The public life of care: How caregivers in the United States and India frame their contributions

Abstract

How do caregivers articulate the contributions of their work? Using data from two ethnographies—of an immigrant rights organization on the US–Mexico border, and of community health workers in Punjab, India—we emphasize frames that caregivers use in strategic public-facing moments to describe the value of their work. We argue that caregivers frame care as making direct contributions to public life, beyond the privatized realms of family and market usually associated with care, and toward an expansion of the rights of the marginalized. This “public life of care” illuminates new actors, sites, and dynamics in care.

Keywords

Care democracy frames public sphere social movements state

Introduction

Scholars of care draw attention to care’s many contributions to society (Duffy et al., 2013; England, 2005; Glenn, 2000; Razavi and Staab, 2010). The focus of this literature is on unpaid care done in the home, or on (under)paid care done in care work occupations outside the home. In this article, we highlight what we call the “public life of care,” that is, care’s contributions outside of the privatized realms of family and market. The central question that we address is: how do caregivers articulate the contributions of their work to public life?

To answer this question, we center frames used by caregivers in strategic public-facing moments. Frames are “schemata of interpretation” (Goffman, 1974) that identify a problem, identify its solution, and issue a call to action. Frames strategically align the cause of social movement actors with that of their prospective audience (Snow and Benford, 1988). We bring together data from two studies conducted independently, putting them in dialogue. Author 1 conducted 13 months of participant observation in 2017–18 with immigrant rights organizations on the US–Mexico border, while Author 2 conducted 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2018–19 with community health workers employed by the health department in Punjab, India. Here we discuss the strategic framing undertaken during fundraising efforts in El Paso, Texas, and during a protest in Patiala, Punjab. These are moments in which caregivers mobilizing in public arenas strive to convince members of civil society and the state that their work is valuable. While the immigrant rights organization in El Paso, Texas—called Compromiso—is raising funds to support the targets of enhanced immigration enforcement, the women community health workers from Muktsar, Punjab—called ASHAs or Accredited Social Health Activists—are participating in collective action to demand the formalization of their role.

In these widely distinct social and political contexts, we argue that caregivers frame care as a direct and distinctly political contribution to public life. Caregivers challenge how social and political institutions structure caregiving, while seeking to expand the rights of the marginalized. Compromiso staff call out the excesses of the immigration system and fight for the human rights of migrants and asylum seekers; ASHAs challenge the state’s devaluation of their gendered labor and fight for their caregiving responsibilities toward their communities to have the status of work.

The cases we present here were researched independently, and compared and contrasted post-facto via what Andrews and Shahrokni (2014) call “linked ethnographies.” Linked ethnographies “examine global processes horizontally, by considering how they take effect in different settings.” Linked ethnographies underscore analytical parallels. They are not a controlled comparison, or a multi-sited ethnography, or a global ethnography. Rather, Andrews and Shahrokni (2014) describe linked ethnographies as “a dialogue, in which each case is used to mark the other’s particularity in relation to a general process” (p. 154). This allows researchers to both go deep into the nuances of each case, while also going broad to overcome silos of conceptual categories and geographical regions. In this way, linked ethnographies are analogous to what Vrushali Patil (2022) in the context of historical research calls “thinking sideways,” that is, disrupting a priori boundaries of what does and does not constitute one’s subject matter. We treat our two cases as variations on the theme of the “public life of care.” Honing in on similarities and differences between the two for analytic traction, we show that while the frames our two cases throw up are different—and attempt different kinds of alignment processes—they are essentially diverse ways of “caring with” (Tronto, 2013), that is, making care consistent with democratic commitments to justice, equality, and freedom. Together, they expand our notions of who a caregiver is beyond women in families or in reproductive/nurturant occupations, to also include states, social movements, and their interstices. We make visible how the social organization of care is being “formulated, enacted, and resisted” in different locales (Litt and Zimmerman, 2003), and how the activism of caregivers in their communities is also a gendered form of care. Here, caregivers’ frames articulate the value of their own work as well as a vision of how care ought to be distributed and the rights that the social contract ought to uphold. Our findings illuminate the centrality of care to contemporary contests about citizenship rights. Struggles over care are vital to democracy. There is evidence of these struggles in places one would look, and in places one would not.

Care, public life, and frames

Care refers to labor that develops the physical, mental, social, and/or emotional capabilities of the recipient (England et al., 2002). This labor is characterized by its relational nature (Held, 2006); care involves taking responsibility for the needs of another, often a dependent on account of age, illness, or disability (Tronto and Fisher, 1990; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). Most of the sociological scholarship on care focuses on unpaid care in the home, or on paid care work occupations outside the home like nursing, teaching, and cleaning. In both cases, the burden of care is borne disproportionately by women. This negatively impacts how care work is valued in society, which in turn drives gender equality (England, 2005).

Scholars agree that there is a “crisis of care” today, in which people’s social capacities for maintaining families and communities are being squeezed from several directions. Nancy Fraser (2017) locates this crisis in the social-reproductive contradictions of the current form of financialized capitalism, driven by debt, which has caused care work to be externalized onto families and communities while diminishing their capacities to perform it. As a result, social reproduction has been “commodified for those who can pay for it, privatized for those who cannot” (Fraser, 2017: 25–26). Indeed, many campaigns aim to re-evaluate the significance of care work done in the private sphere as a public good, and to bridge the care gap through policy (Nedelsky and Malleson, 2023). As Fraser (2017) notes, taken together, these are struggles over social reproduction, encompassing housing, health care, food security; struggles for the rights of migrants, domestic workers, and public employees; campaigns to unionize social service workers; and struggles for public services, for a shorter work week, and for childcare leave (p. 35).

