Good Mothers as Guest Workers: Constructing the Trope of Compliant Maternity in Spain's Strawberry Industry

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

International Journal of Sociology

Volume

44

Issue

3

Publisher

Routledge

Publication Date

12-7-2014

First Page

8

Last Page

22

Abstract

This study contributes to scholarship on gender, migration, and work by demonstrating the ways gender intersects with parental status to shape global employers' ideas about the ideal worker. Focusing on a guest-worker program that targets Moroccan mothers to work in Spain's strawberry industry. We reveal how employers and policymakers rely on a "trope of compiant maternity" to secure a low wage, disciplined migrant labor supply. This trope draws on assumptions of maternal devotion and emotional attachment, which migrant women themselves accomodate and contest in their participation in this guest-worker program.

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