A Review of The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age by Valerie Francisco-Menchavez
Reading Valerie Francisco-Menchavez’s The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age in the middle of the global pandemic attests to many of the points she makes regarding the complexity, nuance, respect and paradoxical aspects of transnational migration and family dynamics. As the pandemic and in particular the U.S. federal response lifts the veil on inequities and disparities between privileged and marginalized populations, Francisco-Menchavez’s multi-faceted research is made all the more relevant. Her writing advances the conversation on parallel processes related to family systems and communication that through their presence, transform situations that on the surface appear to function solely to divide and render that which matters to people obsolete and invisible.
Francisco-Chavez’s ambitious and enriching text illuminates the many layers of movement, relations, tensions, and adaptations involved with Filipino families whose members are working and living in multiple countries, in particular the US. Focusing on a group of Filipina migrants involved with a worker rights group in New York, Francisco-Menchavez’s many objectives and topics accompany the narratives of the women migrant workers and their families. From this text, Francisco-Menchavez identifies key points and terms creating an inquiry and matrix to encourage action. Her audience is focused within communities of academia, transnational worker rights activists and the workers whom her work represents.
The study situates the Philippines as the largest supplier of global labor through the Filipino brokerage state (Guevarra, 2010; Rodriquez, 2010), with the realm of neoliberalism and globalization. Francisco-Menchavez’s research focuses on care labor within the realm of global labor, “…this book demonstrates that capital’s gluttonous need for cheap domestic labor pulls in more than migrant women in the ‘care chain,’ (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002) or those involved in ‘global house holding’ (Douglass, 2006).” (Francisco-Menchavez). In her introduction, Francisco-Menchavez incorporates Laslett and Brenner’s definition of social reproductive labor, applying it to both her framework on domestic labor and care work for all family members involved: “Among other things, social reproduction includes how food, clothing and shelter are made available for immediate consumption, the ways in which the care and socialization of children are provided, the care of the infirm and elderly, and the social organization of sexuality…” (Francisco-Menchavez).
Francisco-Menchavez’s work is grounded firmly in the present, a method that strengthens the many focal points of her work, particularly as it relates to her goals, but perhaps one that could benefit from being transposed within the broader perspective and context if examined within the longterm impacts of colonial rule in the Philippines. Francisco-Menchavez questions ways that transnational families navigate and distribute care work in a country that emphasizes (through large-scale, sanctioned coercion) income generation via diasporic migration, a mechanism key to neoliberal practice. Her research participants include members of the Kalabikat Domestic Workers Support Network in New York, their immediate, extended and chosen family members living in Manila.
Francisco-Menchavez provides clarity on the systems at play within these apparatuses that influence migration, the out-sourcing of care work and the impact on care worker’s family systems. She examines and redefines care work using three approaches, expanding on Laslett and Brenner’s definition of social reproductive labor by incorporating the role of technology and its subsequent paradoxes, adaptive roles of family, and the importance of the changing and nimble family system. A question perhaps for her future work would be an examination of the motivations for outsourcing and disengaging from care work as a imposed narrative in many societies.
With her first of three theoretical strategies to de-center the migrant woman as the primary care provider, and the perceived care vaccuum created her absence, Francisco-Menchavez focuses on the critical roles of family members, in her words, “left behind.” Pushing beyond the reductionist, Western idea of the nuclear family she identifies the transnational family by defining the structure and functions of immediate and extended biological and fictive kin/chosen family, incorporating the Filipino concept of pakikisama or “being with.” Pakikisama is a critical thread throughout Francisco-Menchavez’s trio of theoretical realms that emphasizes the prioritization of interpersonal relationships across the spectrum of identified and chosen family. Francisco-Menchavez is interested in learning what roles family members in the Philippines provide, how that care work is identified and allocated and who makes the decisions about what work is done. How the care work is received and acknowledged is an additional (and critical) point of exploration.
Francisco-Menchavez’s focus on lexicon and etymology to ensure the identifying and quantifying language used is clear, inclusive, is admirable and free of assumption. Co-research methods would further empower this practice, further elevating the chorus of her research subjects and their families, activating a parallel process to their organization and communal efforts. Co-research is a dialectical approach to research that prioritizes the process of inquiry established by complimentary points of view, skills and expertise of the participants and researchers alike.
By inquiring of her research subjects what words are imperative to advance the dialog, Francisco-Menchavez enacts techniques key to Participatory Activist Research (PAR), including personal reflection, development of survey interview processes, data collection, and action. “PAR seeks to understand and improve the world by changing it. At its heart is collective, self-reflective inquiry that researchers and participants undertake, so they can understand and improve upon the practices in which they participate and the situations in which they find themselves.” (Baum, MacDougall, Smith).
By prioritizing the values of the Filipino family, Francisco-Menchavez’s work emphasizes the self-identified members of the participant’s families, an action which evokes the practice of co-research. In her research and interview methods, perhaps a formal application of co-research would further amplify Francisco-Menchavez’s objectives, creating a parallel process to her stated actions of de-centered, co-created and multi-vocal narrative. Francisco-Menchavez’s questions and kuwentuhan interview method elegantly invite both self-disclosure and parallel interpersonal communication participants are accustomed to, undoubtedly a technique that created a welcoming environment for open discussion.
