BiblioVault - Books about Migration

Emotional Landscapes

Love, Gender, and Migration

Edited by Marcelo J. Borges, Sonia Cancian, and Linda Reeder

University of Illinois Press, 2020

Love and its attendant emotions not only spur migration—they forge our response to the people who leave their homes in search of new lives. Emotional Landscapes looks at the power of love, and the words we use to express it, to explore the immigration experience. The authors focus on intimate emotional language and how languages of love shape the ways human beings migrate but also create meaning for migrants, their families, and their societies. Looking at sources ranging from letters of Portuguese immigrants in the 1880s to tweets passed among immigrant families in today's Italy, the essays explore the sentimental, sexual, and political meanings of love. The authors also look at how immigrants and those around them use love to justify separation and loss, and how love influences us to privilege certain immigrants—wives, children, lovers, refugees—over others.

Affecting and perceptive, Emotional Landscapes moves from war and transnational families to gender and citizenship to explore the crossroads of migration and the history of emotion.

Contributors: María Bjerg, Marcelo J. Borges, Sonia Cancian, Tyler Carrington, Margarita Dounia, Alexander Freund, Donna R. Gabaccia, A. James Hammerton, Mirjam Milharčič Hladnik, Emily Pope-Obeda, Linda Reeder, Roberta Ricucci, Suzanne M. Sinke, and Elizabeth Zanoni

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Empire of Care

Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History

Catherine Ceniza Choy

Duke University Press, 2003

In western countries, including the United States, foreign-trained nurses constitute a crucial labor supply. Far and away the largest number of these nurses come from the Philippines. Why is it that a developing nation with a comparatively greater need for trained medical professionals sends so many of its nurses to work in wealthier countries? Catherine Ceniza Choy engages this question through an examination of the unique relationship between the professionalization of nursing and the twentieth-century migration of Filipinos to the United States. The first book-length study of the history of Filipino nurses in the United States, Empire of Care brings to the fore the complicated connections among nursing, American colonialism, and the racialization of Filipinos.

Choy conducted extensive interviews with Filipino nurses in New York City and spoke with leading Filipino nurses across the United States. She combines their perspectives with various others—including those of Philippine and American government and health officials—to demonstrate how the desire of Filipino nurses to migrate abroad cannot be reduced to economic logic, but must instead be understood as a fundamentally transnational process. She argues that the origins of Filipino nurse migrations do not lie in the Philippines' independence in 1946 or the relaxation of U.S. immigration rules in 1965, but rather in the creation of an Americanized hospital training system during the period of early-twentieth-century colonial rule. Choy challenges celebratory narratives regarding professional migrants’ mobility by analyzing the scapegoating of Filipino nurses during difficult political times, the absence of professional solidarity between Filipino and American nurses, and the exploitation of foreign-trained nurses through temporary work visas. She shows how the culture of American imperialism persists today, continuing to shape the reception of Filipino nurses in the United States.

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Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes

At the Crossroads of History and Anthropology

Brooke Larson, Olivia Harris, and Enrique Tandeter, eds.

Duke University Press, 1995

Until now, Andean peasants have primarily been thought of by scholars as isolated subsistence farmers, "resistant" to money and to different markets in the region. Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes overturns this widely held assumption and puts in its place a new perspective as it explores the dynamic between Andean cultural, social, and economic practices and the market forces of a colonial and postcolonial mercantile economy.
Bringing together the work of outstanding scholars in Andean history, anthropology, and ethnohistory, these pioneering essays show how, from the very earliest period of Spanish rule, Andean peasants and their rulers embraced the new economic opportunities and challenged or subverted the new structures introduced by the colonial administration. They also convincingly explain why in the twentieth century the mistaken idea developed that Andean peasants were conservative and unable to participate effectively in different markets, and reveal how closely ethnic inequalities were tied to evolving market relations. Inviting a critical reconsideration of ethnic, class, and gender issues in the context of rural Andean markets, this book will revise the prevailing view of Andean history and provide a more fully informed picture of the complex mercantile activities of Andean peasants.

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