‘Looking after granny’: A transnational ethic of care and responsibility

Geoforum 64 (2015) 121–129

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‘Looking after granny’: A transnational ethic of care and responsibility Tanja Bastia IDPM, University of Manchester, 1.064 Arthur Lewis Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 1 April 2014 Received in revised form 13 June 2015 Accepted 15 June 2015 Available online 23 June 2015 Keywords: Responsibility Elderly care Transnationalism Bolivia Spain

a b s t r a c t Recent writing in geography has focused on the ways in which we can think and act responsibly in relation to place as well as ‘distant others’. Others have argued for a more ambiguous stance towards responsibility. In most of this literature, however, responsibility is seen as flowing from the centre to the periphery. In this paper I argue that we should also be paying attention to the spaces where responsibility flows in the opposite direction. Using the example of Bolivian elderly care workers in Spain, this paper shows that many elderly care workers are practising a transnational ethic of care that goes beyond the remit of their marketised responsibilities. Many elderly care workers place their ‘grannies’ into the realm of familial social relations and express feelings of responsibility towards them. This allows them to accept or at least bear their demanding and often demeaning work. However, this same process contributes to them staying in often exploitative working conditions while denying responsibilities of care to their own families and to themselves. The paper argues that shifting our attention to how responsibilities and care are practised in transnational social fields, allows for the recognition of the many benefits that richer countries continue to draw from the migration of people from the Global South and contributes to the construction of less Eurocentric perspectives on care and responsibility. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Europe is undergoing deep, structural changes in relation to its organisation of care. Ageing population, low fertility rates and women’s higher levels of labour market participation rates have all combined to create a ‘crisis of care’ (Benería, 2008; Tronto, 2005). Work within geography has shown that current political systems and hegemonic understandings of care frame it as relating to individual autonomous selves, increasingly privatising responsibilities for care work; whether related to the care of children, people with disabilities or the elderly. This is a process that reflects market expansion (Staeheli and Brown, 2003; Lawson, 2007; Raghuram et al., 2009; Robinson, 1999). In this context, care is understood as a commodified good, a transaction, as opposed to a social relation (Green and Lawson, 2011); a good that is increasingly provided by migrant workers; mainly women migrant workers (Anderson, 2000; Williams and Gavanas, 2008; Lutz, 2008, 2011). This paper takes on board critical work advanced in geography that proposes an alternative conceptualisation of care and responsibility (Lawson, 2007; Raghuram, 2012; Raghuram et al., 2009; Massey, 2004; Laliberté, 2015) and extends it through a multi-scalar and multi-sited approach (Lawson, 2007: 6). In

E-mail address: [email protected] http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.06.014 0016-7185/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

particular, it shows how migrants who carry out live-in domiciliary elderly care work relate to their work as a responsibility towards the ‘grannies’ they look after. I argue that the responsibility that many of these women feel towards their ‘grannies’ suggests that we should pay attention to these areas where responsibility is practised. This enriches the ways in which responsibilities and care have been conceptualised previously in geography, for example, as ‘caring for distant others’ (Corbridge, 1993; Lawson, 2007), as the collective responsibilities of the West for past events (Gatens and Lloyd, 1999; Massey, 2004) or as a post-colonial responsibility (Power, 2009). As post-colonial subjects working as carers in the nation that once colonised their countries of origin, ‘distant others’ (who are often thought of as the recipients of our responsibilities) also voice responsibility towards cared-for members of the colonising societies. By turning the elderly people they care for into fictional family members – into their ‘grannies’ – elderly care workers transform their commodified care into a familial social relation. This in turn allows them to humanise their work. At the same time, I also show how this very process is the basis for further exploitation and disempowerment, making extremely low wages and very challenging working conditions bearable. In the context of commodified care, therefore, the turning of work into familial social relations, further exploits the workers implicated in these relations, sometimes to the extent that they have to deny

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responsibilities for close family members and for the caring of themselves (Tronto, 2006). 2. Geographies of elderly care and responsibility Geography has a long history of dealing with the geographies of care, particularly through the work of medical geography (Milligan and Power, 2010) and it has now become of broader interest to the discipline (Datta et al., 2010; England and Dyck, 2012; Green and Lawson, 2011; Lawson, 2007; Raghuram, 2012; Raghuram et al., 2009; Milligan et al., 2007; Blazek et al., 2015), as Lawson (2007) argued that it should. Of particular interest has been the interconnection between care and responsibility, which has recently attracted increasing attention (Noxolo et al., 2012; Raghuram et al., 2009; Lawson, 2007; England and Dyck, 2012). This is a welcome development given the potential that these new directions bring for developing a less Eurocentric view of geographies of care (Green and Lawson, 2011; Robinson, 1999; Kofman and Raghuram, 2009), particularly if this is combined with a transnational perspective. Such an approach expands not just the social fields for our analysis of care but also how care and responsibility are conceptualised. 2.1. Geographies of care and responsibility Care has become a contested term (Kofman, 2012; Kofman and Raghuram, 2015), and an increasing number of scholars argue that it is Eurocentric (Green and Lawson, 2011) or not very useful because it obfuscates more than it illuminates (Anderson, 2000). For example, some have argued that the concept of care is not very useful because the same term is used for care practiced within the family and care carried out in a marketised setting such as a care home, providing insufficient distinction between the different settings in which care is carried out (Twigg, 2006). Authors following this position highlight that family care is usually performed in a context of ‘emotional connectedness’ because it is given and received by family members and argue that we need to distinguish this type of care from the care carried out in a work setting in which ‘emotional connectedness’ cannot be assumed (Twigg, 2006). This presupposes that care is best practiced within the family and rests on the assumption of a heterosexual family, in which women will take up caring responsibilities. Both assumptions have been widely criticised, showing that care is a globalising concern (Robinson, 1999); that not all households are composed of heterosexual couples with children, or indeed, that familial relations are universally taken as being the most significant (Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004). Moreover, families are not always spaces of harmonious and caring relations; while work settings can become spaces of emotional connectedness. In most of this work on the geographies of care, care is conceptualised as flowing from the ‘stronger’ (carer) to the ‘weaker’ (cared for) individual. Similarly, responsibility is framed as residing within the domain of the privileged and flowing from the ‘centre’ (Europe and North America) towards the peripheries (e.g. Lawson, 2007). The question here has been the extent to which privileged groups feel responsibility towards ‘distant others’ (Corbridge, 1993; Lawson, 2007; Laliberté, 2015). Some have raised questions about postcolonial responsibility (Power, 2009), arguing that attempts at bringing partnerships and promoting ‘good governance’ are imbued with paternalistic assumptions about development and reform. In fact, there is a growing sense of ambiguity towards responsibility (Noxolo et al., 2012) as well as care (Green and Lawson, 2011; Kofman, 2012). Despite the adoption of ‘a global sense of place’ and the ‘outwar dlookingness’ of places (Massey, 2004), the ways in which care and

