21 June 2012

Laura Caldas de Mesquita

Student number 5768578

Bachelor Thesis in Sociology

Thesis advisor: Joram Pach

Second Reader: Carolien Bouw

“They don't understand what an au pair is”

A qualitative study of Brazilian au pairs in the Netherlands and their

self-perception: temporary migration, domestic ‘non work’ and

tourism.

Universiteit van Amsterdam

FACULTEIT DER MAATSCHAPPIJ- EN GEDRAGSWETENSCHAPPEN

Afdeling Sociologie en Antropologie

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Preface

The process of writing this thesis and conducting independent research for the first time has

been both extremely exciting and at times incredibly difficult. While I knew that choosing a

topic so very 'close to home' would touch me emotionally as a person and therefore ask more

of me as a first-time researcher, I had little idea of the impact the narratives my respondents

shared with me would have on many aspects of my life. My ambition to touch upon issues of

class, gender and nationality served to teach me about my own efforts to negotiate my

position as a transnational migrant. As a social scientist in training, I thank every single one of

my fifteen respondents for the access and invaluable willingness to share their stories with

me. As a person, I thank them for irreversibly opening my eyes to the complexities of the two

societies I navigate in. I cannot possibly stress how much of a learning experience this has

been.

I would like to thank my parents, Agnes and Fábio, for their genuine interest, words of advice,

expertise, emotional and financial support throughout this entire process, without which

writing this thesis would have never been possible. I would like to thank my sister Juliana for

the words that kept me focused when I needed it most. I would also like to my sister Natália

for helping me prepare for the interviews and living each one of them with me. I am so

thankful to my partner Annis for being incredibly generous with his time; reading my work,

staying up with me, coping with my insecurities and ensuring our cats and home survived the

last few months of almost complete lack of attention from my part.

I will be forever indebted to my thesis advisor Joram Pach for all of the honest input,

guidance, support, incentive and opportunity to follow through on this topic which in actual

fact has little to do with the grand theme of our thesis group. I am very grateful for Sebastien

Chauvin's input in the process of writing my thesis proposal and encouragement to not be

scared of tackling new academic territory. And finally, I am very thankful to Carolien Bouw

for her invaluable comments and input on my work, as well as for offering a new pair of eyes

at a time when mine were so fatigued.

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Table of Contents

Chapter Page

I. Introduction........................................................................................................................4-6

II. The Au Pair Program

2.1 Migrant Women and the Global Economy...........................................................7-8

2.2 Au pairs in the Netherlands.................................................................................8-10

2.3 Tourism, Temporary Migration and the Middle-Class Dream...........................10-11

III. Brazilian and au pair, in the Netherlands

3.1 Categorization and Meaning-making: Class, Gender and Ethnicity..................12-14

3.2 Analytic Frame: Self Perception, Work Situation and Community...................14-15

IV. Methodology..................................................................................................................16-21

V. The life of the Brazilian au pair

5.1 Social Class: Middle and Middle.......................................................................22-27

5.2 Gender: Changing Perspectives.........................................................................27-31

5.3 Ethnicity and Difference: The Warm Brazilian and Her Cold Dutch Family....32-35

5.4 Family Dynamics: Not Quite Family, Not Quite Love......................................35-38

5.5 Negotiations: A Happy Au Pair is a Good Au Pair............................................38-41

5.6 Community: Friends, Social Contacts and the Role of the Internet..................41-43

VI. Conclusion.....................................................................................................................44-47

VII. References....................................................................................................................48-49

VIII. Appendices

8.1 Au pair Biographies…………………………………………………………...50-60

8.2 Interview Questions…………………………………………………………...60-61

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I. Introduction

Au pairs first caught my interest some years ago, when I became acquainted with a group of

young Brazilian women residing in the Netherlands both legally and illegally participating in

the au pair program. The group itself seemed to me quite diverse in terms of geographic origin

within the national borders of Brazil and certainly in parental socio-economic status, but also

in terms of experiences with the program. As a person who was born in Brazil and had been

residing in the Netherlands for several years, I found myself casually testing a hypothesis that

social class in Brazil somehow shaped the experience of any given Brazilian au pair in the

host society. Social class, the most widely accepted category of exclusion and privilege in

Brazil, simply could not be meaningless in the new situation for temporary migrants, I

thought. I started to notice how opportunities such as other forms of exchange, for instance for

study, were simply not available to those belonging to what I had until that point perceived to

be the lower classes of Brazil. Genuinely curious about this mostly feminine form of

migration that makes international travel and temporary relocation to the west relatively

simple for citizens of developing countries (Lutz, 2002; Ehnrenreich and Hochschild, 2002;

Anderson, 2007) such as Brazil, and fascinated by the intersections of meaning-making in a

Brazilian context of immigration to the Netherlands from a rather biographic stand-point, I

embarked upon this study of temporary migration.

My personal interest and theories surrounding the group of Brazilian au pairs that I had met

highlight some of the assumptions I had entering the field. Firstly, I had assumed that the au

pair program was a viable option for living abroad inexpensively, for most social strata of

Brazilian society, as to include the lower classes. Secondly, I assumed that my understanding

of ‘lower classes’ was to some extent clear and objective. Lastly, that the au pair program

would not have been a first choice in terms of exchange. That, given the opportunity, all

engaging in the au pair program would have preferred to study or work freely abroad. While it

cannot be overlooked that au pairs who feel they have options may not be as accepting of ill-

treatment or poor working conditions from the host family, my research has shown that self-

perception of access and choice are infinitely more complex and much less linear than one can

casually hypothesize about.

The au pair program in the Netherlands remains a rather intriguing phenomenon, particularly

due to its perhaps contradicting nature whereby a host family quite literally ‘imports’ a series

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of young women year after year, throughout the lifespan of their children, to look after them

and perform household chores in what could be perceived to be a part time working week of

30 hours, for a sum of money significantly inferior to national minimum wage standards; yet

meanwhile, all of these characteristics are framed in a context of a ‘cultural exchange’. In

other words, it is the opposite of labour. As most of the ‘working’ conditions are defined on a

one-on-one basis between the au pair and the host family, these vary significantly. The title of

this thesis is in fact a quote from one of my informants, Renata, about how the loose working

conditions for au pairs in the Netherlands made her feel like a maid. She compared the latter

to a previous experience as an au pair in the United States, where strict regulations treating the

au pair as an employee with right to minimum wage, limited contractual hours and activities,

as well as guidance and surveillance offered by recruitment agencies, grant au pairs a special

migration status (Yodanis and Lauer, 2005).

I took it upon myself to investigate what the aforementioned conditions of the au pair

program in the Netherlands implied for individual experiences of Brazilian au pairs. The

importance of a focus on experience as an instrument for understanding complexities of social

life is delineated by feminist scholar Joan Scott (1992) in a chapter dedicated to the value of

studying experience for understanding the political, where she states that “…subjects have

agency. They are not unified, autonomous individuals exercising free will, but rather subjects

whose agency is created through situations and statuses conferred to them.” My research was

aimed at understanding the ways in which intersecting categories of social class, gender and

ethnicity influence expectation, experience and self-perception through the course of the

program. Social class, gender and ethnicity are, each in their own logic, socially constructed

as hierarchically positioned social categories. As such, they ascribe hierarchically defined

status and social condition to individuals belonging to the diverse classifications they

encompass. Brazilian au pairs come from a country of great inequality, where one’s social

class and gender identity shape one’s existence and opportunities. The idea was to translate

what such categories meant to their experience in this particular kind of temporary migration.

The central research question for my thesis reads:

What role do self-perceived categories of social class, gender and ethnicity in the

home country play in the experience of Brazilian au pairs in the host country?

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In order to answer my research question, I interviewed a total of fifteen Brazilian au pairs

from different parts of Brazil living in different parts of the Netherlands. I wanted to unveil

the reasoning behind their choosing for the Netherlands as a destination. I aimed at

understanding why these young women would opt to place themselves in what can be

perceived as a vulnerable position. I wanted to identify how respondents negotiated their

social position in general terms, and how this might change once they found themselves

performing domestic work for the families they live with. I also intended on recognizing how

respondents classified their occupation while au pairs, for instance whether they perceived it

as labour (Lutz, 2002; Ehnrenreich and Hochschild, 2002; Anderson, 2007) or tourism (Rice,

2010), or perhaps even both. I was interested in what kinds of people they socialized with and

how they viewed the social position of those same individuals in regards to their own. And

finally, I was very much interested in how much these different aspects influenced their

perceptions of their choice to become au pairs and how they articulated their overall

judgement of the program.

In the following chapter, I will draw upon existing theories of feminization of migration and

the apparently increasing need for the international recruitment of child-rearing migrants from

the rest of the world to the West. In so doing, I will position my research in terms of its main

fields of study: migration, gender and globalization. In chapter three, I will discuss in greater

detail the categories that I observed in my interviews (class, gender and ethnicity) and the

dimensions in which they were observed (self-perception, work situation and community). In

chapter four, I will introduce my methods and further explain my methodological choices as

well as clearly and openly state the inevitable bias one must come to terms with when

researching subjects with which identification is so prominent. Chapter five consists of the

main body of my thesis, containing the most important findings from the interviews, linking

back to the literature and focusing on thick description of the fieldwork and the

interconnectedness between the different categories I have chosen to focus on. Finally, in the

last chapter, a conclusion will be drawn from the data presented and opportunities for further

research on this subject will be briefly discussed.

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II. The Au Pair Program, Globalization and Tourism

2.1 Au pairs: Migrant Women and the Global Economy

The increase in wealth in post-industrial global economic centres of the West today has

created not only a need for highly-skilled migrant workers, but also for low-skill and low-pay

migrant workers who can take over tasks such as cleaning and maintaining care systems for

children and the elderly that middle-class individuals – and in particular, women – no longer

have time for (Sassen, 2002; Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002; Lutz, 2002; Henkes, 1999;

Van Walsum, 2011). This demand for care workers is only likely to rise (Lutz, 2002; Henkes,

1999; Van Walsum, 2011) as little appears to have changed in terms of male participation in

the organization of housework tasks (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002; Ehrenreich, 2002;

Van Walsum, 2011) and even in countries with ‘family-friendly policies’ (Anderson, 2007:

250) that allow rights for working women who have children, such as the Netherlands

(Henkes, 1999; Van Walsum, 2011; Lutz, 2002) but also Germany (Hess and Puckhabber,

2004; Lutz, 2002) and the United Kingdom (Hess and Puckhabber, 2004; Anderson, 2007)

public provisions to take over care duties historically assigned to women are, simply put,

insufficient. It is perhaps important to mention that this holds true in Brazil as well, where this

sort of reproductive labour in the richer states of the South and South-East are performed by

immigrants from the poorer North-East of the country (Ramos Beserra, 2011). The result is

that women who combine work and family life increasingly buy the work assigned to their

gender role from other – poorer, migrant – women.

Commercialization of housekeeping and caring practices is a rather accepted phenomenon.

Specific to our times is how informal provisions are increasingly offered by migrant women,

shifting patterns of housework from a primarily gender or class issue, to now greatly entail

aspects of ethnicity and nationality (Sassen, 2002; Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2002; Lutz,

2002; Henkes, 1999; Van Walsum, 2011; Hess and Puckhabber, 2004; Anderson, 2007). Care

work is different from 'real work' (Hondagneu-Soleto; 2002) in terms of what is expected

when such labour is purchased. That which “wealthy countries [...] seek to extract something

harder to measure and quantify, something that looks a lot like love” (Ehrenreich and

Hochschild, 2002, pp. 4). Interestingly, this feminization of migration is a migration of

oftentimes highly educated individuals hired to perform low-skill work (Ehrenreich and

Hochschild, 2002; Lutz, 2002), something that comes across within my respondents also. Yet

it is this specificity of 'love' in care work, paired with an idealization of the migrant woman's

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natural abilities of quasi-primitive warmth and attachment conditioned by family values

'modern' women no longer possess, that make them desirable employees (Anderson, 2007). It

is in this context that Brazilian au pairs now temporarily populate many Dutch families'

households.

2.2 Au Pairs in the Netherlands

A fast-paced industrialization and urbanization in the Netherlands around the 19th

century

brought about many changes that created an unprecedented and widespread need for

housemaids. These changes include new norms of hygiene and as well as a new middle-class

eager to show status through the display of servants in the household (Henkes, 1999). The

idea that servants were a status symbol of sorts for the new bourgeoisie was common

throughout most of the industrialized world at the time (Lutz, 2002; Ehnrenreich and

Hochschild, 2002). However, by post-war years, the housemaid ‘trend’ had practically

disappeared from Dutch life (Henkes, 1999). Dutch women started to prefer hiring cleaning

staff per hour instead, a tendency still very much present today as the ideal image of the part-

time working woman who cares for her home and children has been perpetuated as the

prominent feminine gender role in the Netherlands (Van Walsum, 2011). I would like to

propose that the au pair arrangement somewhat contradicts these norms by re-introducing the

live-in female worker into the homes of a limited number of Dutch families.

In policy of the Netherlands, a person entering the country under the au pair arrangement is

defined as a foreigner aged between 18 and 26 years, whose legal stay cannot exceed the

period of one year with the purpose of becoming acquainted with Dutch society and culture,

while residing with a host family and performing light housework in exchange for board and

lodging, as well receiving as sum of a maximum of 345 Euros of ‘pocket money’ per calendar

month (IND, 2010). Literature regarding au pairs in the Netherlands proposes that the number

of au pairs to enter the country legally from outside of the EU falls around 1,000 a year, yet it

is estimated that only fifteen per cent of all working au pairs in the Netherlands are working

within such legal terms – that is to say that either they overstay the stipulated period of one

year or enter using a tourist visa and work illegally as au pairs (Kohlmann et al., 2003;

Botman, 2010).

Using the United Kingdom as a case study, Ruhs and Anderson (2010) introduce the concept

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of semi-compliance to describe situations where an immigrant has legal right to stay, yet does

not obey specified restrictions of the visa – as is the case for au pairs that perform extra

cleaning services for money or non-EU students that work more than the legally stipulated

maximum weekly hour count in the United Kingdom. Interesting in this perspective of semi-

compliance is that Ruhs and Anderson's study offers the possibility that policy documents and

other legal-bureaucratic documents that clearly forbid semi-compliance cannot always be

followed to the letter due to lack of resources for surveillance but also in some cases simply

due to the fact that the state in practice turns a blind eye to minor infractions, contributing to

the very existence of these practices. In another article, Anderson (2007) discusses how the

state not only creates the possibility for infractions due to its migration policies that allow for

non-work migrants to have access to some forms of work, but also how it facilitates informal

work and such minor infractions, by separating itself from the private sphere. The home, and

thus the private sphere, is the domain of the family and undermining this assumption makes

for the kind of control western societies are not prepared to accept (Anderson, 2007: 250).

