These two rich ethnographic studies examine the changing contexts of transnational care work and the mechanisms by which two labor brokerage states, Indonesia and the Philippines, pursue gendered migration as a development strategy. In The Labor of Care, Valerie Francisco-Menchavez examines the “multidirectional care” (p. 7) of Filipina migrant mothers and the families they leave behind, with an emphasis on the role of communication technology in sustaining relationships. Olivia Killias's Follow the Maid focuses on the role of Indonesian state and nonstate intermediaries in placing women from Java into household labor in Malaysia, elaborating the frictions along the way. Both books offer new understandings of the processes of gendered migration and insights about how to improve migrant women workers’ lives.
Follow the Maid is a multisited ethnography that focuses on the role of state and nonstate actors in the process by which Indonesian village women become migrant domestic workers in Malaysia. It traces the paths of these women from a village in upper Java through various nodes of the Indonesian state's migration industry, their placement into residential employment in Malaysia, and their eventual return to Indonesia. Killias captures the dynamics of each “moment” in the journey to show the different negotiations of power that take place at each node, thus highlighting the temporalities of brokered migration in Indonesia. The book's emphasis on the infrastructure of gendered migration also makes clear the incredible amount of work that goes into turning Indonesian village women into transnational maids. Drawing on interviews of the migrant workers and their families, the brokers who recruit these women, teachers in the government-run predeparture training camps, staff in Malaysian recruiting agencies, and the women's Malaysian employers allows Killias to richly capture the tensions and complexities in these processes. The book also stresses that the temporality of the migrant work contract is a key element in the regulation of these workers’ lives and the precarious conditions of their work. The Indonesian state has mandated that workers return home from Malaysia after two years, but they are also required to stay with their Malaysian employers for the entire length of their contract. This obviously shifts the balance of power toward the employers in ways that heighten the conditions of exploitation. Sensationalistic tales of the abuse of Indonesian transnational care workers who migrate “illegally”—meaning who emigrate outside of this state-sanctioned scheme—has legitimized these restrictive legal arrangements. Consequently, the temporally restricted migration contract is pushed by both international human rights organizations and the Indonesian government as an alternative to migrant labor exploitation, even as it makes the work more precarious.
The structure of the book is as follows. Chapter 1 examines the Indonesian state's brokerage of domestic labor to other parts of Asia and the Middle East as a development strategy, placing it within the historical context of colonial forms of indentured labor migration in the region. The chapter is grounded ethnographically in an analysis of the predeparture briefings that every migrant worker is required to attend. These briefings familiarize the workers with their rights and obligations, such as the need to stay with their employer in Malaysia for the duration of the contract and not run away or leave for a different job in the country, which they are told could result in their sexual abuse and trafficking. They are also trained in “proper” behavior of self-management, hard work, moral conduct, and sending home most of their pay as remittances. The second chapter discusses the reasons that women in the village leave the local plantation for paid domestic service elsewhere, as well as the patterns of migration in which younger single women migrate internally, although women who are married and have a child are more likely to be engaged in transnational migration. Chapter 3 examines the key role of male brokers in introducing women to the labor migration system, and chapter 4 provides an ethnographic account of the camps where women are trained for domestic service abroad, highlighting forms of regulation as well as contestation to development aims that take place there. Among other things, the chapter examines the contradictory ways that Muslim religious principles are deployed in the training, such as the connection trainers make between Muslim teachings and obedience on the one hand, and the indifference these trainers express about bans on eating pork since the women may be working in non-Muslim homes, on the other. The next chapter examines the processes by which Malaysian employers are able to exert control over their workers, including the ways that the illegalization of workers who leave their indentured position gives employers an upper hand. This chapter also makes clear that in many cases workers migrating “illegally” are not caught up as victims in coercive situations, as the state and humanitarian antitrafficking groups would suggest, but are rather engaging in acts of resistance. The final chapter in the book examines the return home to the village, where some women prepare for their homecoming and stay, others challenge the process of being sent back to the village, and still others return for a while but eventually seek employment in other foreign countries.
