Out of the Home, into the House

This chapter examines how curated storytelling in legislative advocacy campaigns redirected migrant domestic workers away from oppositional strategies. During the campaign for a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York State, storytelling at the legislature and in the media helped to draw mainstream attention to the plight of domestic workers but also truncated larger political possibilities. Domestic worker stories were publicly disseminated through limiting media tropes, they were reframed using hegemonic myths in legislative debates, and they were couched in the language of Hollywood narratives. These stories were severed from the root causes of injustice and from strategies to address these causes. Over the course of the Bill of Rights campaign, the heavy involvement of advocacy networks and foundations in shaping the strategies and narratives employed by the groups ultimately narrowed the goals of the movement and resulted in limited changes for migrant domestic workers.