New Chemical Entanglements Publication: “Settler Maintenance” and Migrant Domestic Worker Ecologies of Care
As a follow-up to Chemical Entanglements: Oral Histories of Environmental Illness, we are delighted to share a new publication emerging directly from the project’s extensive oral history collection. The article, “Settler Maintenance” and Migrant Domestic Worker Ecologies of Care—authored by Rachel C. Lee, Abraham Encinas, and Lesley Thulin—appears in Humanities (2024) as part of the Special Issue Care in the Environmental Humanities. Drawing on oral histories collected by the UCLA Center for the Study of Women|Barbra Streisand Center in collaboration with the California Domestic Workers Coalition, the authors examine how Latina domestic workers narrate the bodily costs of cleaning labor, the chemical exposures embedded in that labor, and the wider systems of racial, economic, and environmental precarity in which their work unfolds.
The article introduces the concept of “settler maintenance,” a framework that links the compulsory use of hazardous cleaning chemicals to broader structures of power. “Maintenance” here describes not only the physical act of cleaning with “strong liquids,” but also the ways these products uphold socioeconomic hierarchies between immigrant care workers and their employers, and sustain a settler-colonial relationship to land and property. The authors show how chemical injury is not an isolated workplace hazard, but part of an entrenched system that prioritizes speed, efficiency, and property upkeep over the wellbeing of workers whose labor makes domestic life possible.
At the same time, the study highlights the powerful forms of care and resilience that domestic workers build in response. Through grassroots organizations such as Mujeres Unidas y Activas and the Colectiva de Mujeres, workers develop community-based health knowledge, advocate for safer materials, and organize collectively for legislative protections—including California Senate Bills 1257 and 686. Even as these bills were twice vetoed, the process of organizing forged crucial networks of mutual aid, political education, and collective strength. The publication underscores how these lateral networks of care challenge the logic of settler maintenance by foregrounding reciprocal, relational practices of care for workers, families, and the environments in which they labor.
This new article deepens the ongoing work of Chemical Entanglements by illuminating how environmental illness is shaped not only by chemical exposure, but also by histories of migration, gendered labor, and structural inequity. We invite readers to explore the full publication (Humanities 2024, 13(6), 164) to learn more about these critical insights and the voices of the domestic workers whose stories anchor this research.