In the Netherlands, many somewhat symbolic steps have been taken in policy to restrict semi-

compliance. For instance, with the introduction of the Alien Act of the year 2000, au pairs and

host families who make use of a recruitment agency are made to sign a so-called 'declaration

of awareness', in which the role, working hours and days off are agreed upon, in order for

there to be a clear understanding from both parties about what the duties and limitations of the

au pair entail (Reede, 2002; Miedema et al., 2002). This does not apply to those families who

recruit au pairs independently. The host family has since also become fully responsible for

requesting and arranging the necessary documentation for the legal stay of the au pair in the

country (Ibidem). In establishing a new residency permit specific for au pairs, the Dutch

government made its first policy attempt at separating au pairs from exchange students or

temporary labour migrants (Reede, 2002). Such changes to the au pair arrangement were

supposedly implemented to foster a sense of protection for the young adults entering the

country under this form of migration (Reede, 2003; Miedema et al. 2002). In fact, prior to

changes made to au pair policies with the above act, au pairs from outside the EU were not

allowed to request a new host family in the case of a conflict and were instead to leave the

country if a disagreement were to occur (Reede, 2002).

In reality, the scope of the recruitment agency's jurisdiction over the well-being of the au pair

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is rather limited and although I will discuss this in greater detail in my findings, the labour

conditions of most of my respondents who did not make use of an agency are far superior to

those who did. In the Modern Migration Policy of the year 2010 –still to be implemented– au

pairs from outside the EU will only be permitted to enter the Netherlands with the help of

such au pair mediation agencies recognized by the Dutch government. The, until now,

relatively common practice of informal recruitment of au pairs directly through the use of

internet postings and the like (Reede, 2002; Kohlmann et al., 2003) by families, who then

request the papers from the government independently, will no longer be possible. While the

implications of such a change remain to be seen, one can perceive that there is a

problematization on the part of the Dutch government of the many irregularities that are made

possible due to the lack of guidelines on their part. Yet as I mentioned previously, regulating

the avenues that individual temporary migrants use to enter the country and not emphasizing

the need for regulating the agencies and host families who are now still able to fulfil the au

pair placement as they please, is quite bluntly a strategic flaw of this new policy.

2.3 Tourism, Temporary Migration and the Middle Class Dream

Tourism studies focusing on Working Holiday visa arrangements in the United Kingdom offer

interesting insights into questions that have proven quite relevant with regards to the au pair

arrangement of the Netherlands. Working-holiday visas offer a very similar migration status to

that of au pairs in terms of requirements such as age, some starting capital – in the case of au

pairs who make use of agencies –, permitting work while being officially primarily meant for

the purpose of an extended holiday and acquainting oneself with the local culture. Moreover,

occupational disparity during stay in the host country with regards to education level of these

temporary migrants is also very prominent (Rice, 2010). In terms of working conditions, Rice

(2010) discusses how the temporary nature of the stay and focus on international experience

work to set standards lower than what working holiday visa holders would find acceptable in

their home countries. This process is a trade-off of sorts, yet it is particularly advantageous for

employers of certain hospitality establishments, who have a battalion of undemanding

employees at their disposal who are flexible, inexpensive and have absolutely no access to

social benefits (Rice, 2010). The same could be said about au pairs, as they too find work

under the premise that there is a ‘mutual dependence’ (Anderson, 2007) whereby the family

needs care and the au pair needs a placement for their exchange, leaving employers free to

make use of this supposed cultural exchange for inexpensive labour with a very large supply

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of foreigners at their disposal year after year.

In terms of networks, the working-holidaymakers Rice (2010) interviewed have limited

opportunities to interact with locals and form strong network ties with those who share their

visa and work situation. Hess and Puckhaber (2004) reported very similar circumstances for

au pairs whose place of work was the home and whose only possibility of network formation

was with other au pairs who shared their need for contact. In chapter five, I will discuss how

in the case of my respondents the same occurs. Finally, Rice (2010) equates her respondents

with young people who are taking time off to travel for a period longer than their mere means

would allow and to 'figure out' what to do with the rest of their lives in different phases

ranging from recent high-school to recent university graduates; once again quite parallel to

what we know about the nature of the au pair program. While the extent of the parallels

between au pairs and Working Holiday visa holders will become much more evident in

chapter five where I discuss findings of my research, Rice's work was incredibly useful in

explaining and setting a precedent for this type of face-value willingness to be 'exploited' on

the basis of the temporary quality of the experience.

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III. Brazilian and au pair, in the Netherlands

3.1 Categorization and Meaning-Making: Class, Gender and Nationality

The central theme of this thesis is the subjective experience, and therewith self-perception, of

Brazilian au pairs living in the Netherlands. I was particularly interested in how the three

defining, albeit fluid and intersecting, categories of social class, gender and ethnicity were

negotiated in the new situation of au pairship in the host country, how my subjects reflected

upon these same categories in their 'normal' lives in their home country, and finally how they

served to shape experience during the au pair program.

While race is certainly a relevant category of exclusion in Brazil, theories about the country's

extreme miscegenation dating back to colonial times have lead the people of Brazil to often

assume to live in what is referred to a 'racial democracy' (Freyre, 1987 quoted in Fry, 2000

and Ramos Beserra, 2001) and made approaching race in concrete terms rather problematic.

Social class, however, is widely accepted in Brazil as the most important source of exclusion

and prejudice on the one hand, and privilege and ‘whiteness’ on the other (Fry, 2000; Ramos

Beserra, 2011). Much of the racial theory in Brazil is based on the idea that money ‘whitens’

(Ibidem), meaning that a person of colour belonging to the middle or upper classes is likely to

consider his or her race to be white. I chose to submerge race as a category into the

multifaceted categories of social class as they were discussed by my respondents.

I chose to emphasize my search for inequities in terms of self-perception of class, once it

became clear through the narratives of my respondents that their educational level was not

indicative of lifestyle, financial means or access to other forms of exchange such as studying

abroad. I was interested in how they described or perceived their occupational opportunities to

be in Brazil, the type of work they did during their studies (if any), the quality of life that they

experienced at home, whether they had parental funding for university or during the au pair

exchange and, finally, what kinds of opportunities they had to travel were it not for the

possibilities offered by au pair program. For the purpose of this analysis, I used ‘social class’

as a hierarchical categorization system that facilitates the understanding of power relations as

it always articulates other categories, based the analysis Santos (2002) uses in his book about

the structures of the class system in Brazil. I placed the respondents’ accounts of socio-

economic status in Brazil against their new situation in terms of difference, looking at whether

they had moved from a role of care-receiver to care-giver or how they reflected upon the host

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family’s lifestyle and their own change in lifestyle living abroad.

Gender has a very central place throughout my research. Santos (2002: 111) discusses how

gender in Brazil is perhaps even more defining in the social structure of the country than the

two aforementioned categories, as occupational groups form whose participants are mainly

male or female, creating exclusionary practises of 'feminine' (e.g. teaching, housekeeping)

versus 'masculine' (e.g. industrial, financial, managerial) work. Conclusions presented by

Santos (2002) based on a longitudinal study of the national demographic census in Brazil

indicate that educational level of women in masculine fields does little to improve their

competitive position in the workplace, as upper managerial work is still largely performed by

men (Santos, 2002: 113) and the pay gap between men and women of similar age, ethnicity,

educational level and occupation is still very broad (Santos, 2002: 147).

I looked at gender from various angles as to include several ideas. Fisrtly, as introduced in

chapter two, the natural feminine role assigned to foreign women discussed in Ehrenreich and

Hochschild (2002) and Lutz (2002). Secondly, tackling ideas about traditionally feminine

fields discussed in Santos (2002), I looked at the fields of study of my respondents and their

occupation in the country of origin as well as that of their mothers. Thirdly, their references

regarding gender roles and also the roles of men and women concerning fatherhood and

motherhood, of both of their own parents and of their host parents. Finally, linking back to

social class, whether they, their sisters and mothers had any experience doing housework, or

whether they had always had an empregada (maid) to do such work for their family. I focused

particularly also on whether they framed their own occupation as au pairs in terms of being an

empregada or a babá (nanny) or any other such term for domestic worker, with no regard for

internal distinction as little distinction was made in the respondents’ narratives between the

two. I wanted to understand what connotation such comparisons had in their narratives (i.e.

Questions such as: were they criticizing the program and host family when using such terms?

Or were they insulted when such a comparison between being an au pair and doing domestic

work was made?). In broad terms, I assumed gender to be a category that is not divided in

terms of a dichotomy between men or women, but rather as a number of intersecting

categories as to include socio-economic status and otherness: wealthy woman, middle class

woman, white Dutch woman and foreign Brazilian migrant woman (Brah, 1992).

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While I made a conscious choice to leave race ‘untackled’ as an explicit category, I adopted

ethnicity to discuss the change between being in whatever social position one occupies in

one’s home country and becoming the migrant ‘other’ in one’s host country. Ethnicity, then,

was looked at mainly in two distinct manners: one referring to my subject's nationality and

their reflections on what that meant about who and how they were as people individually and

in relation to their compatriots; and another referring to their accounts of their understanding

of what 'Brazilianness' meant to their host families. Anderson (2007) conducted interviews

under host families in the UK who expressed this exact sentiment of dismissing or avoiding

the topic of race in explicit terms yet were very blatant about choosing certain nationalities

due to their ‘national characteristics’ such as docility, cleanliness or warmth. Such

assumptions illustrate how non-racialised yet essentialist discourse means that a group

identified as culturally different is assumed to be internally homogeneous (Brah, 1992: 434).

It could be said that my interest was then in stereotyping, mostly from the perspective of the

Brazilian or non-Western woman being the loving other. Or whether, based on stereotypes, the

host family had expressed a preference for a particular type of ‘foreignness’ and whether the

au pairs agreed. Throughout the course of my analysis, it became evident that the au pairs had

their own ideas about the 'otherness' that constituted their perceptions of their host families

and these became secondary sources for analysing where they positioned themselves in

comparison to what they are not.

3.2 Analytic Frame: Self-perception, Work Situation and Community

To best grasp precisely what had changed in the social situation of my respondents, I looked

at three categories that aided in pinpointing where their narratives reflected change: Self-

perception in terms of the aforementioned categories of social class, gender and ethnicity,

Work Situation and Community. These dimensions were approached from two kinds of

narratives: one where respondents were encouraged to speak about their background and

recent past in the home country and one where respondents were asked to speak of their lives

as au pairs in the Netherlands. These three dimensions are interrelated in the sense that each

one of these cannot be fully comprehended without the context offered by the other two.

For instance, work situation and occupation in the home country are largely related to social

class-bound social circles and gender. While a university degree can affect these aspects

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significantly, Brazil is also a country where opportunities are concentrated in only few states

and cities and thus often very limited, making social network an important aspect of

reproduction of social-class-based opportunities and exclusion. Meanwhile, in the

Netherlands, it is not the formal qualifications au pairs may have in terms of study or acquired

capacities that are central to their occupation as housekeepers but, rather, their traditionally

feminine role as ‘natural home makers’ and their ‘foreignness’, making them an affordable

alternative of flexible live-in home and child care and in many ways defining what their work

situation will be (Anderson, 2007). A focus on community in the Netherlands supports in

illustrating to what extent the time spent in the Netherlands as an au pair opens doors for

becoming part of Dutch life, or rather whether their position based on their work situation,

class, gender and ethnicity implies that they are confined to a particular type of social

networking and community-building – for instance only with other au pairs (Hess and

Puckhaber, 2004).

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IV. Methodology

This study focuses on micro self-perception and meaning-making within a context of macro

social structures. The latter is set partially in migration policy that allows for Brazilians such

as my respondents to enter the Netherlands as au pairs to fill a gap in the market for

affordable and flexible care for Dutch parents. Moreover, it is set in a context of class

structures in Brazil that instil in much of the social strata a desire to explore the privileges and

professional benefits of international travel –traditionally reserved for the upper classes. The

aforementioned foci of this study and the specificity of this relatively small group of

Brazilians required a research design that was open and allowed for several accounts of the

seemingly same reality (Bryman, 2004: 274). I decided that the appropriate research

methodology for describing the realities of Brazilian au pairs in the Netherlands was thus

qualitative. A comparable qualitative study done under a group of ten Slovakian au pairs in

the United Kingdom – mentioned in Hess and Puckhabber (2004) – served as a base for

several other studies aimed at shedding light on the idea that au pairs were no longer only

young women in cultural exchange, but rather, increasingly becoming a form of “racialised

economization of the private sphere and care work” (Hess and Puckhabber, 2004: 65) with all

of the specificities of that situation. My own study consisted of fifteen in-depth interviews

with Brazilian au pairs.

The interviews were conducted combining two different methods in each single sitting. The

first method used was a Narrative Interview (NI), whereby I asked respondents to tell me

about the moment they decided to become au pairs, how the process took place in terms of

making arrangements with the family and immigration and, finally, how their experiences had

been thus far. I did not interrupt at any point during this initial part of the interview, giving

only encouraging looks and making notes about aspects I wished to discuss further. This

initial part of the interviews varied in time from eight to thirty minutes and had also great

variation in terms of detail. While some respondents would tell me stories chronologically and

precisely, including dates and descriptions of feelings throughout each phase; others were

much quicker to state only factual information about how they had found their families or

which agency they had used and the bureaucratic procedures involved. Jovchelovitch and

Bauer (2000) discuss how story-telling is not simply an account of events as they objectively

occurred, but rather a selection by the respondent of what elements of an event gave it

significance to their lives.

17 | P a g e

My choice for the NI method came thus from my expectation that it would offer insights into

how au pairs select what is most important to them about their experiences with the au pair

program in a natural way and allow me to grasp their vocabulary prior to asking probing

questions, facilitating clear communication. For instance, the use of English terminology such

as 'host father' or 'kids' was rather frequent although you would not use those terms in

everyday Brazilian Portuguese outside of that setting. Had I used the proper Brazilian

Portuguese terminology, I could have created a distance between myself as a Brazilian non-au

pair and my respondents. It should be mentioned at this point that the interviews were carried

out in Brazilian Portuguese and that all of the translations of the data used in this thesis were

performed by the author.

