Making Work Visible

My parents came to US in 1998. Like most immigrants, they moved to US under a tourist visa and stayed here when their visa expired. Like most immigrants, they came here chasing after their American dream, in search of a better life. My mother was twenty-five, already a mother to two children, and around the same age I am right now. She probably had many dreams and ambitions just as I do or any early-twenties individuals do. However, like most immigrants, especially women of color, her American dream was predetermined for her the minute she hopped off the plane—domestic labor.

From 1998 to 2006, my mother worked as a “Live-in nanny.” Her job wasn’t a typical 8- or 10-hour shift, it was a grueling work that started at 6 in the morning and didn’t end well after the child she was caring for was asleep. Her job wasn’t limited to just taking care of the child, but to clean the house, do laundry, cook for the family and many more. Being an undocumented immigrant meant you take what you can get. For a lot of undocumented domestic workers, which largely consisted of WOC and immigrants, overtime pay, health insurance, vacation days or disability compensation are words that are virtually unheard of.

My parents got their green card in 2006 through my mother’s employer. There are still millions of undocumented workers, parents, who have not been able see their children, or their families for years. Like every undocumented immigrant, my parents sacrificed a lot for us. If it wasn’t for their hard work and sacrifice, I wouldn’t be able to study something like graphic design, and I certainly wouldn’t have been able to afford Photoshop to create the artworks I want to create, such as this one.

I was three when my mother came to the US, and she tells me how she used to sing this Nepali lullaby about Jureli birds to one of her children she was taking care of, imagining that she was singing it to me, which was the inspiration behind my illustration.

I once asked my mother what she wanted to be when she grew up, it was a question that she had never been asked before. She thought a lot about it and replied in a mixture of Nepali and English, “I wanted to be a Dactor Sahib,” which, translated into proper English, basically means “respected doctor.”