Abstract
Care migrants and their transnational families are replete with contradictions: as migrants care for other people and their families, they are unable to provide direct care for their own. The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age captures the causes, consequences, and at times contradictory experiences associated with care migration. Collecting her data over a period of five years, author Valerie Francisco-Menchavez uses myriad culturally informed ethnographic field methods to achieve these goals, including participant observation among undocumented Filipina domestic workers in New York City and their families in the Philippines, semi-structured interviews, and group talk (or Kuwentuhan) where author and field informants engage in dialogue and exchange stories about their families.
The analysis for Filipino transnational families begins by laying out the socio-political conditions that facilitate care migration. The Philippine brokerage state’s neoliberal logic commodifies and trades off care migrants, expecting them to sustain their families left behind. The key argument presented in this work is that family members simultaneously accommodate and resist family disruption by initiating what Francisco-Menchavez calls “multidirectional care,” that is, informal care work organized in de-centered and multi-familial patterns as social reproductive labor shifts from migrants to family members left behind. As mothers send remittances to sustain their families while they perform paid care work abroad, extended kin, husbands, and young or adult children in the Philippines perform care for one another and for their migrant relatives abroad. A multidirectional model, argues Francisco-Menchavez, pushes against a Eurocentric model that assumes a nuclear family and therefore diminishes how “multiple sets of people from multiple locations do work to maintain the transnational family as a functioning and viable family form” (p. 7).
Francisco-Menchavez insists that multidirectional care is not merely “a consequence of a family member’s departure.” Instead, multidirectional care is informed by and redefined through the activation of culturally informed conceptions of family already held by migrants and their families. Upon the departure of migrant mothers, family left behind draw from past experiences in their activation of extended kinship networks, acting as “co-parents,” organizing family events, and managing the household. Significantly, transnational correspondence mediates these activities: kin networks keep migrant mothers abreast and involved in the daily life of family by receiving direction from migrants on how to spend remittances; how, when, and where to organize family events and celebrations; or even how to negotiate conflict among family members, including children. But extended kin’s participation in these activities is not merely a transactional exchange to reciprocate monetary support provided by the migrant family. Rather, families left behind profoundly see their maintenance of the family as an extension of their own caring for their migrant relatives abroad. A multi-directional care model may also mediate gender transgressions: men’s participation in local kin networks may increase their own participation in care work, thereby challenging gendered ideas and patriarchal logics of the family.
The Labor of Care also addresses how technologies and social networking platforms such as smart phones, Skype, and Facebook now offer migrant mothers the ability to maintain a visual presence in their family members’ lives, in real time. This is a significant departure from previous decades, when prolonged separation meant that mothers communicated with family members sparingly, often through the occasional letter or through scheduled and more costly phone calls. In this sense, transnational families exchange emotional care through their online interactions, mimicking their physical presence in their family homes by frequently watching the quotidian happenings of family life.
Yet a fair amount of labor performance is required on all sides of the multi-directional care divide. Children must offer practical advice or train mothers and other members of local kin networks on how to use the technologies through which they communicate. While the feeling of being ever present may decrease migrant mothers’ isolation abroad, some children may also engage in a fair amount of “impression management” or rail against the ever-watchful technological gaze. One key argument in this book is that it is critical to understand these technologies within the context of capitalist globalization. While global capitalism and the neoliberalization of economies engender family separation through care migration, the technology industry actually necessitates family separation to profit and thrive.
Later chapters trace how migrant mothers draw from their transnational familial identities and their experiences in a racialized and gendered servant workforce to develop communities of care in the host society. Drawing from queer theories of “chosen families” and critical race feminist theories of “other mothers,” Francisco-Menchavez argues that migrant mothers create a “community of care” as an extension of the care they perform for their transnational families. These local “fictive kinships” are produced through systems of power while they simultaneously provide a sense of belonging to undocumented migrant mothers as well as spaces for collective action to address their marginalization and their abandonment by the state.
In the final analysis, Francisco-Menchavez points to the complex web of emotions that travels alongside multi-directional care: migrant mothers and their left-behind kin may experience sadness, happiness, hurt, and gratitude at one time or another, yet no one emotion defines prolonged family separation. Here is where the value of a long-term methodological approach to studying transnational families is particularly highlighted; emotional strain between parents and kin is just one part of a negotiation process as the meaning of family is continuously renegotiated and relearned. For daughters in particular, the anger or resentment they may feel is not always merely a result of family separation in itself but rather reflects the unequal reorganization of care in their families. At the same time, daughters may still see their performances of multidirectional care for their local and global family as especially meaningful, despite the gendered burden of care placed on them.
Francisco-Menchavez writes accessibly, deftly linking macro analyses of neoliberal globalization to the micro-politics of everyday life. Her keen insights into the quotidian dynamics of familial adaptation and resistance is a much-needed addition to research on the transnationalization of care. However, more fully understanding multidirectional care within the context of multidirectional structural processes would strengthen the macro-micro analyses throughout. For example, while the Filipino brokerage state is certainly an important and consequential force, more could have been said about care resource extraction from the perspective of host sites such as the United States, where the state outsources care to poor and migrant women in place of providing adequate social service support to citizen families. Further, as Filipina domestics’ racialized and gendered status as marginalized workers in the United States activates what Francisco-Menchavez calls “global imagined communities,” more could be said about the racialized, gendered, and colonial systems that produce those identities. More fully recognizing the legal restrictions and citizenship regimes within host societies that exacerbate the necessity of multidirectional care is also important. Notwithstanding these critiques, The Labor of Care provides an excellent foundation for much-needed analysis of the transnational family as a generative site of study.