Empire of Care

Catherine Ceniza Choy is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

• Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xiIntroduction: The Contours of a Filipino American History 1Part I. Nurturing Empire 1. Nursing Matters: Women and U.S. Colonialism in the Philippines 172. “The Usual Subjects": The Preconditions of Professional Migration 41Part II. Caring Unbound 3. “Your Cap Is a Passport": Filipino Nurses and the U.S. Exchange Visitor Program 614. To the Point of No Return: From Exchange Visitor to Permanent ResidentPart III. Still the Golden Door? 945. Trial and Error: Crime and Punishment in America's “Wound Culture"1216. Conflict and Caring: Filipino Nurses Organize in the United States 166Epilogue 186Appendix: On Sources 193Notes 197Bibliography 229Index 245

”Empire of Care is an extremely important work, a milestone in Asian American and American studies, and a singular contribution to the emergent field of Filipino American studies.”-Vicente L. Rafael, author of White Love and Other Events in Filipino History "Empire of Care provides an eloquent analysis and exciting transnational interpretive framework for understanding the political economy of American imperialism and the immigration of Filipino nurses. Catherine Ceniza Choy’s lively and vivid history of women who connected the professional and the home spheres to become architects of their own lives against the backdrop of race, gender, and class constructions is an impressive contribution. Students of nursing, immigration, and social history will benefit enormously from this theoretically insightful and absorbing volume."-Darlene Clark Hine, author of Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–1950 "[An] absolute classic: chances are, if have ever been to a hospital of any kind, you’ve benefited from the care of a Filipinx nurse. . . . Catherine Ceniza Choy traces the long history of that labor back to, you guessed it, the American colonization of the Philippines, which makes this book a vital work of American history as much as it is a cornerstone of Filipinx history, labor history, and feminist history." - Elaine Castillo (Electric Lit)