Caring for Caregivers: Filipina Migrant Workers and Community Building During Crisis

A transformative look at the lives of Filipina care workers and their mutual aid practices

Migrant workers have long been called upon to sacrifice their own 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, 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 US health-care 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.

Valerie Francisco-Menchavez is associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University and author of The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age.