responsibility are framed still suggests looking from a particular place (i.e. the author’s point of view) and as Green and Lawson (2011) have shown, most work on care has been framed in and from the Global North. In this context Raghuram et al.’s (2009) proposition is an interesting one, given that they de-centre questions of ‘self’ and ‘others’ by adopting a post-colonial approach, and challenge the centre from which care and responsibility are talked about. They ask: ‘‘What does care look like for different people from different centres?’’ (2009: 10) and argue that shifting this centre can lead to alternative conceptualisations of responsibility and care. In this paper I explore this possibility by looking at care work through the experiences of a group of Bolivian women who found work as live-in elderly carers in Spain. This allows me to recognise the ways in which they exercise agency in their attempts to bring some control over the work they perform. At the same time, their experiences also reveal the structural constraints that they encounter in their everyday lives, whether these are related to gendered expectations of care, structural constraints of poverty, class and racism in their country of origin, or labour and migration regimes in countries of destination (Williams and Gavanas, 2008; Parreñas, 2008). Finally, despite the original inclusion of ‘self’ in the framing of care (Tronto, 2006), the issue of how the person who cares for others also cares for herself has generally been omitted in the work on geographies of care and responsibility. Tronto (2006), drawing on Foucault, argues that caring for self is an essential element of an ethics of care, albeit one that rests on the recognition of our essential vulnerability, which is not easily recognised in Western societies. Moreover, she argues that integrating the caring for self into our wider framing of a politics of care opens up the opportunity for the recognition of the ways in which we are all implicated in care-giving and care-receiving. Recognising the caring for self as an important element of a politics of care opens up the possibility of analysing the consequences of the structural constraints experienced by elderly care workers. 2.2. A transnational ethic of care While the ‘global’ perspective can provide a useful starting point for analysing the re-organisation of care, the same approach also de-territorialises and flattens the analysis (Lawson, 2007; Massey, 2005; Sparke, 2007), given that it pays little attention to the specificity of the locations where some of these processes take place (Raghuram, 2012). A transnational perspective can help focus on the specificities of these locations and how social relations, even when transnational, continue to be embedded in social hierarchies, which are often place-specific (Glick Schiller and Çag˘lar, 2009; Basch et al., 1993). A transnational perspective can also help us think through the social values that migrant carers of the elderly bring with them and necessarily employ in carrying out their everyday tasks. Some of these issues have already been explored in the literature on migrant domestic workers around issues of transnational motherhood, that is, the new meanings given by domestic workers to motherhood as a result of spatial separation from their children (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila, 1997). However, the focus on motherhood has meant there has been little recognition of the fact that the migrant carers’ role as daughters is also important for the framing of their identities. While only some women are mothers, they are all daughters, albeit with different understandings of what this role and identity might entail. In most Latin American countries women traditionally provide not only child care but also elderly care. When they migrate, they often continue to care from abroad, by sending remittances, telephone calls or paying for hospital bills. This creates complex circuits of care, yet in most of the literature