The second method I used was semi-structured qualitative interviewing, whereby I prepared a

set of questions falling under three categories: background, expectation and experience. These

questions played an important role in understanding the social class backgrounds and

opportunities my respondents had in terms of employment or of travelling abroad were it not

for the year as an au pair. In asking them to reflect upon their circumstances in Brazil and to

give detail of how they had imagined the exchange helped me establish commonalities in

terms of intentions and motivation. Finally, a focus on actual experience both in and outside

of the host family home reinforced findings with very explicit accounts of work circumstances

and cultural exchange opportunities, defining whether expectation had been generally met. It

also illustrated in what way – if at all – experience was affected by the self-perception social

class, gender and nationality. For those interviews where the narrative had been more detailed,

I found that this second method served more as a general 'check-list', as well as an opportunity

to aid clarification and to entice respondents to state some aspects of what they had already

stated more specifically. For those interviews where the narrative part had been less detailed,

the semi-structured interview was an invaluable asset to obtaining information, and further

questioning that diverted from the prepared question list were generally far superior in

number.

18 | P a g e

Respondent Selection

Elena, 23

Pharmaceutical Sciences

São Paulo

Hoofddorp

Fabiana, 20

Publicity São Paulo

Delft

Juliana, 25

Accounting Sc. R.G. do Sul

Leiden

Daniela, 23

Intl. Relations Paraíba

Zeist

Luiza, 21

N/A São paulo

Amersfoort

Lúcia, 26

Business Logistics Paraná

The Hague

Joana, 23 Intl. Relations

Rio de Janeiro

The Hague

Julia, 26

Photography

São paulo Amsterdam

Renata, 23

N/A

Sergipe Rotterdam

Flávia, 23

Marketing

São Paulo

Rotterdam

Carolina, 23

Business Admin. Paraná

Heemstede

Maria, 23

Intl. Relations

São Paulo Naarden

Fernanda, 24

Law Paraná

The Hague

Clara, 24 Belles-Lettres

Ceará Heerlen

Alessandra, 23

Journalism Ceará

Apeldoorn

Respondent Scheme:

Name, Age, Field of Study, State in Brazil and

Location of Au Pair Placement

Thick Line: friendship

Arrow: One-sided mention

Light-blue Circles: no relationship to other respondents

19 | P a g e

In order to recruit respondents, I joined a closed group on Facebook called 'Brazilian au pairs

in the Netherlands' and posted an announcement stating that I was a student of sociology

interested in understanding the life of an average Brazilian au pair and that I was looking for

au pairs who would like to be interviewed for my bachelor thesis. I also mentioned the

importance of the research in terms of there not being much written on this particular subject,

and how their cooperation would therefore be a great contribution to our knowledge about this

type of exchange. This last point seemed to strike a chord in particular with au pairs that had

experience having concluded their own bachelor's, with a few of them mentioning how

innovative and interesting my research seemed on the first contact. It took only a few brief

moments before the first au pairs volunteered. I assured my respondents that the interview

data would be used anonymously and, as such, I have modified their names and identified

their origin in Brazil only to state-level and not city. Perhaps because these young women

meet many of their friends on the Facebook group, although my first message and follow-up

email were rather formal, by the last confirmation of date and time, all of the respondents

without exception were signing off with a beijo (kiss). I assumed these to be displays of how

my 'Brazilianness' proved to be a true asset in terms of access in this first moment.

I had very few criteria on which to select my respondents. My only intention was to interview

au pairs who were Brazilian and in the Netherlands. All other criteria that accompanied that

such as gender, age and other commonalities were defined by the nature of the program and

were not entirely intentional in my respondent selection – although I had fully expected that

all of my respondents would be women in their twenties. I aimed at interviewing au pairs who

were currently in their exchange year; however, during the course of the interview it became

clear that three of them were no longer au pairs. A short biography of each respondent can be

found in the appendix of this thesis. Fernanda had just finished her second au pair exchange

and was returning to Brazil on the week following our interview, Renata had also finished her

exchange but was working illegally as part-time live-out nanny and Alessandra was working

in the informal cleaning services economy of Amsterdam. I chose not to exclude au pairs who

had overstayed from the point of view that my intention was to speak with Brazilian au pairs

from diverse backgrounds and perhaps even those here illegally. Alessandra turned out to be

the only respondent whose legal stay in the Netherlands had expired. All but two of the au

pairs I interviewed either have a bachelor's degree or temporarily stopped their studies for a

year to follow the au pair program abroad, but will resume their studies upon return. The two

20 | P a g e

young women who have not studied voiced that they plan on doing so in the near future.

Interestingly, five of my respondents – Renata, Carolina, Juliana, Joana and Julia – had also

been au pairs in the United States previously.

Although my respondent selection was somewhat at random, my respondents shared many

commonalities. One definite selection bias for all but two of my respondents was self-

selection and the fact that all but one, were members of the Facebook group where I had

posted a listing inviting them to participate. The first respondent I interviewed, Maria, is not

on the Facebook group and was recruited after I had read her blog and asked her to participate

in the study. The very last respondent to complete my total of fifteen, Julia, I met while

interviewing Joana in The Hague. As these young women use the Facebook group to

exchange information and meet people, I ended up interviewing one friend group of six

women and two friendship 'dyads' whose members of each group formation constantly

referred to one another during their accounts of their lives in the Netherlands. Moreover, the

weekend prior to the beginning of my interviews, the au pairs from the 'Brazilian au pairs in

the Netherlands' Facebook group hosted a Brazilian dinner to meet and so those who were not

friends as such did often know 'of one another'. The interesting result of that group dynamic is

that I found myself feeling quite familiar with some of the au pairs I had not yet interviewed

and they too had already heard about me and knew roughly what to expect from the

interviews.

Difficulties and Methodological Considerations

The total times of the interviews, combining both methods, varied between 56 and 123

minutes. The divergence in time had very much to do with how much detail respondents gave

about the topics I set out to investigate. Affinity had surprisingly little to do with the formal

interview time, although I found myself having longer post-interview chats with those

respondents with whom I managed to create real rapport. I also found that such affinity was

often related to how comfortable the respondents appeared to be with my status as a migrant.

Prior to turning on the recorder, I refrained from asking any questions and this was in most

cases when my respondents would interrogate me about what I am doing in the Netherlands,

where I live, how long I had been here and where my family is. Their ‘comfort level’ or

acceptance of my migration status was expressed often when narratives would include a

‘peer-check’ where the respondent would state something about Brazil or Brazilians and use

21 | P a g e

the word “we” or say “you know what it’s like in Brazil”; while in a few cases respondents

would express that I was now an outsider, with statements such as “you’re Dutch now, but…”

or “for you it is different, of course, because you moved here so young” suggesting that I

would not relate to their stories.

After the first interview, the main difficulty I experienced was that being originally from

Brazil and asking a Brazilian woman of similar age questions about her socio-economic status

was terribly awkward for me. This was a point where my 'Brazilianness' and the socially and

culturally-conditioned awkwardness speaking about the main indicator of social privilege and

exclusion, was not such an advantage after all. Through the process of interviewing Joana, a

young woman whose self-perception was that her low socio-economic status had made her

life in Brazil unbearable, I learned that it was important to overcome my fears by boldly

asking my respondents about their social class and that of other au pairs in their lives. Luckily,

Joana was my second interviewee. Listening back to the interviews, it is noticeable that I

hesitated to ask the questions and that respondents hesitated to answer in concrete terms at

first, but as rapport was established between the respondent and I, the answers they gave to

such questions made for very rich data. In the following chapter, I will provide further detail

on this matter.

One practical difficulty I encountered at first was in relation to the use of Facebook and email

for making appointments. It was quite a tiresome process and although eighteen au pairs

replied to my initial post on the Facebook group, I found that I still dealt with a total of five

non-response cases. I contacted these same people twice; some of them did show interest on

the second contact also, yet never emailed me again. This is essentially what led to me having

to approach one au pair face-to-face in The Hague to complete the fifteen interviews I had

aimed to conduct. The face-to-face interview recruit, Julia, was the au pair most visibly and

verbally uncomfortable with opening up about her trajectory to the Netherlands. I had to

reassure her several times that the data was anonymous, making it quite clear to me that

having approached the other respondents online and giving them time to decide whether they

actually wanted to part take had been a more adequate choice.

22 | P a g e

V. The life of the Brazilian au pair

As discussed in the methodology section, I enticed my respondents to speak about their

experience and from their narratives I derived the results that I will present in this chapter.

The chapter is divided into six different parts, each exploring one main topic of findings. Parts

one to three focus on the three main categories of analysis (social class, gender and ethnicity)

in terms of background and assumptions that the au pairs expressed when asked directly to

reflect upon these issues, but also, on the fluidity of meaning-making and contradictions that

occurred throughout their narratives. Parts four to six discuss other findings that support the

idea of existing power struggles between employer and employee, immigrant and native; the

issue of emotional, domestic non-work and the boundaries of intimacy; as well as community

formation and social network.

5.1 Social Class: Middle and Middle

Social class was implicitly and explicitly the focal point of many of my respondents'

narratives. It could be said, in fairly general terms, that the au pair program is accessible for

Brazilian women of the 'middle class' with few exceptions on either end of the spectrum. Yet

one cannot speak of 'a' middle class when discussing the case of Brazilian au pairs. The

layering of the concept of middle class is a recurring point made by my respondents:

“I had a life that was very... relatively... yeah, middle class. I say relatively because my city

is not like São Paulo, that when you're rich you're like riiiiiiiiiich! In my city you're middle

class when you have a home and a car... I didn't have to ever take a bus to school or eat the

same food every day. I had a pretty good life.” (Renata)

“I think everyone is middle class. There are some slightly higher that you see that their

father can help them. But the most you see are people that work and that take care of

themselves. And some are low-middle class. I am middle class but like, middle-middle.

Middle to low, even.” (Lúcia)

“I think we're all middle class because if you're from the upper classes you wouldn't look

for the au pair program, you would go to Ireland or England which is obviously a lot nicer.

You don't depend on a family... and well, lower than middle class I think is hard because I

find with the people that were from the lower classes in my university that their income

made a difference to their parents so they couldn't just leave” (Fabiana)

23 | P a g e

Lúcia illustrates the layering that she sees in the middle class, positioning herself in that

spectrum, but also defines middle class as what could be essentially understood as working-

class. Not unemployed, unemployable or uneducated, yet not rich. Middle class to her is a

case of money as opposed to lifestyle. Renata, on the other hand, uses lifestyle as a way to

position herself. She never had to take the bus to school and her family clearly did not live in

any sort of misery, yet she is aware of the hierarchical position of her state in relation to the

standard of living of the states of the South and South-East. Fabiana, who considers herself to

be middle class, defines middle class in very broad terms where essentially the only categories

that fall outside of that are the upper classes, the dominant classes and the very poor. In fact,

in my entire pool of respondents, the only one whose income made a difference in her family's

survival was Joana:

“We live in a situation of struggle. My money makes a difference at my house. So much

even that when I quit my job at the airline to become an au pair and I got my severance

indemnities, I left it all there for them. So it would be hard for me to get a job and go live

on my own, change my life and go live in a better neighbourhood. My parents would never

accept that. If I could do that, maybe I would go back to Brazil, but where I live it's just

impossible” (Joana)

Another issue with treating 'middle class' as an objective category of sorts was identifying

‘indicators’. My first reflex was to ask about their own empregadas or babás in Brazil. As

Renata stated above, asking the same questions to compare lifestyles in the rest of Brazil to

the South and the South-East is not an efficient way to identify divergence in social condition.

As such, I found that only Juliana, Carolina and Joana had never had an empregada or a babá,

which given that two of them had worked from a young age to help support their respective

households (Juliana and Joana), was fully in accordance with my expectations. Yet the

remaining twelve au pairs from all layers of the middle class and from the North-East to the

very South of Brazil seemed to have had some type of third-party help in the home at some

point in their lives. Maria, Alessandra and Flávia were the only ones to state that their families

had gone through phases where they needed one but did not have constant help for diverse

reasons ranging from financial to circumstantial. What was quite palpable was the difference

in what the respondents understood to be the role of such domestic workers. To some they

were servants;

24 | P a g e

“A babá in Brazil is quite different. She is pretty much your empregada that does absolutely

everything. Like an au pair, in the Netherlands. In the life I had in Brazil, I never even made

my own bed.” (Renata)

To others they were friends and part of the family;

“Inês worked at my house for about six years and she's like a friend to us. She actually

made me a recipe book when I came here the first time and she came to my house to teach

me how to make my favourite dishes. She did everything for us and we thanked her so

little. Now I see I was quite spoilt by her.” (Fernanda)

Or anonymous cleaning ladies

“I always had an empregada, yes. But I never treated her like the girls here treat me. The

fourteen year old turned to me the other day and asked me to get her a glass of water! That

does not exist in my house” (Daniela)

“I still have one, she comes in three times a week. I don't need to do anything on the days

she is there, but if she's not, I know how to make my own bed.” (Elena)

In an attempt to better understand the place that my respondents gave to their time as au pairs,

I decided to inquire about their opportunities for international travel outside of the program.

Of the au pairs I had interviewed, Juliana, Elena, Lucia, Julia and Fernanda had all been to

other countries in Latin America in recent years. They were also all very quick to dismiss such

destinations as answers to my question of whether they had ever been abroad, stating for

instance that it 'did not count' as going abroad without further reasoning as to why. While it

did not occur to me to ask why at the time, analysing the data it became clear that such

readings of Latin America not being foreign enough were not exceptions. It could be that it

did not seem foreign to them purely in terms of distance or for not being intercontinental

travel. But it might be interesting to consider what constitutes as 'foreign': was it perhaps a

case of access? Fabiana was the only respondent who answered positively to my question

about having been abroad prior to the program. She had been to Argentina with her family and

had toured the United States as her fifteenth birthday present with a group of peers instead of

having a debutante ball – which is still common practice in the Brazilian upper-middle and

dominant classes. So as the reader can observe, Fabiana not only mentioned a Latin American

25 | P a g e

country in combination with international travel, she at the same time clarified how 'access'

was not a matter of concern for her. Using one simple question answered with the same

destination by six different Brazilian au pairs, one can uncover a marker of social distinction.

