Detached Attachment: Burnout and Commitment among Caregivers in the Immigrant Rights Movement

Abstract

The increasing numbers of migrants and asylum seekers reaching the U.S.–Mexico border since 2014 has strained local nonprofit organizations helping them. Lack of material and human resources along with uncertain policy implementation by the government generates frustration and burnout among caregivers working in local nonprofits. Nonetheless, turnover as a result of burnout is surprisingly low. To answer why so few caregivers make efforts to help migrants and asylum seekers on the border, I analyze how caregivers respond to burnout in this resource-scarce context. I find that caregivers practice what I call detached attachment, the process of physically and emotionally distancing oneself from care work, while maintaining a cognitive attachment to it. Caregivers seek space to process their negative emotions and manage their relationships with care recipients to reduce intensity, while also reflecting on their normative attachments to the work. Paradoxically, then, the negative experience of burnout ends up renewing caregivers’ commitment to the immigrant rights movement. This article highlights the significance of everyday practices of care in sustaining social movement participation.

Keywords

Sociology social movements care work immigration emotions borders

Introduction

Since 2014, increasing numbers of migrants and asylum seekers from Central America have made their way to the U.S.–Mexico border. They face an immigration system that has criminalized and detained immigrants since the 1990s (Abrego et al., 2017; Welch and Schuster, 2005). Because a large number of asylum seekers are family units, which detention centers in the United States are not equipped to detain, many are released on parole to friends and family members residing in the United States. However, neither Customs and Border Protection nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement are capable of reuniting families, so this work has fallen onto local, mostly faith-based nonprofits. This development increases workloads and absorbs the resources of organizations continuing to service their regular clients.

In this article, I examine the work done by on-the-ground caregivers in the immigrant rights movement—shelter volunteers, paralegals, and attorneys in El Paso, Texas—who assist migrants with legal and shelter needs. Because of criminalization and enhanced enforcement, migrants’ needs have greatly increased, leading to significant work burdens for caregivers. In many parts of the United States, and the world, faith-based organizations have stepped up to provide for the needs of migrants and asylum seekers. On the U.S.–Mexico border, these needs are intensified because it is a high traffic space where migrants’ legal immigration cases begin as the last of their material resources are exhausted. Under these testing conditions, one would expect burnout and turnover among caregivers. The scholarship on burnout defines it as “the emotional depletion and loss of motivation that result from prolonged exposure to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors. . .” (Leiter et al., 2015) and suggests that it leads to turnover. Recent research confirms that caregivers in El Paso working with asylum seekers experience secondary trauma and burnout (Lusk and Terrazas, 2015). However, during fieldwork, I found that turnover among caregivers in immigrant rights organizations is extremely low. I conducted 13 months of participant observation and 51 interviews in two nonprofits in El Paso. During this time, despite the stress and frustration of work, only one individual out of 30 stopped working full-time. Commitment as explained by social movement scholars does not fully explain why turnover is low under these conditions. This is because commitment to movements is conceived as a sum of positive experiences and attachments, ignoring whether or not the resources to nurture these experiences are available (Klandermans, 2009; Nepstad, 2004). Because of this discrepancy between studies of burnout and commitment, and what I saw in El Paso, I ask, why is turnover among caregivers in the highly stressful working environment of migrant care so low?

The answer lies in how the mostly women caregivers manage burnout after it happens in order to continue providing care. I call this process detached attachment, that is, the emotional and physical detachment from caregiving while maintaining cognitive attachments to care recipients and the work itself. The moral imperative to help migrants and asylum seekers, the seriousness of cases as well as the time spent with migrants on long cases leads to intense attachments to care receivers and caregiving. However, the emotional energy sustaining these attachments runs out under the daily grind of work, migrants’ departures, and negative case outcomes. Caregivers manage the ensuing stress, frustration, and burnout through the search for physical and emotional detachment from migrants and work. They develop a cognitive attachment to the work while managing space and their relationships with migrants. Detached attachment is a coping mechanism that reaffirms commitment to social movements or other social change efforts.

My findings contribute to social movement literature by showing that commitment is not only a function of positive experiences and emotions, but of negative ones as well. After experiencing burnt out, caregivers in the immigrant rights movement manage cognitive attachments, space, and relationships to avoid burnout and renew commitment. Additionally, by de-centering the high emotional points of protest, and focusing instead on the quotidian, gendered practices of care, this article highlights labor that is otherwise invisible. Caregivers “make do” (De Certeau, 1984) despite resource constraints and an uncertain policy context, and while doing so, articulate an everyday form of political resistance (Scott, 1989). This is analogous to other movements of the marginalized that provide care, such as the Black Panther Party’s provision of breakfast and medical aid to African Americans (Heynen, 2009; Nelson, 2013) and the disability rights activists who create their own “care webs” away from state and family control (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018).

This article also contributes to care work literature. It broadens the parameters of who gets counted as a care worker. Efforts to empirically measure the number of care workers for policy reasons miss caregiving within social movements (Duffy et al., 2013). Similarly, the literature maintains a constricted view of care receivers as dependents by virtue of their health or age. Here I show care work toward a population that has been rendered dependent by the consequences of state policies restricting migration, namely, the separation of families and the disruption of migration. While the caregivers I study are not engaged in care for the reproduction of one’s own or another’s family, they remain immersed in the politics of family unity and informed by familial moralities.