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the elderly have often been invisibilised, unless they are present as providers of care for their grandchildren (Vullnetari and King, 2008; Bailey, 2013). Moreover, their role as daughters also influences the relationships they establish with the person they care for. Datta et al. (2010) argue that there is a specific ‘migrant ethic of care’, or a specific way that migrants practice care because of their condition as migrants, while Raghuram (2012) argues that the way migrants exercise care is not so much influenced by their condition as migrants, but rather is influenced by the ‘‘pre-migration configuration of care’’ (2012: 160). The transnational nature of the relationships involved in elderly care work means that migrant carers’ culturally specific views of how elderly people should be cared for will influence the ways in which they will carry out their work. This aspect of elderly care work has not been widely researched, as most studies of elderly care workers have been conducted only in countries of destination (Walsh and O’Shea, 2010; Datta et al., 2010; England and Dyck, 2012). They are therefore limited to those care workers of the elderly who are currently employed in the sector. Including research in the countries of origin provides information on the configurations of care prevalent in the migrants’ country of origin. It also allows for the inclusion of those migrants who had left these jobs and returned ‘home’. This gives us better information on the reasons for leaving, including injury or inability to cope. 2.3. Elderly care work Elderly care work has changed significantly with the rise in women’s labour market participation and changes in family formation (Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004). Increasing demand for elderly care in many European countries is now increasingly being met by migrant women from Eastern Europe and countries of the Global South (Lutz, 2011; Parreñas, 2012; Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010; Glenn, 2010; Anderson, 2000; Hochschild, 2000). In addition, informal care work has emerged as a specific subcategory of care work, which is significantly different from unpaid family care (as it is not provided by family members) and professional paid care work (because it is not regulated by labour market legislation) (Geissler and Pfau-Effinger, 2005). Despite not meeting this increased demand for elderly care, the state continues to influence the constraints and opportunities that elderly care workers have to confront via its migration policies and labour market regulation (Williams and Gavanas, 2008). Within this broader context and changing landscape of provision of care, a large part of the literature on care has also focused on the relationship between the carer and the cared-for and has generally found it to be quite problematic. Green and Lawson (2011) argue that even in some feminist approaches care is thought of as a vertical exchange between an (autonomous) carer and a (needy) receiver of care. This is echoed by Raghuram et al. (2009) who argue that in many studies ‘‘carers [. . .] are largely seen as responsible, autonomous subjects. In these accounts the care needs of the carer and the cared-for are held distinctively apart as care flows out from the care-giver to the care-receiver, each constituted as distinct subjects’’ (Raghuram et al., 2009: 6). Twigg (2006) argues that in elderly care work the usual dynamic found in domestic work, where mistresses are in power (see Anderson, 2000), is reversed, given that the ‘clients’ i.e. the cared-for elderly person, is weak and the ‘‘workers are very much in charge’’ (Twigg, 2006:141). While questioning this notion of the carer as being in charge (Milligan and Wiles, 2010), the interviews I carried out indicate that the carer has very little power vis-á-vis her employer, who is usually the daughter or son of the cared-for person. This can be explained by the often undocumented status of many domiciliary elderly care workers, as well as the fact that

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the work is performed in private homes and provides few, if any, opportunities for improving the conditions of work. The place within which the care work happens is therefore also important. As Twigg (2006) concedes the unequal relationship between carer and cared-for identified above might be stronger in the residential home, where carers are better able to control their environment as well as the bodies of the elderly they care for. However, private homes are difficult to access for researchers as is informal domiciliary elderly care work carried out by migrants. This might be the reason why much recent research on elderly care work has been carried out in more formal settings, such as elderly residential homes or where domiciliary elderly care work is provided by agencies (England and Dyck, 2012; van Riemsdijk, 2010; Datta et al., 2010). These settings are important sites for understanding care, but lived realities of informal live-in, domiciliary migrant elderly care workers are often very different. Therefore, contrary to current notions of marketised care as measurable and quantifiable tasks, the interviews I conducted in Spain show that care work encompasses a broad spectrum of activities that relate to tasks, emotions, and responsibilities. Interviewees sometimes placed responsibility squarely within the realm of work but at other times talked about a sense of moral obligations and feeling responsible for the elderly people they were caring for. Taken together, these tasks, emotions and responsibilities make a significant contribution to countries that are already much better off than the countries where most of the elderly carers come from (Silvey, 2006).

3. Methodology and sample This paper draws on multi-sited research carried out in three cities in Spain (Madrid, Algeciras and San Fernando) and a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Cochabamba, Bolivia. In total I conducted nineteen life story interviews with Bolivian women who worked as elderly care workers in Spain. These care workers had varied employment histories. They changed jobs and sometimes sectors of work. Maria, for example, had also looked after small children in previous jobs while Josefa had worked as an elderly care worker in the past but was working as a self-employed builder and decorator at the time of the interview. However, elderly care work, often combined with domestic work, was the predominant work found among this group of migrant workers in Spain, as is common with other Latin American migrants. This has led some to refer to elderly care work as an employment niche for Latin American women (Martínez Buján, 2010). As is common elsewhere, ‘domestic work’ included elements of care work, while those employed as ‘care workers’ also carried out other duties, such as cooking or cleaning (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010), hence the difficulty in separating the two categories of work. I carried out six interviews in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2008; and thirteen interviews in Spain in 2009. All interviewees were women. There is some evidence that men began entering care work, particularly elderly care work, as a result of the financial crisis and the high unemployment rates in Spain (interview with migrants’ rights organisation, 7th August 2009). However, I did not find any men working in this sector. I also interviewed three representatives from organisations working on migrants’ rights. The sample is quite varied in terms of age, levels of education as well as previous migratory experience. The average age at the time of the interview was 37 years. However, there was great variation between the youngest interviewee, a 17 year old returnee and the eldest, who was 53 when interviewed. On average, they had just over 9 years of education. Eight interviewees finished secondary

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school and some also attended universities, while four had fewer than five years of schooling in total (unfinished primary school). I aimed to interview people who originated from the same town – a mining town located in the department of Cochabamba – to ensure shared gender and ethnic practices. Interviewees were initially found through contacts given to me by their family members in Bolivia and Argentina and additional interviewees were then found through snowballing. All those who were interviewed in Bolivia (i.e. returnees) had been unsuccessful in securing regular residency and work permits in Spain. Of those interviewed in Spain, 7 were irregular, 3 were in the process of being regularised and had submitted an application for regularisation; only 3 had legal residency and work permits at the time of the interview. Those who had been able to secure residency and work permits had arrived in Spain in 2003 and 2004 and were able to apply for the 2005 amnesty programme. All names are fictitious to preserve the anonymity of the interviewees. Interviews were conducted in Spanish, which I speak fluently, and then transcribed. I translated only the relevant quotes, which are identified with the interview place and date in parenthesis following the quote.

