Synopses & Reviews
Illegal. Unamerican. Disposable. In a nation with an unprecedented history of immigration, the prevailing image of those who cross our borders in search of equal opportunity is that of a drain. Grace Chang's vital account of immigrant women—who work as nannies, domestic workers, janitors, nursing aides, and homecare workers—proves just the opposite: the women who perform our least desirable jobs are the most crucial to our economy and society. Disposable Domestics highlights the unrewarded work immigrant women perform as caregivers, cleaners, and servers and shows how these women are actively resisting the exploitation they face.
Review
"[Disposable Domestics] offers a much-needed understanding of the multifaceted linkage between global and local issues in today's world."
Elizabeth Martínez
Review
"Since Grace Chang's Disposable Domestics was first published fifteen years ago, it has not only become a major classic in feminist studies, but has helped to make transnational analyses of reproductive labor central to our understanding of race and gender in the twenty-first century."
Angela Y. Davis
"[Disposable Domestics] offers a much-needed understanding of the multifaceted linkage between global and local issues in today's world."
Elizabeth Martínez
"Grace Changs nuanced analysis of our immigration policy and the devastating consequences of global capitalism captures the experiences of poor immigrant women of color. Disposable Domestics reveals how these women, servicing the economy as domestics, nannies, maids, and janitors, are vilified by politicians and the media."
Mary Romero, author of the The Maid's Daughter: Living Inside and Outside the American Dream
Synopsis
This classic work sheds light on the lives and struggles of immigrant women domestic workers.
About the Author
Grace Chang: Grace Chang is completing her book, Trafficking by Any Other Name: Transnational Feminist, Immigrant and Sex Worker Rights Responses, (The New Press, forthcoming). She is co-editor with Evelyn Nakano Glenn and Linda Forcey of Mothering: Ideology, Experience and Agency (Routledge, 1994).
Foreword by Alicia Garza writer and Oakland-based activist. Garza is one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, an organization founded in 2013 after the shooting death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin.
Afterword by Ai-jen Poo is an American activist. She is the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.[1] She is also the co-director of Caring Across Generations, a national coalition of 200 advocacy organizations working to transform the long-term care system in the US, with a focus on the needs of aging Americans, people with disabilities, and their caregivers.