【by Hannah Lorenzo】
To first understand the presence of Filipino migrant workers in the Western sphere, one
should analyze the context of the Philippines’ national independence from Spanish rule as well
as the U.S.’ military interference during the Spanish-American War and the Philippine
Insurrection. Ever since its declaration of independence in 1946, the Philippines is still
considered a “developing” Third World country, where many Filipinos become Overseas
Filipino Workers (OFWs) to provide financial support to their families back home. These
Filipinos migrate to the West, most notably the U.S. and Canada, taking up labor as migrant
employees. What is interesting to note is how Filipinos, specifically Filipino women, are
identified as the majority population of the profession of nurses and caregivers when employed
as OFWs. Along with a history of national and racial discrimination in the U.S. toward the
Philippines that subjected Filipinos to being “uncivilized” and in need of Western governmental
institutions, Western stereotypes are still perpetuating the identification of Filipina migrants as
caring women, nurses, and/or caregivers in the domestic sphere. The intersectionality of race and
gender impacts Filipina nurses and health caregivers migrating to the West, particularly the U.S.
and Canada, through racial and gendered divisions of labor confining them into categorizations
of female migrants and employees. These categorizations complicate the argument of the
suppression of the “Third World women” construct for Filipina nurses and health caregivers by
translating the significance of familial values to the cultural roles of Filipinas under Western
employment. Within the context of this intersectionality, comparisons can be made between
these roles that Filipinas inhabit both in the U.S. and Canada, and how these institutions for
migrant employees set boundaries around women’s social and cultural mobility.
To start, the foundation of how the intersectionality of race and gender came to be in the
West should be recognized to contextualize Filipinas’ roles as nurses and caregivers as well as
complicate the modes of oppression that it creates. Critical social theories on the oppression of
Black women in the Western sphere can be a significant point of research to consider in this
intersectionality. Rather than a direct comparison between Black women and Filipinas, one can
instead interpret the underlying challenges and resistance they both faced that are set in diverse
geopolitical and cultural spheres. “The Politics of Black Feminist Thought” by Patricia Hill
Collins presents research conducted in the 1980s to 1990s, revealing the causes of the oppression
of Black feminist scholarship to include economical, political, and ideological barriers; these
barriers impacted Black women by isolating them into specific Western stereotypes based on
their race and gender, using their race to justify American segregation of Black communities
while naming them “mammies” and “jezebels” as slang terms for their role as uneducated,
“breeder” women (McCann et al., 2003, p. 321). Here, Collins argues that Black women faced
both racial and gender discrimination that placed them in unique positions of societal oppression
apart from their Black communities and white womanhood. Especially within a white,
patriarchal framework in the U.S., Black women were challenged with choosing which side to
support, being forced to pick a side as the societal recognition of this intersectionality was hidden
due to further complicating Black people and white women’s movements for their own
democratic liberties. Connecting this with Filipinas in the West, their roles as migrant employees
also merge Western discriminatory action through racial prejudice and gender bias in the
nursing/caregiving workforce that are impacted by their non-native status in the West. However,
it is also important to highlight how these women interact and form their own acts of resistance
rather than simply persevere under this oppression. Collins’ critical social theory emphasizes
how Black women in the U.S. shared their life experiences as both Black people in segregated
communities as well as women who shared roles as mothers and caregivers; they developed an
“outsider-within” framework, allowing them greater insight into how their position as
“opposites” in race, gender, and class stimulated their oppression in domestic work as caregivers
within a white patriarchy (McCann et al., 2003, p. 327-328). They compared their perspective
with that of the American white woman while further understanding their interconnected roles as
mothers, laborers, and intellectuals in these interactions. This understanding may have a relation
and impact on Filipina caregivers in the domestic sphere, further challenging this oppression. By
studying how Filipina migrants developed their own “outsider-within” perspective, there may
also be an intersectionality that ties race, gender, as well as cultural roles that hold significance
for them back home in the Philippines.
To analyze the Western stereotype identifying Filipinas as natural caregivers, the
connection made with their migrant status impacts the discrimination and prejudice they faced.
