabeth Osborn (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987), 245.
Baz Kershaw, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (London: Routledge, 1992), 1.
First, not all theatre productions are professional. The immigration status of amateur, student, and community theatre-makers is irrelevant, as they are not officially employed. Second, not all professional participants are subject to a theatre company’s I-9 forms. “Independent contractors,” a category that may include some self-employed artists, allows for a company to contract out a service (e.g., writing a play, teaching a workshop) without the responsibility of checking immigration status. This is not some easily exploitable loophole, as the Department of Labor regularly monitors “misclassification” (Department of Labor website, dol.gov/whd/workers/misclassification/ [accessed 21 July 2013]). Finally, some theatre artists do work in violation of immigration laws. On the specifics of Latina’s undocumented actor, see Sánchez-Scott, introduction to Roosters, 246; and Alicia Arrizón, Latina Performance: Traversing the Stage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 104.
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© 2014 Gad Guterman
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Guterman, G. (2014). Act § 274A—Unlawful Employment of Aliens. In: Performance, Identity, and Immigration Law. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137411006_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137411006_3
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