Rooted in the ways Black women understand their lives, this collection archives practices of healing, mothering, and advocacy during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recognizing that Black women have been living in pandemics as far back as colonialism and enslavement, this volume acknowledges that records of the past—from the 1918 flu pandemic to the onset of the HIV/AIDS epidemic—often erase the existence and experiences of Black women as a whole. Writing against this archival erasure, this collection consciously recenters the real-time experiences and perspectives of care, policy concerns, grief, and joy of Black women throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nineteen contributors from interdisciplinary fields and diverse backgrounds explore Black feminine community, consciousness, ethics of care, spirituality, and social critique. They situate Black women’s multidimensional experiences with COVID-19 and other violences that affect their lives. The stories they tell are connected and interwoven, bound together by anti-Black gendered COVID necropolitics and commitments to creating new spaces for breathing, healing, and wellness.

Ultimately, this time-warping analysis shows how Black women imagine a more just society, rapidly adapt to changing experiences, and innovate ethics of care even in the midst of physical distancing, which can be instructive for thinking of new ways of living both during and beyond the era of COVID-19.

Contributors
Shamara Wyllie Alhassan
Sharnnia Artis
Keisha L. Bentley-Edwards
Candace S. Brown
Jenny Douglas
Kaja Dunn
Onisha Etkins
Rhonda M. Gonzales
Endia Hayes
Ashley E. Hollingshead
Kendra Jason
Julia S. Jordan-Zachery
Stacie LeSure
Janaka B. Lewis
Michelle Meggs
Nitya Mehrotra
Sherine Andreine Powerful
Marjorie Shavers
Breauna Marie Spencer
Tehia Starker Glass
Amber Walker

Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender and Care Work in Portugal examines the everyday lives of an African descendant care service workforce that labors in an ostensibly “anti-racial” Europe and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire. While much of the literature on global care work has focused on Asian and Latine migrant care workers, there is comparatively less research that explicitly examines African care workers and their migration histories to Europe. Sociologist Celeste V. Curington focuses on Portugal—a European setting with comparatively liberal policies around family settlement and naturalization for migrants. In this setting, rapid urbanization in the late twentieth century, along with a national push to reconcile work and family, have shaped the growth of paid home care and cleaning service industries. Many researchers focus on informal work settings where immigrant rights are restricted, and many workers are undocumented or without permanent residence status. Curington instead examined workers who have accessed citizenship or permanent residence status and also explores African women’s experiences laboring in care and service industries in the formal market, revealing how deeply colonial and intersectional logics of a racialized and international division of reproductive labor in Portugal render these women “hyper-invisible” and “hyper-visible” as “appropriate” workers in Lisbon.

The first English-language collection of Latina/x caregiving testimonios, this volume gives voice to diverse Chicana/x and Latina/x caregiving experiences. Bringing together thirteen first-person accounts, these testimonios speak to the tragic flaws in our health-care system and the woefully undervalued labor of providing care to family and community.

The book opens with an introductory chapter by the three co-editors, and then is divided into three sections exploring the caregiver voice, community caregiving, and reflections that outline a Caregiver Bill of Rights and present a call to action. Throughout, contributors discuss kinship care, including formal and informal adoptions, community care, caregiving in professional health contexts, and the implicit caregiving inherent in teaching BIPOC students, which largely falls upon faculty of color.

Testimonios of Care gives voice to those who often are voiceless in histories of caregiving and is guided by Chicana and Latina feminist principles, which include solidarity between women of color, empathy, willingness to challenge the patriarchal medical health-care systems, questioning traditional gender roles and idealization of familia, and caring for self while caring for loved ones and community.

Contributors
yvonne hurtado allen
Angie Chabram
Natalia Deeb-Sossa
Yvette G. Flores
Inés Hernández-Ávila
ire’ne lara silva
Josie Méndez-Negrete
Maria R. Palacios
Hector Rivera-Lopez
Maria Angelina Soldatenko
Anita Tijerina Revilla
Mónica Torreiro-Casal
Enriqueta Valdez-Curiel