From “Registered Nurse to Registered Nanny: Discursive Geographies of Filipina Domestic
Workers in Vancouver, B.C.” by Geraldine Pratt, the author researched how Filipinas migrated
as temporary citizens to the West in the 1990s; Canada being one of the prominent countries they
migrate to, they are required to enroll in the Nursery Nurse Examination Board (NNEB), a two
year certificate program in early childhood care and education, to take part in the Live-in
Caregiver Program in Vancouver (Pratt, 1999, p. 227-228). These women earned the formal
qualifications as registered nurses, but their migrant status shifted their qualifications into
subservient, female qualities in the Western sphere, becoming a defining factor in how Filipina
nurses were downgraded to nannies and domestic caregivers. Pratt looked into the Philippine
Women Centre in Vancouver, where they congregated with fellow Filipinas and created social
networks to gain these job opportunities. As such, these centers most likely facilitated manners
of communicating shared goals of providing for their families in the Philippines as well as their
experiences in being stereotyped as “underdeveloped,” foreign women. This grants insight into
how the racial and gender intersectionality interacted with their identification as “visa holders”
by the federal government and “employees” by provincial governments (Pratt, 1999, p. 222);
Pratt argues how “imaginative geographies,” depicting contrasting identities placed upon
Filipinas, enabled Canadian agencies to manipulate their roles as domestic workers by
“deskilling” Filipina registered nurses who could not receive further education or citizenship
rights, enticing them with visa opportunities, and suppressing them through relocation to their
employers’ residences (Pratt, 1999, p. 221 & 225). Overall, a main takeaway from Pratt’s
research is that these women’s racial and ethnic status as Filipinas classified them as foreigners
and noncitizens in the West, allowing governmental restrictions within these legal parameters
and also hinting at an Orientalist perspective in these “imaginative geographies” that paint a
Western-controlled image of Filipina migrants. In a way, this “outsider-within” perspective
contains a double-standard institutional recognition of how these women were both degraded as
foreign noncitizens who have to earn equitable citizenship rights and as women who are socially
and even “naturally” assigned domestic work as mothers, wives, and caregivers for their
employers. Another article, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses” by Chandra Mohanty, ties in this idea of the “exploited Third World women”
construct within these categorizations (Pratt, 1999, p. 232). Mohanty’s depiction of women as a
“category of analysis” highlights how Western feminist discourse viewed women in Third World
countries as constantly shaped by their “developing” societal frameworks rather than having any
self-determination in shifting their own positions in social, political, and cultural contexts
(Mohanty, 1984, p. 338). Filipinas’ migration to Canada is one example of how Filipinas are
exploited in the intersectionality of race, gender, and migrant status. It challenges them to take on
the profession in caregiving with a Western stigma tying it to lack of education and racial
inferiority rather than their esteemed qualifications as registered nurses. Mohanty’s notion of
women as a category connects to the manipulation of Filipinas’ labor roles as caregivers, rather
than registered nurses, in their employer’s homes, the defining differences between these terms
enabling Western employment institutions to sequester their identification to a singular domestic
quality. This relocation merges the differentiation of the economic and social spheres, concealing
these women in the household and downplaying their healthcare labor as familial domestic work
for varying wages and no standard working conditions to be established. Though their work may
assume them to be a part of their employers’ families, the lack of employee rights combined with
noncitizenship are another mode of racial and gender oppression for Filipina migrants.