Literature Review: Social Change and Care Work

Social movement scholars study how people join and continue in social change efforts. James Jasper (1997) argues that it takes considerable emotional work to create the indignation and outrage that leads to protests. Moral shocks, the triggering event that shakes our view of the world and springs one into protest, is an example of this. In the present article, I look at those who have already been mobilized into action and now feel burnt out due to the demanding emotional and physical work involved in movement participation. Bert Klandermans (2009) provides a typology of commitments to explain longer term engagements with social movements. However, he does not delve into how too much commitment can lead to disengagement because of burnout. This contradictory dynamic of burnout—commitment leading to disengagement—is seen in professions and activities involving “people work” (Maslach and Jackson, 1984) and includes social movements and other social change efforts in general.

Care work is typically defined as the face-to-face activities providing for the physical and affective needs of care receivers (Huang, 2016). Care work is usually operationalized along occupational groupings such as teachers, nurses, and nannies; relationship categories like mothers, daughters, friends; and/or by economic or public sectors (e.g., health care system and childcare; Duffy et al., 2013). Missing in these conceptualizations are those face-to-face activities meeting physical and affective needs in spaces of political struggle. The immigrant rights movement, along with others, provides care in the form of physical, intimate, and emotional labor; however, this does not take place in traditional care settings and is overlooked in the scholarship. Given its gendered nature—it is mostly women who do the critical but behind-the-scenes, everyday, and mundane work of care in social movements—it is also made invisible. Instead, the public-facing aspects of movement life, charged emotions of exceptional moments like protests, and masculine figure heads get most of the attention. Conceptualizing movement participants as caregivers enriches care work literature by expanding our ideas of where care is happening, who is doing it, and the ends to which it is put. Attention to care work in social movements can show us how care work is even more commonplace, foundational, and productive than scholars thought.

Burnout is common in care work and other service-oriented jobs that depend on technical and interpersonal experience. Decades of research demonstrate that burnout leads to turnover among social workers (Abu-Bader, 2000; Kim and Stoner, 2008; Wright and Cropanzano, 1998), physicians (Gundersen, 2001; Linzer et al., 2009), nurses (Leiter and Maslach, 2009; Van der Heijden, 2019), and other human service professions (Mor Barak et al., 2001). In the context of social change efforts, Gomes and Maslach (1991) find that a combination of psychological stressors and high levels of commitment result in burnout. Among caregivers in the immigrant rights movement, burnout is a consequence of resource scarcity and the moral weight of caring for migrants and asylum seekers.

Social Movements

Social scientists have studied various attachments to and within social movements. Immaterial attachments to morality, projects, or ideas define movement frames, goals, and tactics (Doezema, 2001; Jasper, 1998; Shih, 2019). Material attachments to place, work/professions, relationships, and community also contribute to movement participation and reproduction when they are under threat (Escobar, 2001; Jasper, 1997; Oselin, 2015). However, attachments can also undermine movement goals because there is a finite number of emotional ties one can make to causes, people, and places (Goodwin, 1997; Snow et al., 1980). Strong attachments to social change can lead to burnout due to the “culture of martyrdom” prevalent among activist circles (Chen and Gorski, 2015). Therefore, a form of detachment can become necessary for caregivers in social movements to remain committed.

Collective identity is another factor explaining commitment (Klandermans, 2004). Belinda Robnett (1996) finds that gender exclusion in leadership roles positioned women as intermediaries and (micro)mobilizers in the Civil Rights Movement, which in turn increased grassroot participation. Strong identification and a nurturant emotional culture among middle-class white women with postpartum depression also encouraged participation in the postpartum support group movement (Taylor, 1999). When attachments do not necessarily involve a collective identity or a shared experience of oppression, how are they maintained when tested under stress?

Sociological work on detachment in social movements as a strategy to increase commitment is limited. Social movement literature focuses on disengagement, which is conceptualized as the opposite of commitment or the exhaustion of it. This results in the end of participation or the shift toward participation in other movements (Klandermans, 2009). Detachment as measured disengagement, without ending in turnover, remains untheorized.

Using previous research and his own work on the Dutch peace movement, Klandermans (2009) argues that the psychological costs of participation, like frustration, are not enough to cause burnout. Rather, it is these psychological stressors in combination with high levels of commitment that lead to burnout. This perspective shifts the conversation on the persistence of social movement actors away from waning participation due to a lack of commitment to how too much commitment also leads to turnover. In a similar vein, Chen and Gorski (2015) frame human rights activists’ burnout as a combination of self-inflicted pressure from working on overwhelming social problems of oppression, while receiving little organizational support to deal with the burnout that results from it.

Literature touching on burnout in social movements has focused on the persistence of actors in organizations when burnout emerges. Downton and Wehr (1991) identify shared leadership, distribution of organizational roles, reaffirmation of ideology, rituals, and strengthened relational ties as factors increasing commitment among social movement members. Nepstad (2004) identifies the reinforcement of group beliefs and identity, strengthening of relationships, and provision of material needs to reduce turnover in high-risk activism. Other scholars have added acknowledging movement successes, integrating opportunities for professional growth, and encouraging exercise and hobbies to cope with stress (Chen and Gorski, 2015).

