Organizer: Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI), The City University of New York (CUNY)
Type/Location: Virtual
Description:
Migrant workers have long been called upon to sacrifice their health to provide care in facilities and private homes throughout the United States. What draws them to such exploitative, low-wage work, and how do they care for themselves? In Caring for Caregivers: Filipina Migrant Workers and Community Building during Crisis (University of Washington Press, 2025), Valerie Francisco-Menchavez centers the perspectives of Filipino caregivers in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2013 to 2021, illuminating their transnational experiences and their strategies and practices to help each other navigate the crumbling U.S. healthcare system.
These caregivers routinely endure arduous labor conditions, exhaustion, depression, anxiety, abuse, chronic injuries, and illness—and the COVID-19 pandemic pushed them further to the frontlines of care and risk. Despite this, they found ways to forge bonds and build networks that provided material and emotional support. Drawing on surveys, individual interviews, and caregivers’ stories as told through kuwentuhan, a Philippine cultural practice of collective storytelling, this book offers an intimate examination of intergenerational care work in the Filipino American community.
About the Speaker:
Valerie Francisco-Menchavez is an award-winning scholar-activist, researcher, writer and educator whose academic and political work calls attention to the experiences of Filipina migrants in care work industries and their indelible abilities to form solidarities and organize with one another. Her academic writing critically interrogates systems of capitalism that produce the conditions for historic and continued labor migration from the Philippines. More importantly, Dr. Francisco’s body of work aims to recognize the multifaceted experiences of migration and transnationalism for people in the Filipina/x/o diaspora exploring their communities of care, political activism, conditions of low-wage work, and intergenerational dialogue. Her development of innovative methods such as kuwentuhan in her research explores Filipino cultural practices as valid ways of knowing and navigation.
Her second book project, Caring for Caregivers: Filipina Migrant Workers and Community Building during Crisis, is the inaugural book in the University of Washington Press, Critical Filipinx Studies series, set to be published in November 2024.
Dr. Francisco is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University.
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