Immigrant Women and Home-Based Elder Care in Oakland, California’s Chinatown

Abstract

We know little about how race, gender, migration and class intersect to shape paid elder care within immigrant and racialized communities. This chapter examines publicly subsidized, home-based elder care in Oakland, California’s Chinatown. Analysis of interviews with Chinese immigrant women who help family and non-family elderly show how this work combines coercive relations of paid employment and gendered duty with nurturing relations of empathy. Nurturing relations, coupled with labor, elderly and disability movement organizing, allowed unionization and the potential to challenge multiple inequalities. Women not only spoke of the power of the union to give them voices as immigrant women through mass collective action and to improve wages and benefits, but also noted the union’s inability to intervene with difficult recipient-employers. As a result, this work reflects persistent forms of social and economic subordination of immigrant women workers and enduring relations of gendered duty, alongside nurturing relations.

We are grateful to the women who participated in this study, to Young Shin, Executive Director of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) for supporting and contributing to this project, and to AIWA staff MuTing Cen and Dennis Yee for facilitating the research. Graduate students Chi Cheng Wat and Justin Kong conducted interviews and Chi Cheng Wat, Justin Kong, Michael Lee, and Angela Hick transcribed, translated, and/or coded them. We would like to acknowledge the funding of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant “Gender Migration and the Work of Care,” No: 895-2012-1021.