Making the connection with Filipina nurses and caregivers’ experiences in Canada to the
U.S., there is already a discrepancy in that the U.S. had a more direct conflict with the
Philippines after the Spanish-American War. While the Philippines prepared for their
independence, they faced another imperial-like world power that not only racially discriminated
against Filipinos, but also attempted to reinforce external government control until the
Philippines could “prove” their ability to self-govern in Western-making transitology. With this
in mind, “The Cost of Caring: The Social Reproductive Labor of Filipina Live-in Home Health
Caregivers” by Charlene Tung provides an example that presents similar challenges Pratt noted
in Canada. Tung highlights how many Filipina migrants were actually not registered nurses, as
these women were mostly “off the books”; rather than going through governmental
documentation like in Vancouver, they moved through “social networks” of friends, relatives,
and “‘unaffiliated providers’” (Tung, 2000, p. 64-65). These pathways allowed them to gain
more opportunities to earn and send money to their families in the Philippines, despite the
knowledge that their employee rights would diminish through the more informal employment
sectors that appeared to offer them more economic and social mobility as women and
noncitizens. There is also a connection made with Pratt’s studies of Filipina caregivers’
relocation to their employers’ homes in Canada, where Filipina caregivers in the U.S. were
hidden in the private sector of “‘natural’” and “unskilled” work in elderly people’s homes while
maintaining the gendered stereotypes of men working in the public sphere (Tung, 2000, p. 65).
Within this gendered division of labor, Filipina caregivers’ cultural values to care for their
families implicitly aids in creating the barrier that denigrates their caregiving experiences and
employment through a gendered assignment of work simulating housewife and motherly roles.
All the while, this maintains a form of hidden discrimination against Filipinos that still
references the history between the two countries, playing on Filipinas’ familial importance of
caregiving, especially providing financial aid, to excuse non-regulated employment and
discriminatory practices justified under the exclusivity of national identity/citizenship.
Focusing on these familial values of Filipina caregivers, the emotional division of labor
also works alongside gender in conflicting their cultural and economic roles in the Philippines
and the U.S. Tung’s research on Filipina non-RNs in the U.S. centered around this emotional
labor by defining Filipinas’ work as “mothering from afar,” alternating between being motherly
toward their elderly employers they considered parents while removing their presence from their
families in the Philippines (Tung, 2000, p. 66-68, 74). This provides a different perspective from
what Pratt’s research found in Vancouver, where there is not only a perpetuation of Filipinas’
caregiving profession experiences and nurturing qualities assigned to them as women in the
domestic sphere, but also a complication in that Tung’s work highlights a way these women
found familial and personal value in their employment. Identifying their elderly employers as
parental figures provides a way for Filipina caregivers to shift and elevate their rank in status as
mothers, wives, and overall caregivers by their own cultural standards, which challenges the
“category of analysis” that conforms Western images of women in Third World countries, as
Mohanty points out. To make another connection, “Commercial Surrogacy in India:
Manufacturing a Perfect Mother-Worker” by Amrita Pande revolves around surrogates in India
becoming the “perfect mother-workers” as non-attached, reproductive laborers and caregivers
with the innate female ability to care for dependents/children (Pande, 2010, p. 977). The
economic factor of surrogacy supported these women’s ability to provide for their families, just
as Filipinas could in their caregiving work, though the construct of both serving and potentially
severing close ties to their families in the Philippines remains a balancing act. Regardless, their
experiences with nurturance also interact with this factor in helping bring purpose to their work
as financial providers and cultural representatives. One representation is found through the
“surrogates’ feelings of self-worth” in embracing their motherly, caring qualities as women,
while “eroding the surrogates’ recognition of the significant role they play as workers and
breadwinners for their family” (Pande, 2010, p. 988). Pratt also studied how the exploitation of
Filipina caregivers in Canada manipulated their citizenship and visa identification that lowered
their status in the racial and gendered divisions of labor. Though, Tung’s work further hints at
the shifting interactions of Filipinas in connecting the importance placed on their families with
the care they provide for their employers. It is significant to consider how Filipinas are exploited
in this manner in the West, where the concept of motherly, caring qualities as a natural attribute
for women may not solely be due to Western stereotypes. Tung’s research also indicated that
many Filipina caregivers choose to accept lower wages due not only to “their own comfort level
and emotional connection with their patients, but also in the interest of the patients’ families”
(Tung, 2000, p. 75). The emotional labor adds a complex level of how Filipinas in these
positions respond to the layers of oppression and decisions they are exposed to, possibly creating
a vague separation between Western stereotypes of naturally nurturing Filipinas and Filipinas’
comprehension of these qualities that suit their cultural and financial stability. These women’s
goals as OFWs, nurses, and/or caregivers in relation to their cultural emphasis on women’s roles
as mothers, wives, and caregivers in the Philippines may also influence this racial, gender, and
migrant intersectionality.