4. Bolivian elderly care workers in Spain Bolivians have historically migrated to Argentina and the US, but a combination of harsher migration policies by the latter and the Argentinean crisis in 2001, meant that these destinations were no longer viable at the turn of the century. Spain, on the other hand, was experiencing fast economic growth and had relatively open borders, with a focus on integration rather than on limiting immigration flows, making it very attractive for Latin American migrants (Bastia, 2011a). This changed with the introduction of visas for Bolivians in 2007 and the financial crisis that began that same year. In contrast with previous regional migrations, which were mainly led by men, the new destination, Spain, attracted larger numbers of women: about 57% of Bolivians in Spain were women in 2008 (Escandell and Tapias, 2009; Hinojosa, 2008). Many of these women found work in care or domestic work, usually looking after elderly people (Bastia, 2011a). As Martínez Buján (2010) has shown, Spain has experienced an increased demand for elderly care work as a result of the increased (native) women’s labour market participation rates and very weak social protection policies for older people. There were two main types of work arrangement for elderly carers: ‘interna’, live-in, i.e. sleeping and eating at their employer’s residence; and ‘externa’, working only part of the day and not sleeping at the cared-for house. Most of the women interviewed were employed as live-in elderly carers or ‘internas’. Live-in carers were usually on call 24 h a day and had between a half and two days off per week. Their wages included boarding – accommodation and food – and varied from about 600 to 1000 euros per month. None of my interviewees earned 1000 euros, but they had been offered that wage or had heard of others earning as much. The advantages of working as a live-in carer were that they could send most of the wage home. Although live-in carers saved on food, accommodation and travel, they usually still had to rent a room, which they often shared. This rented room provided a place to keep their belongings and spend their time off at weekends. Many interviewees took up additional jobs on their days off, such as a cleaning job that was paid by the hour. This meant that they had very little time to rest, sometimes only one night. ‘Externas’ generally worked only part of the day, usually 12 h shifts and they also received a monthly wage. The advantage of

having this work arrangement was that carers did not need to be on call 24 h. They could also enjoy more time on their own and sometimes combined two jobs. Those working as externas usually earned 600 euros per month for 12 h shifts six days a week, or just over 2 euros per hour. However, they often managed to have two jobs, a day and a night shift, earning up to 1200 euros per month. This was extremely tiring and they were generally able to sustain this work arrangement for only a limited period of time as is illustrated by the interviews with returnees in the following sections. Almost all interviewees were employed informally and privately. There was only one exception, Cecilia, who worked for a private residence. Her better salary and working conditions reflect this. She worked night shifts in a private residence for terminally ill elderly people: two nights on and three off for 800–900 euros with all benefits included, such as overtime, holidays and media paga, the two half wages given every six months in addition to the monthly wages. Undocumented status was an important shaper of working conditions. Cecilia, for example, saw an improvement in her working conditions after obtaining her residency and work permits and also received her media paga, which she was not receiving before she regularised her status. Employers often do not pay out the media paga to undocumented migrant workers. Many interviewees identified their irregular status as the reason for their lower bargaining power vis-à-vis their employers, which meant that employers were able to get away with not fulfilling promises for pay or help with regularisation; commitments which they had made verbally. Interviews were conducted during the financial crisis (May– August 2009) so it is unsurprising to find that all interviewees mentioned that conditions of work had worsened. Most were unable to negotiate time schedules. Women who held their jobs since before the crisis were generally able to maintain their wages, but those seeking new employment as cleaners were offered lower wages, sometimes as low as 3 euros per hour when the going rate before the recession was between 8 and 9 euros. This might suggest that carers had an incentive to stay with their current employer but as will be shown in the next sections, monetary gain was not the only, or even the most important, factor for some elderly carers in their employment decisions. Most women looking for new jobs mentioned having far lower bargaining power and potential employers being unwilling to negotiate working times, adopting a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude. This suggests that higher competition was making it difficult to find new jobs and negotiate their employment conditions. A representative of a migrant women’s organisation interviewed in Madrid mentioned that a number of Bolivian women were offering to work for below the going rate: when faced with competition from other workers, some offered to work for 600 euros per month even when employers advertised jobs for 700 euros per month (interview with migrant women’s organisation in Madrid, 7th August 2009).

5. Emotional responsibility: looking after ‘granny’ Live-in elderly care work involves doing everything that is required (Twigg, 2006) – as requested by the employer, the cared-for person or as deemed necessary by the elderly care worker to ensure the wellbeing and safety of the elderly person she is looking after. This was confirmed in the interviews, in which women described their everyday tasks of elderly care work as consisting of: helping the elderly person get up, giving her a bath, putting on nappies, cooking, cleaning, making up the bed, mopping the floor, shopping and making sure that there was sufficient and adequate food in the house, taking the elderly person for a walk, feeding her, keeping her company, talking to her, keeping noise down

