Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work, Second Edition

by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

Book Overview

Servants of Globalization offers a groundbreaking study of migrant Filipino domestic workers who leave their own families behind to do the caretaking work of the global economy. Since its initial publication, the book has informed countless students and scholars and set the research agenda on labor migration and transnational families.

With this second edition, Rhacel Salazar Parre as returns to Rome and Los Angeles to consider how...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804796149
• ISBN13: 9780804796149
• Release Date: August 2015
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.9" x 8.9"

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.