Fictive Kinships and the Remaking of Family Life in the Context of Paid Domestic Work: The Case of Philippine Yayas

Authors

Maria Rosario de Guzman, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Aileen S. Garcia, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Minerva D. Tuliao, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2018

Citation

Published in Parenting from Afar and the Reconfiguration of Family Across Distance, ed. Maria Rosario T. de Guzman, Jill Brown, and Carolyn Pope Edwards (New York: Oxford, 2018), pp. 72-89.

Comments

Copyright © 2018 Oxford University Press. Used by permission

Abstract

In this chapter, we draw from our study on Filipina rural-to-urban migrant workers in the domestic care sector to illustrate how migrants make and remake family in the context of separation. The setting of our study is in Quezon City, Philippines, and our participants are women employed as yayas-domestic care workers employed to care for children. They live in their employers' homes, and most of our respondents live apart from their own children and all are living away from their nuclear families. Details of this study are laid out in an earlier paper that focused on the experience of family separation for domestic care workers and strategies they utilized to reconfigure and maintain relationships across physical distance (de Guzman, 2014). Here, we reexamine our data with a lens toward understanding how they rebuild new family life in their immediate contexts. We explore the nature of those relationships and how they reflect deeply embedded notions of family life (e.g., family roles) and implications for coping and wellbeing given the challenges of migration and domestic care work.