Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work, First Edition

by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

Book Overview

Servants of Globalization is a poignant and often troubling study of migrant Filipina domestic workers who leave their own families behind to do the mothering and caretaking work of the global economy in countries throughout the world. It specifically focuses on the emergence of parallel lives among such workers in the cities of Rome and Los Angeles, two main destinations for Filipina migration.

The book is largely based on interviews...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804739226
• ISBN13: 9780804739221
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 328 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Great book from a great scholar...

Parreñas, a scholar admired by many whose academic training, coupled with her linguistic skills, draws inquiring minds into the largely untapped world of Filipino international migration. The book critically situates the migration from a historical-structural perspective and yet focuses on the family as the unit of analysis which must negotiate between the state regulations of both sending and receiving countries, the financial realities of citizens from poor countries of the world, and the emotional hardships faced by family members. The study, in general, is an extremely important one because it taps into what is a "female" international labor migration, bound by related expectations of gender roles, thereby encouraging readers to rethink our gendered perspective of all labor migrations. In addition, the book offers an effective assessment of the critical role of the family to young children (the focus of her subsequent book), the challenges faced by poor populations of the world, and how the global economy is structured to benefit wealthy nations of the world. I highly recommend the book and have only a small criticism: though she has carefully helped us to see the gendered inequalities faced by female international migrants, at times in the book Parreñas herself seems quite unnecessarily judgemental of the very women whose predicaments she details.