These strategies are helpful in strengthening the three commitment styles studied by Burt Klandermans (2009): affective, continuance, and normative attachments. Affective commitment is the emotional attachment to movements built on gratifying exchanges between participants and movements. It leads to greater satisfaction in interpersonal relations, resulting in greater commitment. Continuance commitment involves investing time, energy, and resources in the movement. As the costs of leaving increase, leaving the movement becomes less likely. Lastly, normative commitment reflects congruence between movements’ and participants’ values. These commitment styles and the strategies strengthening them make activists more secure in their attachments and therefore less vulnerable to factors leading to burnout and turnover. However, Klandermans (2009) does not delve into the resources required for each of the commitment styles he describes. My study focuses on how commitment is sustained in a resource-scarce context, made more stressful due to an uncertain policy regime.

Care Work

As part of the struggle for defending immigrant rights, the movement organizations I study provide services that ameliorate the difficulties experienced by migrants, give valuable information on how the government is curtailing rights, advocate for the defense of those rights, educate the public on the immigration system, and protest on the streets. The multifaceted nature of their care work is stressful, though. Social workers, a professional group at the frontlines of care provision, have significant experience in navigating tensions between professional expectations and social justice advocacy (Reisch, 2019). Each of these poles, professionalism and activism, comes with its own set of demanding expectations. Studies on social workers confirm that large caseloads, time pressure, negative working environments, moral dilemmas, and policies that undermine adequate service provision lead to burnout (Diaconescu, 2015).

Setting aside structural factors, organizations can reduce burnout and subsequent turnover at the meso level by providing a supportive work environment and an equitable distribution of resources among social workers (Campbell et al., 2013). This may not be possible in resource-scarce settings. Hobbart and Kneese’s (2020: 3) term “radical care” takes note of social movements that embrace care provision under precarious circumstances because of their ability to create spaces of hope despite “dark histories and futures.” Other studies highlight the role of deep-acting (Brotheridge and Grandey, 2002), resilience (Collins, 2007), and different forms of self-care (Brown, 2020; Pyles, 2020) Part of the job, then, involves caregivers employing emotional strategies to cope with the burnout emerging from politically oriented care work.

A less studied strategy is the use of detachment in the face of emotional exhaustion. However, some contributions are worth noting. Tobias Haeusermann (2018) develops the term “professionalised intimacy” to convey the coexistence of intimacy and professionalism among caregivers implementing a family care model in Germany’s first dementia village. Cindy Cain (2012) illustrates how hospice workers take on detached attitudes towards death when debriefing with fellow care workers as a way of sustaining a professional self. Detachment proves important in professional settings in order to fulfill roles when emotions may be running high. However, when professional care work is embedded in social change efforts—an ideal context for burnout—detachment has not been studied sufficiently.

Context and Methods

I chose El Paso, Texas, as the site of my research because it is a historic migratory pathway for Mexicans and other Latin Americans toward the United States. Consequently, it is also a historic site for the emergence and development of immigration control. The Border Patrol originated in El Paso in 1904 (USCBP). Operation “Hold the Line,” which amassed physical barriers and agents on the border to deter crossings, was developed in El Paso in 1993 and later implemented across the southern border (Dunn, 2009). The “zero tolerance” policy that lead to thousands of family separations along the southern border in 2018 was tested in El Paso before going into full effect.

Efforts to assist and advocate for migrants on the border also have a long history in El Paso. Many refugees from the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) and the Cristero War (1926–1929) came to the United States through El Paso and were aided there. Central Americans fleeing civil wars in the 1980s also sought refuge in the city. Currently El Paso is at the forefront of assisting asylum seekers, even though the infrastructure and resources of the city pale in comparison to those of major metropolitan areas in the United States. El Paso’s poverty rate for example is higher than the national average (U.S. Census Bureau). These structural factors set the conditions for caregiving in El Paso, Texas.

This article is based on a border ethnography of the care work provided to migrants and asylum seekers between 2017 and 2018, when enhanced immigration enforcement began to consolidate in the United States. I conducted participant observation with two nonprofit organizations. One, that I call Compromiso, provides legal services to migrants and asylum seekers. Compromiso was founded in 1987 and is focused on representing low-income immigrants, including asylum seekers, victims of crime, and families seeking reunification who otherwise would not be able to afford an attorney. The organization is widely known in El Paso because it is one of the few organizations providing low costs services in the city. Compromiso also works as a clearing house in the immigrant community with regards to immigration policies and has become a regional standard-bearer for immigrant rights. The other organization included in my study, Casa Asunción, provides hospitality services. Casa Asunción was established in 1978 and is rooted in Catholic social justice teachings. The organization was founded with no clear objective other than putting the gospel into practice, but began hosting undocumented migrants when the founders realized these migrants had nowhere to turn for shelter, food, clothing, and other basic necessities. Casa Asunción also offers a border immersion program that seeks to educate high school, college, and church groups on issues regarding immigration, economic development, social justice, and human rights.

Broadly, daily tasks at Compromiso involved meeting with migrants and asylum seekers and working on their cases. The pace of these tasks depends on the types of cases being worked on. Adjustment of status cases usually require putting together a packet that is mailed to immigration agencies. On the other hand, asylum cases would require visits to the detention center, gathering evidence from family members, and putting together packets for parole or asylum, depending on the case. At Casa Asunción, a regular day may include being on shift. This means running the house for 8 hours, and ensuring that the shelter is safe at all times, chores are being done, food is getting prepared, rules are being followed, and that any emergency that comes up is attended to. The volunteer on shift is also in charge of, with help from others, receiving, orienting, and initiating the 10–30 asylum seekers the shelter would normally get Monday through Friday.