In advocating a re-valuation of care, some scholars argue that care is a resource for political citizenship (Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2012). The private values and skills associated with care can enhance the public practice of citizenship (Bubeck, 1995). Care ought to be incorporated into the definition of citizenship such that the time to provide and receive care are protected rights (Knijn and Kremer, 1997). In Caring Democracy, Joan Tronto (2013) argues that political life is ultimately about the allocation of caring responsibilities. Not only do states need citizens to be produced and reproduced through care, Tronto argues that we are all “equally needy citizens,” that is, we are all equal as democratic citizens in being both givers and receivers of care. This ought to make caring a central value for democracy, one that is fundamental to being a citizen. Tronto (2013: xii) calls this “caring with,” that is, caring for citizens and for democracy itself, which she defines not as a narrow preservation of self-interest, but as a much broader and deeper practice: requiring that “citizens care enough about caring—both in their own lives and in the lives of their fellow citizens” (p. xii).

The role of care in political life is empirically demonstrable. Herd and Harrington Meyer (2002) argue that the care women provide in families is a catalyst for civic engagement; not only does it enable men and later children to participate in public life, women’s own activism often emerges from their desire to protect the health and wellbeing of their children and families, for instance, in disability rights and environmental justice movements (Dombroski, 2016; Panitch, 2007; Ryan and Cole, 2009). The provision of care has been a central feature of several social movements. The Black Panther Party provided breakfast for children and medical services to thousands in efforts to liberate their communities from symptoms of oppression: hunger and illness (Heynen, 2009; Nelson, 2013). Indigenous groups in the United States and Australia built urban health clinics in Seattle and Sydney, respectively (John, 2017). In efforts to combat environmental racism in marginalized communities, care work can take the form of medical services and dietary health support services (Hobart and Kneese, 2020).

Such efforts require the use of frames that locate the struggle to give and receive care as a public, and not private, concern. When caregivers are also social movement actors, they are signifying agents engaged in meaning-making for constituents, antagonists, and bystanders (Snow and Benford, 1988). They use collective action frames as “schemata of interpretation” (Goffman, 1974) intended for diagnosis (to identify and attribute a problem); prognosis (to articulate a solution or plan of attack); and motivation (a “call to arms” to engage in collective action) (Snow and Benford, 1988). Frames forge ideological connections between individuals and groups (Hunt and Benford, 1994), and reflect, even stimulate, political opportunities (Gamson and Meyer, 1996). Frames often have to accommodate dominant values in order for social movements to gain support (Einwohner et al., 2000). In a cross-national review of nurse narratives, Briskin (2012) shows how the dominant value of patient wellbeing is accommodated into protest frames. When protest participation was criticized for detracting from caring duties attributed to nurses, nurses were able to use the frame of patient wellbeing to argue that better working conditions for nurses leads to better care for all. However, frames used to center care receivers can come at the cost of racial and gender justice. Premilla Nadasen (2021) shows that African American domestic worker activists in the 1970s resisted the frame of “one of the family” that was a basis of their underpayment and exploitation, demanding instead equal labor rights. In addition, movement participants can differ in their choice of frames. In her study of women workers in India’s government-run childcare centers, Preethi Krishnan (2020) notes the difference between how individual workers experience their grievances, and how their union frames these grievances. Even though individual workers identify caste discrimination, union leaders do not articulate the caste question when mobilizing for better wages and against privatization itself.

Here, we examine caregivers in two distinct settings with a common “framing problem” (Skotnicki, 2019): how to articulate the value of what they do. In the El Paso, Texas case, we analyze the frames used by immigrant rights activists at a phone-a-thon and a dinner to raise funds for their organization amid aggressive immigration enforcement. In the Punjab, India case, we analyze the frames used by women designated community health “volunteers” at a protest march to demand the rights and recognition of workers from their government. While the framing in El Paso is primarily targeted at its community of supporters and sympathizers, in Punjab it targets the state as an antagonist. But even as caregivers in the two cases engage different audiences, both cases present us with strategic public-facing moments directed at a particular goal, which require social movement actors to align their frames with that of their prospective audiences. We analyze what frames caregivers use, why, and what this tells us about the public life of care.

Methods

The city of El Paso, Texas, located on the US–Mexico border, has experienced significant changes in migration patterns in the last decade. Not only has the number of migrants coming through increased dramatically, including unaccompanied minors and family units (Gramlich, 2021; Gramlich and Scheller, 2019), migrants now represent more demographic diversity than before, with surges from Ecuador, Brazil, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti in 2021, and from Colombia and Peru in 2022. As a result, local organizations managing this border crisis have had to step up their efforts. Despite limited resources and a hostile political climate, these organizations practice solidarity with migrants by providing care and support.

In 2017–18, Author 1 conducted 13 months of participant observation, including over 50 interviews, with two immigrant rights organizations in El Paso, Texas that meet the most immediate needs migrants and asylum seekers have after crossing the border: legal representation and shelter. This article is based on 8 months of participant observation in the legal aid nonprofit, which he calls Compromiso. Compromiso was started in 1987 to address the legal needs of Central American asylum seekers who, fleeing civil war, found themselves in El Paso. Today it is the last-resort legal option for many (im)migrants and asylum seekers in the region who do not have the means to pay for a private attorney. Because people in immigration proceedings do not have the right to a government appointed attorney, Compromiso attorneys become de facto public defenders for these cases.

