Valerie Francisco

Student Fellow

Valerie Francisco is a doctoral candidate in sociology at CUNY, The Graduate Center. Her dissertation, a participatory project with Filipino migrant women working as domestic workers in New York City and their families in the Philippines, explores the dynamics of transnationalism and diaspora for Filipino migrants, their families and its possibilities for political mobilization. In her work, gender and labor and globalization are key to examining the lives of migrant women.

Collected Work

“Save Mary Jane Veloso: Solidarity and Global Migrant Activism in the Filipino Labor Diaspora”

More

On April 29, 2015, Mary Jane Veloso, a Filipina migrant worker who was sentenced to death in Indonesia for trafficking heroin into the country, was granted a stay of execution by Indonesian President Joko Widodo. In this article, Francisco-Menchavez argues that transnational networks activated by this case exemplify the power of systematic migrant worker organizing both in Filipino diasporic sites where Filipinos migrant use ongoing local campaign work against precarity to create migrant class consciousness in critique of neoliberalism and the Philippine state.

Participating Years

2010–2011

Labor/Crisis/Protest

Labor processes and conditions of employment in almost all sectors of the economy and most of the world have been revolutionized over the last thirty years. Generally, the share of wages in gross domestic product has declined while the share taken by capital (finance in particular) has soared. The response (or lack of it) to these new conditions has been patchy, raising questions of the state of political consciousness and political subjectivity among affected populations. Where, many ask, is the outrage and why the lack of mass protest and mass movement?