Can we talk about a ‘postcolonial cultural capital’? The case of Afro-Surinamese women in the Dutch care sector.

Home-care work is often seen as the only option for many migrant women who are relegated to the most dirty, dangerous and demanding jobs (Anderson, 2000). However, I believe to be of crucial importance to look at the historical legacies, which shape migrant women’s experience of home care work in Europe, in order to fully understand what is happening in this sector. To do so, I discuss fifteen semi-structured interviews with Afro-Surinamese women who arrived in the Netherlands before 1980 and who, at one point in their life, worked in the Dutch home-care sector.

I show that colonial legacies have conditioned their performance in home-care work, not only in structuring personal contacts and networks which facilitate their entrance into the sector, but also, and especially, in affecting the representation of those skills which are considered as necessary for access to the paid care work. Moreover, I connect the way interviewees represent their ‘ethnic’ skills to the importance of what I call a gendered 'postcolonial cultural capital'. In so doing, I want to emphasise that the disposal of a gendered and postcolonial form of cultural capital is crucial in the process of a classed/ethnic/gendered niching for migrant women in the care sector. In my view, indeed, Afro-Surinamese interviewees have ‘used’ the colonial bond between their country of origin and the one of arrival as a narrative tool for the `trading´ of their cultural capital.