In general, staff members at Compromiso have stable roles and duties. During Author 1’s fieldwork period however, given the limited number of staff and the turmoil unleashed by the Trump administration, everyone had their hands in many pots. Author 1 began as a volunteer paralegal, conducting research for asylum cases and putting together case files. Three months later, he became one of two intake specialists at Compromiso. As an intake specialist, Author 1 visited detention centers in West Texas and Southern New Mexico to meet with clients and potential clients. In addition, he assisted with advocacy events such as press conferences, attended meetings of a city-wide immigrant rights coalition, organized fundraisers, and participated in protests. During this time, he kept field notes on everyday activities, and conducted interviews with 20 Compromiso staff and volunteers, and with five paralegals and immigration attorneys from other organizations working on similar cases. Interview participants were asked about organizational and individual challenges, coping mechanisms, and reflections on how the experience of helping migrants affected them.

Author 2 conducted ethnographic research on India’s women community health workers in the northwestern state of Punjab. Community health workers are a type of frontline health workers. India’s one-million-strong all-women community health workforce, officially called Accredited Social Health Activists or ASHAs, is the largest in the world. ASHAs were first appointed by the Indian government in 2005 for the uptake of maternal and child health services. The ASHA program is generally lauded for improving health outcomes—like vaccination coverage and the hospital birth rate—in a country that otherwise spends only 1.5 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health (Rao, 2017). However, ASHAs were appointed under a temporary but renewable government scheme: the National Health Mission. ASHAs do not have the status of employees, or even workers. ASHAs are categorized as “paid volunteers,” and receive task-based incentives instead of a salary. The list of tasks for which ASHAs receive incentives began with 6 in 2005, and grew to 38 in 2017 (Ved et al., 2019). But these incentives continue to add up to monthly amounts that are a fraction of minimum wage. It is fair to say, then, that ASHAs perform a considerable amount of care work, without having the rights and recognition of care workers.

Author 2 conducted 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2018–19, primarily in Punjab. She conducted field observations with ASHAs across one urban and one rural block of the same district: Muktsar. She followed ASHAs as they mediated between the government-run health system and their communities. She began by attending ASHA trainings and departmental meetings, as well as hanging out at health centers and hospitals to see how ASHAs service their patients, interact with hospital staff, navigate payments, and so on. With time, as she became friendly with some ASHAs, she accompanied them as they toured the areas under their charge, conducting vaccination drives, outreach camps, and household visits. With still more time, she began hanging out with some ASHAs outside of work, in their homes and while they shopped, visited local temples, grabbed chai and snacks, or ran errands. When a newly formed district ASHA union gathered steam, she attended their union meetings and protest marches.

A couple of months into fieldwork, Author 2 began interviewing ASHAs. She interviewed equal numbers of Dalit (formerly “untouchable”) and dominant caste, and urban and rural ASHAs, totaling 60. These interviews were 30 to 90 minutes long, and covered work history, selection into the ASHA role, experience of the work, barriers, knowledge of public life, experiences with women from within and outside their castes, and recommendations for the program. Toward the end of fieldwork, Author 2 conducted an additional 20 interviews with officials and experts on the ASHA program at the district, state, and national level.

While health services commonly come under the banner of care work, a word about our conceptualization of an immigrant rights organization under the same is in order. We conceptualize the everyday work of Compromiso as care because of its causes and consequences. Compromiso assists those fleeing political, economic, and ecological crises, what Fraser (2017) calls collectively the “general crisis,” with inseparable strands that exacerbate each other, and within which the crisis of social reproduction—the crisis of care—must be situated. Furthermore, the United States, through the criminalization of immigration and the militarization of the border, generates dependency in populations beyond the ones usually imagined as dependents in care: children, the elderly, the ill, or the infirm. We know that social movement organizations can fill the gap in care for marginalized groups, or rather, meet care needs that the state actively leaves unmet, as with the Black Panther Party’s service provision and disability activists’ “care webs” (Nelson, 2013; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). So, too, immigrant rights organizations attend to migrants and asylum seekers’ care needs and state-created dependencies. And in attending to legal needs, the staff at Compromiso do not just service clients as any other law office would. Rather, Compromiso staff must create intimate and supportive spaces where migrants feel safe to share their stories. This requires intense emotional labor to build mutual trust. It also requires commitment to a cause, not just a profession, as resource scarcity, lengthy bureaucratic processes, and political uncertainty make work evermore difficult. It should be no surprise then that just as in traditional care work occupations, care work in social movement organizations too leads to burnout and secondary trauma (Márquez, 2021).

Since this is a special issue on ethnographic comparisons, it behooves us to say how our particular ethnographic comparison came to be. This article is the result of the two co-authors having been in conversation about their work for nearly a decade now. We started as graduate students in the same department who gravitated to the same advisor because of our mutual interest in the politics of care provisioning. We benefited from active and generous scholarly communities around us: an ethnography lab, area studies institutes, and an intimate group of co-advisees doing ethnographic work around the world, much of which was uncovering new market-family-community-state entanglements in how everyday care was supplied, valuated, denied, or recovered. In these spaces, to paraphrase Geertz (1973), the village was always the locus and never the object of study. Beyond a point, it did not matter that we were interested in different empirical and geographical coordinates. We were encouraged to, and encouraged each other to, draw broader conceptual and theoretical meaning from fieldwork. As the two co-authors continued to dialogue about their research, it became evident to us that care provisioning was an area in which mainstream academia had not caught up to activist and practitioner struggles. In these struggles, the scope of care we were witnessing went well beyond conventional measures of care. Our fieldwork demonstrates that care has a decidedly public life. Apart from home and workplaces, caregiving exists in many avatars in states, social movements, and civil society that are neither strictly family nor strictly market. Scholars of care who seek to reorganize the provisioning of care make estimates about the care economy (Duffy et al., 2013). Our comparison is motivated by a desire to contribute to this conversation by providing an ethnographic account—rather than a quantitative one—of care in understudied sites that centers caregivers’ voices.

