When Tizon was young, the only point of comparison for his family’s exploitation of Eudocia Tomas Pulido—called Lola throughout his account—was the slave Pompey in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a John Wayne movie he sees on television. It’s not clear from his essay whether the adult Tizon learned much about systems of domestic-labor exploitation across the globe: the mistreatment of au pairs in the U.S., the plight of migrant domestic workers abroad, or the epidemic of abusive marriages in which undocumented wives are cut off from society in ways that mirror Lola’s isolation.

Tizon chose a frame for his essay that omits these systems entirely. In doing so, he missed an opportunity to capture the full context of Lola’s enslavement: that she was his third parent, his true mother, and his biological mother’s battered wife.

Indeed, many of the tactics that Tizon’s biological parents employ to keep Lola trapped are straight out of the same playbook used by the abusive spouses of undocumented wives and the very worst host families of au pairs: Lola is prevented from assimilating into society, she does not have access to her own finances, and she cannot leave the house because she cannot drive. Her immigration status is wielded as a weapon against her. She is physically intimidated and verbally abused; she is beaten down day by day so that she will continue to take care of the children and do the work that the abusers cannot or do not wish to do.

But she lavishes affection on the Tizon children, and the children love her in return. Because the biological parents leave the domestic sphere to Lola, she is closer than either of them to the children: “She got to know the details of our lives in a way that my parents never had the mental space for,” Tizon writes.

The young Tizon fights back his tears while trying to defend Lola, only for his parents to then accuse Lola of turning him against them. His biological mother torments Lola all the more, in retaliation, if the children try to intervene or help Lola with her work.

Tizon and his siblings ask Lola why she stays with their biological mother, and she replies, “Who will cook?” and “Where will I go?” When Tizon reflects on the past, he wonders if he should have told others about what was happening to Lola, exposing the family to the threat of deportations.

Tizon’s emotional turmoil and self-loathing can be read as self-serving, but they also echo common experiences of children who witness intimate partner violence. In a way, “My Family’s Slave” is one more addition to a body of literature in which sons grapple with having to watch their fathers beat their mothers. Who will cook? Where will I go? These statements are likely familiar to anyone who has tried to convince a victim of abuse to leave their partner. And the choice to hide abuse, rather than to risk deportation, is particularly familiar in the context of an immigrant family.