Review of Soviet Signoras: Personal and Collective Transformations in Eastern European Migration

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Reviewed by: Besnik Pula, Virginia Tech, USA

Soviet Signoras is a captivating ethnographic study of labor migration from former Soviet states to western Europe. Written in clear and unpretentious prose, the book gives fascinating insight into the lives of a group of women who separately made their way from Ukraine, Moldova, Russia, and other former Soviet spaces, to find employment as domestic care workers in a wealthy region of northern Italy. The question Martina Cvanjer pursues through her research is a straightforward one: how do economic migrants, in this case women from former Soviet spaces, shape their personal and collective identities as they enter social contexts that are new and unfamiliar? The question is sociologically relevant because the women are new arrivals to places where there are no pre-existing familial or ethnic support networks. They are largely invisible to the host society, known mostly through uncharitable stereotypes. And they are desired primarily for the socially devalued domestic labor they provide as caretakers of mostly elderly Italians in their homes, an occupation that the women themselves deride using the Italian phrase lavaculi.