Other markers of social distinction that were not visible at face-value would appear in the

same fashion: subtly and casually phrased in my respondents' narratives about their lives. All

of my respondents spoke of the desire for living abroad in terms of an 'urge' or a 'dream', but

also in terms of a need. The au pairs I interviewed who already had a career or were studying

in certain competitive fields felt the experience of living abroad would be invaluable for them

to be able to compete in the labour market:

“It is really good for your CV. That was something I thought about before coming here, if I

were to ever work for a large corporation like I wanted to, having an international

experience and having spent a year abroad could really open doors for me to be hired”

(Alessandra)

“What pushed me to be here was the fact that I started working for a multinational.

Everyone knew that to go up the corporate ladder, you needed an experience abroad, even if

it was working at McDonald's in the United States. I needed this to move forward in my

area so I dropped everything to get that” (Lúcia)

“Professionally I've grown being here. In publicity, when I would sit in on interviews,

everyone had lived abroad. My English improved. So it was the right time for me to come

and it's really the best thing I could have done.” (Fabiana)

“Saying that I lived a year abroad counts a lot when you go for an interview. That was one

of the things I thought. I won't be wasting a year of my life, I'll be reaping the benefits of

this later.” (Elena)

I inquired as to why they had chosen the au pair program to understand what benefits the

program, and not simply the time spent abroad, offered to them in particular. The absolute

most common answer was the financial accessibility of the program. Besides affordability –

which relates to the au pair program more generally – the primary reason for coming to the

Netherlands related to two aspects: it was one of the few EU countries to accept Brazilian

nationals under an au pair visa and it was the only country in the EU that satisfied the first

condition while also not requiring au pairs to speak the local language. On the passages below

26 | P a g e

one can detect again how different ways of expressing affordability relate to privilege, and

how even this privilege in itself is layered:

“I didn't have any money to come. I always wanted to live in Holland, then this thing of

working for a multinational where everything was in English and I really needed to improve

mine, so I went to see how much it would cost to study in England. Twenty thousand reais!

Oh great, thanks, bye! […] I found the au pair program and that was to Holland. I said to

myself: my god that is in heaven! That is what I am doing! It was maybe 800 Euros, but

even so it was quite a bit of money. Not anything absurd that only people with rich parents

can afford, but still money.” (Lúcia)

“The agency fee was a lot of money to me. It was around 1900 reais [approximately 730

Euros]. For my reality that was too much. I started working without spending absolutely

anything, saved my money and went. All other exchange programs were like between

fifteen thousand [approximately 5 700 Euros] and twenty thousand [approximately 7 700

Euros]! I said: my god, I'll never leave! I had never even left Rio de Janeiro, and with those

prices I was never going to.” (Joana)

“I insisted on the program mostly because I didn't work but I had my money that I received.

Like an allowance. And so I paid the agency with that” (Elena)

“She gave me all the prices, which was so surreal to me how cheap it was going to be. Then

I made the decision that this is what I was going to do. That's what I’ll do, because it is

what I can afford, and it is the only way I'll get to go and chase my dream, which is to be

out of Brazil” (Maria)

Lúcia, Joana, Elena and Maria are all discussing the same idea: that in comparison to any

other form of exchange, the au pair program was infinitely less expensive. And although, for

instance, Maria and Elena express this in terms of 'cheap', their narratives are divergent. Maria

worked while at private university, as an English language teacher, and was using mostly her

own money with some assistance from her parents based on 'what they could afford'. Maria

had no expectation that her parents would be able to pay for her. Elena, on the other hand, did

not work and was essentially only using her allowance to pay for the exchange because her

parents did not agree with her decision to stop her studies for a year to go travel abroad. She

does, however, still receive an allowance from her parents to complement her 'meagre au pair

salary', as she describes it, and so that she can take multiple language courses while here.

27 | P a g e

Fabiana has a similar narrative to Elena, whereby she used her own money to pay for the

agency fee but clarifies that she was only able to do so because her father pays for her

apartment and university fees. Daniela's narrative about choosing for the program is similar to

Elena's and Lucia's with the difference that she was the only one whose parents were able to

and willing to pay for whatever exchange she would want to, yet her desire to live abroad was

matched by her desire to experience financial independence. Daniela, too, receives financial

assistance from her parents during the exchange so that she can maintain herself and travel.

For Lúcia, who identified herself as 'middle-middle-to-low-middle-class', the fee was still a

significant sum of money as she had two jobs and a career, but also had two parents who

generated little to no income. At this point, I will not re-emphasize Joana's story, but again I

found that using the above-mentioned six cases very much illustrate the sheer contrast in

access and affordability of the au pair program over any other type of exchange for Brazilian

au pairs from all of the social strata represented in my fifteen respondents.

In the following part of this chapter, I will discuss how perspectives on gender roles change

and are influenced by exposure to the new situation of 'au pairing' in the Netherlands, also

relating the concept back to some of the ideas I have presented about the role of social class in

my respondents' accounts of their lives.

5.2 Gender: Changing Perspectives

As discussed in chapter four, gender in Brazil is still a very relevant category for occupational

group formations and one's competitive position in the labour market (Santos, 2002). Of the

au pairs I interviewed, only Clara was in what can be called a 'traditionally feminine' field of

study, namely belles-lettres, specialized in editing and education. Alessandra and Fernanda

also studied in the somewhat feminine area of humanities, but at the more 'unisex' degrees, if

one can call it that; journalism and law. Renata does not have a degree in higher education and

thus has occupied herself with childrearing work as an au pair and English-teaching, which

are both fairly standard 'feminine' fields. Flávia, who studied Photography in the field of the

fine arts, also falls in a field of study mostly dominated by women – although the activist

group Guerilla Girls have made great efforts to show how professionally, in the arts, this

balance shifts towards male dominance. Luiza also does not have a degree in higher

education, but worked as an entry-level financial controller, placing her in the 'masculine'

professional spectrum. The other nine au pairs all studied in 'traditionally masculine' fields:

28 | P a g e

Juliana studied accounting sciences; Fabiana studied publicity; Elena studied pharmaceutical

sciences; Daniela, Joana and Maria studied international relations; Flávia studied marketing,

Lúcia studied business logistics management; and Carolina studied business administration.

All of my respondents were asked about their parents' occupations. Of the nine au pairs who

studied to enter the labour market in the 'masculine' fields, seven have mothers who work in

traditionally 'feminine' fields either as home makers, selling products and services from home

or teaching in primary and secondary schools. While this places their own career paths in the

realm of a remarkable transgression, both in terms of breaking a possible reproduction of

traditional family patterns and on a societal level that these young women from the same

generation are challenging such social norms and simply studying what they wish; it was also

quite noticeable how when discussing any money-related matters, most of the respondents

would still automatically start referring to their fathers or a hypothetical father figure:

“I'm already earning 300, which is the minimum, and now they're discounting 50 Euros per

month from my ticket, so I earn 250. What do you even do with that? We want to travel, go

out...My father can't be sending me money all the time. So it's complicated.” (Lúcia)

“I mean, in Brazil if my money was finished I would just say: oh dad, I don't have any

money, can you give me a 20? And here what I am supposed to do? Ask my host father?”

(Elena)

“Some girls get a lot of help. I get help like... once or twice I'll buy something on my dad's

credit card, reserve a hostel or get Skype credit... I'll say: come on, dad, throw me a bone

here! And yeah, some girls don't get any help from their dad.” (Fabiana)

“Living in other people's homes you don't mature that much. You live like an eternal teenager.

You live with an allowance that a father gives to his child. Like.. here you go, here is 300

reais [approximately 115 Euros], go have some fun.” (Fernanda)

One must wonder whether this practice relates to their own mothers not being the primary

earners in their homes or whether they are expressing a socially-conditioned idea that it is the

father who is supposed to be the breadwinner and head of the household. In this latter

scenario, the father is the one to handle finances to his daughter, de-valuing the role of his

spouse for being less economically successful. There are other such contradictions that arose

29 | P a g e

from discussing gender issues. For instance, the great majority of my respondents did not

know how to do any type of ‘traditionally feminine’ housework prior to becoming au pairs. In

a way, as I explained in the first part of this chapter, it could be argued that it is due to the

across-the-board custom of hiring domestic help in Brazil; and therefore a class issue. More

importantly, however, is that house work and child rearing are in broad terms what they do as

au pairs. Nevertheless, anecdotes about inability to perform cleaning and cooking duties were

usually extensively and humorously told. It would seem as though distancing themselves from

their current status of au pair, and a child-rearing domestic worker, carried with it a merit of

living a housekeeping reality that was only temporal.

“I've burned clothes, broken pots, every kind of trouble you can get into in a house, I've

done it. I've never hurt the children, but the house... You know that kind of really fancy

wooden table? With a hot pan on it? Needless to say I spent a month covering it up with

cloths and anything I could find. […] The very first issue I had in America was the laundry.

I didn't know how to fold clothes! Everything I know about housekeeping is from the au

pair program” (Renata)

“The first time I ironed a shirt, it took over an hour. And I didn't know how to cook. Luckily

cooking in Holland isn't really cooking. At home I would just be like: what's for lunch?”

(Lúcia)

“I always liked cooking but I never had to wash my own dishes. Or make my own bed. So I

didn't really know how to do anything” (Fabiana)

“I don't really know how to cook, but luckily all I have to do here is fry steak or make rice.

Not cooking like in Brazil. Because I've always had an empregada to do everything for

me!” (Elena)

“I didn't know how to do anything or cook anything. My father had a restaurant so I would

just go there and ask them to make me whatever I felt like. I never learned” (Flávia)

Joana, Maria, Carolina and Luiza were the only ones to claim they knew how to do most

housework prior to coming here. Maria and Luiza expressed this in terms of helping their

mothers, Carolina in terms of helping her parents. Joana, however, went to great lengths to

distance herself from performing such work;

30 | P a g e

“Cleaning, cooking, I don't do that! That's something different here in Holland and that

scared me a lot. Au pairs here are empregadas! In the United States it's completely

different, their vision of au pair. Here you're a maid, cleaning lady, you do everything! In

the US, you look after children. I do not clean. I know how to cook a little and when you're

poor you have to clean your own house so I know how to. But I won't. Some girls do it, but

I refuse.” (Joana)

The distinction between how the quotes by Lúcia, Fabiana, Elena and Flávia display status

and what Joana's quote displays is that the Brazilian middle class that grows up having

domestic help distances itself from its current circumstances of doing domestic work by

referring to comforts they had at home, not having to perform such (degrading) feminine

work; while Joana who grew up without domestic help, displays her new status as someone

who does not need to perform housework anymore by emphasizing that an au pair is not in

fact an empregada. For my respondents, negotiating their position as temporary migrant

women often entails framing the work they do in terms of performance and not in terms of

work. They refer to their time in the Netherlands in terms of sabbaticals, vacations and the

like, often making reference to the stress they incurred in their daily lives – their ‘real’ lives.

This effort to treat the au pair program as an extended holiday whereby one performs tasks

that are not part of their reality as women or as professionals is what I refer to as 'domestic

non-work'.

Contradictions in discussing gender roles resurface when respondents discuss their host

family. For instance, the Dutch father is praised for being active in the lives of his children

and helping in the housework. Host mothers, on the other hand, are criticized for not

complying with feminine gender roles as mothers and as housekeepers.

“You see how things work here and how the role of a father in a Dutch family is much more

egalitarian. It's not a father that sits in the living room with his legs on the coffee table

waiting for his woman to serve him, you know? You see that there is a much better division

of tasks around that.” (Clara)

“It's funny to see the inversions, like. He is more of a mother than she is. She's kind of like a

'macha', you know?” (Lúcia)

“She doesn't even know where the cleaning products are. She doesn't know what product to

use to clean the toilet” (Maria)

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“My host mum could spend more time with her children. I don't think she gives much value

to that. It's not like in Brazil that mums like being with their children, picking them up from

school, that kind of thing. She spends very little time with the children. She'll be home at six

and put them to bed by seven. She can't even look after them alone, if her husband isn't

home she'll call someone.” (Luiza)

It seems as though the gender normativity that many of my respondents are in a way rejecting,

by taking enormous intergenerational leaps in terms of education and occupation, is still used

to analyse the situations they are faced with regarding gender roles. Respondents such as

Luiza whose mother started working when she was a teenager reflect upon the Dutch mother

as a lesser mother for not making what she perceives to be an effort to be career woman and

mother. Instead of looking at putting her children to bed by seven as a cultural custom of

sound parenting we do not have in Brazil – children's bedtimes are usually much later than

that of Dutch children – she sees that practise as a reflection on her host mother’s lacking

interest in spending time with her children. Maria discusses how helpless the family is

without the au pair and ends with ridiculing her host mother – 'she' and not host father, 'he', or

'they' – for not being aware of the whereabouts of cleaning products, as though that was a

woman's duty. Lúcia, using the term 'inversion', speaks of how her host mother is a high

executive and how she is never home for dinner, unlike the father who looks after 'her'

children for her and is thus in this case, the 'mother' while she is the 'macho' of the house.

Fabiana, whose mother worked full time when she was growing up, says she consoled her

host mother on several occasions for not being able to collect her children from school.

Fabiana then stated that she was herself raised by her empregada and that she calls the lady

who raised her her mãe preta (black mother). Many of the respondents were above all

impressed by the progressive, pro-family labour laws that allowed their host mothers to stay

home once a week while earning full-time wages due to the fact that they had children,

although their impression of how the host mother then decided to fill that time was not always

the most positive. There was great concern, just as with Luiza's narrative, that the mothers

who had such opportunities to spend time with their children did not, unlike 'we' do in Brazil.

The following section of this chapter is dedicated to these types of narratives, the ones that set

'us' apart from 'them', the narratives about otherness.

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5.3 Ethnicity and Difference: The Warm Brazilian and her Cold Dutch Family

Few aspects were more emphasized in my respondents' narratives than difference. While this

is perhaps a logical consequence of a program that places a person from the global south in

the home of a family from the global north, 'otherness' took fairly consistent forms in most of

the narratives shared. As explained in chapter three, I chose to treat nationality and narratives

surrounding national difference as forms of expressing ethnicity and belonging. It is rather

difficult to discern discourses of 'we' from discourses about 'them' and the reason is that

whatever the 'they', the Dutch 'others', are, 'we', Brazilians, are not. Likewise, whatever 'we

are' is contrasted in my respondents' narratives with that which they observe about the Dutch

'others' surrounding them. Discourses of otherness were in any case fundamentally essentialist

in nature. To exemplify these types of discourse, I have selected fragments from the

interviews where they occur.

