This article explores the success of the “migrant in the family” model of care for the elderly in southeast Italy and the mechanisms that bond the caregivers and their patients in a mutual dependency. I describe this model as a meeting place between endurance and vulnerability, and between the fragility of the elderly and the fragility of most of the women who work as migrant care workers. I argue that migrant live-in care work for the elderly is a combination of attentive practice and detachment in completion to the current description of care work as ritual and as tinkering and adaptation. In a broader perspective, the article shows that the economic needs in poorer regions of the world manifest in the commitment and determination to keep the elderly alive in Italy. This article reports findings from long-term ethnographic research among 34 migrant domestic care workers and 24 Italian employers in a medium-sized town in Italy. The article illustrates the findings by means of three case studies and engages with the existing literature on person-centered care in patients with dementia, biopolitics, and the global political economy of migration for work in the field of care. Migrant work for the elderly is crucial for a general understanding of social reproduction in Italy and in many other global contexts.

This article discusses the meeting point of two political systems with their distinctive value imprints on individuals’ everyday lives. It focuses on two stories of care, aesthetics and labor of Romanian women before the fall of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe and in the first two decades after 1989. The first account comes from an expert, the head of the Union of National Cooperatives of Production (ucecom) during socialist Romania, the main producer of artizanat objects for export. She tells the story of the benefits of employment in state factories for women, and how socialist products were sold for Western markets in the 1970s and 1980s. The second account is of a former Romanian factory worker who after 1989 quit her job in Romania when state socialist factories were about to collapse and became a healthcare worker in Italy, for a larger salary and more stable employment. This second ethnographic example discusses migration for caregiver jobs in Italy as the transborder continuity of autonomy and employment practices that survived socialism. It is also a form of downward migration, where former state socialist professionals are paid as unskilled migrant workers. This article emphasizes the persistence of socialism in post-1989 practices and values embodied by people’s work habits not only in Eastern and Central Europe, but in unexpected places, such as southern Italy. This article applies the idea of “tactical socialism” as a strategy derived from a close analysis of work practices, with their positive accomplished effects, in contexts where jobs are distributed by the state and citizens feel protected.

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