During the time that I conducted participant observation at Compromiso, staff was mostly comprised of first- and second-generation Mexican Americans with familial ties to northern Mexico. Volunteers at Compromiso were college students studying in El Paso or elsewhere who were also Mexican Americans or white. One position, assistant to the sole attorney in the organization, was filled by two white women who volunteered for a year each after finishing college. Another position, detention center intake specialist, was filled in by two Catholic nuns while I was at Compromiso. I substituted one of them and worked closely with the other. Both of them were white women in their seventies and had been in a religious order for most of their lives doing social justice work in the United States and abroad.

Casa Asunción was mostly staffed by summer and year-long volunteers who lived in one of two houses operating as shelters. During my time as a volunteer, white women, in college or recent graduates, formed the majority of the volunteer community. Three older white men were also volunteers; one of them part of a religious order, and another who had recently decided not to continue religious training to become a priest. I was constantly mistaken as a seminarian or theology student while conducting research. With the exception of the director and some members of the board, the organization was run by nonlocals. The majority of migrants and asylum seekers at Compromiso and Casa Asunción came from Central America while the minority was constituted by people from Mexico, Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, and Cameroon.

I conducted 51 in-depth interviews with shelter volunteers and legal staff during the same time period. An unintended result from conducting interviews was the highly reflexive nature of answers. Even though I was extracting information from participants, many still thanked me for asking them about their work. The interview quotes I analyze in this article are unedited in order to illustrate this reflexivity. Showing verbal missteps, silences, laughter, or halting syntax helps analysis “go beyond what people say to how they say it” (Pugh, 2013: 54). The accounts people give of their motives reveal the cultural meaning of care, and what is and is not valued by their society (Wuthnow, 1991).

Here I investigate the role of emotional management under stressful conditions and its consequences for care work. Volunteers at immigrant rights nonprofits in El Paso are often left to their own devices to deal with these conditions. Patricio, a white middle-aged volunteer at Casa Asunción, described the operating ethos of these spaces as such: “There’s a philosophy that things will happen, things will run, things will get done; there’s no need to panic, there’s no need to worry. Somehow it’s been going on for forty years and things keep going.” This article explains how “things keep going” despite the “panic” that conditions on the ground generate.

Emergence of Burnout

While caregiving and movement participation require an attachment to people, the work, or a larger mission, too much of an attachment leads to stress and burnout. How caregivers’ attachments lead to burnt out, then, is key to understanding why they remain attached after being burnt out. Here I describe how burnout emerges in Casa Asunción and Compromiso.

In addition to being composed mainly of white volunteers, Casa Asunción was also seen as radical for two reasons. First, the social justice model of the shelter involved living in the shelter in solidarity with migrants and asylum seekers. Volunteers—mostly from middle and upper middle-class backgrounds with disposable money—did not get a wage. However, they were provided with the rooms, food, clothing, toiletries, etc. that the organization acquired through donations. Second, young volunteers espoused feminist, humanitarian, and abolitionist ideologies and countercultural aesthetics that contrasted against the backdrop of a religiously oriented shelter. The volunteers at Casa Asunción were both invested in the well-being of migrants and asylum seekers and at the same time in awe of their fortitude. All would reach their physical and emotional limits while caring because there was always something that could be worked on. Their ideological commitments, either religious or political (and in many cases both), met material obstacles when put in practice.

At Compromiso, the ideological and religious impetus to help migrants was less apparent due to the professional veneer of the office. Office staff was underpaid considering their experience and workload; long-term volunteers sometimes received stipends, depending on the availability of funds. The staff’s connection to migrants was qualitatively different compared to volunteers at Casa Asunción. Most staff were Mexican American and co-ethnicity led to familiarity, especially with nondetained migrants who were usually from the border region. However, a longer time helping migrants in a bureaucratic setting, along with class difference, also created some practical distance that was unlike the idealization of migrants I saw in Casa Asunción among nonlocal volunteers.

In both organizations, paid or unpaid care work is a function of seniority. Nonetheless, both paid and unpaid caregivers experience burnout. Paid caregivers have more administrative and managerial responsibilities. At Casa Asunción this means coordinating volunteers in each house or having an executive position in the organization, which entails coordinating with immigration agencies, procuring funds, paying bills, and so on. At Compromiso, paid staff work legal cases or administer the office. Those with stipends or those volunteering have administrative or legal supporting roles. Thus, in both organizations unpaid caregivers are less experienced and thus more likely to stress about the development of cases. Paid workers experience different stressors, usually having to do with the responsibility of sustaining services.

As Byung-Chul Han (2015: 7–8) describes it, burnout emerges due to “excess positivity” of an “achievement society” generating pressure to succeed in what can be done. Not achieving these goals, according to Han, leads to depression and estrangement. Among caregivers on the border dealing with resourceless organizations, uncertainty in policy implementation, and clients’/guests’ traumatic situations, “achievement” is rarely possible. Caregivers’ sacrifice seldom results in short-term satisfactions. This section illustrates how frustration and burnout is produced in caregivers’ interactions with state agencies, their own organizations, and migrants and asylum seekers. The practice of caregiving in El Paso creates attachments, and the intensity of these attachments is revealed in the emergence of worry, frustration, and guilt among caregivers. These feelings are difficult to shake off as evidenced in informants’ constant difficulties in managing their emotions.