“They have a very different lifestyle. They will never understand what we do in Brazil.

Leaving your house at 6am to go to work, taking a full bus, working all day like a camel,

going straight to university afterwards and staying there until 11 o'clock at night, getting

home and then doing your thesis until god knows what time only to start it all over again

the next day. […] That's something I admire so much in Brazilians and they don't

understand that here and don't want to understand. Their lives are from 9 to 5.” (Maria)

“Based on what I've seen from Dutch people, they're pigs. The kids at my house shower

twice a week. They don't cut their nails, they have black dirt under their nails! […] all the

Brazilians say the same. One of them looks after babies and when the baby throws up they

just clean it up with a wipe. No bathing or anything. The dishes at my house always come

out a little dirty and I want to put it back in but they say no... they put it away in the

cupboards, dirty! And for Brazil I'm a pretty messy person. Imagine if I was a neat freak?”

(Fabiana)

“I think people here know how to be happy with so little. Both in Brazil and America

people are happy when they have a nice car or a good job, when they have something to

show for themselves. And here in Holland they're happy with a sunny day in the park, a

beach towel and an apple. And that's nice. I think I learned that from them.” (Renata)

“Sometimes the fact that you're Brazilian, like, we keep things inside. We don't say what

we're really feeling when we're hurt. And here in Holland they're really honest. They're

quite brute and you do get upset, because you take it personally. And our personality is just

like that, we get upset with so much honesty” (Fernanda)

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Above, the reader can observe how there are four examples of narratives whereby the

respondents treat 'Brazilian' and 'Dutch' to be objective categories. Maria insinuates that all

Brazilians live in hardship, have to go work, have work, take the bus and have the opportunity

to go to university. In this passage of the narrative, she does mention that she is speaking

about a very particular type of Dutch 'other', namely the 'rich snobs' from the area she is living

in. Fabiana assumes Brazilians to be by definition clean and to share certain hygiene regimens

and, as such, based on two cases she knows of, assumes the Dutch to be unhygienic. Carolina

drew a similar conclusion about the Dutch in general when asked about whether her host

family had a cleaning lady, stating that it was disgusting that they had one that came once a

week and that in between visits they would not clean anything. Unlike Maria, Renata did not

have much contact with the wealthy Dutch suburbs such as Naarden, and did not experience

her host family as snobs or as particularly rich. In fact, she admires in them what she assumes

to be a universally Dutch characteristic of not being materialistic; contrasting that with the

consumerism she supposes is uniform in the Americas. Fernanda makes two assumptions in

her own narrative: one, that there is such a quality as a 'Brazilian personality'; and two, that

the Dutch are honest brutes as opposed to tactful and sensitive. The idea that the Dutch 'other'

is a 'hyper-honest' individual returns time and time again in several narratives:

“They've always been very honest with me. That's a really Dutch thing right? (Daniela)

“The girls say that Dutch people are rude. I don't think so, I just think that they say

everything to you straight. They don't try to please you in any way. But that's a cultural

thing, nothing you can do about it.” (Luiza)

The stereotype of the 'honest Dutchman' is matched only by the stereotype of cultural

'coldness'.

“It's not just work. I participate. And I think all the girls should, too. Because otherwise

you're making it a very distant relationship. And Dutch people are cold enough, so if you

make it colder, my god! (Julia)

“I don't think this thing of being part of the family exists in Holland. The Dutch are so cold,

and that really makes that part of it hard. […] We're [host mother and Joana] not best

friends but she shows she cares about my needs. Only in like a very Dutch way. Cold.”

(Joana)

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From the narratives, it would also seem that the absolute most common stereotype of

Brazilians for Dutch host families is that they are warm. The responses to this stereotype

varied, mostly, on the type of relationship the au pairs had with their families. Most of the

respondents were very much in agreement with the family. Fabiana, who has made Mexican

friends, went as far as extending this supposed warmth to all of Latin America. In the

following two examples, the host families also spoke of Latin American warmth as an

advantage, yet the au pairs in question quite clearly did not enjoy being categorized in terms

of difference. Alessandra's contract was prematurely terminated and she was dismissed from

the host family's house just over half-way through her stay, leaving her homeless; while Clara

has considered searching for a new family on several occasions. The last example is Lúcia,

who has struggled with the isolation she feels from the host parents and the lack of attachment

the elder children seem to have as they have seen many au pairs come and go, leaving them

quite desensitized by her efforts for real, 'Brazilian-style' emotional connection.

“They would say like... oh you're from Latin America and that's such a happy place, right? I

want you to bring this happiness into our home! And sometimes I would feel bad because I

felt they were expecting me to entertain them and I'm not like that. So it was a little

embarrassing. She even turned to me and said I wasn't happy at all and that I didn't bring

any joy into her home.” (Alessandra)

“They say that people 'over there', in Latin America, are great because we're warmer. They

said 'we wanted someone to bring joy into our home. Okay, then.'” (Clara)

“They really like Brazilians, they say we're very warm [...] and the little one is really

loving. Probably because I'm the fifth Brazilian, so he was only raised by Brazilians. He

comes and hugs you and gives you kisses. And when you're sad he says 'I love you'”

(Lúcia)

As an immigrant often surrounded by other immigrants, I have experienced otherness and the

act of contrasting 'us' from 'them' as perhaps an inevitable part of exchange programs and of

any type of migration as a whole, from either side. The concern with ethnicity in this thesis in

particular is that two thirds of my respondents had just started their au pair program, with the

exception of Maria who particularly disliked her family and saw in them the personification

of all 'bad things Dutch', Fernanda and Renata who are involved with Dutch men and

Alessandra who had been asked to leave her host family's home months prior to the interview.

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The issue was then that given the amount of time that had passed for the other eleven

respondents, even the most open-minded respondents who had had contact with foreigners

prior to the exchange, were in fact recent arrivals. This meant that the extreme ‘othering’

found in the interviews could have been linked to the novelty of the situation.

That host families would have a preference for the nationalities of the persons they had

chosen to begin with, even if such preference is based on stereotyping or gut-feeling

assumptions, is not a particularly ground-breaking finding. What is interesting here is how

such a preference is perceived, how Brazilian au pairs cope with being the 'other' and how

they create their own essentialist othering practices in the process. Living as temporary

migrants, who live as guests in their host families' homes, who also work for the families in

question but are expected to have independent lives outside of that context, my respondents

often struggle to define their position. They struggle to place themselves in terms of the

personal pronoun 'we' in reference to their relationship with the family they live with, but they

do use personal possessive pronouns to describe their living space (e.g. my house) and their

host parents (e.g. my host mother). There is a sense of distant intimacy that arises from co-

habiting a private space, such as a home. However, the imbalance of power between host and

guest, employer and employee, native and foreigner, with the responsibility of child care

added to the mix, results in relationships that are extremely complex and that affect the

experiences of my respondents enormously. In the following two parts of this chapter, I will

present findings that add new dimensions to the complexities of such a relationship.

5.4 Family Dynamics: Not Quite Family, Not Quite Love

Many of the questions I asked my respondents about their experiences as au pairs related to

their relationships with their host families. The answers were usually quite dubious.

Narratives of negative experiences were frequently spun in terms of how their host family

were ‘actually good people, but…’ or that the respondent had been naïve or had unrealistic

expectations prior to arriving. At times, however, it was quite clear to the au pair that the

relationship of care was one-sided and that if the family used official au pair program

terminology about the au pair being ‘part of the family’, it was used when it benefitted them,

with no real intention of deepening the relationship. It would seem that in doing emotional

care work (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2010), in particular under the premise that what one is

doing is not ‘work’, my respondents were often prone to expecting care, emotions and

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intimacy in return. The frustration that was experienced when the family did not respond in

such a way is illustrated by the following interview passages:

“And every time they would come with that same story that ‘oh, you’re part of the family’.

Then you realise you’re not. She would say I was, but no one else in that house had to clean

their own room, only me. It wasn’t about the extra work or anything, it was more that she

would say I was part of the family and then tell me the cleaner wouldn’t clean my room. It

was very clear that mine was the ‘au pair’s room’ and that just made me feel excluded”

(Alessandra)

“On my birthday all I got was an sms. Like… ‘Happy birthday’. They didn’t even bother

saying it to me, or like, making a phone call. My feeling was that I was an employee”

(Renata)

For the remainder of the respondents, who were most positive about their placement, it seem

they had not expected much more from the relationship with the family than a work

relationship, and had been pleasantly surprised at any display of care or affection from their

part:

“I came here without any expectations. I came for this particular family and I really fell in

love with them. I think when you don’t have any expectations it ends up being cool”

(Joana)

Daniela, Julia and Fabiana expressed similar circumstances whereby their expectations

were low in terms of a personal relationship with the family. They stated having dismissed

the idea presented in most au pair program information packages that one becomes a ‘part

of the family’ claiming instead full awareness of having an opportunity to live abroad in

exchange for work. Fabiana even says she thinks au pair programs should be displayed on

travel websites under ‘work abroad’ and not ‘cultural exchange’, as the cultural exchange

would be implied in ‘living abroad’ but the balance between activities would depict reality

more accurately. Most striking in the narratives about relationships with the host family is

what I will call the ‘love effect’. The love effect refers to diverse situations in which

emotional attachment to the host parents or children works to influence the work

relationship. In these cases, experiencing love or closeness leads to leniency in the labour

terms and what is considered to fall under duty. The love effect is that which blurs the

boundaries of work and favours, and between affection and obligation.

37 | P a g e

“They end up being our kids, you know? We feel that way. You’re a single mom that looks

after three children, basically. And it’s hard because you have to educate them and be mean.

You say ‘don’t do this’ or ‘don’t do that’, things you wouldn’t normally say to other

people’s children but in this situation you have to. (Lúcia)

“I really had to work a lot. And it was hard because when a person is depressed [referring to

host mother], they just don’t do anything! And I had to make sure the little one was okay

because she didn’t have anything to do with her mother’s condition. […] I really worked

too much, but I also received a lot of love from her” (Fernanda)

“Officially it’s 30, but I work more. Because there’s just no time. It’s 30 hours but when the

little one is home he wants to play the entire time. And the parents don’t want him to spend

the day playing videogames, he is only allowed one hour of ‘screen time’ a day. So I take

him to the park, what am I supposed to do? This child is so needy. So I do the housework

outside of my actual hours. Sometimes on Friday nights even. But I don’t mind too much.”

(Flávia)

These three fragments are examples of a cultivated sense of responsibility for the host

children that develops in particular when the au pair’s host family has small children and the

parents work long hours or, in Fernanda’s case, do not give their children enough attention for

other reasons. Fernanda’s case with the second family is peculiar in the sense that she was

working approximately sixty weekly hours for a stay-at-home mother experiencing deep

depression. She was responsible for running the entire household in terms of grocery-

shopping and staying with her host child from the moment she woke up until she went back to

sleep. She would also take it upon herself to make sure that the host mother was eating

sufficiently as she was pregnant. Essentially, she was looking after a little girl, a home, a

mother and her unborn child. That burden was emotionally taxing as it asked for more than

what an employee is able to offer. It asked of her the commercial love and intimacy

Hochschild and Ehrenreich (2010) write about, and the kind of compassion that cannot be

purchased yet is an intrinsic part of care work.

Lúcia felt her host mother had shortcomings as a mother. Her reaction to this was to pity the

children and try to instil manners upon them, as a ‘real’ mother would. Flávia’s story about

the demands that host parents have for how their children are to spend their day in the

company of the au pair, while also expecting her to do housekeeping, is quite common. And

while au pairs are usually not as preoccupied with the activities of the older children, toddlers

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and babies are often named as reasons for extra hours, remunerated or otherwise. Small

children are simply harder to ‘abandon’ and au pairs feel responsible for not only their basic

needs but their emotional ones also. At times, the sense of belonging that a pleasant

relationship with the family creates also sensitizes au pairs into doing work that is off-hours,

which is subtly implied or very explicitly stated by the host family:

“I make dinner, then I put things in the dishwasher. That’s the part I don’t really like

because often I’m tired but I still have to do it. Then I think to myself…my poor host mom

left at 6:30am, came home at 6:30pm. She just wants to put her kids to bed and still has to

clean the kitchen, you know? So I just go upstairs and get online for half an hour and then I

come back down and do it” (Elena)

“Sometimes I’m in the kitchen with the babies and my host mom will say something like

‘I’m so hungry’ and I think ‘gosh, it would be nice if I prepared something for her’. I mean,

I’m living in a home, in a family. It’s not just work, you have to give more, you have to

participate” (Julia)

The topic that I introduced in this paragraph, the love-effect, is in actual fact the starting point

for the next section of this chapter that discusses negotiations that occur between au pair and

host family within the program – such as the emotional ones shown here and economic ones

that will be shown in the next section.

5.5 Negotiations: A Happy Au Pair is a Good Au Pair

The issue with the au pair placement in the Netherlands is that in spite of symbolic efforts

from the Dutch government to control some aspects of it, real regulations are still far too few.

And the ones that do exist are by definition not implemented at the national level. Au pair

placements are private, hidden, and personal. Au pairs are not employees. Rules and

regulations are defined at the micro-level. They fall into a labour laws ‘limbo’, a true no

man’s land of legislation. Botman (2010) discusses in her book about the informal domestic

work economy in Amsterdam the idea that the true agency of illegal and informal domestic

workers lies in the fact that they can simply walk away: it is the type of labour with no legal

terms binding employer and employee; if they are not happy, they leave. In the case of au

pairs, this issue is not quite so simple. They are not ‘making their lives’ in a foreign country as

labour migrants do, they do not have a house they can leave to at the end of a ‘shift’. They are

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guests, privately recruited, whose travel and immigration arrangements are made by the host

family and who frequently do not have enough funds at their disposal, should they need to

leave. And, what is perhaps most important: their stay is temporary.