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when she sleeps in case she wakes, etc. Lucia, for example, when asked what her job involved, described: ‘‘Taking her out, put the washing machine on, I mean, housework, cooking, helping her with stuff she couldn’t do, sometimes she would forget things’’ (Cochabamba 16th May 2008). While many of these activities could be understood as just tasks that elderly carers perform as part of their duties, many interviewees talked of feeling responsible for the wellbeing of the elderly people they looked after. They would put the person they looked after before their own wellbeing, for example, by never leaving her alone, or making sure that they found somebody trustworthy to look after them when they had to leave their jobs to return home. Emotional responsibility was therefore not linked to specific tasks but to the relationship that many elderly care workers established with the people they looked after. Most migrants spoke in detail about their daily tasks involved in caring for elderly people, which challenges suggestions by Twigg (2006) that these are usually silenced and not talked about. For example, Fernanda, who was in her mid-thirties, married and had two children in Bolivia, said: ‘‘He was paralytic, I had to change his nappies, clean his bottom, I had to take him to the toilet, everything. I had to take him, change him, make him eat, that’s what my job was like’’ (Cochabamba, 29th April 2008). Despite the long days and the undefined list of tasks these carers are responsible for, some of the interviewees cared deeply for the person they were looking after. In fact, some suggested that they were ‘like daughters’ to the women they were looking after, that is, that they provided the people they looked after with the love and support that a daughter would provide to her elderly mother (or father) in an idealised world and according to the moral expectations implied in Bolivian culture. The woman that Fernanda was looking after was 88 years old but this job lasted for only four months because the person she was looking after died. In recalling her experience she invokes family relations to make sense of the relationship she had with the woman she was looking after, calling her ‘granny’ and positioning herself as a daughter. ‘‘My granny died. I looked after her in the hospital for a month, because she didn’t have any children. I took her to the hospital, I did everything, it was as if I had been her daughter, I was looking after her, she had a scan, radiographies, I took care of everything, because the granddad [the husband] couldn’t do anything, he was also 88 years old, he couldn’t do anything. He had a daughter [. . .] but she had a family, children, a husband, she couldn’t. . . The lady I was looking after was in hospital, ill, because she wasn’t feeling well, she had stomach pains, and her guts had burst. The doctors were only waiting for her to die. I asked them: ‘‘When is she going to get better? Please operate her.’’ And the doctor would tell me: ‘‘Miss, you know what, are you the main carer?’’ ‘‘Yes, she doesn’t have anyone else.’’ ‘‘OK, I will tell you the truth. The lady is going to die. We are only waiting for her to die.’’ He told only me. I couldn’t believe it. And I looked after her during the day and during the night. Before dying she complained a lot, she said: ‘‘Ay, hijita [daughter, endearing] please look after me, look after me,’’ because she wouldn’t let me sleep at night, she wouldn’t let me sleep, she would shout: ‘‘Take me out of here!’’ I suffered all that because I went to work. Then she died, we buried her.’’ (Cochabamba, 29th April 2008). In this quote, the responsibility that Fernanda felt for the elderly woman she was looking after is clearly placed within the realm of work, albeit with an understanding that work implies suffering. However, it is also clear that responsibility in this case is much more than just the daily care that might be required to keep an elderly person well and comfortable. Fernanda placed herself and

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was also placed by the doctor and the person she looked after within the realm of familial relations. She was given confidential information about the care that the elderly person was receiving in the final stages of her life, information which would generally be restricted to family members. Needless to say, the elderly person’s death meant that Fernanda was also jobless, but she does not emphasise this part of the story. This quote also reflects cultural expectations of care in Fernanda’s country of origin, Bolivia, where looking after your elderly mother is a moral obligation. Transferring these expectations to her role as elderly carer, Fernanda therefore positioned herself in the role of daughter and cared for her granny anyway, whether this was part of her job or not, as when she includes burying her ‘granny’ in her account. This sense of responsibility expressed by elderly carers in some cases translated in migrant women staying in their jobs even when they were offered better paid opportunities elsewhere. This implied a longer separation from their children. For example Zenaide was born in the late 1960s and was a single mother whose daughter was 14 years old when she decided to go to Spain. She found work looking after an elderly woman who died two months later. She then found another job caring for a 92 year old woman. She was paid 700 euros per month as ‘externa’. She was offered a better paid job: 1000 euros per month as live-in, but she did not take it, despite the significant savings the move would entail. She explained: ‘‘I got used to the granny’’ (Algeciras, 2nd August 2009). In this case it is clear that Zenaide did not see her care work as a mere responsibility attached to a payment. Zenaide accepted to continue in a lower paying job, which also delayed her own return to Bolivia and reunion with her own daughter so that she could continue looking after the 92 year old woman. Although Zenaide does not make this comparison, other migrants had a set target amount of savings they wanted to achieve. They aimed for the highest paying job to maximise their earnings which would help them achieve their savings target as soon as possible so as to minimise the time they had to stay abroad and therefore separated from their children (see next section). While experiencing different types of harm (see below), many migrant carers made sure that their ‘grannies’ did not remain alone when they had to leave their jobs, either because of pressing issues back home or because they could not take the pressure any longer. These decisions are often overlooked in studies of care because they focus on those who are still employed in the sector. Fernanda, for example, found it very difficult to cope in her last job but she also made sure that the lady was not left on her own: ‘‘But before coming back I left another Bolivian there with them’’ (Cochabamba, 29th April 2008). Sometimes the emotional responsibility they felt towards the people they looked after prompted them to continue working even when they would have preferred not to. Rosa, who was in her early thirties, returned early to work after a maternity break because the elderly woman she was looking after remembered her and was used to having her and her sister as her main carers: ‘‘Now I went back to work because, well, the granny got used to us, she has Alzheimer’s disease, but she hadn’t forgotten me and my sister’’ (San Fernando, 27th July 2009). These examples show how migrant workers felt responsible for the ‘grannies’ they looked after and experienced this as much more than a paid job (see England and Dyck, 2012). Despite the fact that the ways in which they made sense of their relationship kept them in a position of disadvantage – e.g. they did not contest low wages or sought a better job elsewhere – migrant elderly care workers did not always perceive these conditions in a negative way, mostly because they see their work in Spain as time-bound and do not have the expectation of having the same rights and protections as Spanish workers (see Datta et al., 2010; Näre, 2011).

