Maya Shapiro | SIT Graduate Institute/SIT Study Abroad (original) (raw)

Papers by Maya Shapiro

Dialectical Anthropology, Volume 37, Issue 3-4, pp 423-441 , Dec 2013

In 1991, the Israeli government responded to severe shortages in the low-wage labour force by dev... more In 1991, the Israeli government responded to severe shortages in the low-wage labour force by developing a Foreign Worker Program. Over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands of labour migrants from the Global South were issued work visas that would allow them to live temporarily in Israel. Migrants have since settled, primarily in Tel Aviv, where some have also overstayed their visas, given birth to children, and established ways of living as undocumented residents of Israel’s largest urban centre. In this article, I describe how undocumented migrant women and their Israeli-born children have had a particularly significant impact on the social and political context in which they live. Specifically, I explore how they have come to constitute a “privileged underclass” within the ethnically, geographically, and socio-economically stratified population of the city. While they share dilapidated public spaces and conditions of poverty with their historically marginalized Mizrahi neighbours in the southern part of the city, undocumented women and their children share special events, interpersonal engagements, and processes of “sentimental civics” with the largely wealthy and politically enfranchised Ashkenazi residents of Tel Aviv’s north who are their employers, financial patrons, and supporters of their campaign for citizenship. The development of a “privileged underclass” has thus exacerbated class conflict in Tel Aviv, bringing to the surface the well-established, but long-ignored Mizrahi struggles for recognition, and sowing the seeds for a sometimes violent, yet politically nuanced, anti-migrant mobilization.

When Care Work Goes Global: Locating the Social Relations of Domestic Work. Eds. Valerie Preston, Mary Romero and Wenona Giles. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2014

Dialectical Anthropology, Volume 37, Issue 3-4, pp 423-441 , Dec 2013

In 1991, the Israeli government responded to severe shortages in the low-wage labour force by dev... more In 1991, the Israeli government responded to severe shortages in the low-wage labour force by developing a Foreign Worker Program. Over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands of labour migrants from the Global South were issued work visas that would allow them to live temporarily in Israel. Migrants have since settled, primarily in Tel Aviv, where some have also overstayed their visas, given birth to children, and established ways of living as undocumented residents of Israel’s largest urban centre. In this article, I describe how undocumented migrant women and their Israeli-born children have had a particularly significant impact on the social and political context in which they live. Specifically, I explore how they have come to constitute a “privileged underclass” within the ethnically, geographically, and socio-economically stratified population of the city. While they share dilapidated public spaces and conditions of poverty with their historically marginalized Mizrahi neighbours in the southern part of the city, undocumented women and their children share special events, interpersonal engagements, and processes of “sentimental civics” with the largely wealthy and politically enfranchised Ashkenazi residents of Tel Aviv’s north who are their employers, financial patrons, and supporters of their campaign for citizenship. The development of a “privileged underclass” has thus exacerbated class conflict in Tel Aviv, bringing to the surface the well-established, but long-ignored Mizrahi struggles for recognition, and sowing the seeds for a sometimes violent, yet politically nuanced, anti-migrant mobilization.

When Care Work Goes Global: Locating the Social Relations of Domestic Work. Eds. Valerie Preston, Mary Romero and Wenona Giles. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2014