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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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)
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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;
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“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
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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
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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.
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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:
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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
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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;
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“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.
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“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
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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
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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?