In contrast to Follow the Maid, The Labor of Care examines a very different form of restrictive immigration and its temporal consequences, one marked by an often decades-long absence of undocumented Filipina migrant workers in New York City who have overstayed their tourist visas. Based on five years of ethnographic work that included interviews with migrant women workers and the families they left behind, the book examines how these workers stay connected with their families across the years, and how they cope with the separation. Much of what makes these arrangements “work” is a multidirectional care model that includes not only the care of migrant mothers but also the caring activities of children and partners left behind, extended families, fictive kin, and immigrant networks.
In contrast to dominant notions of maternal care that position migrant mothers as the givers and their families as the receivers of care, the book highlights the exchange that takes place from family members to the migrant, as well as the care work that is done back home within nonmigrant families. Thus the provision of social reproduction is reconfigured in these global households through new arrangements of children providing care for their siblings and migrant mothers, fathers negotiating ideals of masculinity to take on more care tasks, extended families and fictive kin pitching in back home, and immigrant social networks in New York meeting care needs for each others’ families back home as well as creating communities of care for each other. The book also showcases the important role of communication technologies such as Facebook and Skype for maintaining intimacy in transnational families and care networks. Videoconferencing in particular has allowed families to feel close to each other, as families back home and migrant mothers both leave it on for hours a day to be part of each other's everyday lives. These communications technologies help to meet family's desires for intimacy, but they also support the agenda of the Philippine labor brokerage state by facilitating the flow of remittances and normalizing the separation of families that is crucial to the nation's multi-billion-dollar migration industry.
In the first chapter, Francisco-Menchavez places Philippine labor migration into historical context and introduces her concept of multidirectional care. This chapter also examines the contested redefinitions of family, roles, and gender expectations that occur in the reorganization of social reproduction in global households. Chapter 2 examines the role of technologies such as videoconferencing and social media in both maintaining intimacy and changing care roles. The third chapter deploys the concept of “communities of care” to make sense of solidarity and care networks in New York City. Here she imaginatively draws on black feminist and queer theories of fictive kin and chosen families to show the importance of reaching beyond the nuclear family to understand how care is produced. The fourth chapter does important work in decoupling care work from feelings of love and nurturance, showing that in many cases the work gets done despite contradictory emotions.
The concluding chapter contextualizes the strategies of multidirectional care that characterize family separation within the larger social forces that produce them in the global political economy. Key to this discussion is the role of the Philippine labor brokerage state's reliance on steady remittances, which requires a connection between migrants and the families they leave behind to keep it going. The chapter ends with a call to action that includes acknowledging and tapping into the radical potential of solidarity networks and transnational families in exposing and resisting exploitation, the need to fix the broken migration system in the United States that keeps these women in an illegal status and unable to travel, and—more implied than directly stated—a national and global development model that no longer requires the Philippines to aggressively export labor in exchange for remittances as its primary growth strategy. The book ends with a fascinating methodological appendix that outlines the ways that the author combined multisited transnational ethnography with participatory action research. This innovative methodology allowed her to acknowledge the expertise of her research subjects while also fostering dialogue and strategies for change among them.
These two books demonstrate how crucial a grounded approach is for making sense of gendered migration, not just for understanding the contours of migrant workers’ everyday lives but also for making sense of how their precarious working conditions are produced and resisted. In The Labor of Care, Francisco-Menchavez's thick account of multisited care demonstrates that families and other care networks not only perform social reproduction that is crucial to the maintenance of migrant labor systems and precarious work, but also how these relationships create new solidarities, transform gender roles in progressive ways, and challenge the injustices of precarity. In Follow the Maid, Killias is able to show not only the varying sites and practices in which the conditions of precarious work are produced but also the use of the migrant worker's own resources and strategies to challenge these conditions. In addition, she makes clear that women who migrate outside of legal channels may do so with very good reasons and with degrees of autonomy, while not denying that they remain vulnerable in these situations. Because of the careful and finely grained ethnographic approach they take, both Killias and Francisco-Menchavez are able to center the agency of the migrant women they study, constrained as it might be in a world with few economic options for them outside of transnational labor.
These books make important contributions to the literature on gendered transnational migration and global householding. Francisco-Menchavez's book also expands our understanding of caring labor and social reproduction more generally in the way she deploys her key concept of multidirectional care, while Killias makes an important intervention on debates about migrant labor, regulation, and trafficking. Both books will be of interest to scholars of migration, precarious labor, transnational families, care work, and economic development.