Articulating care for migrants: the frames of “giving voice” and “resilience”

On an evening in early December 2017, after Compromiso has closed for regular business, the organization is holding a phone bank. Staff and board members sit together chatting and eating takeout in the conference room, as they wait for volunteers to arrive. After a few minutes, Rebecca begins giving instructions. Rebecca is the executive director and only attorney at Compromiso. She migrated at a young age from Chihuahua City, 4 hours south of the border in Mexico; in fact, her aunt and cousin had been Compromiso clients. Rebecca has been leading Compromiso through a particular tough period. Since 2015, immigration agencies in El Paso have enhanced their apprehension and removal operations, resulting in a lot of uncertainty for attorneys and advocates. Relief that was granted for migrants and asylum seekers in the past is now denied by officials. A hardening of the executive’s anti-immigration stance both increases the needs of migrants and makes it tougher to deliver care to them.

Rebecca begins by getting straight to it.

In the 30 years of Compromiso’s experience, the work is more politicized than ever. We are going off script this time . . . we need to talk about what we’ve been seeing in the past year. This year has been incredibly difficult . . . just today we had hard losses. We had two clients deported today by ICE. That has never happened to me in the four years I’ve been here.

Rebecca wants our calls to communicate the exceptional urgency of the border crisis.

What exactly are we doing? You can tell donors that we are putting pressure on ICE because that is our role in this community. If we don’t hold them accountable, who will? . . . Whether we come out winning or losing, the one thing I know in my heart is that we fight really hard. We are providing a voice for the people. (emphasis mine)

Rebecca positions Compromiso as the voice of the voiceless, an organization fighting for the rights of migrants against unprecedented odds. The frame she uses, “giving voice,” becomes by implication the frame for volunteers to use on their calls. She goes on to specify individual cases that volunteers can take up on their calls, cases that demonstrate both urgent need and the critical role of Compromiso in meeting that need. The aim is for people who support migrant rights to support Compromiso.

One case Rebecca brings up is that of Mayra, a pregnant woman and one of the two Compromiso clients deported that day. Another is Juan Pablo, a HIV-positive detainee who began a hunger strike because he was not getting adequate care for his condition in detention. These are both sympathetic cases, but neither were treated that way by the authorities. In Juan Pablo’s case, Compromiso organized a press conference to denounce U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) treatment of him, which resulted in a front-page story in the leading El Paso newspaper. Juan Pablo, a marketing professional, wanted to start a crowd funding campaign for Compromiso from within the detention center. Rebecca shares Juan Pablo’s campaign slogan: “Compromiso needs to exist for people to have hope inside of the detention center.” She explains how important it has become to conduct intake interviews at the detention center. Intake interviews help attorneys like Rebecca assess legal options for the case at hand and determine if they can take it on. “Two years ago, people were being released on parole. Not anymore . . . Finally news is breaking—even though we knew this for a long time—that families are being separated at every step of the way.” In the absence of protocol around ages, asylum seekers are being separated from their infant children. “ICE will deport without notice. We need stability because we need to keep up with demand.” The volunteers move into calls. Rebecca’s impassioned speech has left her a bit drained. She sits for a sip of water. I know the situation is as dire as she has laid out. “Voice” is what Compromiso’s clients are systematically denied. Staff and volunteers at Compromiso feel this acutely, not only because they come in daily contact with clients’ suffering, but also because they identify with clients’ backgrounds. Staff and volunteers are not migrants themselves, but they are overwhelmingly Mexican-Americans with family histories of migration.

Like Melissa, the longest serving staff member at Compromiso. When I interview Melissa she tells me she grew up in a low-income neighborhood in El Paso at a time when gang violence and drug trafficking were on the rise. Her parents were immigrants and she witnessed firsthand the hardships and mistreatment they endured. Things were not easy, and were not made easy, for Melissa. She resented the fact that the military, and not universities, recruited on her high school campus. She felt like her high school gave up on her when they expelled her for skipping classes. When she got to college, Melissa was able to locate her and her family’s struggles in the larger context of the impoverishment and marginalization of migrants. Now, as a legal representative for victims of crimes, Melissa relates to the emotional and financial struggles of her clients. But she also confesses that it frustrates her:

Taking an hour to do some sort of therapy intervention for something that should take 15 minutes . . . or like identify with a kid that is starting to rely heavily on substances because she’s bipolar because dad just got deported and mom might get deported. It’s hard to open up to a fucking client’s kid and tell them I was a fuck up kid too: “Maybe I wasn’t in your shoes or as bad as you, but it’s going to be ok one day”

Preparing case files and government forms for clients requires accounts of abuse and other distressing events. While giving details, clients are emotionally triggered which is why Melissa provides “some sort of therapy.” In addition to comforting clients, Melissa also encourages them to seek appropriate help; something that she feels she and her family lacked guidance on. This relationship between the caregiver and the care recipient is both invoked and erased by the frame of “giving voice.” The frame emphasizes the victimization of the care recipient, and to a lesser degree, the agency of the caregiver who is in solidarity. But it does not quite make space for the struggles of the caregiver.

Five months after the phone-a-thon, it is time for the Border Heroes Awards dinner. At this dinner, two to three community members are awarded the Border Hero award. Award recipients are not staff or volunteers at Compromiso, but activists, attorneys, politicians, journalists, or organization leaders who have contributed to the cause of migrants in El Paso. It is a way to thank them for their work, but also a way for Compromiso to build and maintain links to other local organizations. Funds are raised by selling individual tickets or a package for a whole table, and by encouraging attendees to donate at the event.

