cost of caring: The social reproductive labor of Filipina live-in home health caregivers, The

The movement of peoples across national borders is not a new phenomena, but with the recent upsurge in discussions about transnationalism and globalization along with increasingly strict immigration laws and efforts to enforce borders, it is a phenomena that needs to be addressed. While the growth of multinational corporations, such as U.S. corporations in Mexico and other so-called "developing" countries including the Philippines, is evidence of a more free circulation of goods and commodities, increasingly restrictive immigration policies are evidence of a less open circulation of people. People are welcomed into countries, are border-crossers, only insofar as they meet the need for "cheap labor" and at the same time produce no strain on the resources of the "host" country. As a result, not only are such migrant workers overlooked by policy makers (governmental and nonprofits), but also by the wider public, leaving their lives and especially the benefits of their work invisible. The inevitable result is that the public overlooks the people, increasingly women, who live and work at the center of the debates. This paper examines one specific group of these migrant workers: Filipina domestic workers in Southern California employed as live-in home health caregivers for the elderly.

While Filipina/o1 registered nurses (RNs) are highly visible, having been trained and recruited specifically for service in Canada and the United States, many researchers and community activists alike are unaware of the burgeoning numbers of Filipina non-RNs who provide elderly care. While the Filipina women migrant workers to the United States are not under contract as they are in certain Middle Eastern, East Asian, and European nations, they endure similar hardships and living conditions. Filipina migrant domestic workers in the United States care for homes and children, but they are even more likely to care for the terminally ill and the elderly. These caregivers, mainly women, assume not only the companionate and light medical care of elderly persons but also the housekeeping, including cooking and grocery shopping.

The labor of transnational migrant Filipinas lacks visibility within academic circles for a number of reasons ranging from the tendency of the international development literature to overlook women's outmigration as a response to developing nations' globalization strategies, to an unreflective foregrounding of the work of male migrants, to assumptions that Filipina migration to the United States must be primarily composed of the migration of professional nurses.2 Filipina live-in elderly caregivers, to use the term the women use to describe themselves, especially face such multiple challenges to their visibility.3

The invisibility of Filipina transmigrant live-in elderly caregivers is fueled additionally by the nature of the work itself. The labor of Filipina women and the subsequent benefits afforded to U.S. elderly citizens remain invisible not only because the women are often undocumented migrant workers, but also because the work they engage in takes place within the confines of private homes, as part of the informal economy, and squarely within the world of the most invisible U.S. population aside from children: the elderly. Furthermore, they are involved in what is stereotypically considered "women's work," or that which is built upon women's "natural" inclination toward caring and relational thinking. Feminist scholars have worked to redefine this "natural" inclination as labor, specifically as social reproductive labor, or what Evelyn Nakano Glenn defines as the "array of activities and relationships involved in maintaining people both on a daily basis and intergenerationally."4

The goal of this paper is to begin to address the invisibility of these women by sharing the social reproductive labor that shapes their lives.5 I focus on this labor to highlight both the enduring nature of women's roles as social reproductive laborers in this era of globalization and the continuing undervaluation of this labor. The emotional and physical labor of Filipina migrants caring for the elderly in Southern California is as clear a testament to the enduring ideology of a woman's place in this transnational age as it is a testament to women's strength of will to provide for their families.

I begin with a short overview of why we ought to pay some attention to these Filipina caregivers for the elderly and then present a typical profile of who these women are. Next, in order to set the background for their work and life experiences, I briefly touch on the gendered and ethnic-racial division of labor in the United States. Third, I introduce several women and their daily work lives as they engage in physical and emotional labor both as mothers from afar and as caregivers locally. And finally I suggest that an inherently uneven power dynamic exists between employer and employee not simply on the basis of race, ethnicity, migration, and class as might be expected, but as a result of the emotional labor invested. The Filipina caregivers, in some ways, contribute to their own disempowerment through the offering up of their emotional labor, willingly subverting their own wages and working conditions under certain circumstances.