Someone to Keep Me: Emotions, Labor, Trauma, and Orphanhood in Haiti

In Haiti, the orphan occupies an important place in humanitarian discourse and practice as the key figure underlying the institution of the orphanage. Crucial to the orphanage and the orphan is work done by house mamas as nannies for the children, drawn primarily from the same communities and economic backgrounds as orphans. This ethnography explores how interactions between orphans, nannies, and volunteers are woven into a system of emotions produced by orphans, managed by nannies, and consumed by volunteers. Furthermore, how the intricacies of racial, gendered, and age-based inequalities, underlying these emotional exchanges, presume to reproduce discourses about the proper conduct of orphans and nannies. As sites that intertwine levels of emotional responses, social relationships, and religious benevolence, orphanages operate with forms of economic exchange, commodification, and labor through the emotional labor of orphans and nannies. This dissertation contributes to understanding how managing or regulating emotions, defined as emotional labor (Hochschild 1983), impacts children in orphanages long-term, and the nannies who care for them. This research will provide important insight into how emotional labor structures the everyday practices of care in Haiti’s orphanages. The goal of this research is uplift the voices of the children and families who have fallen victim to the orphanage industry, providing them a platform to educate others and advocate for change in their own words.