Within this process of identifying the features of the families she interviews and the culture-norms and adaptation of those norms to the transnational family unit, Francisco-Menchavez defines the core term, multidirectional care, a complex, ephemeral and flexible network of supports, exchanges, currencies and obligations that support the circulation of and redefine what comprises care and how it is rendered. Again, a process that parallels the imposed apparatus of globalization and neoliberal practice, multidirectional care broadens the conceptualization of care as both an adaptation and reaction to coerced diasporic labor practices. Francisco-Menchavez fearlessly delves into this complex network, insightfully prioritizing this as a way that Filipino families thrive despite distance and what on the outset may appear as a sort of recessional velocity.
The second theoretical strategy Francisco-Menchavez utilizes is the paradoxical element of technology both as a mechanism for connectedness with family members and the unique transactional aspects of the relationships created by the use of video conferencing and social media. Communication mediums like Skype, Facebook, Zoom allow, at first glance, transnational families greater intimacy but exacerbate disparate harmonics between members. Additionally, these mediums elicit forms of transactional and obligational communication, which parallel the remittance at the heart of the reason for transnational families to initially develop. Aligned with the numerous currencies at play within the transnational family, Francisco-Menchavez highlights the profound strengths technology brings to the possibility for the maintaining and development of close, caring relationships within families, and the alleviation of solistalgia for those far from their natal homes. Employing the digital divide, Francisco-Menchavez points to the neoliberal use of technology as a way to identify who provides social reproductive labor and care work. This strategy, as extended through her text, informs her theory that technological advancements in communication, despite their basis in neoliberal, capitalist and exploitative roots, evolve a continuum of care work through transnational practice. At the heart of Francisco-Menchavez’s theoretical examination of technology, she finds optimism and tolerance, a departure from the oft-cited idea that technology thoroughly and only blunts the opportunity for valid, meaningful human intimacy.
Third and finally, Francisco-Menchavez’s work demonstrates the evolution of the family form in what she describes as “communities of care.” Pointing to Black, queer and feminist theory, Francisco-Menchavez furthers her initial strategy of the remapping of families to include both biological and chosen supports, in order to fully furnish the requisite care needs. While Francisco-Menchavez indicates her employment of feminist theory, additional incorporation of material feminist thought and strategy would further amplify her arguments, particularly around the evolution and shifting nature of gender roles as well as the conceptualization of family members and structure. Her points around the circulation of care work, expansion of the definition of family and the incorporation of new technology that contrast with their potentially intended purpose all weave into tenets of material feminism in the Industrial Revolution.
Francisco-Menchavez employs methods that parallel the accounts of her research subjects, including ethnography, both transnational and institutional, and Participatory Activist Research, all of which successfully illustrate her objectives. Some theories used were initially unexpected and the rationale for their use unclear, but then became apparent through each chapter. The report and performance of the conclusion of her study aligned beautifully with her objective of researching with an underrepresented and nearly invisible community, taking on a lateral perspective and atunement rather than a hierarchical one. Her work will clearly inform additional organizing as her primary and other audiences engage with the book. Francisco-Menchavez’s writing while appearing to name theory to inform her practice, by the end of the book the opposite has occurred – through her initial motivations personal and academic, her inquiry resulted in new practice.
Further inquiry of this work includes the potential for additional exploration of pressures and types of assimilation, particularly informed by Gluck and Schiller’s premise of “ways of being and ways of belonging,” and illuminating additional and new layers within the context of the transnational family and multidirectional care work. Additionally, The Labor of Care placed within the context of other diasporic labor movements, both historical and contemporary would likely result in an expansion of Francisco-Menchavez’s objectives and work, particularly alongside other remittance economies developed out of neoliberalism and colonialism. An inspiring work, Francisco-Menchavez’s text invites inquiry and application in future research. References
Baum, MacDougall, Smith. 2006. “Participatory Action Research.” Journal of Epidemiology ad Community Health. Bethesda: National center for Biotechnology Information.
Francisco-Menchavez. 2019. “The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Migrants
in the Digital Age.” Urbana: Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
Guevarra, Ana. 2010. “Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor
Brokering of Filipino Workers.” Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Levitt, Peggy. 2004. “Transnational Migrants: When “Home” Means More Than One Country.”
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/transnational-migrants-when-home-means-more-one-country#:~:text=Transnational%20Migrants%3A%20When%20%22Home%22%20Means%20More%20Than%20One%20Country,-October. Accessed December 27, 2020.
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. 2001. “Mothering from a Distance: Emotions, Gender, and Intergenerational Relations in Filipino Transnational Families.” Feminist Studies 27 (2): 361–90.
Rodriguez, Robyn. 2010. “Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World.” Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Schiller, Gluck, and Georges Fouron (2001). “Georges Woke Up Laughing: Long Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home.” Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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