Recognizing dispossession: Mobilization among Nicaraguan migrant domestic workers in Costa Rica

This paper will address the presence of Nicaraguan women migrant domestic workers in Costa Rica at the forefront of a transnational social movement making broad demands for social welfare, immigration and labor policy reform. I argue that the Costa Rican household-worksite is a space of heightened discrimination towards Nicaraguan migrants, producing organizing efforts.

Costa Rica is imagined as uniquely modern, democratic, white, prosperous and egalitarian within Latin America; the belief that Nicaraguan encroachment threatens the ‘exceptionalism’ of Costa Rica and its Central Valley is hegemonic. Yet, neoliberal restructuring in the 1980’s brought Nicaraguan migrants into Central Valley businesses and homes by creating demand for inexpensive labor to compensate for declining income. Although ethnic and class segregation of Nicaraguan neighborhoods and employment increases their visibility, social distance is maintained. Lack of interaction allows the proliferation of discourses that Nicaraguans threaten the “cultural regime” of exceptionalism and are responsible for Costa Rica’s declining prosperity. 

I argue that the household is unique among sites of employment in that distinction between Costa Ricans and Nicaraguans is overtly and directly asserted. Ethnographies of South-South migrant domestic workers shows that employers actively and self-consciously construct markers of “distinction” that maintain social barriers between employer and employee within the “transcultural contact zone” of the household workplace. I propose that by entering the Central Valley, Costa Rican neighborhoods and homes, domestic workers have engaged in multiple “transborder” crossings. The decreased distance subjects them to more acute discrimination. Establishing markers of distinction within the household, employers, whether unconsciously or consciously, respond to the perceived threat of Nicaraguan encroachment. Addressing domestic workers, employers personalize discourse of Nicaraguans as the antithesis of exceptionalism. In this paper, I argue that organizations of Nicaraguan women migrants draw on lived transborder labor experience to link discrimination to structural violence and demand broad policy reform.