Everyday Care Activism

Chapter 5 shifts away from the organization-level focus of previous chapters by examining migrant care workers’ everyday engagements with care activism in their individual lives. By looking at individual migrant care workers’ everyday forms of activism, the chapter uses a “desire-based” framework (Tuck 2009) to show that migrant care workers’ ambitions, hopes, dreams, and desires for themselves and for their families motivate their attempts to subvert stereotypes regarding the inevitably “tragic” circumstances of their lives (Manalansan 2008). It looks at how migrant care workers navigate live-in care work, their relationships with their children and their partners, and their daily encounters with other figures such as immigration officials. It assesses, too, the diverse (and at times contradictory) ways that migrant care workers deliberately and strategically uphold care work as being empowering and therefore worthy of pride but also as only constituting a small part of who they are. They shift discourses surrounding migrant care work by participating in covert acts of workplace rebellions, participating in beauty pageants, and even making jokes with each other about their existing realities. They do these with fellow care workers as a way to form community, where they bond with each other as a result of shared experience. Through these everyday engagements with care activism, what is clear is that migrant care workers are continuously thinking of how their interventions can impact other migrant care workers.