The Nanny Chronicles

The image of the brown woman as care provider of white children is one that permeates in TV and film, from Hattie McDonald as Mammy in "Gone with the Wind" to Viola Davis as Aibileen Clark in "The Help". Commonly this narrative is secondary to that of a white protagonist. These brown women are merely part of the mis-en-scene or used a convenient plot tools. Rarely is the narrative deeply explored in the viewpoint of these women, instead, what is the perspective of white, attractive, young nannies, like Fran Fine in “The Nanny", Kimmy Schmidt and of course, Mary Poppins.  These young women are portrayed as magically competent in childcare after a minor blunders, and these narratives often gloss over the complexities and intricacies of child care, especially in terms of race, class, and gender. Taking a casual glance throughout the streets of Tribeca and the Upper East Side, it's brown women you see pushing around strollers with tiny white faces peering above. There is a certain strange internal dichotomy to being a nanny as someone of color, temporarily shifting your class environment yet constantly being reminded of who and what you are.  These women are often immigrants hailing from various countries around the world, they are the unsung heroes of New York, doing the difficult work that is child care while society demeans this occupation as undignified. 

My project is called "The Nanny Chronicles" a series of vignettes in which I interview different people of various ethnicities to recount their worst experiences working as nannies. The style of the videos is similar to that of the popular series “Drunk History” in which people recount historic events and professional actor act them out. Of course, no one is actually inebriated in this series. The series presents horrific, terrifying and perplexing situations in a humorous light. I chose this route because I believe that humor is the quickest way to educate, humor is easily spread, and especially with something as niche and marginalized as childcare, sometimes all you can do is laugh at the horror. The first in the series is my own story which I have previously shared in class, about one of the children uttering out the N-word and my struggle on how to act. My plan for this serious is to move it forward and hopefully give a voice to those who have been misrepresented.

Citations

Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. Servants of globalization: Women, migration and domestic work. Stanford University Press, 2001.