The Politics of Care Work

Emma Amador is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Connecticut.

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Part I. Making Care Count in Puerto Rico 1. Women Building Social Welfare Programs in Puerto Rico after 1917 31 2. Labor, Welfare, and Gendered Citizenship in New Deal Puerto Rico 62 3. Working-Class Women, Claims for Benefits, and the Politics of Deservingness under the Puerto Rican Populist State 94 Part II. Care Work and Women's Activism in the Puerto Rican Diaspora 129 4. Care Workers, Household Labor Organizing, and Puerto Rican Migration after 1944 131 5. Women's Leadership in Struggles over Welfare, Citizenship Rights, and Decolonization in the Puerto Rican Diaspora 156 6. Community Organizers, Civil Rights Activism, and Demands for Care in Puerto Rican Communities in the United States 186 Epilogue. Envisioning Caring Futures 214 Notes 221 Bibliography 267 Index 295

"In this deeply researched, thoughtful, and wide-ranging book, Emma Amador demands that historians of Puerto Rico profoundly shift their understandings of politics, the colonial state, and state agents. By focusing on women's organizing around social welfare, Amador challenges earlier masculinist approaches to twentieth-century Puerto Rican politics to create a refreshingly different narrative of political demands across and beyond the archipelago. The Politics of Care Work will open a new chapter in the history of social welfare and its attendant movements for citizenship rights in modern Latin America." - Eileen J. Findlay, author of (We Are Left Without a Father Here: Masculinity, Domesticity, and Migration in Postwar Puerto Rico) "The Politics of Care Work connects the reproductive labor of Puerto Rican women social work professionals on the archipelago and the mainland to the women needle and domestic workers who navigated the colonial welfare state and its means-tested programs for maternal and child welfare and income support. Expanding the definitions of care and tracing the emergence of social worker community activism, Emma Amador offers a fresh history of the racialized gendered state and those who fought back." - Eileen Boris, coauthor of (Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State)