Compromiso

Clarissa, a twentysomething Mexican American woman from El Paso, had the task of processing all the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) renewals before the 5 October 2017, deadline established by the Department of Justice after it rescinded the program on 5 September 2017. Having processed over 50 applications in the span of three weeks, Clarissa was emotionally exhausted. On a day nearing the deadline, I walked into Compromiso’s kitchen and found her eating breakfast at lunch time while looking at her phone. She looked up visibly tired, a look the legal staff learned to recognize in each other. “I couldn’t sleep last night. I had a nightmare that I messed up with some of the applications!” A few days later, when Clarissa was finished with the greater portion of the renewal applications, Rebecca, Compromiso’s director and sole attorney, commended her for her excellent attention to detail at a staff meeting. This alleviated Clarissa’s concerns, but only momentarily. On separate occasions, Clarissa continued to complain about neck pains and general tension that even her masseuse noticed around her shoulders. Physical strains of this sort are typical of office work, so their relief also becomes a regular topic of conversation. Exercise, massages, therapy, and drug use (including alcohol) are ways staff members at Compromiso occasionally deal with stress and frustration.

Talk of self-care and burnout was a constant at Compromiso. Melissa, a thirtysomething Mexican American woman from El Paso and the most senior staff member at Compromiso, continually warned staff members about the signs of burnout. On many occasions, she shared with me that once you start hunching over or feeling tension in your shoulders, it means you have begun to internalize stress. Melissa is aware of these issues because she has burnt out in the past. When Melissa began working at Compromiso, she would feel guilty about going back home after work to watch television, so she began taking work home. The toll of work led to a dramatic disconnection from work: she stopped using a cell phone. Without a cellphone, Melissa was unreachable outside the office. Neither work colleagues nor clients could call her if they had questions about cases. Eventually the staff convinced her to start using her cellphone again. Despite her awareness about the initial signs of burnout, she still succumbed to the dynamics leading to burnout. During my fieldwork, after a week’s vacation during the summer, Melissa again began to take work home because she had fallen behind on her cases.

Melissa’s experience illustrates the generative role of guilt, a moral emotion associated with harm done to communal or personal relationships (Haidt, 2003). Rebecca considers guilt a serious symptom given its intrusiveness during personal time. “Guilt. Intrusive thoughts. So, can you be enjoying your day and then suddenly you start thinking about somebody that’s detained? And how you can’t help them. . .” For some staff members, even after knowing they are burnt out, guilt is manifested because they compare themselves to others. Kamila, Rebecca and Melissa’s legal assistant, felt burned out after a year of working at Compromiso. She felt a sense of failure and guilt for not being as productive as others and also because others seemed to be flourishing under the same working conditions. In the caregiving exchange, then, feeling like one is not doing enough to help migrants weighs emotionally.

Additionally, frustration and burnout emerge in interactions with the subjects of care: migrants. Rebecca explains the feeling the following way: “one of the symptoms. . .is clients just start getting on your nerves. . .that’s the best way to know you are burned out, that you need some time off.” She related that after hearing similarly patterned stories of abuse over and over again, “When you’ve heard a VAWA story for the thirteenth time and you start to be like. . .you roll your eyes. . .you are just annoyed: why are you still with him?” Rebecca contrasts this frustration with the compassion that moves her, other staff members, and volunteers at Compromiso, but, she warns, when you stop being compassionate, “it’s burnout.” Additionally, Rebecca also points out that given enhanced enforcement policies, burnout happens more easily because “there’s little that we can do and we feel really helpless.”

Care workers burnout at Compromiso because the state has created a stressful context for care. Without many resources, Compromiso cannot hire enough staff, leading to emotions of guilt and inadequacy among caregivers who cannot accomplish all the work that needs to be done. This combination of pressures, along with high levels of commitment to immigrants’ well-being, causes burnout.

Casa Asunción

Isabel, a white woman in her late twenties from the Midwest, has been a volunteer for more than five years at Casa Asunción and experiences burnout when big changes in shelter dynamics take place, such as when long-term guests with whom she has bonded leave the house. And then there was the unexpected arrival of a large number of Cuban refugees that depleted the organization’s material and human resources. Other volunteers’ criticisms of how she handled the situation made her feel devalued, exacerbating her frustration. Isabel explained to me how the departure of a guest and her child along with a conflict with another guest left her burnt out.

. . .But when Nancy left, she had been with us for over a year. She had her child born when she was in the house. I was really close with the child and she left. And it wasn’t just that. That was hard. That was hard to just go from being really close to this mom and this child and her other kids, too, from one day to the next, whether or not I agree with her decision, whether or not that was a good idea that they’ll be okay. I mean, part of me is like, “Yeah, they’ll be okay. He doesn’t need me. He knows me and we’re really good friends, me and this baby, but he’ll be fine. He’s got other people.” But emotionally, it’s a change. And then, I think right after that was when that mom that attacked me and so I was just exhausted.

Even though Isabel tries to hide it, she did not want Nancy and her children to leave. This strong emotional attachment to migrants, the disappointing news of their departure, her fight with the other shelter resident, and all the other work she was doing as shelter coordinator ultimately led to burnout.

