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—incl
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”Empire of Care is an extremely important work, a milestone in Asian American and American studies, and a singular contribution to the emergent field of Filipino American studies.”—Vicente L. Rafael, author of White Love and Other Events in Filipino History
"Empire of Care provides an eloquent analysis and exciting transnational interpretive framework for understanding the political economy of American imperialism and the immigration of Filipino nurses. Catherine Ceniza Choy’s lively and vivid history of women who connected the professional and the home spheres to become architects of their own lives against the backdrop of race, gender, and class constructions is an impressive contribution. Students of nursing, immigration, and social history will benefit enormously from this theoretically insightful and absorbing volume."—Darlene Clark Hine, author of Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–1950
"[An] absolute classic: chances are, if have ever been to a hospital of any kind, you’ve benefited from the care of a Filipinx nurse. . . . Catherine Ceniza Choy traces the long history of that labor back to, you guessed it, the American colonization of the Philippines, which makes this book a vital work of American history as much as it is a cornerstone of Filipinx history, labor history, and feminist history." -- Elaine Castillo * Electric Lit *
Table of Contents
Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: The Contours of a Filipino American History 1
Part I. Nurturing Empire
1. Nursing Matters: Women and U.S. Colonialism in the Philippines 17
2. “The Usual Subjects": The Preconditions of Professional Migration 41
Part II. Caring Unbound
3. “Your Cap Is a Passport": Filipino Nurses and the U.S. Exchange Visitor Program 61
4. To the Point of No Return: From Exchange Visitor to Permanent Resident
Part III. Still the Golden Door? 94
5. Trial and Error: Crime and Punishment in America's “Wound Culture"
121
6. Conflict and Caring: Filipino Nurses Organize in the United States 166
Epilogue 186
Appendix: On Sources 193
Notes 197
Bibliography 229
Index 245