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These choices are not simply emotional but also a result of the conditions these migrants face, such as the visa for Bolivians introduced in 2007, which implies that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to return to Spain in the foreseeable future. The cost of travel to Spain often makes a temporary return to Bolivia prohibitively expensive. Moreover, as mentioned above, the traditional countries of emigration, the US and Argentina, had lost their appeal due to new migration barriers for the former and financial instability for the latter. Carers also put up with difficult working conditions because they see their work abroad as temporary and they endure it with the aim of achieving their migration goals, e.g. a specific amount of savings needed to complete a project, such as building a house (Bastia, 2011b). Bolivians were the last among Latin American migrants to arrive to Spain and therefore faced more competition in the labour niches they were seeking to enter. Moreover, few were able to benefit from the amnesty in 2005 because they could not qualify for the residency required to apply for the amnesty. The debts that they often incurred at home in order to finance their migration also weighed heavily on their decisions to remain and put up with long working hours. While the context is useful in understanding the choices these women made in terms of staying in Spain, it does not explain the relationship that these elderly care workers had with the people they looked after and the sense of responsibility they felt towards them. Therefore, despite this broader political economy context, which helps understand the constraints that many migrant elderly carers have to negotiate, their acting responsibly does suggest that they practise an ethics of care (Lawson, 2007; Tronto, 1993) towards distant others by taking on a much larger role than just the tasks that are associated with keeping an elderly person well and comfortable. They feel responsible for their wellbeing. The working conditions described above also raise questions regarding the carers’ difficulties in looking after their parents and children, the responsibilities that are denied to them, which I explore in the next section.

6. Responsibilities denied While Alicia was able to keep her baby daughter and her job (see below), most elderly care workers faced difficult choices and were unable to combine work with family. When they already had a family, or a baby came along, they often had to decide to either leave or send their children to Bolivia. This is the result of the intersection of labour and migration regimes (Williams and Gavanas, 2008). The labour regime does not cover informal domiciliary elderly care work and live-in carers are on call 24 h on their working days, which is most of the days of the week as indicated above. Migration legislation makes it difficult for these migrants to regularise their stay in Spain, which became even more difficult during the financial downturn (Bastia, 2011b). This meant that many interviewees experienced a denial of responsibilities towards close family members, such as their children or ageing parents, which in turn raises clear tensions between the responsibilities they expressed towards the elderly cared-for person and their own family members. Sandra, for example, initially had a job as live-in cleaner earning 650 euros per month. Taking her three children to Spain was not feasible because it would have been too expensive. She had to work long hours in order to make ends meet and save enough money to be able to build a house in Bolivia. She then changed to working by the hour, earning up to 1500 euros per month working 9 am–8 pm, including weekends. If she had taken her children with her, the costs would have come to over 1000 euros per month, including renting a larger flat, buying more food and childcare

(fieldwork notes, Cochabamba, April 2008). Moreover, she would not have been able to work long shifts because – as she explained – child protection legislation does not allow parents to leave children by themselves. Instead she worked long hours and shared a flat with her brother to maximise her savings and return as soon as possible. She stayed for two years and then returned to Bolivia. Josefina worked as a live-in carer when she first arrived in Spain looking after an elderly person, from Monday morning to Saturday 4 pm. The lady had Alzheimer’s disease and Josefina found it very difficult to cope with her, but she stayed for two years. However, about a year before the interview she had a daughter, whom she had to send to Bolivia to be looked after by her mother and sister, because she could not work with her daughter and could not find affordable and suitable child care for her. She was desperate to go back to Bolivia to see her daughter, who was already 18 months old at the time of the interview, a situation that made her even more desperate about her low wages. She described the vicious circle she was in: being undocumented, she could not press her employer for a raise, meaning that she needed to spend longer in Spain and away from her daughter before she saved enough to be able to return to Bolivia: ‘‘I want to see [the neighbourhood], I want to go! That’s why I’m desperate about the papers. I’m working a full day for less than 700 euros [a month]. I should be earning more for all the time I put into it, I should be earning more!’’ (Madrid 21st June 2009). The working conditions and her undocumented status in Spain, being incompatible with her parenting responsibilities, were therefore denying her being close to her daughter, who was being looked after by her relatives in Bolivia. Similarly, Reina also mentioned that her daughter, who worked as a live-in elderly carer, and had been recently widowed, had to send her baby to Bolivia to her mother-in-law because her employers would not let her keep her baby with her (Madrid, 8th August 2009). There were some exceptions (see Alicia in next section) but most live-in domestic carers found it impossible to look after their children or their elderly parents. As a result, they either sent their children back to Bolivia to be looked after by relatives or they had to leave their jobs and return themselves. Moreover, wages were often insufficient to support a family. As live-in workers, migrants accepted low wages because they could save on accommodation and food. They therefore saw the wage as a saving that they could send almost entirely back to Bolivia. Some decided to return to Bolivia to care for elderly parents. Maria, whom I interviewed in Cochabamba, had been in Spain for three years from 2005 and decided to return to Bolivia because her mother was lonely: ‘‘My mother, she is very lonely. I am the only one who is with her now’’ (Cochabamba, 16th May 2008). Her other siblings were still in Spain at the time of the interview. Her brothers and sisters had suggested that they could employ a carer to look after their mother but Maria felt that she was better able to look after her mother. In fact, she made a wider critique of care as practiced by Spanish people: ‘‘They usually don’t have time, no? In the taking care of children. That’s what I saw. They are not like us. Our parents dedicate themselves exclusively to us. But they do the opposite. They dedicate themselves exclusively to their jobs and the children are raised . . . well, that’s what we are there for’’ (Maria, Cochabamba, 16th May 2008). Echoing the superior moral position adopted by interviewees in Datta et al. (2010), some argued that family relations are more caring in Bolivia. This speaks to the care ethic in the country of origin and the expectation that elderly people should be looked after by a family member (see also Bastia, 2009). It is in this context that carers try to be like a family member also in contexts when they are paid to look after an elderly person, turning commodified care into

