“My Lady Tells Me I'm Good Woman…”: a Bulgarian Female Migrant's Life-Story Between Assistance Relations and Care Practices

Abstract

In this article, I report on a Bulgarian female migrant caregiver's “life-story,” especially focusing on her relationship with an old Italian woman, on the care practices performed in her favor in Italy, and on her daughter and parents still living in Bulgaria. I chose to do it by means of an anthropological approach based on experience as field of mediation between personal dimensions and historical and social processes and therefore centered on the body conceived as historical product, the influence of political and social forces on shaping human lives, and finally interest in the specific link between bodies and work. From this analysis, based on language and narratives, I think useful cultural aspects may emerge about “gender” and care practices, regarding the two women linked by an assistance relationship, and the activities/strategies used by the Bulgarian caregiver to fulfill her family obligations.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropology
• care
• gender
• life-story
• migration.

Notes

1. In the Italian article the terms “assistente [caregiver]” and “assistita [patient]” are preferred even though they seem rather neutral with respect to “badante [caretaker]” and “badata [person who is looked after]” because these latter on the one hand recall an idea of surveillance with a not always positive connotation, on the other hand the term “badante,” linguistically accepted in the technical-specialized field with bureaucratic-trade union-related use identification (De Mauro, 2000, p. 567), is used with a merely abstract significance to designate a worker typology.

2. ISTAT statistical data indicate in little less than 55,000 units the Bulgarians regularly present in Italy on January 1, 2014, among which 63% are women, against larger numbers of Rumanians, Albanians, Ukrainians, Moldavians, and Poles (see http://dati.istat.it/Index.aspx?DataSetCode = DCIS_POPSTRCIT1). What is more, there are no further statistical sources, not even Bulgarian, which provide reliable estimate on Bulgarians' overall presence, including illegal migrants and workers. I also recorded the almost total absence of national and/or local association forms that could promote and give voice to the Bulgarian community present in Italy, except for the Association Bulgaria-Italy (see http://www.bulgaria-italia.com). In Campania Bulgarians are officially 5,500 with a certified prevalence of women reaching 72%, which in the area of Naples and surroundings arrives to 79%, with a national average of 63% and an average in northern Italy of 54% (2012 data available at http://www.comuni-italiani.it/statistiche/stranieri/bg.html). This particular feminization of the Bulgarian migratory flow, parallel to that of other nationalities, is significant in Campania. This region has remarkable occupational problems in productive and tertiary sectors, therefore it offers house work as the main, if not exclusive, working possibility for Bulgarian women, so as for other eastern European women (Orientale Caputo, 2007). In particular, care-giving work (in-house assistance in various forms) represents an important enticement (Andall & Sarti, 2004) because it is practically a working insertion niche for migrant women, even coming from eastern Europe, often irregularly employed (Pasquinelli & Rusmini, 2010).

3. On interdisciplinary complexity and the various significances of the “gender” category and the concepts of “gender identity,” “gender-related roles,” “sex” and “sexual orientation” see, among others, Butler (1990), Fausto-Sterling (2012), Héritier (1996), Mahler and Pessar (2006), Mead (1949), Scott (1986), Stoller (1968), Valerio and Zito (2006), Zito (2013a, 2017), and Zito and Valerio (2012).

4. My interventions preceding her vacations in Bulgaria were prevailingly functional to conversational persistence and continuity and to ask for linguistic explanations or confirmations. In the meetings following her return, I was partially more directive, containing her narration and asking her specific questions about her life, work experiences, relationships with P., and also women's conditions in her country. Later on, through a more accurate analysis of what was collected in the field, I acquired a better understanding of M.'s lived experience as well as theoretical elements for a more general reflection and thorough study of emerged themes.