Reviewing the variations in the intersectionality of race and gender stated initially,
Filipina nurses and caregivers who migrate to the West are further defined by their identities as
migrants and employees that shift the societal ranking and cultural value of caregiving.
Similarities were found in the examples from their migration to Canada and the U.S., where their
status as Third World women is manipulated by implicit discrimination and prejudice within the
explicit framework of Western governmental identification. Here, Filipinas are easily stripped of
their healthcare education from their home country, replaced by reassignments as female
domestic workers who are demoted to the status of “nannies,” which in itself in the West can be
interpreted as a stereotype associated with impoverished, uneducated women. Not only are they
suppressed by the Third World stigma of their country, but they are forced to accept the different
connotations of their caregiving work that infer their gender is inferior to the patriarchal, public
sector. However, Tung’s research delves into how they transferred their values of respect and
care for their families, especially their elders in Filipino culture, with their Western elderly
employers. This brings an intriguing outlook into how these values may reflect their associations
of motherly, caring qualities as innate or developed qualities of women within the Philippines,
and how these are further exploited by their Western employment and narrowly interpreted
without considering the empowered Filipinas’ perspectives. In “Pagdipara: Caring work by poor
elderly women in coastal communities in Iloilo, Philippines” by Alice Prieto-Carolino and
Bernice Landoy Mamauag, the authors interviewed three elderly Filipino women from Iloilo,
Philippines, an area relying on coastal fishing for employment and income; their interviews
developed similar themes of these women caring for their families as full-time housewives for
their children, grandchildren, and husbands who all became disabled (Prieto-Carolino &
Mamauag, 2019, p. 384). As these coastal communities gained economic well-being from
fishing, the generational continuance of fishermen husbands and household wives impacted the
gendered division of labor of nurturance and caregiving for women and more public, physical
labor for men in the Philippines. The more positive connotations of caregiving for these women
growing up and still living in the Philippines also emphasize how more research should be done
on how the term “pagdipara” or “caring” is influenced by not only the gendered conformity of
men and women’s labor, but also the social and cultural upbringing that values these caregiving
qualities of Filipinas. This upbringing is also a factor in determining the cultural roles of these
women’s engagement and devotion to being mothers and wives, as these were deemed their
utmost responsibilities and desires (Prieto-Carolino & Mamauag, 2019, p. 385). The gendered
stereotypes of Filipinas’ exploited roles as caregivers in the West and even the Philippines
should not be discounted. However, the recognition of these women’s self-worth and personal
understanding of their roles as essential for them as women is another avenue to further study,
learning how their own interpretations and interactions with caregiving may challenge past
discourses focusing solely on the Western institutionalized exploitation of such roles.
Works Cited
McCann, C. R., Kim, S.-K., & Collins, P. H. (2003). The Politics of Black Feminist Thought. In
Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (pp. 318–333). essay,
Routledge.
Mohanty, C. T. (1984). Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.
Boundary 2, 12/13, 333–358.https://doi.org/10.2307/302821
Pande, A. (2010). Commercial Surrogacy in India: Manufacturing a Perfect Mother-Worker.
Signs, 35(4), 969–992.https://doi.org/10.1086/651043
Pratt, G. (1999). From Registered Nurse to Registered Nanny: Discursive Geographies of
Filipina Domestic Workers in Vancouver, B.C. Economic Geography, 75(3), 215–236.
https://doi.org/10.2307/144575
Prieto-Carolino, & Mamauag, B. L. (2019). Pagdipara: Caring work by poor elderly women in
coastal communities in Iloilo, Philippines. Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, 25(3),
375–395. https://doi.org/10.1080/12259276.2019.1646493
Tung, C. (2000). The cost of caring: The social reproductive labor of filipina live-in home health
caregivers. Frontiers, 21(1), 61-82`. Retrieved from
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