As the months stretch, the chances of an au pair – whose legal stay is only of one year – to

look for another family or even consider making demands diminishes. This ‘hold’ that the

family has on their au pair is peculiar because it is often not forceful; it is implied in the

nature of the program. Clara, who did not use an agency, discusses her insecurities about

looking for a different family, even though she has never proposed this to her current host

family:

“Every now and then I post [on the Facebook group] that I’m looking for a new family…

But then I think it’s going to be so hard to find a new one, not so much to go live

somewhere else, but I’m assuming that this family is going to want the new family to cover

the expenses they had. If they don’t have me for a year, why would they pay for the entire

year?” (Clara)

Of the respondents who did not use a recruitment agency most were often less certain about

their rights and duties, only Fabiana and Joana are exceptions. Meanwhile, at the other side of

this story is what can only be assumed to be purposeful misinformation on the part of

recruitment agencies and the host parents who make use of such services. Luiza’s family had

her working an amount that far exceeded thirty hours. After speaking with the family to no

avail, Luiza approached her agency. They arranged for her to work less, yet misinformed her

about the maximum weekly hours. Elena’s host family made it seem as though they were

paying her in excess of what is permitted by law and that she was not to discuss this with the

police. That sum of money was 340 Euros, the exact maximum permitted as per au pair

policy. The passage below is one of the more explicit attempts on the part of recruitment

agencies to maintain an unhappy au pair in the family she was with;

“I told her I was feeling really lonely and that I wanted to go back to Brazil, but she told me

like ‘you can’t do that, to go back you’ll have to pay a massive fine! Much more than what

you invested, it’s not worth it. […] Because the family pays for your visa so if you give up

on the first month, they calculate what you owe them by dividing what they’ve paid in

eleven parts.” (Fávia)

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Coercive practices from both the agencies and host families that misinform au pairs as to keep

them from ‘straying’ or becoming too inquisitive about salary and boundaries of justice are

precisely where exploitation tends to occur. The issue here is that even if such a ‘rule’ that

required an au pair to re-pay the investment the family made exists, it is likely to be

‘corporate policy’ and is not part of the Dutch au pair visa policy. The Brazilian au pairs I

interviewed do not consider themselves victims by any means and many take advantage of

loose regulation on the au pair placements for personal gain. Yet, it would be relevant to

consider whether the above is precisely the type of vulnerability created through a lack of

regulation of the placements.

With few sources of information, my respondents often turn to one another for answers about

what is ‘fair’ or ‘just’. One very common practice of irregular use of the au pair placement is

a form of ‘learned behaviour’ stemming either from host families or from other au pairs. It is

what I call ‘reward-systems’. These are often experienced as fair and desirable by my

respondents and consist of the most diverse arrangements between the host family and the au

pair. These reward-systems serve to have the au pair work more than she is supposed to work,

or undertake activities she is not supposed to undertake in exchange for money. In essence,

this is where the commercialization of the au pair program blossoms in full form.

“The agencies don’t allow you to work extra. It’s illegal to work over 30 hours. But my host

family is really relaxed. They’re really nice. They know that’s not a lot, it’s almost

inhumane. I told them right? I want to travel but I can’t. What can you do with 300 euros?

So there was a cleaner at the house and I asked if I could stay in his place. She accepted and

fired the guy. Then she said ‘I’ll prioritize you because you’re part of the family’.” (Julia)

“They said that if it ever went over 30 hours, that I should put it up on the board over there.

I put it in red and they know to pay me extra. I think I was lucky because I found this

family without an agency, I was scared that they wouldn’t respect my hours, and I still earn

more than normal! They say that a happy au pair, that can travel, works better. So they pay

450.” (Fabiana)

The above interview passages illustrate how the lack of formal regulation, along with

experiencing the au pair allowance as a form of low salary as opposed to an ‘allowance’,

create perfect circumstances for such exchanges. My respondents often learn how to cope

with situations from other au pairs. In the study mentioned earlier, in Hess and Puckhaber

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(2004), the same conclusion is drawn: au pairs learn about rights and responsibilities through

networking with other au pairs. In the case of the Brazilian au pair, this occurs not only

through the formation of friendship ties, but also through information shared online in a

virtual community meant exclusively for them. The last part of this chapter will focus

precisely on social network building and the life of the Brazilian au pair outside of the host

family home.

5.6 Community: Friends, Social Contacts and the Role of the Internet

Whereas this may be the final part of this chapter, it is in a way also where this chapter began.

Prior to fully developing the concept for this thesis, I spent approximately two months on the

‘Brazilian Au pairs in the Netherlands’ Facebook group observing the exchange between its

members, many of whom were later to become my respondents. The Facebook group and its

predecessor, the Orkut community – a social networking site owned by Google that was until

recent years very popular in Brazil –, are where many of my respondents commence their

journey into life as au pairs. The ones who find an au pair placement independent of an

agency particularly stress this point: information exchanged in these groups is invaluable to

their temporary migration process. They also exchange information and anecdotes about life

in the host family home and ask for ‘legal assistance’ in terms of whether something they

were asked to do is acceptable. However, that is not all that the Facebook group is used for. In

my months as a ‘covert observer’, the most common types of messages aside from visa

inquiries were: 1. Au pairs who had scheduled time off from their duties with the host family

and were looking for company to go on a trip elsewhere in Europe or 2. Au pairs who had a

day off and were searching for company for exploring the Netherlands. To a great majority of

my respondents, the internet is experienced as the great facilitator of human connection:

“I looked online to make friends because you come here and you feel quite lonely. I

wouldn’t know how to approach someone and be like: hi, do you want to be my friend? So

talking online is easier.” (Fernanda)

“I now have a Dutch boyfriend. It’s actually really funny but all the Brazilians registered at

one of these dating sites. We exchanged messages and then decided to meet. I said ‘man, I

came here with a family I found on the internet, I met my friends on the internet and now

my Dutchman! The girls and I always joke like: how do you make friends here without the

internet?” (Fabiana)

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The au pair program offers many of the benefits behind its supposed philosophy: travel, the

opportunity to live abroad for an extended period of time, the experience of living with a

foreign family, an allowance. But the au pair program does not offer a social network. Moving

somewhere one has never lived, where one does not speak the local language – nor is one

required to – and where one’s workplace is located in the private sphere, often makes the first

few moments of life as an au pair incredibly isolating. The internet is one way to bridge that

gap between life as an au pair in the home and life as a temporary migrant eager for tourism

experiences. The five-person friend group I interviewed met online, many also prior to their

arrival, going through the procedure simultaneously. Other respondents also stated having met

friends on Facebook groups or on Couchsurfing.com. For the most part of my respondents,

friendship ties they form as au pairs are expressed as very strong. The idea conveyed by these

young women is that the condition of having ‘no one’ makes them more prone to achieving

closeness at a faster pace, out of necessity more so than true affinity. It could be said that

instead of fostering a sense of family with their host family, they seek closeness with those

who understand, and temporarily share, their circumstances. The Brazilian au pairs who are

friends with other Brazilian au pairs exchange information about rights and duties, discount

train cards and even speak to one another’s host families to assist in conflict resolutions.

Non-Brazilian au pairs also play a part in many of my respondents’ friend circles. Clara was

the only respondent who did not primarily interact with other au pairs, yet she claimed that

this was mainly due to her geographic location. Julia made great efforts to not only spend her

time with au pairs, yet admitted that it was often easier to find company among other

Brazilian au pairs. Aside from these two cases, non-Brazilian au pairs are also very prominent

characters in the narratives of my respondents. Some were also met online, on the general

Facebook group named ‘Au pairs in the Netherlands’. But many au pairs that live in cities or

towns where other au pairs are commonly found reported meeting peers from other

nationalities at ‘their’ children’s school. It would seem that the condition of being an au pair

works to foster commonalities between individuals. Commonalities that they express they do

not share with ‘outsiders’:

“[friends of her boyfriend] are not friends like ‘oh, let’s go to the Euroland, buy everything

for one Euro’, that’s more of an au pair thing to do.” (Renata)

“My friends are mostly Brazilian and mostly au pairs. You meet au pairs from Colombia,

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America… We meet so many people online that live nearby. […] We always look for

something to do at the weekend, like ‘we don’t have any money, what should we do?’ Then

we go to Albert Heijn, buy something and go to Fabiana’s terrace […] We sometimes go

out but always thinking ‘I hope I don’t spend too much’” (Lúcia)

As illustrated above, one very prominent commonality in the absolute majority of narratives is

having limited access to money, while wanting to obtain the most out of one’s limited free

time. And what is noticeable is that in times of scarcity, any difference in income can make

sharing experiences somewhat difficult. Differences in background, or what one is

accustomed to having, proved to be a relevant aspect of distinction in experience:

“When we take trips, I think for instance that they want comforts I don’t care about. We

have to go to a particular country and the hostel has to be good and the room needs to have

a bathroom inside, we can’t share a room with anyone else… I understand that you have to

search for the best but even in this condition of being an au pair, they won’t sleep just

anywhere. And I’ve slept just anywhere my entire life so there are things I just don’t care

about.” (Joana)

“I had money to eat and do everything I wanted to. London eye…and London is an

expensive place because it’s pounds, not even Euros. […] Me and Juliana did a lot of

things. But I did the most. I would go with each one to the places they wanted to go. […]

And there were girls who were just aimlessly walking around because they didn’t want to

pay 7 pounds for a transport ticket” (Elena)

The former passage from Joana’s interview illustrates that the ‘hardship’ experienced by

having limited funds, a quality so life-changing about the program to most of my middle-class

respondents, is experienced rather differently by her. Joana sees the au pair condition as a

sufficient privilege in terms of access to travel, for instance. The latter passage, from Elena’s

interview, is an answer to a question about her trip to London with her friend group and a few

other Brazilian au pairs. In a way, it might be ironic that after constant mention of sameness in

terms of ‘the au pair condition’, the last two quotations of this chapter are ones of distinction.

However, they also serve to reinforce that the differences that exist in experience and self-

perception extend beyond money, schooling, temporary occupation, migration status,

nationality and other face-value commonalities. My respondents’ narratives of experience

show that although conditions relating to the program are shared, they can only view them

through the lens that their trajectories leading up to life as au pairs have given them.

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VI. Conclusion

The au pair placement in the Netherlands has, at its very core, characteristics that appeal to

this group of young women belonging to what can generally be characterised as 'the Brazilian

middle-class' – with all of the problematization that speaking of 'one' middle class carries.

Difficult as it may be, it allows for a time away from one's reality that is both short and

intensively lived. It allows for international travel and an immersion in a culture in its own

right, beyond Brazilian and parallel to Dutch. The life of the Brazilian au pair is experienced

and thus narrated as a succession of events that supposedly 'make up' for a life-time of having

grown up in the bubble of protection that is middle-class life for young women in Brazil, with

their babás and empregadas and fathers who spoil them. It is where young women who claim

never having had to fend for themselves feel they learn how to be problem-solving adults

without parental assistance; it is where they practice their English; it is a short-lived and

radical lifestyle change and therefore, in spite of it all, it is 'worth it'. My respondents ascribe

to their experiences of being au pairs qualities that are practically immeasurable and

extremely diverse. Yet although their motives and aspirations for embarking upon the program

differ, it could be concluded that the specificity of age, or rather the specificity of 'life phase',

and the small 'window of opportunity' in which one can participate in the program, are the

aspects that essentially define the widespread appeal of it. All of my respondents, without

exception, are women in their twenties. The latter is no detail.

Virtually every one of my respondents found themselves searching for an exchange program

to suit their needs and wants, but that at the same time was financially attainable; when they

came across the au pair program. Rash decisions were made and many acted on impulse, yet

few regretted their choice – for better or for worse, it was 'worth it', they told me. Lúcia, a

working-class young woman whose lack of loosely defined 'international experience' was

affecting her possibilities of growth at work found that at almost twenty-six years of age and

with no other opportunities to live abroad, the au pair program was to her a tool, a means to an

end, a temporary sacrifice for improving her future. It was the one affordable exchange

program available to her. Daniela, an even younger middle-class woman in search of freedom

both from the monotonies of everyday life and from her parentally funded existence, found in

the au pair program a sense of agency. She felt more dependent residing on her own without

earning any of her own income than living with, and working for, a Dutch family. However,

the complexities of self-perception and experience of access and belonging to a social class

45 | P a g e

position do not end at the layers of the middle class. In Joana, one can observe a young

woman who succeeded in breaking with the barriers of education in an impressive display of

upwards mobility, but who did not manage, in all of her stride, to break the barriers of class.

She was left preferring underemployment as a non-worker abroad to accepting the social

place that Brazil, as long as she is from the favela, has to offer her.

The central paradox that defines the au pair program is perhaps that my respondents are

women with careers and aspirations, most of them with degrees or in the middle of obtaining

one, and most of those carrying degrees in areas that are not 'traditionally feminine'. And be

that as it may, my respondents are au pairs. They are hosted, fed and paid to be women.

Mothers, some of them would say. They are transgressing boundaries of professional sexism

that exist in their home country to fulfil 'naturally' feminine roles (Lutz, 2002) in the host

country, oftentimes to succeed at competing for professional space in the home country. They

admire Dutch fathers for their egalitarian division of care and yet they pity the children who

grow up with mothers who dedicate most of their time to their careers. If their own mothers

worked and managed to be loving, how come their host mothers cannot? These mothers are

Dutch, and therefore cold, they would argue. They develop feelings, good and bad, towards

the host family and believe that they raise the children they look after with a touch of

Brazilian warmth. Their workplace is their home and, for the most part, they have no fear in

identifying what they do as work. Brazilian au pairs are prepared to negotiate time in

exchange for capital rewards, in a semi-compliant fashion so long as they can travel. The

semi-compliance occurs undisturbed as no official regulation of the home ever takes place.

Brazilian au pairs know Brazilian au pairs and other au pairs. They socialise online and at the

school yard. They divide their time between being lonely domestic workers and adventurous

long-term tourists.

In terms of the theories introduced in chapters two and three, my research has shown that

studying au pairs under the premise that they are by definition being exploited as irregular

migrant workers ‘in disguise’ is a methodological choice that can sacrifice the possibility of

finding, as is the case with this thesis, that much of what we know about domestic labour can

be different for au pairs. The issue of temporality must be considered, but perhaps most

importantly, the issue of money that accompanies temporality. In research done under other

nationalities from the developing world, the au pair allowance may be considered a sign of

46 | P a g e

exploitation because it is insufficient to sustain a family or send any earnings home. The au

pair program for Brazilian nationals does not have a connotation of ‘migrant labour’ because

the money being made is in essence being used in practices of tourism during the exchange

year. It approximates the au pair program sooner to the holidaymaker visa holders than to the

housemaids of the United States of America.