The dinner is a big occasion, and Compromiso sets a theme for the dinner that also serves to frame the message of the dinner. This year’s frame is “Resilience.” Big and intricately folded paper flowers in bright pink, turquoise, and yellow hang throughout the event hall. Rebecca points to the flowers at the start of the award ceremony and declares, “these are there for a reason.” She goes on to explain,

We’ve had a pretty dark year in terms of immigration . . . It hasn’t been easy for the people fighting these battles every day. It is not easy for us. It is even harder for our clients. It is even harder for the undocumented. So today we wanted to say thank you and we wanted to celebrate resilience. Today’s theme is truly resilience.

The colorful flowers contrast the depressing state of immigration in the country. Rebecca has recently returned from Washington D.C. where she attended her last protest. She tells the audience that while marching she kept hearing the slogan “undocumented, unafraid!” It made a big impression on her. “To me, that is beautiful.”

Next, the president of the board of directors, Katherine, gives her introductory remarks. A seasoned immigration attorney, Katherine briefly describes the problems she has observed during her 17-year experience with the immigration system, and then sounds an alarm: “But what I have seen in the last 16 months truly shocks the conscience.” Katherine provides a summary of Mariana Nevarez case. Mariana Nevarez, whose deportation Compromiso helped delay, is an undocumented Mexican woman living in El Paso with a daughter in need of cancer treatment.

It required a full court press conference, media, religious leaders, community members, and our congressional representative. Never before this moment would this kind of advocacy be required in such a compelling and sympathetic case. Never before have we seen parents and children separated at the border and kept in separate detention facilities for months on end for no justifiable reason . . . I don’t have to remind you what is going on with our Dreamers . . . But we are here to celebrate, and where there is darkness—and there is a lot of darkness—there is light and there is hope. And today that light and that hope manifests in you all who have come together tonight to stand up by supporting Compromiso, an organization that is in the frontlines, day-in and day-out, fighting against this inhumanity.

The metaphors Katherine uses—of fighting in the “frontlines” and “light in the dark”—denote the stakes of the border crisis, while saluting both the organization and its supporters, and ending on a hopeful note. Katherine’s speech echoes Rebecca’s and goes further in establishing the unity of purpose between Compromiso, its clients, and the community represented in and through the dinner.

As the evening progresses, the frame of resilience is repeatedly used for Compromiso staff and clients alike. A video directed by Compromiso staff comes on. It features Melissa stating that what really represents Compromiso is the clients: “. . . through the resilience of our clients we are also reflected . . .” The closes with Rebecca: “The goal would be that one day, there would be respect for migration as a human right. Where Compromiso wouldn’t have to fight because that fight would be unnecessary. But at this point we are very needed.” After the video Rebecca presents Monica, a Compromiso business administer who is leaving after 4 years, with a farewell gift. She announces to applause from the room: “We could not have made it without Monica. There is no doubt in my mind that we are as resilient as we’ve come to be because of her.”

The frame of resilience allows Compromiso to talk about migrants’ resilience as well as their own. In this way, “resilience” is more capacious than the frame of the phone-a-thon, “giving voice.” “Giving voice” deployed clients’ and only clients’ stories, while “resilience” allows caregivers to talk about their own struggles, albeit tinged with heroism and celebration since it is, after all, an awards dinner. Both frames emphasize the need for Compromiso, which is appropriate for fundraisers asking audiences to pledge money.

The final act of the evening, the presentation of the Border Heroes Award, is preceded by the introduction of two Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients. Brother and sister, Luis and Gloria had their DACA revoked under the Trump administration. With the help of Compromiso, they were freed from detention 13 days before the fundraiser, so their presence generates much excitement. Luis and Gloria speak about how helpful Compromiso staff has been to them, making them feel safe even while in detention. Gloria’s words offer a fitting tribute to end the evening with: “Thank you for giving me a second chance to be here . . . and to all who contribute to Compromiso, you have no clue how much you’ve helped us, how much you help people like me.”

Demanding recognition: the frames of “workers’ rights” and “exploitation of women”

On a clear, sunny day in October 2018, a protest demonstration has been planned by ASHAs in Patiala, one of Punjab’s bigger cities. Patiala is the constituency of Capt. Amarinder Singh, Punjab’s then Chief Minister. ASHA unions allied under the banner of a leftist national trade union and representing several of Punjab’s districts have planned to march to the captain’s—as the Chief Minister is known—residence, demanding that their appointment be regularized. ASHAs want the status of tenured and salaried workers. At present the government categorizes them, rather oxymoronically, as paid volunteers.

Patiala is a 4-hour drive from the district where I am doing fieldwork, Muktsar. A bus full of us sets off from the Muktsar city bus stand at 8.00 AM. There is much chatter and laughter. The ASHAs have worn their uniforms, pink salwar kameezes, but paired with black instead of pink dupattas, to signify protest. Once in Patiala, we gather under a flyover by the railway station. I find myself flanked by Harmeet and Jaswinder, two urban ASHAs. More ASHAs from more buses are joining in. Soon, a small group of union representatives gets on a wooden stage and begins to raise slogans. The lot of us from Muktsar struggle to keep pace with the sloganeering. For most, it is their first protest. Giggling, Harmeet turns to Jaswinder and I, “I hope we are not saying murdabad (‘down with’) when they want us to say zindabad (‘long live’)!”

When the speeches begin, everyone around me falls silent. Some start recording on their phones. The first speaker, an ASHA from the district neighboring Muktsar, is fiery. Extending her right arm in exhortation, she declares:

This government is exploiting the daughters and sisters of Punjab! They tell us we are the backbone of the health department. For ten years they have put every responsibility on our shoulders. We work 24 hours, day and night! We leave our homes, our children, in these times that are not good times for women, to do the government’s work. Day and night! “We salute you” they say. This is all lip service, my ASHA worker sisters! If they salute us, let them give us a salary of 18,000 (USD 257) a month! This is all lip service. This government is unmoved by our plight. So let us move them! Let us shake them up!

