Abstract
In this book, Francisco-Menchavez centers the transnational family, which is constituted by sustained emotional and functional links connecting mostly undocumented Filipina migrant domestic workers in New York City with their extended families back home as well as with each other. She sets out to show how this family generates “multidirectional” circuits of care and enables laborious and fraught processes of social reproduction in conditions of long-term and forced family separation. Francisco-Menchavez brings a number of things to light, some of which serve as contextual reminders throughout the book and others of which activate new categories of understanding that frame the book’s central focus of investigation. First, she reminds us that overstaying a tourist visa for the purpose of engaging in precarious work, and embarking on a painful and long-term separation from one’s family in order to provide financial support, must be understood in the context of neoliberal development, global political economy, and “forced transnationality.” It is the Philippine state’s “aggressive and sophisticated” labor-export policy that “pushes people into labor migration,” netting it huge profits in the process (p. 38). She therefore locates her work within a larger “feminist political economy theoretical frame of social reproduction” (p. 8), which includes both structures and relationships encompassing all the labors of care, paid and unpaid, emotional and practical, required to sustain life. According to the author, these labors circulate transnationally and multidirectionally and do so in the context of neoliberal globalization.
The book focuses on how families cope with the long-term absence of the migrant mother/wife/aunt and how they continue to “do family” transnationally. As part of this focus, the author also considers the paradoxical role of videoconferencing technology and social media platforms, which are, on the one hand, propagandized by tech companies and the Philippine government as a way of normalizing and blunting critiques of family separation and, on the other, play a major role in easing the strains of separation.
Francisco-Menchavez asks, broadly, how are these families negotiating mutual care strategies in the context of long-term separation over long distances and how are they adapting to the new demands, such as shifting gender and parent/child roles and new forms of emotional labor, being placed upon them? To answer these questions, she activates new categories of understanding to reveal hitherto unexplored dimensions of care-based work, relations, and subjectivities. The most important of these organizing concepts is “multidirectional care.” The concept comes out of a move to decenter the migrant in the story of migration and of the transnational family and to highlight “the horizontal exchange of care from the nonmigrant family members to their migrant counterparts simultaneously with the care work within nonmigrant families” (p. 63). A reciprocal network of care is enabled by a process of “relativizing” the family, both conceptually and in practice. This requires new arrangements: drafting into service premigration networks of extended and fictive kin to share the burden of care; adjusting the “patriarchal logics” of the family to accommodate and legitimize the reconfigured masculine identity of the nonmigrant father/husband stepping into the primary domestic role; revealing the agency of children in providing care both in their nonmigrant families and to their migrant mothers (a departure from what the author calls adultism, i.e., adult bias, in migration studies).
In chapter one, Francisco-Menchavez showcases the dynamics of this multidirectional care through stories from her multisited ethnography tracking several family networks. In chapter two, the author considers the ways in which videoconferencing and social media facilitate and compromise intimate relationships among separated family members. In chapter three, the author deploys another important concept, “communities of care,” to refer to migrant-to-migrant care and solidarity networks that build fictive kinship based on shared experiences abroad. Drawing rather liberally from queer theories of kinship and black feminist epistemologies, the author incorporates migrant families of choice into the conceptual boundaries of the transnational family. In chapter four, the author highlights the contradictory and negative emotions that can be generated by long-term separation. Here, the author once again returns to the theme of children’s sacrifice, pushing against both adultism in scholarship and the idea of remittances moving in one direction and generating a “logics of consumption” rather than relations of mutual care and sacrifice at both ends.
The rest of the book comprises a conclusion that largely summarizes and reiterates the author’s main theses and an appendix on the author’s methodology which, while not uninteresting in its own right, well might have been separately published for all the light it sheds on the subject matter of the book.
This book is important in revealing the intense emotional labors that go into keeping the transnational family afloat often through decades of painful, forced separation. One does note, however, a tendency to compulsorily fit a wide array of evidence into somewhat constricting concepts of transnational family and care.