The reproduction of care work can be both facilitated or undermined by the use of space. At Casa Asunción, the blurry division between work and life, that is, living where you work, allows the organization to react easily to crises, but it also makes volunteers feel trapped. Olivia, a twentysomething white woman from the Midwest and the coordinator of another house run by Casa Asunción, explained the frustration emerging from how the place was set up:

Yeah, for me I think one of the harder parts is just feeling I can’t get away because I am living at the house and I need to sleep there and I need to eat, and I also need to work. . .sometimes I feel like everything is so constant because we’re always on call and there’s always new things happening at the house that it feels like I can’t always process everything. I’m also an introverted person so sometimes it’s very exhausting for me to just to be with people in the house all the time. And it feels very hard to get away and process everything I’ve been experiencing with the people in the house. So sometimes I feel I get negative emotions too, just being frustrated or just so tired, and sometimes that makes me feel angry like sometimes I have needs too but I’m trying to meet all these other people’s needs and respond. And sometimes I feel like I can’t even do a good enough job of that because there’s not always enough volunteers, and then I can’t even meet some of my own needs. And so, I get – sometimes I just feel kind of negative about that.

The cumulative effect of physical and emotional tasks takes a toll on Olivia because she works where she lives. She misses a division between home and work. Absent the divide, being tired, frustrated, and having unmet needs makes her feel angry and negative. Ultimately, without the space to process emotions, there is no finality to a day or to an emotional dynamic. Olivia feels suffocated. Even though anger and other negative feelings are not what volunteers are supposed to feel at Casa Asunción—for it is supposed to be a sanctuary of compassion and peace—they form a constitutive part of the experience.

In this section I show how caregivers in Compromiso and Casa Asunción experience burnout. Burnout is the outcome of strong attachments under stressful conditions. Caregivers are attached to cases through the work they do and the migrants they meet. Knowing that migrants are in delicate situations adds emotional weight to the practice of caregiving. As a result, caregivers reduce this weight not by quitting, but by strategically detaching from work and migrants while remaining attached to their mission. In the next section, I illustrate the response to burnout: detached attachment. Through detached attachment caregivers renew their commitment to the immigrant rights movement.

Detached Attachment: A Response to Burnout in Resource-Scarce Settings

Isabel defines the experience of being burnt out as “feeling exhausted, less emotionally connected to some of the work that I do or not wanting to, wanting to detach myself—emotionally, specifically. And not having as much. . .motivation.” But these feelings are difficult to manage under the current immigration regime, which is aggressive in its actions against migrants. Caregivers like Alice, Isabel, and Oliva catch no break from caregiving.

Given the lack of resources to combat burnout, caregivers respond with what I call detached attachment: the process of physically and emotionally distancing oneself from care work, while maintaining a cognitive attachment to it. Accordingly, this process requires management on three fronts: (1) maintaining cognitive attachments to care work; (2) finding space away from care work to attend to one’s own care; and (3) managing relationships with migrants and asylum seekers. This, I argue, is what keeps social movement actors persisting rather than ceasing to help. Through this process, caregivers are able to reaffirm their commitment to care work and their social change efforts.

Melissa is the most vocal proponent in Compromiso of detaching to relieve frustration. She explained to me the balancing act that caregivers in El Paso continually engage in when calculating how much they should work and how much they should rest.

I was talking about it to a friend this weekend. . . and we were exchanging war stories. . .there has to be better self-discipline to separate work from leisure because it’s almost like you are having leisure and then you run into somebody and something comes up and you start talking about things and it gets as intense as they are at work but maybe they don’t have anything to do with immigration. . .but it’s just like the brain is programed to work like that, all the time and she was telling me how she was able to help this one person and she had to work a lot of extra hours and she was super behind doing a bunch of other things that she needed to do at the time and while she is telling me this, the logical side of my brain is saying “dude, you can’t work twelve hours and then study and then try to find leisure.” The body is just not made for that, right? But like my bleeding-heart Mel from work [laughter] my bleeding heart me from work was, “dude, she was so blessed to have had run into you because you changed her life in such an awesome way, right?”

Melissa uses abstract categories of the “brain” and “heart” to distinguish between practices that make her a healthy caregiver—one whose body is rested—and those that make her a passionate being, which is also needed to be a good caregiver. Melissa frames her concerns for leisure as self-centered, while she frames her passion for work as selfless. Her reflection nonetheless recognizes that helping migrants under current conditions of overwork is unsustainable. Her newly revisited desire, therefore, is more distant and self-centered. Melissa’s desire to help involves a cognitive attachment to care work rather than a purely passionate attachment. The latter can be draining and potentially inhibiting. The former allows her to moderate her passion, and to recast the work in a more detached light. Several interviewees spoke of their care work in terms of a recalibration, a tempering of expectations, a battle between what they want (heart) and what is possible to achieve (brain). This reveals the cognitive reframing of the relationship to care that is common in these organizations.

The second component of detached attachment, the search for space, was more poignant at Casa Asunción. The live-in requirements for volunteers here can overwhelm them. Olivia explained the role of space in caregiving, illustrating why the need for distance becomes necessary.

And also just like listening to these hard stories all the time and—I mean that does affect me too and so not—sometimes feeling like I can’t—there’s not a good place for all those negative feelings to escape to before the next time that I have to be with people again. And even when I’m not on shift or if it’s my off day and I’m still at the house for whatever reason, even just going to the bathroom or trying to get breakfast, people know that I work there so they come to me with questions and I can’t even respond to my own really basic needs [Laughs]. I just don’t always want to be around people, and that’s really, really hard on the house. And so just being in that kind of environment 24/7 is exhausting. So sometimes I feel like I’m not refreshed to do it again. And I know that I’d interact with people a lot more effectively and compassionately if I feel I’m well rested and I had time to exercise and haven’t just like been constantly in the house for the last two days meeting everyone’s needs or trying to, to the best of my ability [laughs].