The speaker’s condemnation of the government is met with thunderous applause. ASHAs know how significant their work is to the health department. Since ASHAs were first appointed, their numbers have swelled to nearly one million nationwide, the areas under their charge have expanded from rural to also include urban, and the responsibilities they are given far exceed maternal and child health; ASHAs today make malaria slides, screen for noncommunicable diseases, run the polio campaign, monitor tuberculosis patients, and so on. At departmental meetings, ASHAs are routinely praised for their hard work and credited with improvements in public health outcomes. But the speaker does not want ASHAs to be swayed by empty words of appreciation, or “lip service” as she calls it. Indeed, she opens and closes her comments by framing the government’s treatment of ASHAs as “exploitation of women.” She lists the growing responsibilities and hours that take ASHAs away from their own families, and demands that the government pay ASHAs a fair salary. This is the other frame that sets the tone for the day: “workers’ rights.” The two frames of “workers’ rights” and “exploitation of women” are inter-related in content and goal. In creating the post of ASHA as “incentivized volunteer,” the government has framed the care that ASHAs provide as service and not work. As volunteers, ASHAs do not receive decent pay, employee benefits, and oftentimes equal treatment by other employees. At the protest, ASHAs counter-frame the government’s actions as exploitation, and their own care as work and not service.

Harmeet turns to me and says emphatically of the speaker who just finished, “She is absolutely right!” 46-year-old Harmeet has been an urban ASHA for 4 years. She has a thin voice and a gentle face, with round cheeks that perk up when she smiles. Harmeet is Ravidasia Sikh (Dalit/ Scheduled Caste or SC), with a neighborhood of roughly 4500 residents under her charge. Her nurse supervisor describes her as a model worker. Typically, ASHAs come from the working poor, across castes, but find the most success connecting SCs to public health services. SC households are usually poor and can be persuaded to give public hospitals a chance, unlike dominant castes who prefer to pay for private healthcare. Harmeet stands out for the nurses because she manages to bring dominant castes to the public hospital as well.

Harmeet’s journey to model worker has not been an easy one. Although she has studied till 10th grade, before becoming an ASHA Harmeet had never worked outside home. When her husband lost his job and their family was beset with financial difficulties, he signed Harmeet up for the post of an ASHA. “Back then, the kitchen was my whole world,” she tells me. Now, she is always rushing off. Harmeet’s primary responsibility is to track women through the duration of their pregnancies. She counsels them about safe delivery, supplies them with iron and folic acid supplements, takes them to the hospital to have their hemoglobin levels checked and their ultrasounds done, and so on. When it is time to give birth, if the woman has decided to use a public hospital, Harmeet gets her admitted and keeps close tabs on her. After childbirth, she continues her follow-ups, this time for the child’s vaccination schedule.

The speeches at today’s protest really resonate with Harmeet and Jaswinder. 41-year-old Jaswinder (also SC: Mazhabi Sikh) is new. She has been an ASHA for 10 months, and marvels at how much the work is:

The government has dumped so much work on ASHAs’ heads. I have just finished conducting a household survey in my area all by myself. Some days I don’t return home till 4 PM. I have to make visit after visit to the hospital; when there is a delivery, I stay overnight. All this for 3000 rupees a month (USD 43), payment that is sometimes delayed, sometimes denied.

The next two speakers are from the national trade union. They berate the Prime Minister, then the Chief Minister, and invoking the battles of Sikh gurus, tell the ASHAs that their fight too is a fight for justice and for truth. But around me, many are losing interest. They talk among themselves, take pictures, and a few walk off in search of water or a restroom. I realize it is when other ASHAs speak that their interest is piqued. The last speech is from an ASHA who is the state-level union leader.

We have been cheated from the beginning! The government says to people, if you have any trouble go to the ASHA for help. Well, who should the ASHA go to when she has trouble? The ASHA who cares for everybody’s children, what about her children? The government says to us, “we respect you, we thank you.” To the government I say, we don’t need your thanks! We need money! We need our rights! If this is service, if money doesn’t matter, then the politicians should make their wives do this work. And to you, my ASHA worker sisters, I say, the time has come for us to become Rani Jhansi!¹

Everyone is rapt. The speaker’s indictment of the political elite is as hard-hitting as her call to action. The images she conjures for the crowd are deeply gendered. She pits ASHAs’ children against the children ASHAs serve, to remind ASHAs that their key responsibility as mothers is to provide for their own children, which they cannot do without commensurate pay. This is a recasting of where “womanhood” really lies—not in sacrifice but in first securing self-interest. She follows this up by issuing a bold challenge to policymakers: if what ASHAs do is so noble, then make your wives do this work. This is a frontal attack on the imagination of care as being so intrinsically rewarding that extrinsic rewards do not matter (Marwah, 2023). It also draws ASHAs’ attention to the class and caste composition of their workforce, as if to say, “if this was ‘good’ work, elite women would be doing it.” And finally, she ends by calling on her sisters to get ready to fight, to become warrior queens. The use of Rani Jhansi is significant here. Rani Jhansi, like Joan of Arc, is remembered both for picking up arms in rebellion against injustice, and for forging a new meaning of womanhood in the process.

With this, our march begins. As the crowd of roughly 400 ASHAs sets off, there is much jostling. Harmeet knots the ends of her dupatta to mine and Jaswinder’s, so we don’t lose track of each other. When the cross-section before the Captain’s house comes into view, we see a row of barricades, and several rows of police personnel. Harmeet gasps, “They have water cannons!.” Jaswinder responds, “And so many lady police! It is because they are scared of us.”

