The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age by Valerie Francisco-Menchavez (review)

The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age is a theoretically rigorous, methodologically innovative, and empirically engaging ethnography by sociologist and activist-scholar, Valerie Francisco-Menchavez. In her longitudinal, transnational, feminist study that explores the creative care strategies engaged by Filipina migrants in New York and their families left behind in the Philippines, this study makes important interventions in how we think about both care work in the context of transnational work, and the multi-actor agents necessary to keep the transnational family a viable formation.

Building on the pioneering work of scholars like Rhacel Parreñas (2001) who drew attention to the emotionally taxing nature of global work and the care strategies that migrant woman invoke to "mother from a distance" (as well as the implications for children left behind), Francisco-Menchavez offers a theoretical intervention that decenters the migrant as the primary provider of care, and the direction from which care is performed and enacted. Through her concept of "multidirectional care," she argues that "multiple sets of people from multiple locations do work to maintain the transnational family as a functioning and viable family form" (7). Care work, then, is performed not only by migrants through remittances. Rather, it is performed by aunts, uncles, fathers, and others who provide support to children left behind (with the knowledge that this care eases the worry of migrant mothers), as well as by children who (regularly) keep in communication with their mothers as a way of honoring the sacrifices and challenges they face when separated from their families. Moreover, Francisco-Menchavez adopts an expansive definition of the family, social reproductive labor, and the different forms that "caring" can take in her analysis of how transnational families can remain viable, sometimes even after decades of separation.

By situating her study within the global economy that has incorporated the Philippines as the leading supplier of global labor through the workings of the Filipino labor brokerage state (Guevarra 2010; Rodriguez 2010), this study offers both grounded as well as systemic clarity on the forces shaping the experiences of (mostly undocumented) Filipina migrants engaged in domestic caregiving work, and their families left behind. To accomplish this, Francisco-Menchavez takes a three-pronged approach that interrogates what care is, how technology facilitates care, and the new "family forms" (through communities of care) that can emerge to shape the experiences of migrants and their families.

The first prong (what care is) is described above: by decentering the migrant as the primary performer of care and appreciating the multidirectional, multi-generational, and multifaceted forms by which care can be performed, we gain a deeper appreciation of the concrete ways in which transnational families remain viable.

A second theoretical intervention posed by Francisco-Menchavez is her insight into how technology through social media platforms like Facebook and Skype provide transnational families novel ways to build intimacy and stay connected under conditions of sometimes long-term separations. While other mediums of communication (like telephone and letter writing) were shown to be useful forms of sharing information or making plans, these new platforms actually facilitate intimacy and relationship-building in contexts where video-conferencing technology is the only viable means of actually "seeing" each other. Children, then, can show care to their mothers abroad by teaching them platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and allowing them access into their more daily and personal lives. These technologies, however, can be experienced by children or spouses as a form of unwanted surveillance that can exacerbate already (sometimes) strained relationships. Irrespective of these shortcomings, Francisco-Menchavez found that for migrants and their families, these new platforms have radically reshaped the kinds of interactions and intimacy that can exist across great distances. Even in times of tension, families often continue to provide care through these platforms, and in turn, maintain the transnational...