Olivia describes the never-ending nature of her work, which causes a buildup of feelings that need to “escape.” But Casa Asunción is not an appropriate place for an escape because the needs of migrants are so demanding. In order to help others, Olivia must first take care of herself; at the same time, this is exactly what Olivia and other volunteers signed up to do—to put the needs of others first. In the face of this dilemma, caregivers manage space so they can replenish their emotional energy. Olivia does this by leaving the house, getting exercise, because “just going to the bathroom or trying to get breakfast” can lead to requests from migrants or other caregivers. Olivia’s search for space was common to the volunteers I observed and interviewed. Many expressed the desire for a “breather” or an “escape.” and would find similar ways of achieving it.

The third component of detached attachment is the emotional management of relationships with care recipients. Here, Alice illustrates the anxious attachment emerging from relationships between care workers and care receivers as a source of burnout:

. . . I felt very challenged by. . .guests coming and going. I think of this mom that was with us for a while with her one-year-old and her two-year-old. And I felt like really attached to her kids and I really just adored them a lot. And then after a couple of months of being at A House she left. . .And so, I felt really challenged by that and I felt really sad and worried about her. I remember even having nightmares just about like her situation and like hoping that she was ok. I think that’s just hard with people coming and going. It’s like I’m happy for them that they’re moving on to something else but it’s also challenging.

Alice feels sad about being physically estranged from Casa Asunción residents when they leave, but at the same time, she is happy that they are moving on to “something else” when they leave the house, even though this “something else” may be worse. Uncertainty about the future of Casa Asunción’s migrant residents worry Alice, which causes her nightmares. This worry was expressed to me by volunteers on different cases and I felt this worry myself when I lived in Casa Asunción. This management of relations with guests is the final component of detached attachment. The cognitive attachment that Melissa undertakes, the management of space that Olivia narrates and Alice’s management of relationships with shelter guests show how caregivers reduce the intensity of attachments that lead to burnout. Detached attachment is a process that begins after burnout. It results in a renewed commitment to care work and social movement participation; I explore this progression in the next section.

Renewed Commitment through Detached Attachment

While detached attachment is a response to burnout, it also has the effect of renewing commitment for the caregivers who engage in it. By the time I started my field work, Isabel had been living outside the house in a nearby apartment room owned by Casa Asunción. When she requested the apartment, Marcos, the shelter director, was concerned that Isabel was burnt out. Isabel shared with me that “his interpretation of being burnt out is: you need to leave or you should leave or people usually leave. . .in my sense, if it’s something you care about, like when you are a mother and you are burnt out, do you just leave your child?” Moving out of the shelter was indicative of burnout, but was also a strategy that Isabel employed to be able to continue working. “Casa Asunción is basically a lifetime of emotions but really, really fast. . .[you have to let] yourself feel burnt out and trying to understand where that comes from.” In order to do this reflective work, Isabel needed space that the shelter was not providing.

The management of space is essential to recharge physically and emotionally. The space afforded Isabel room to reflect on her emotions, values, and personal goals. Isabel’s detachment, and that of other caregivers, strengthens the attachment to work. I interviewed Isabel a year after she moved out of the shelter, and she was going strong. She told me she wants to continue helping even in old age: “. . .what are my abilities and capabilities at that time. Can I still talk? If I can’t use my hands, will I even be useful? Would I just give lectures? What skills can I use to still make a difference? I’ve thought about that for some reason.” Isabel’s detachment—taking space by moving into the apartment—I argue is constitutive of her attachment to caregiving. It is a reaction to caregiving and undertaken to perpetuate care work. Therefore, I find that detachment is not a negation of emotion but a management, a search for a feeling of emotional stability, certainty, or rationality.

After Isabel told me how she dealt with burnout, I asked her if her job was difficult. She said no: “I think living is difficult. I think this [work] makes it worth living.” Then, Isabel reflected on her career options; whether she should be doing something she does well or something that makes money. Ultimately, neither avenue does anything to mitigate her concerns about her complicity in what she perceives as an oppressive capitalist system:

For me, that’s just difficult to think, “I’m taking the easy way out.” This makes sense. Doing this makes life—living in a world where—that’s why there is so much oppression. . .[p]art of me is still living in the system but doing the work is the thing that makes the most sense and gives me the most life, makes it more worth living. . .And it’s not about being good at a challenge. It’s about doing what’s right. And being able to fulfill that part of me makes it, makes life, life.

Isabel’s reflections reframe the difficulties of her work by downplaying how effective she is or is not, and making the matter about morality. This is an honorable position (Pugh, 2013) where she sacrifices “taking the easy way out” for “doing what’s right.” Isabel says that being faithful to care work is easier than living a regular life. Here, Isabel is alluding to morals that will make it easier to live with her conscience, despite the difficult physical and emotional work of the shelter. This logic has no finitude and Isabel struggles to articulate how her sacrifice is having an impact on what she identifies as the “system.” Her open-ended motivations show that caregiving is not only about helping migrants and asylum seekers, but also about the perpetuation of the care work she identifies with.

Detached attachment, then, encapsulates the balance between the emotional closeness to care and the distance necessary to reflect on and calibrate the various tasks of caregiving. At Compromiso, Melissa’s clearest form of detachment took place when she decided to stop using a cellphone. But the ability to disconnect from the casework itself did not mean migration was not on her mind. Activity on Facebook from various staff members at Compromiso indicates that they read, commented, and engaged in debates about immigration online while they are supposed to be home resting. Sandra, a twentysomething woman from the Northeast volunteering at Casa Asunción, continually talks about her work when she is not at the shelter. In fact, she enjoys visiting detained migrants and asylum seekers with another local organization during her free time. Sandra considers these visits as rest from the shelter. Detached attachment allows for these kinds of engagements to occur without producing the turnover one would normally expect from burnout.

