Care Workers, Household Labor Organizing, and Puerto Rican Migration after 1944 Available to Purchase

This chapter focuses on the history of Puerto Rican labor migration to the United States through an emphasis on the experience of Puerto Rican women who were domestic workers and social workers who worked to reform labor migration. It looks in particular at how Puerto Rican women were recruited into contract-labor programs that brought them to the United States and how these workers later were involved in labor organizing when they faced difficult conditions in the United States. The chapter also explores how demands for labor standards within the Puerto Rican communities led to the creation of new training programs for domestic workers in Puerto Rico that placed worked in the United States and were used as justification for the creation of the Migration Division of the Puerto Rican Department of Labor, with offices in the United States.