Returning to the research question of what role self-perceived categories of social class,

gender and ethnicity in the home country play in the experience of Brazilian au pairs in the

host country, one finds answers in the nuances. There is sufficient evidence that these

categories are influential, yet the ways in which they shape experience are not as blatant as I

had perhaps anticipated. To begin with, background in the aforementioned categories plays

the role of defining how any given au pair perceives the program in itself. Social class is the

initial rough line that can be drawn between perceiving the program as a salvation, a means to

an end or a ludicrous adventure, sometimes resulting in a combination of factors. Moreover,

social class is implicitly present in all other narratives that frame experience, from supposed

culture shocks that are perhaps more related to general mannerisms of the upper classes than

to a Brazilian/Dutch dichotomy, to one's willingness, issues with, or experience in doing

housework. A heavy baggage of gender role normativities present in some narratives matched

by what can be perceived as the 'lower layers' of the middle class in many ways serves to

cloud the vision of some of my respondents regarding their own ambivalences in terms of

performing the feminine role in exchange for board, lodging and a salary. Furthermore, not

only does the contradictory nature of the au pair program in itself – that essentially imports

foreign talent to perform 'feminine' care work – go unnoticed, but in a general sense,

expectations and thus judgement of host mothers far exceed that of host fathers. Ethnicity

approached as national belonging and othering practises is as central to the narratives of my

respondents as any of the other two aspects, in that it affects one's self perception in a

relational way, just as social class and as gender do.

To put it simply, if one's social position is a certain way, it is likely to influence their

perception of 'sound' gender practices, which in turn is also likely to influence an au pair's

openness to envisioning herself as more than Brazilian in relation to the family. While I shall

make no attempt to speak of a population of hypothetical Brazilian au pairs, the individual

experiences reported in my findings vary in fairly uniform ways as to allow for a conclusion

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that all three of these categories have an influence in experience that is complementary and

quite defining, albeit in subtle ways.

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VII. References

Anderson, B. (2007) “A Very Private Business”, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 14 (3), pp. 247-264.

Botman, S.J. (2010) “Mijn zus zei dat je hier heel veel geld kan verdienen” in Gewoon Schoonmaken, Uitgeverij

Boxpress: Amsterdam, pp. 73-111.

Brah, A. (1992) “Difference, Diversity, Differentiation” in Donald, J. and Rattansi, A. Race, culture and

difference, London : Sage Publications, pp. 431-446.

Ehrenreich, B. and Hochschild, A.R. (2002) “Introduction”. In Ehrenreich, B. and Hochschild, A.R. (Eds.),

Global woman : nannies, maids and sex workers in the new economy, pp. 1-14. London: Granta Publications.

Ehrenreich, B. (2002) “Maid to Order”. In Ehrenreich, B. and Hochschild, A.R. (Eds.), Global woman : nannies,

maids and sex workers in the new economy, pp. . London: Granta Publications.

Fry, P. (2000) “Politics, Nationality and the Meanings of “Race” in Brazil”. Daedalus, 129 (2), pp. 83-118.

Henkes, B. (1999), Van Dienstbode Naar Au Pair in Nemesis: Euwige Kwesties 100 jaar vrouwen en recht in

Nederland, 6, Holtmaat, R. (ed.), W.E.J. Tjeenk Willink:Deventer, pp.49-64.

Hess, S and Puckhabber, A. (2004), “Big Sisters Are Better Domestic Servants?! Comments on the Booming Au

Pair Business” Feminist Review, No. 77, Labour Migrations: Women on the Move, pp. 65-78.

Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. (2002) “Blowups and other unhappy endings”. In Ehrenreich, B. and Hochschild, A.R.

(Eds.), Global woman : nannies, maids and sex workers in the new economy, pp. 55-69. London: Granta

Publications.

Integratie- en Naturalisatie Dienst (2010), Au pairs en culturele uitwisseling, found on

<http://www.ind.nl/themas/momi/Consequenties_per_verblijfsdoel/aupairs-en-culturele-uitwisseling.aspx>

Kohlmann, C., Kraus, S. and Orobio de Castro, I. (2003), “Er is een land waar vrouwen kunnen werken” in

Vrouwen in het migratiebeleid, E-quality: Den Haag, pp. 37-47.

Lutz, H. (2002), “At your service Madam! The Globalization of domestic service”, Feminist Review, 70, pp. 89-

104.

Miedema, F., Post, B. and Worldringh, C. (2003), Evaluatie Au pair Regeling, ITS: Nijmegen.

Ramos Beserra, B. (2011), “Book Review: Cultural Imperialism and the Transformation of Race Relations in

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Brazil.”, Latin American Perspectives. 38 (194), pp. 194-208.

Reede, R. (2002), “Positie van au pairs uit landen buiten de Europese Unie in Nederland”, Wetenschapswinkel

Universiteit van Brabant: Tilburg.

Rice, K. (2010), “'Working on Holiday': Relationships between Tourism and Work among Young Canadians in

Edinburgh”. Anthropology in Action, 17 (1) pp. 30-40.

Ruhs, M and Anderson, B (2010), “Semi-Compliance and Illegality in Migrant Labour Markets: An Analysis of

Migrants, Employers and the State in the UK”. Population Space and Place. Vol. 16, pp.195-211.

Santos, José Alcides Figueiredo (2002) “A estrutura de posições de Classe no Brasil: Mapeamento, Mudanças e

Efeitos na Renda”, Belo Horizonte: UFMG.

Sassen, S. (2003) “Global Cities and Survival Circuits” In Ehrenreich, B. and Hochschild, A.R. (Eds.), Global

woman : nannies, maids and sex workers in the new economy, pp. 254-274. London: Granta Publications.

Scott, J. (1992), “Experience” in Butler, J. and Scott, J. Feminists Theorize the political, pp. 22-40. New York:

Routledge publications.

Van Walsum, S. (2011), “Regulating Migrant Domestic Work in the Netherlands: Opportunities and Pitfalls.”

Canadian Journal of Women and the Law. 23(1): 141-165

Yodanis, C. and Lauer, S.R. (2005),"Foreign Visitor, Exchange Student, or Family Member? A Study of Au Pair

Policies in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia", International Journal of Sociology and Social

Policy, Vol. 25 Iss: 9 pp. 41 - 64

Zarembka, J. M. (2002) “America's Dirty Work: Migrant Maids and Modern-Day Slavery”. In Ehrenreich, B.

and Hochschild, A.R. (Eds.), Global woman : nannies, maids and sex workers in the new economy, pp. 142-153.

London: Granta Publications.

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VIII. Appendices

8.1 Au pair Biographies

Alessandra

Alessandra is a twenty-three-year-old from Ceará, in the Northeast of Brazil. In Brazil,

Alessandra shared her widowed and retired agriculturist father's home with him, her two

sisters, one brother-in-law, nieces and nephews. After attaining a degree in journalism and

interning at a local newspaper throughout her studies, she decided to fulfil her desire to live

abroad for a year to improve her English and to experience a different reality to her own.

Until that point, she had never been abroad in her life. As her family could not afford to send

her to England or Ireland to study, she began to look for alternatives. The au pair program to

the Netherlands offers the possibility of traveling without a recruitment agency that requires

capital investment from the au pair, and is the only European country with a legal au pair visa

that does not require the au pair to speak the local language. Alessandra lived in Apeldoorn

with a Dutch family of entrepreneurs for six months until the family decided to end the

contract, without any apparent regard for where she would end up going to, and with a return

ticket to Brazil dated six months after. Alessandra now lives in Amsterdam with her Brazilian

boyfriend and does informal cleaning work for a living. She had only just surpassed her

official legal stay in the Netherlands when I interviewed her. She did not get on the airplane

that would take her back to Brazil, nor did she try to modify the dates. Her family in Brazil

believes that she is continuing the au pair program with another family in a village in the

south of the Netherlands.

Clara

Clara is twenty-four years old and is from Ceará, in the Northeast of Brazil. Clara studied

Portuguese Belles-Lettres at the state university of Ceará where she also received a research

scholarship. Throughout her studies and after, prior to coming to the Netherlands, Clara

worked as a teacher and as an editor. She lived with her widowed mother, a retired textile-

worker; her sister, who has a bachelor's degree in history and works in a book shop; and

brother, who studies business administration and works at the university. Clara and her

siblings assisted their mother in paying the house bills with their jobs, and shared one car

between them. Clara saved up her own money to hire a recruitment agency to mediate her au

pair exchange, yet after months of waiting she decided to look for a family herself online. She

had never been abroad yet seeing as the agency told her the Netherlands would be the right

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place for her, she continued to search for Dutch families. She found the host family she is now

through Au Pair world. They live in Heerlen. Her host father is an executive at a multinational

and her host mother is a medical doctor, they have three children Clara is responsible for.

Although Clara majored in Portuguese, she wishes to work in English-teaching, and as such,

she has opted to use the funds the host family is required to make available for one course

with an English language course, in spite of the pressure she experienced to take a Dutch

language course instead. When we initially booked the interview, Clara phoned me to say that

her host father had offered to speak with me as he expressed that any research focusing only

on the au pairs would be one-sided and he was eager to tell his side of this story. This offer

seemed somewhat unexpected until the moment I interviewed Clara and her situation became

clearer. She feels rather isolated for being in a part of the Netherlands with few other au pairs

and few foreigners in general and at times shows great discontent with her host family for not

taking any personal interest in her and with that emphasizing a relationship that is strictly

work-related. However, she strongly stressed that it is all “worth it” for the opportunity to

travel and live abroad.

Renata

Renata is a 23 year old from Sergipe, in the Northeast of Brazil. Renata does not have a

degree of higher education as she has been an au pair for most of her adult life. At eighteen

she went to the United States of America as au pair for two years, returned to Brazil at twenty

years of age and worked as an English language teacher at a languages school. She decided

that she wanted to “continue the dream” and become an au pair once again in a new place. At

the moment we spoke, her au pair program in the Netherlands had already ended. Renata had

just returned from a trip to Brazil with her Dutch fiancé, where she applied to stay in the

Netherlands as a partner and is due to get married later this year. Renata was not entirely

satisfied with her au pair experience in the Netherlands when comparing to the mostly

positive experiences she had as an au pair in the United States. In her interview, she gave

detailed account as to why she felt that the au pair program in the USA was in fact a cultural

exchange, while in the Netherlands, an au pair is an inexpensive domestic worker for the

family. In Brazil Renata and her younger sister lived with their stay-at-home mother and

entrepreneur father. In the Netherlands, she lived with a Dutch family in Rotterdam. Renata's

host father was an executive at a large technology multinational and her host mother was a

medical doctor. Her current migration status as 'partner' does not allow her to work, yet she is

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to remain for seven months in the country if she is ever to attain a new residency permit.

Renata currently works informally as a live-out nanny and lives with her fiancé, who is an

engineer, in the Rotterdam metropolitan area.

Carolina

Carolina is twenty-two years old and is from Paraná in the South of Brazil. She temporarily

interrupted her bachelor's in business administration to become an au pair in the United States,

yet after only three months she had issues with the American host family. She asked her

agency for what is called a re-match, yet in failing to find a new family, Carolina had to not

only leave the country but also pay her own way back to Brazil. She decided to complete her

studies before attempting to do the au pair program again, and was interning at the largest

hydroelectric in the country. The USA regulates au pair visas so that one can be an au pair for

two years at a time but not for another two years after any amount of time one has spent being

an au pair in the country. Still very much eager to follow the program, Carolina was left with

the option of coming to Europe and as she did not speak any languages other than Portuguese

and English, the Netherlands ended up being her only option. In Brazil Carolina lived with

her younger sister who studies physiotherapy, her mother who works from home and with her

father, who is a tourist guide. In the Netherlands she lives with a Dutch family in Heemstede

where she has her own studio apartment of sorts, in the same location as the main house, but

detached from the family. She works more than the permitted 30 weekly hours and feels

underpaid. The day following the interview, Carolina had an appointment scheduled with her

recruitment agency to discuss the irregularities of her situation and ask the agency to

intervene.

Fernanda

Fernanda is a twenty-four-year-old from Paraná in the South of Brazil. Fernanda's father is a

banker and her mother is retired. Fernanda dated a Dutch man she had met in Brazil

throughout her years in law school. Once she graduated, she decided to come to the

Netherlands as an au pair. She is an Italian citizen as well as Brazilian and is thus able to

travel and live freely throughout the EU, which in its turn means she did not make use of an

au pair agency to facilitate her stay. Fernanda's elder sister is currently also taking advantage

of her passport, doing her PhD in Italy. Fernanda has been an au pair in the Netherlands twice.

The first time she lived what she perceived to be the true au pair experience: traveling,

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exploring, making friends and seeing new things. Due to a sudden worsening of her mother's

condition associated with breast cancer, Fernanda terminated her contract with the first host

family early and went back home. The second time, she migrated to the Netherlands

specifically to live with her boyfriend who had by then become unemployed and was living

with his parents in Friesland, a part of the Netherlands Fernanda felt was very rural and

isolating. As a stepping stone while her boyfriend searched for work, she decided to respond

to an ad on the 'Brazilians in the Netherlands' Facebook group by a pregnant Brazilian stay-at-

home mother married to a Dutch business man who had a two-year-old in need of care. This

time Fernanda worked for three months and ended the contract as soon as her boyfriend found

formal work. She and her boyfriend are now residing in Veldhoven and she has been

considering learning Dutch and going back to university to study something in the area of

pedagogy.

Juliana

Juliana is a twenty-five-year-old accounting sciences graduate from Rio Grande do Sul, in the

South of Brazil. She is of German descent and is originally from a small German village in

Brazil where Portuguese is a second language. Juliana started working in accounting in the

village she is from at fourteen years of age and quickly realized how many employment

opportunities there were for accountants. Juliana's father was a factory worker and her mother

worked from home selling handmade shoes and beauty products, her own income and that of

her siblings had always aided in maintaining her family's household. She therefore decided to

apply for a university bachelor in the same area once she graduated from high school, and

received a full scholarship at one of the most prominent private universities in Brazil. Juliana

was working for a commercial organization prior to initiating her first au pair program, which

was in the United States. Juliana had applied for a promotion at work and was told her

English was not sufficient for the position. This event pushed Juliana to look for exchange

programs she could afford and the au pair program was the one option that was within her

budget. After returning from her exchange, she had a hard time adapting to the hardship of

everyday life in an office and decided to take a year off through the au pair program again.

Juliana's host family lives in Leiden. Her host mother is a university professor and is part-

Dutch, but grew up in Brazil and speaks fluent Portuguese. Juliana is required to speak only

Portuguese to the little girl she looks after. Her host father is Dutch and is an accountant for a

large multinational. She humorously calls this second au pair program in the Netherlands her

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vacation year as she does not consider the work an au pair does to be 'real' work. She also

expressed at times feeling slightly concerned for having prorogued her career again, yet the

experience is still “worth it on the weekends”.

