Friday, February 21, 2025 | 5:30pm to 7pm
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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: 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.
Purchase Book: https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295753133/caring-for-caregivers/
Author Bio
Valerie Francisco-Menchavez is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at San Francisco State University. Dr. Francisco’s academic interests include: global and transnational sociology, migration and immigration studies, diaspora with a special interest on the Philippine migration, gender and the family, racial and ethnic relations in the U.S., labor, transnational social movements with regard to migrant workers, and international political economy. Her book, The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in a Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, Spring 2018), explores the dynamics of gender and technology of care work in Filipino transnational families in the Philippines and the U.S.
Dr. Francisco research program includes a transnational study of Filipino migrant mothers in New York City and their families left behind in Manila, and participatory action research with Filipino immigrants working as caregivers in the U.S. In journals such as Critical Sociology, Working USA, The Philippine Sociological Review and International Review of Qualitative Research, Dr. Francisco also writes on the transnational activism that emerges from the social conditions of migration, separation and migrant labor.
Dr. Francisco has been awarded the 2015 Pacific Sociological Association’s Distinguished Contribution to Sociological Praxis Award and has been named one of the ten national finalists for the 2014 Lynton Award Scholarship of Engagement for Early Scholars by the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE).