5. In particular, M.'s description of P. appeared as fairly reasonable as far as P.'s virtues and vices, and all the elements given regarding this topic, fractioned in time at separated intervals, resulted as not contradictory. As a matter of fact, when M. highlighted P.'s not always completely positive traits and behaviors, according to her viewpoint, she also pointed out her “lady's” human qualities and balanced judgment capacity, her readiness to start a new dialogue after contrasting moments, her being affectionate and comprehensive, and her tendency to show collaborative rather than directive while carrying out the tasks required. Her narration thus tends to emphasize undeniable, even though sometimes just occasional, moments of tension often triggered by the compensation of a working performance, underlining the efforts she had to undergo, the patient's excessive requests, the environmental and relational difficulties with other members of P.'s family, but on the other hand, though, not hiding or minimizing the assisted person's positive demonstrations, her politeness, humanity, respect, hospitality, availability of the environment, and the acceptable aspects of the family context.

6. For further information, please see the demographic and social data provided by the Bulgarian National Statistical Institute at http://www.nsi.bg/en.

7. Bulgaria has a very advanced welfare system for working women's maternity; it legally provides for a perfect “gender-related” compensational equality and a rather fair equal opportunity system, and yet, concretely, almost only applied to public employment and that the economic crisis practically makes useless. The family right is decidedly equal, but the position of women in their private lives is subordinate with respect to the men's, even though, on the social level, the maternal role is given more relevance than the paternal one. The “gender-related” social structure sees the coexistence of surely juridical social progress elements, and prevailingly cultural traditionalistic elements, which make a portrait of a relatively paradoxical picture. Many are the women who occupy relevant positions in many fields, but in the most general consideration of the feminine world there is still something archaic that gives it more value on a symbolic level, rather than a real one. What is more, in Bulgarian culture, such as in Slavic ones in general, the memory of remote and presumed matriarchal traditions still seems deeply rooted and stratified (Gasparini, 2010), and the ancient myth of the great mother goddess. As to this, we would like to point out that goddess Cybele, the Roman people's Magna Mater, corresponds to Kibela (transliteration from the Bulgarian alphabet) also venerated in the area of ancient Thrace, today part of Bulgaria, together with an analogous goddess named Kotyto for whom, as for Cybele, men's ritual female disguise was carried out to symbolize the union with the divine and absolute feminine (Tacheva-Hitova, 1983; Zito, 2013b; Zito & Valerio, 2010, 2013). These are elements that, somehow, keep on acting even in a traditional culture that can be synthetically defined as patriarchal, giving relevance to women in the virtue of their reproductive capacity, but considering her subordinate to men who protect and support (Bourdieu, 2001).

8. Sometimes the wish to migrate also answers some women's need to live less asymmetric “gender” relationships both within their family and inside a larger society. In some other cases, migration complicates a marriage relationship already in crisis. In this regard, please see Caponio and Colombo (2011).

9. As to the renegotiation between home help and employer, even if I was aware of its relevance, in the analysis I carried out I intentionally left on the background the anthropo-experiential contribution offered by the patient. Therefore, the relevant anthropo-psychological dimensions brought by the elderly lady have been little thematized and problematized, first of all because I aimed at highlighting the complexity of the migrant woman's existence, and, second, because I only met with this latter, only source of narration. One could of course speculate that the patient's anthropo-psychological dimension could have been determining at certain levels to influence the in-home caregiver's experiential process as well as the whole resulting relational process, as what has been described clearly shows. Being woman, mother, 90 years old, with a culture on the gender identity for certain aspect very close to the Bulgarian migrant's one and a migration experience on her turn (from Piedmont to Campania seventy years before, in the 1940s, immediately after the Second World War) could have helped the patient to place, in her relation with the caregiver, in a largely assonant value and sense dimension. Helping identifying processes that may locate on various levels, all this could have favored possible meanings of revision and support to her own life choices, precisely for the lady's elderly age, until they might have made her live a second experiential chance through her caregiver.

10. This expression refers to the forms of control and/or limitation of movements in domestic spaces (Gambino, 2003).