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a social relation (Green and Lawson, 2011). However, some interviewees also took this further, by arguing that migration itself is now spoiling this ‘essence’: ‘‘Money changes people. I have observed that among those who haven’t emigrated, they are a family, as the name indicates in all its meaning, they are a family. But those who have emigrated, not any more. We have lost that essence. [. . .] With emigration we have generated the loneliness of our parents, their isolation’’ (Cochabamba 16th May 2008). While it is beyond the scope of this paper to present a full analysis of the consequences of migration at origin, it is nevertheless significant that migrants themselves identify migration as a key motive behind care absences in their own neighbourhoods of origin. These statements also indicate that migrants contrast care ethic norms at origin, which are seen as more caring, with care norms at destination, which they find lacking, similar to Datta et al. (2010). However, they also identify migration as a ‘spoiler’ of these norms, indicating that pre-migration values are not static but that migration itself is seen as leading to changing values of care at origin. The ethic of care that is being reported in these interviews is not solely related to the experience of migration (Datta et al., 2010) or of pre-migration care norms (Raghuram, 2012). Rather, the ethic of care practiced by the migrant elderly care workers suggest a transnational ethic of care, one in which non-kin members are also included. It results from a combination of pre-migration expectations of care but also migration and labour regimes at destination. These processes combine and result in migrants expressing an ethic of care towards the elderly people they care for and place them within the realm of familial relations. 7. Caring for self While elderly care workers expressed responsibility towards their ‘grannies’, they were sometimes unable to make sure that they maintained adequate care of themselves (see also England and Dyck, 2012). Care for ‘self’ is an important aspect of care, as argued by Tronto (2006), but it is usually overlooked in studies of care. To pay attention to caring for ‘self’ highlights the sacrifices that migrant carers experience as part of their work. It also allows us to identify the full consequences of structural constraints experienced by migrant elderly carers. Many elderly care workers linked their work to ‘sacrifice’. Melanie described cleaning as involving the most sacrifice because it is hard work with long hours and no social security benefits (San Fernando, 12th May 2009). Some women experienced physical and/or psychological harm in carrying out their daily tasks. Erika, in her late thirties, worked with elderly people in Argentina and Spain. She regretted it, because she damaged her back by lifting people. She suffered long term consequences from her injury, given that she could not work as a carer any longer. ‘‘When I first came I was looking after elderly people but I regret having worked with elderly people [laughs] because it is a difficult job, most of all, because I got injured, I was working with a person with limited mobility and since I had to lift him I injured my spine and because of that I am ill, I cannot work much, it affected my back and now I can’t work. Sometimes I go a couple of times a week to work in a house but I only dust, light work’’ (San Fernando, 12th May 2009). Maria had also found her first job challenging because she is small and she was looking after a very tall and heavy person (Cochabamba, 16th May 2008), but she was able to find another job before experiencing any injuries. However, not all harm is physical. Denial of sleep was mentioned by many interviewees.

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Lucia, for example, described: ‘‘Then I worked with another woman, she wasn’t well, she had Parkinson’s and she couldn’t move, she wouldn’t sleep at night, because of her medicine. We had to give her sleeping pills so she could sleep, or she wouldn’t sleep. She would walk all night’’ (Cochabamba, 16th May 2008), which means that Lucia also had to be up and could not sleep. Others mentioned high levels of psychological pressure. Fernanda decided to return to Bolivia after only eight months in Spain because of the stress she experienced in her jobs: ‘‘I was there 24 hours. I was in that house for 24 hours a day. And then . . . sometimes I couldn’t cope being closed in for such a long time, I would get desperate, I couldn’t sleep at night, it even ruined my eyesight, because before [this work] I didn’t use glasses and now I use glasses.’’ (Cochabamba, 29th April 2008). Reina was also on call 24 h a day and was able to rest only half an hour in the afternoon. She struggled to find the opportunity to shop for food because she could not leave the woman she was looking after on her own. She had only Sundays off, from 10:30 am to 9:30 pm and even on her day off she would prepare all the food before leaving her ‘granny’ (Madrid, 8th August 2009). Referring to a friend, she said that she went back to Bolivia because: ‘‘She couldn’t get used to it’’, illustrating that care and responsibility also have their limits. Elderly care workers associated the long hours of work with different ailments, from stress to loss of eyesight. Sometimes these ailments were sufficient for migrants to return to their countries of origin, despite the fact that they often had debts to settle. Fernanda stayed in her last job for four months and then returned to Cochabamba: ‘‘It’s just that I couldn’t cope with all the stress that I was carrying’’ (Cochabamba, 29th April 2008). Part of the difficulty she experienced was related to the fact that she was unfamiliar with Alzheimer’s disease and its symptoms: ‘‘I had never in my life come across Alzheimer’s disease. We don’t know it, because in Bolivia this illness doesn’t exist yet’’ (Cochabamba 29th April 2008). Alzheimer’s disease exists in Bolivia, but she had had little contact with the illness previous to her work in Spain. Being informal workers meant that they had not received any training for dealing with specific conditions. Elderly care workers worked very long days and had almost complete responsibility for frail elderly people they were looking after, with no additional support. This meant that any flexibility they could get in terms of the hours they worked and the days off were extremely important for live-in elderly carers. Having a Wednesday off, like Fernanda had, was not very useful because on that day most other Bolivians worked, so there were few if any other people that she could meet up with, few opportunities for shared meals or going out for a walk. Many workers were physically constrained and were not allowed to leave the flat of the elderly person they were looking after, challenging the notion that in elderly care work, carers are generally in charge (Lawson, 2007; Twigg, 2006). Alicia, for example, was born in a rural hamlet in Bolivia and was twenty at the time of the interview. In recalling her first job, the silences revealed how difficult she found certain experiences: ‘‘In my first job, ah, yes, at first one has to get used to what’s available here, isn’t it? [Silence, 12 seconds]. I couldn’t get used to it, I was with an older woman, I had to cook for her, get up at 6 in the morning [silence, 7 seconds], then her daughter would come, we had to wash the mother, she would go to sleep very late, at midnight. That was hard. Then, well, I got used to it, the woman died, I went again to the parish [where they allocated jobs] (Algeciras, 4th August 2009). At the time of the interview Alicia was looking after an 80 year old woman who had had a stroke and Alzheimer’s disease. She was

