Families Apart: Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love

Abstract

In a developing nation like the Philippines, many mothers provide for their families by traveling to a foreign country to care for someone else’s. This book focuses on Filipino overseas workers in Canada to reveal what such arrangements mean for families on both sides of the global divide. The outcome of a collaboration with the Philippine Women Centre of British Columbia, this study documents the difficulties of family separation and the problems that children have when they reunite with their mothers in Vancouver. Aimed at those who have lived this experience, those who directly benefit from it, and those who simply stand by and watch, this book shows how Filipino migrant domestic workers—often mothers themselves—are caught between competing neoliberal policies of sending and receiving countries and how, rather than paying rich returns, their ambitions as migrants often result in social and economic exclusion for themselves and for their children. This argument takes shape as an open-ended series of encounters, moving between a singular academic voice and the “we” of various research collaborations, between Vancouver and the Philippines, and between genres of “evidence-based” social scientific research, personal testimony, theatrical performance, and nonfictional narrative writing.