Lúcia

Lúcia is a twenty-six-year old business logistics management graduate from Paraná in the

South of Brazil. Lúcia's father is Dutch and was raised by her Dutch grandmother who

migrated to Brazil during World War Two when he was only a small child. Unlike most of the

other respondents, Lúcia specifically chose for the Netherlands as the destination for her au

pair exchange. She had often fantasized about seeing her father's birth place of Rotterdam and

was running out of time to participate in the au pair program seeing as she was about to

complete 26 years of age. Lúcia has a Dutch passport as well as a Brazilian one, however, as

she was not aware that she could find a family without a recruitment agency, and the Brazilian

agency told her that they were unable to send her off on exchange to her 'own country', she

still entered the country on an au pair visa. In Brazil Lúcia worked for a multinational and

owned a shoe shop with her sister, who is also a veterinarian. Lúcia's mother studied

sociology yet never practiced her profession, having worked from home for most of her life.

In the Netherlands Lúcia lives in the Hague, in a separate 'apartment' attached to the host

family's main house, designed specifically for hosting au pairs. Her host mother is a financial

director and her host father is a corporate consultant. Lúcia believes she is in a different life

phase than most of the other Brazilian au pairs, as she is older and decided to take what she

calls a 'sabbatical' to further herself in her career. She was under the impression that having

lived abroad and knowing English were essential qualities for obtaining promotions in her

line of work. Lúcia somewhat struggled to adapt to having free time, yet is still generally very

positive about the au pair program and the opportunities it offers for becoming acquainted

with Dutch culture and traveling through Europe.

Joana

Joana is twenty-three years old and is originally from Rio de Janeiro, in the Southeast of

Brazil. Joana grew up in a notoriously violent favela (shanty town), where her family still

lives and works. She is the first person in her family to finish high school and therefore also

the first person to have gone to university. Joana obtained a full scholarship to study

international relations at a private university in Rio, yet she struggled with not knowing

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English and not having lived abroad as many of her peers had. Joana's family has disagreed

with many of her life choices such as attending university and contributing less income to the

household in that period. They were also against her going on her first au pair exchange to the

United States. In this first exchange, Joana learned to speak English and began interacting for

the first time with the what she considers to be the Brazilian middle-class. She mentioned how

in the USA, the au pair program pays more than in the Netherlands and, as such, au pairs tend

to consume more. Accompanying other au pairs on shopping trips, she came to realize that

even though these young women were not 'rich' by any standards – including her own, they

knew brands and perfumes and were aware of a world of consumption she had never

experienced. Joana went back to Brazil thinking she would have an easier time finding work

in her area as she now spoke English and had the experience living abroad. Instead, although

she did find work, it was not by any means what she had expected. She felt discriminated

against for being from the favela. To specialize in diplomacy and have the international career

she wants requires her to speak yet another language. The disappointment and culture shock

she experienced being back in her own reality made her decide to return to life as an au pair.

As with Carolina, Joana would have to wait two years before returning to America, and so she

decided to turn to the Netherlands to 'kill time'. Joana lives in the Hague with a Dutch family

where both parents work for a large oil multinational and have also lived in Brazil for their

jobs. She found the family online, due to a posting from their previous Brazilian on the social

networking website Orkut. Joana claims her situation at the moment with the host family is

very good, yet she feels other au pairs in the Netherlands are often treated as empregadas. Her

plan of going back to America as an au pair once her year here is over still holds true, as she

no longer wants to live in Brazil. Being from a favela, which is essentially illegal housing

with no legal address or assets to her family's name, Joana is unlikely to obtain even a tourist

visa to the USA and so the au pair visa is her most viable option. While she does not wish to

be a babá for the rest of her life, Joana does not rule out that option if it means not having to

return to Brazil.

Fabiana

Fabiana is twenty years old and is originally from Minas Gerais, but lived and studied in São

Paulo in the Southeast of Brazil before coming to the Netherlands as an au pair. She is a

student of publicity at a prestigious private university financed by her parents and was

interning at a cable company, while living with her older brother. Fabiana's parents still live in

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Minas Gerais. Her mother is a university professor and her father is a retired lawyer. Fabiana

temporarily stopped her studies for the au pair program as she felt her life was proceeding in a

way where she would soon graduate, obtain a full time job and have an entire life of

responsibilities in Brazil that would keep her from ever having the chance to take a year off to

live abroad. She came to the Netherlands without an au pair agency as the one she paid to find

her a family was taking longer than what she was willing to wait. Lara's own family was not

entirely excited about her plans to postpone her graduation and leave her internship for a year,

yet she had specifically chosen the au pair program for its low cost and had secretly been

saving up to pay for whatever was required to make her plans possible so that her parents

would only need to be convinced on a moral and not financial level. She now lives in Delft

with her Dutch host father who has his own accounting business, her Canadian host mother

who works for an international mobile phone manufacturer and their children. Fabiana's host

family offered to speak with me if I had interest in interviewing them and voiced, through her,

how important they thought it was to expose the abuse they witness from other host parents

but also how positive the exchange can be, as it is in their home. Unsurprisingly, Fabiana is

incredibly positive about the au pair program, her host family, her new Dutch boyfriend and

especially about the opportunities to travel she has had since her placement with this family.

Daniela

Daniela is a twenty-three-year-old from Paraíba in the Northeast of Brazil. Her parents live in

Ceará, in the same region of the country, yet still rather far from where she has been living

independently since she was sixteen. As an adolescent, she decided she wanted to study

international relations and the only public university that offered the course was in Paraíba,

where there was also a high school specifically geared towards preparing students for the

competitive entrance exam. Daniela's engineer father and teacher mother have since then

maintained an apartment where she could live, and supported her financially so she could

focus on her studies and her internship as a consultant at her university. She felt that she

would need to go on exchange to have better opportunities in her prospective career, and her

parents had already agreed to paying for her exchange of choice. After having spent years

studying multiple options of exchange to Australia, England and Ireland, she finally settled on

the au pair program in the Netherlands so that she could still practice her English and have an

experience living abroad, while not depending so heavily on her parents. Daniela now lives in

her own complex attached to that of her Dutch family in a village near Utrecht. Her host

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mother works in international commerce and her host father owns his own marketing

company. Mariana voices mostly positive impressions about the program and does not seem

to mind the pay as much as some of her peers, seeing as she still receives financial aid from

home.

Elena

Elena is twenty-three years old and is from São Paulo, in the Southeast of Brazil. She studied

pharmaceutical sciences and lived with her parents prior to coming to the Netherlands as an

au pair. Elena temporarily interrupted her studies to become an au pair in the Netherlands,

although her rather religious family was not entirely supportive of her choice to leave in order

to become what they perceive to be essentially a babá and to do so in a country with liberal

drug and prostitution policies. Elena's primary reason for choosing the au pair program was to

travel through Europe in an inexpensive way. She had originally planned on studying English

in London, yet her family would not be able to afford an expensive language course and

maintain her in a city where she would not be allowed to work. Elena started looking for

options but found that the au pair program offered her certain comforts that working

holidaymaker’s visas to the United States, for instance, did not. She mentioned how easy it

was to simply move in to a nice home with a family and have a relatively simple set of tasks

as opposed to having to 'rough it' as a waitress in America. Although she did not have a job as

such, she saved up her allowance for a few months and paid for the agency fee herself,

contrary to her family's wishes. Elena's father is a computer systems analyst and her mother is

an arts and music teacher. She now lives in Hoofddorp with her Greek host father and Dutch

host mother who are both doctors and their three daughters. She also receives financial aid

from her parents which essentially doubles her disposable income during the exchange, which

she feels allows her to travel and consume a little more comfortably than most of the other au

pairs. Elena is very positive about the exchange and feels she is learning a lot from getting out

of her comfort zone, such as important life lessons from not having everything at her disposal

and having to prioritize purchases.

Luiza

Luiza is twenty-one years old and is from São Paulo, in the Southeast of Brazil. Luiza is one

of two of my respondents that never went to university. She is also the second youngest of the

respondents and was still quite indecisive about where her interests lay. Luiza has spent the

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last few years since high school working as an entry-level financial analyst and aiding her

working mother in the child-rearing functions, in particular for her brother who is only five

years old. Luisa's mother is a personal assistant for a lawyer and her father works on her

grandfather's farm. She has always wanted to go study abroad, in particular in London. The

work and study visa for Brazilians in the UK was suspended just as she applied and not being

allowed to work next to her English course essentially kept her from being able to pursue her

first choice of exchange. She began looking for options and came across the au pair program.

Like most of my respondents, the language requirement for other EU countries drove her to

choose for the Netherlands. Luiza now lives in Amersfoort and cares for two-year-old triplets.

Her host parents work for the same company; her host father is a high executive director and

her host mother is a secretary. She is generally positive about the opportunities one has to live

abroad and travel due to the au pair program and is considering a second placement next year

in another country.

Julia

Julia is a twenty-six year old photographer from São Paulo, in the Southeast of Brazil. Her

family lives in the capital of the state but she studied in another city, away from her

artist/artisan mother and lawyer father. Julia was struggling to find work in her area and felt

like after university she had been a little uncertain of what path to take career-wise. She was

working at a book shop and decided to go 'find herself' by spending some time away from her

reality and studying English in the USA. While she did actually make it to there, Julia and her

American host family turned out not to be a very good match. As she could not find a host

family within fifteen days, she was made to return to Brazil, in a similar fashion as Carolina.

She only had a few months to re-start an au pair exchange procedure to Europe as she was

almost completing twenty-six, the legal limit for au pair placements. Julia has been living in

Amsterdam with a Dutch family and looking after their two babies. The host father is a

contractor and her host mother is a banker. Julia had not specifically chosen for Europe and

the main reason was that she knew the cost of living would be higher while the wages would

be lower than in the United States. She finds Europe expensive in terms of courses she can

take and what she can consume, but she has a good relationship with her host family and is

enjoying being in a new place.

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Maria

Maria is twenty-three years old and is from São Paulo, in the Southeast of Brazil. Maria has a

degree in international relations from a private university her parents paid for, for and was

teaching English at a languages school to support herself. Maria was living with her aunt

throughout her bachelor's. Maria's father owns a judo gym and a personal trainer gym, while

her mother is a school teacher. She had always wanted to spend some time abroad and after

having looked at exchange programs for study, she quickly realized those were not within her

financial reach. The au pair program would be a perfect compromise, where she would have

minimal capital investment – essentially only the agency fee, which her parents helped her to

pay – and still be able to stay abroad for a year. Maria has been rather miserable in her host

family's home and has extended her discontent to being in the Netherlands in more general

terms. Maria is living in Naarden with a Dutch family where the father is a doctor and the host

mother is a banker. After a visit from her parents over Christmas where she started to travel

through Europe, Maria started to view the true benefits of the program again and started to

feel as though she could bare the few months left on her contract if only she was able to travel

once a month. She was at that point, however, quite literally counting the days until her stay

would be over and was leaving Europe two months early.

Flávia

Flávia is a twenty-three-year-old marketing graduate from São Paulo. She went to a private

secondary school in the town she was born, as her parents thought that would be important for

her future. As traditional private schools such as the one she attended in Brazil can be rather

expensive, Flávia always had to work with her father, and even during and after college she

would return home to assist him at his Japanese restaurant. Her mother works in a radiology

clinic. She had been exposed to the middle-middle and upper-middle class of her town, whose

families sent their children on exchange during high school and who could afford

international travel and expressed not being able to ever take vacations with her family, not

even domestic ones. She was working for a European car manufacturer in the city where she

studied, but was not entirely satisfied with her position at work. She felt that she could have

better opportunities if she went on exchange and improved her English. Flávia, too, wanted to

go to London but could not afford it and ended up with the au pair program to the Netherlands

as her only option. She lives in Rotterdam with a Dutch family where the host mother works

at the Rotterdam harbour and the host father is an entrepreneur with three different companies

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to his name. Although she considered leaving the family several times, she now considers

their relationship to be good. She feels that the experience has been worth it as she has learned

a lot of English and enjoys having the opportunity to travel.

8.2 Semi-structured interview questions

Part I

Can you tell me about the moment you decided to become an au pair, how the process was

and how your experience has been until now.

Part II

Ask respondent to elaborate her story on specific points that so require.

Part III

Background:

1. How old are you?

2. Where are you from? (city and state in Brazil)

3. What was your occupation in Brazil?

4. What do your parents do? (Ask respondents to elaborate on parental occupation if

needed)

5. Did you live with your parents or a family member in Brazil?

6. Had you ever travelled abroad prior to becoming an au pair?

7. Did you grow up having a nanny, maid and/or cleaning lady?

8. Did you know how to clean, cook and look after children prior to coming here?

9. How would you describe your life in Brazil in terms of quality of life and

opportunities for work?

Expectations:

1. How did you hear about the au pair program?

2. What attracted you to this program specifically?

3. Why Holland?

4. How was your correspondence with the host family? How did you find them?

5. Did you join any online au pair communities such as the ones on Facebook or Orkut

prior to coming here?

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a. What kind of information were you looking for?

b. Were the stories you read from other au pairs generally positive?

c. Did you maintain contact with anyone who you conversed with online after

your arrival in the Netherlands? What was the nature of your contact with

this/these person/persons? (Did you ever meet them in person, for instance?)

6. What did you expect your life in the host family home to be like before arriving here?

Experience:

1. How is your relationship with your host family?

2. What kind of help are you expected to give them in the household? (In terms of house

work)

3. If you were asked to compare your expectations about the exchange with your actual

experience now, what would you say?

4. Now I would like to talk about your friendships here.

a. Did you make friends in the Netherlands?

b. Where are they from? (states in Brazil, nationality)

c. Where did you meet them?

d. How often do you see your friends here?

5. Comparing your friends in Brazil and the ones you made in Holland:

a. What is their educational level in a general sense?

b. Would you say you have more in common with friends here or there? Please

elaborate.

c. In terms of community, would you say that there is more or less (here or at

home): union, support, a sense of “group” and helping one another?

d. Would you classify friends made here as the same type of people as the ones at

home? Are you more or less selective in your friend choices?

6. What would you say are the best and the worst parts about the au pair program?

7. Generally speaking, has it been good for you to come here? Why?

8. Do you think that you have changed since you started life as an au pair? How exactly?

9. If you had to write a description of what an au pair is, how would you define the term?

In other words, what does it mean to you?