The crowd is instructed to sit where they are. The sun is beating down and the road is hot. But the union reps announce: “Today is not the day to seek the shade, sisters!.” Harmeet, Jaswinder and I reluctantly sit. Thankfully we are not there long. After some more sloganeering, a representative from the Chief Minister’s office comes out to meet with the protest leadership. He is handed a letter of demands. He assures the crowd that a meeting with the Chief Minister will soon be scheduled. Photographs are clicked. Before we disperse, the date for the next rally is announced; this one will be larger, with participation from all tiers of the state government’s contractual employees. The leaders pledge that their struggle will only pick up pace in the run-up to next year’s national election.

Discussion

Compromiso and ASHAs represent care done in the public sphere: in a social movement organization and a state health department, respectively. The frames that Compromiso and ASHAs use to describe the contribution of their work tell us about what it means to do this kind of care in the contemporary moment. Framing processes are strategic processes in that they are deliberative, utilitarian, and purposive, directed at a particular goal such as recruiting new members or obtaining resources, by aligning the frames of social movement actors with that of their prospective audience (Benford and Snow, 2000). This alignment can take the form of frame bridging, frame amplification, frame extension, and frame transformation (Benford and Snow, 2000). In the case of Compromiso, caregivers use the frames of “giving voice” and “resilience.” These aim to create a relation of sympathy with an audience of current or potential donors, by demonstrating both that migrants have urgent need and that Compromiso is the bridge to meet those needs. Compromiso’s frames attempt “amplification,” that is, “the idealization, embellishment, clarification, or invigoration of existing values or beliefs” (Benford and Snow, 2000: 624), with the existing value in this case being the human rights of migrants. In the other case, ASHAs use the frames of “workers’ rights” and “exploitation of women” in a protest march that makes demands on the government, and also encourages fellow ASHAs to keep up their collective action efforts. ASHAs’ frames chiefly attempt “transformation,” by changing old understandings (care as service) to new ones (care as work).

Frames are active and processual, involve agency and contention, and are continuously constituted, reproduced, or replaced through the course of social movement activity. They can vary in terms of flexibility, scope, and resonance to name a few factors, and can occur in the context of different political and cultural opportunity structures, and for different audiences. In the two cases we present here, what explains the similarities and differences in the frames and the alignment processes they attempt?

First the similarities. In both cases (Table 1), the frames are expressly political performative speech acts. They aim at bringing into being what they name: voice and resilience for migrants in need, and workers’ rights for ASHAs. They do this on the terrain of public politics, in public-facing moments that challenge the political organization of care; they challenge how caring needs are being met, or rather not being met, by the state, and advocate for an expansion of the rights of the marginalized.

Table 1.

A snapshot of the two cases.

Case	Compromiso	ASHAs
Type	Social Movement Organization	Cadre of community health volunteers
Ask	Fundraising and support amidst border crisis	Formalization of worker status: pay hike and tenure
Target audience	Community	State
Frame used to value own work	“Giving voice” and “Resilience”	“Exploitation of women” and “workers’ rights”
Frame alignment	Amplification (of human rights of migrants)	Transformation (of care from service to work)
Similarities	-Challenge political organization of care -Draw on family as a moral resource -Most or all women
Differences	-Comp. emphasizes care recipients while ASHAs emphasize caregivers, that is, themselves -Comp’s care recipients are in a politically contentious position while ASHAs’ are not

While caregivers’ frames do not explicitly reference family and are not based on care done in families, both cases nonetheless draw on family as a moral resource in their mobilizations. They do so by highlighting how the cultural ideal of family life is being violated. Compromiso staff fight for family unification, and privately relate to clients through their own family histories of migration. ASHAs speak of their care as taking them away from their families while also preventing them from providing adequately for their families. In both cases, the privatized realm of family is not the site of care, but the cultural ideal of family is mobilized for a political purpose. How do we understand this reliance on family to frame the value of care not done in the family?

We argue this is explained by two factors. First, family is part of Swidler’s (1986) cultural toolkit—an extant system of values, beliefs, and practices from which people draw meaning and narratives draw intelligibility. Framing processes are tied to socio-cultural conditions, the influence of which is referred to by Koopmans and Statham (1999) as “discursive opportunity structures.” In cultural terms then, narratives of family give resonance to mobilization frames. Second, family is the lived, material space within which the crisis of social reproduction is experienced. The use of familial examples and references by caregivers for mobilization simply reveals the phenomenological structure of the social problem of care² (Skotnicki, 2019). In the context of mobilizations for immigrant rights in the United States, Manisha Das Gupta (2014) argues that the frame of family challenges normative, racialized, classed, and nationally bound ideas around which families matter and which families are dispensable; therefore, the family frame should not be read simplistically as appealing to heteronormativity.³ We agree with Das Gupta’s reading. With both Compromiso staff and ASHAs, appeals to family seek to pluralize, that is, make more ways of existing possible for more kinds of families.

While these similarities show the broadly common content of the public life of care, the two ethnographic cases also reveal that this common content can take different forms. We argue that who the marginalized are, or who the mobilization is for, in either case explains the differences between the two cases. As a social movement organization, Compromiso mobilizes on behalf of migrants and asylum seekers who undertake difficult journeys to escape difficult conditions, only to be met by a state system that seeks to repel them at all costs. They offer legal services that migrants cannot otherwise access, and without which they risk prolonged detention, deportation, and a worsening of their life conditions. They act as advocates in the public sphere, raising awareness about state policies that do active harm to migrants and their communities. Migrants’ rights are Compromiso’s raison d’etre. This is what Compromiso’s frames reflect by focusing chiefly on care recipients—even as the two frames differ slightly in that “resilience” makes more space for caregivers than “giving voice.” Indeed, the political status of the care recipients means Compromiso is seeking support from the community against the state. These are care recipients the state is not just ejecting from its “universe of moral obligation” (Bauman, 2002), but whom state agencies are aggressively targeting. As a result, Compromiso members have taken on every “phase of care”: to care about, care for, care-give, care-receive, and care with. Phases of care are how Tronto and Fisher describe the kinds of work in care, including the moral quality associated with the work. For a description of the phases of care and how it relates to Compromiso and ASHAs, see Table 2.

