The role of disillusionment in rethinking and rehearsing better migrant domestic labour relations in Chile

Despite extensive research on employers’ discourses about domestic or household workers as ‘part of the family’, fewer scholars have examined how workers may express desires for or experiences of pseudo-kinship. Shifting away from perspectives that foreground labour rights, we take pseudo-kinship discourses as registers of belonging to examine the affective configurations underlying workers’ attempts to establish ‘better’ labour relationships in private households. Drawing on interviews with Chilean and Filipino migrant women in Chile in 2020 and 2021, we argue that knowledge of ‘rights talk’ is not mutually exclusive with establishing affective relationships with employers. We show that workers may simultaneously articulate feeling ‘part of the family’ and question its authenticity, valuing instead respect and professional boundaries. Despite diverse internal and international migration trajectories, they narrate a common affective trajectory in their labour relationships. After conflicts over labour conditions, pay, or treatment, workers express disillusionment over the possibility of ‘equality’ and mutual care in the household labour relation. We argue that this disillusionment moves workers to rehearse different affective labour relationships that hold employers accountable for unequal labour relations. The generative character of disillusionment allows workers to transform care into an ethical concern beyond the purely legal or economic realm.