The Politics of Care Work

“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

"Rigorously researched. . . . The Politics of Care Work is a necessary addition to the historiography for gender, labor, and political organizing in Puerto Rico that will benefit students and future researchers." - Manuel Grajales, Hispanic American Historical Review

"Amador uncovers the overlooked and undervalued history of Puerto Rican women’s political engagement in social work. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources ... the author moves beyond historiographical reconstruction, employing history as a tool that may illuminate contemporary dynamics of power within colonial contexts." - Lucia Amorosi, ILR Review