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paid 800 euros and was free from Saturday afternoon to Monday mornings but the rest of the week she was not allowed to leave the small 50 square metres flat except to empty the rubbish bin. Yet she felt lucky to have her baby daughter, who was two months old at the time of the interview, and lived with her in the tiny flat. Since two days before the interview her employers were letting her out for two hours a day under her doctor’s advice to have a walk with her daughter. There were very few instances of resistance, and even fewer examples of collective resistance, illustrating the atomisation of this particular sector and the difficulties of unionising care workers (Rhee and Zabin, 2009). For example, interviewees did not mention migrants’ rights or women’s rights organisations, with the exception of one interviewee who complained about a migrants’ organisation for keeping migrants’ wages low. The only other organisation that was mentioned by more than one interviewee was a parish in Algeciras, which provided some basic services, such as emergency accommodation and some meals, and circulated information about jobs. Interviewees participated in the ‘transnational community’ of Bolivians, mentioned above, which met over weekends and the rare days off, to play sports, mostly football (men) but also basketball (women) and the folkloric representations during Bolivian festivities, but had little involvement with unions or social justice organisations.

for. The responsibility they show towards their ‘grannies’ sometimes leads to longer separations with their own family members. They therefore embody contradictory positions. Moreover, their undocumented status gives them little bargaining power and the very limited personal time, often constrained in space, poses questions as to their ability to engage in collective forms of resistance. Rather, they are embedded in social relations of power and personal relationships spanning transnational space, and use these to humanise their often extremely difficult working conditions. Some of the elderly care workers’ accounts give testament to their own resistance to the neoliberal logic where commodified care is transformed into a social relation through responsibility – where they turn their ‘grannies’ into a familial social relation. However, this remains a personal as opposed to a public responsibility. While helping the migrant humanise her experience, this process of adopting care for distant others as their own responsibility further disempowers them, given that they are less likely to put themselves in a position where they could claim better working conditions. ‘Being like a daughter’ therefore further increases inequalities between (poorer) places of origin and (richer) places of destination by providing a further rationale helping live-in elderly care workers cope with extremely difficult working conditions. Acknowledgements

8. Conclusions Despite ambiguities expressed towards the concept of care, this paper shows that it is still useful to use care as a concept to shed light on relations of responsibility and to highlight the ways in which care is practice. Geographies of care and responsibility highlight challenging areas, such as the tensions implicated in care relationships. As the testimonies included in this paper indicate, the care and responsibilities felt towards the elderly often implied denied responsibilities towards the carers’ own family members or indeed, a lack of, or deficient level of care for themselves. The carers had specific tasks that were part of their care responsibilities towards the elderly people they looked after. However, the emotional attachment they developed in these relationships of care expanded the boundaries of their responsibilities to the extent that these then had negative consequences for the carers themselves, such as injuries, and/or for their relationships with their own family members, given the prolonged absences. The experiences reported in this article therefore provide a different point of view from which to explore geographies of responsibility. While it is not my intention to diminish the important task of encouraging responsible geographies towards ‘distant others’, whether they be spatially or socially ‘distant’, it is also critical that we acknowledge how some of these ‘distant others’ also express responsibilities towards members of European societies. They are not just potential recipients of European (or US) responsibility. These testimonies and the transnational approach adopted in this paper provide evidence of the ways in which these different places (Spain, Bolivia) are interrelated and provide texture on the flatter geographies of globalisation that may not take into account the importance of context. They also provide evidence of how responsibilities flow in unexpected directions and help redress Eurocentric notions of responsibilities and care. The interviews reported in this article show that carers therefore are not this autonomous responsible subject of current policy discourse (Green and Lawson, 2011). While their main objective is often linked to savings and investing remittances back home, they often over-ride economic rationales and put their own wellbeing as well as their responsibilities to their own family members on the side while privileging the wellbeing of the elderly people they care

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