like one of the family
2024
For six years I worked as a nanny in Lisbon, Portugal. Watching over the kids in the park by the school allowed me to discover a constelattion of domestic workers sharing experiences and strategies, rates and rights, pleasures and injustices. This experience led me to research a long history of labor resistance by domestic workers. Clandestine, daily and tiny acts of rebellion, some with a collective basis, but all surely with cumulative effect on power relations. Forms of resistance, organized and unorganized, that took place outside, and in spite, of traditional organizations and institutions. The back features a partial map of the Harlem and the Bronx, in NYC, highlighting the “Bronx slave market” in the post 1928 crash, and the building on 409 Edgecombe Avenue. Embroidered in the collar it reads “Club From Nowhere”. Appliqued in the front a pocketbook, and the sabo-tabby on the sleeve. On the lining is the date of 1955, together with the embroidery “I know who makes troubles for me”.
selected readings:
Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life by Alice Childress
Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class by Robin D. G. Kelley
Bronx Slave Market by Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke






100% cotton fabric
100% wool batting
hand appliquéd
hand quilted
hand embroidered