Table 2.

Phases of care compared across cases.

No.	Phase of care^a	Description^a	Moral quality^a	Compromiso, Texas, USA	ASHAs, Punjab, India
1.	Caring about	Someone notices an unmet need	Attentiveness: the capacity to genuinely look from the perspective of another’s need	Compromiso: founders and staff who implement the organization’s mission to provide legal aid	Government and civil society who created the ASHA program to meet reproductive health needs
2.	Caring for	Someone takes responsibility to make certain these needs are met	Responsibility: taking on the burden of meeting unmet needs	Compromiso staff and volunteers, together with others in the immigrant rights movement	The department of health, including but not limited to ASHAs
3.	Care-giving	The actual work of caregiving	Competence: both moral and technical, to carry out the work of care	Compromiso staff and volunteers	ASHAs
4.	Care-receiving	Observing and judging how care was received	Responsiveness, including noting new needs	Compromiso staff and volunteers	ASHAs
5.	Caring with	Making care consistent with democratic commitments to justice, equality, freedom.	Solidarity: plurality, communication, trust, respect	Compromiso staff and volunteers	ASHAs

Tronto and Fisher (1990) and Tronto (2013).

While ASHAs also expand the social rights of citizenship—to health and welfare—of marginalized communities, ASHAs are themselves marginalized women whose care work is devalued by the state. ASHAs have been appointed to a governmental program aimed at improving health outcomes for India’s citizens. The care recipients in this case are not themselves contentious subjects. Moreover, the state has assumed responsibility for several phases of care—“caring about” and “caring for” from Table 2—in which ASHAs play one of many parts, alongside doctors, nurses, and other state personnel, even as only ASHAs perform the “care-giving,” “care-receiving,” and “caring with” assigned to them as community health workers. For this reason, ASHAs’ frames do not demonstrate need; they do not rely on stories of care recipients to show the significance of their work. The value of their work is already known to the government that created, and continues to grow, their role. Rather, ASHAs’ frames seek a re-valuation of their own work, a change in status and compensation. In this way, ASHAs’ frames are also political, but primarily about themselves as caregivers. This is also what makes ASHAs’ frames explicitly gendered in a way that Compromiso’s frames are not, even though the majority of Compromiso staff and volunteers are women.

Conclusion

Finally, we reflect on the theoretical and methodological takeaways from our linked ethnographies. What is the traction that comes from linking two ethnographies that each would not have offered alone?

We contend that using two cases instead of one has both quantitative and qualitative advantages. Two cases from disparate geographical, political, and organizational contexts show that a social phenomenon has broad traction. Simply put, two is better than one. This is especially true when what is under consideration is not usually considered, here, the public life of care. In fact excavating an under-considered theme using two different cases might make one’s findings more robust. If caregivers in very different contexts are articulating a similarly political vision of care, then there is arguably something similar going on with care. We contend there are still more contexts in which the public life of care can be excavated. To grow from two cases, we are exploring avenues—like conference panels—that invite more dialogue from more scholars working on this theme.

But the quantitative advantage here is really in service to the qualitative agenda. The two cases together enable us to argue that the public life of care is fundamental to how we understand citizenship today. We know there is a crisis of care under neoliberalism, and that people’s capacity for care is being diminished from several directions (Fraser, 2017). But there is also pushback to this crisis, indeed the pushback identifies the crisis. It is exemplified by Compromiso and ASHAs. As caregivers who mobilize for and as the marginalized, Compromiso staff and ASHAs fuse social rights with civil and political rights. Their mobilization demonstrates that the neoliberal narrowing of who the states cares for and how it provides care is pitted against a host of politicized caregivers. Their strategies, audiences, and frames differ, but together the two cases empirically demonstrate a potential groundswell of “caring with” (Tronto, 2013), that is, efforts to make care consistent with democratic commitments to justice, equality, and freedom. This is not to say every caregiver mobilization is an example of “caring with.” Caregivers may mobilize toward illiberal or exclusionary ends, or may not mobilize at all. In the Compromiso and ASHA cases however, the frames used by caregivers seek to deepen care and broaden citizenship.

While social and civil/political rights have preoccupied social movement research, focus on the intersections of these realms of citizenship are more recent (Krishnan, 2020; Skotnicki, 2019; Terriquez, 2015; Terriquez et al., 2018). The “public life of care” references the public end of a public/private spectrum in care, with continuities and discontinuities, and not a binary that reifies the public sphere in opposition to the private. At the same time, Tilly’s (1997) prognosis remains relevant: that discussions of citizenship tend to be excessively normative, drawing on nostalgia for civic relations that probably never existed, or summoning visions of how ideal civic life can be. Therefore, we conclude with a call for more empirical research on the relationship between care and citizenship. Our invitation is for scholars to look for and to care, that is, to excavate the care continuum in new sites and modes (and in new iterations of older sites and modes), and to treat the organization of care as a diagnostic of social relations.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Vrinda Marwah received research support from the National Science Foundation, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Foundation, PEO Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

ORCID iD

Alejandro Márquez

Notes

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