Discussion and Conclusion

The previous studies of burnout in social movements focus on the types of commitment that keep social change actors from disengagement and the organizational practices that prevent burnout. Klandermans (2009) provides a typology of commitment styles associated with movements, but he does not expand on how movements manage burnout to reduce turnover. Nepstad (2004) provides explanations as to how these commitment styles are put into action and reinforced through organizational practices. However, the reasons why they are successful strategies remains unanswered. In this paper, I offer part of an explanation through detached attachment. Given that Compromiso and Casa Asunción are resource scarce organizations, they are not able to provide all of the organizational practices necessary to manage burnout. Rather, caregivers are left to their own devices most of the time. This is where alternative strategies to deal with burnout emerge. In this case, the search for detached attachment illustrates the balancing act needed to maintain commitment within a social movement, with the distance necessary to both manage burnout once it happens and reduce the likelihood that it will emerge again.

Detached attachment has three components. First, it involves a cognitive attachment to care work while keeping some distance from it. As Melissa indicates, one must balance the “heart” and “brain” parts of oneself in order to do this work. The costs associated with movement participation, as Klandermans (2009) explains with the concept of continuance commitment, might dissuade participation. Caregivers in El Paso sacrifice a lot while they are involved in the immigrants’ rights movement. Detached attachment allows caregivers to calibrate the balance of “brain” and “heart,” preventing future burnout periods.

Second, detached detachment requires the management of space. Olivia describes how exhausting and frustrating her work is. These negative feelings need an escape that is not available in Casa Asunción; Olivia seeks a literal, spatial detachment from work through leisure and recreation. This physical space away also allows her to process negative feelings. In this way, the detached space of reflection is still attached to the practice of caregiving. This is why, as we see with Isabel, in the space of reflection, normative commitments are strengthened and renewed. Nepstad’s (2004) study on the Plowshares Movement confirms the need for renewed commitment. She documents rituals using modified Catholic songs with movement themes that are used to strengthen movement members’ faith.

Third, detached attachment depends on the management of relations with others. In the case of Compromiso and Casa Asunción, the loss of an immigration case or the departure of a migrant weighs heavily on caregivers, so they learn to be less emotionally attached to migrants and asylum seekers in order to manage their feelings and continue their work. Less intense emotional relationships reduce the weight of intensity that can lead to burnout again.

These findings build on and extend Klandermans’s typology of three commitment styles. While Klandermans focuses on the role of positive emotions, investments, and value-congruence in binding participants to movements, I focus on the role of negative emotions (burnout) as generative of the same outcome (commitment). In terms of Klandermans’s typology, I find burnout decreases affective attachments (the first type) but also draining negative emotions that burn people out. Detached attachment strengthens continuance commitment (the second type)—that is, the costs associated with engagement that encourage continuing participation—by providing a space to reconfigure emotional and cognitive responses, and balance work and rest in order to continue caregiving. By moderating their sacrifices, caregivers are less likely to burnout again. Finally, caregivers strengthen normative commitments (the third type) by processing negative emotions, which helps them reconnect with the values that motivate their social change efforts.

There is empirical and theoretical value to bringing social movement participants into discussions of care work. Empirically, a focus on these participants allows us to move beyond protest—the collective effervescence that is so powerful in attracting and retaining members—into the quotidian everyday practices that ultimately carry forward the life and work of social movements. These caregiving practices are gendered and invisible, but they expand our notion of who caregivers are, as well as who care recipients are, allowing for calculations of the care economy to more accurately reflect the extent of caregiving on the ground (Duffy et al., 2013). Gendered mobilizing structures exclude women but also facilitate mobilization. In the immigrant rights movement, gendered mobilization takes place through an emotional culture of care, primarily focused on the care of others. These gendered structures not only help organize self-care among women, then, but also prove effective when used to help migrants.

Theoretically, the article focuses on social movements in moral situations demanding practical answers. In this case, when states do not provide services to address marginalization or cause harm that generates dependency, social movements and their organizations provide care. Understanding social movement participation as care work enriches the conceptualization of commitment, revealing the everyday forms of care involved in surviving state neglect and violence. Additionally, by not including social movement actors as care workers, scholars may favor the public sphere as the prime site for social movement research when other spaces might be just as important. Care work scholars, on the other hand, may miss how care work can also be a form of direct political action. Moreover, by explaining low turnover despite burnout in social movements, I show how detachments, and not just attachments, help caregivers persist in their jobs despite difficult working conditions. This adds to our understanding of how caregivers cope in resource scarce and politically contentious contexts. Detached attachment can potentially work for other forms of care work, but necessarily in contexts that are resource scarce and politically contentious. This is what is common to Casa Asunción and Compromiso, producing the attachment, and as I show, the detachment necessary to continue. Ultimately, I show how negative experiences are generative of positive outcomes. As the number of displaced people around the world continues to rise, the work of caregivers in difficult contexts also rises in significance. Future research can compare caregiving within and outside of social movement contexts to parse out the dynamics of detached attachment, specifically, to investigate the nature of commitments to care as they relate to social change efforts.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interest

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Alejandro Márquez

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