White Affects, Care Work: Parenting and Latin American Elites in Brazil and Puerto Rico

• In Event: Revisiting Race and Conceptualizing Whiteness in Latin America

Abstract

Drawing from ethnographic research conducted among parents living in the affluent neighborhoods of Ipanema, Brazil, and El Condado, Puerto Rico, I examine how urban Latin American elites deployed their parenting practices as moral justification for their racial and class privilege (what I call “sovereign parenting”). One way in which they do this is by producing particular forms of affective relationships with their nannies. The women these upper-class parents hired were largely dark-skinned immigrants from the Dominican Republic, in El Condado, and from the Brazilian Northeast, in Ipanema. I demonstrate how elites cultivated a form of “informality” and expressions of care in relation to child care workers in ways that not only produced whiteness as a pillar of Latin American liberalism, but also as a way of associating whiteness with the world of interiority and personal growth.

Author

• Ana Y Ramos-Zayas, Yale