Nepali Migrant Women

This book opens up a whole new conversation about minorities among minorities. Gurung describes the experiences of Nepali women who are marginalized as minorities among South Asian Americans. Hamal Gurung presents us with a powerful ethnography of the lives of Nepali migrant women in the US. She weaves stories illustrating the use of co-ethnic networks to find employment as domestics, nannies, and restaurant workers. Her insightful analysis reveals the establishment of transnational families and communities. These women not only subvert traditional gender roles by engaging in activism to improve working conditions for domestic workers in New York and Boston but provide social and economic support to NGOs addressing social justice and human rights in the US and Nepal. A well-written concise account of how and why well-educated Nepali women are migrating to the US and taking domestic service/ care jobs here. This work contributes new knowledge and challenges some theories about female migrants, suggesting that downward occupational mobility for these women serves their own purposes and those of their families and communities when looked at transnationally. At present there are no books on the market that document the fascinating experiences of Nepali women in the United States. This is a necessary addition to the literature on gender, globalization, transnational migration, and informal work. Nepali Migrant Women is a valuable addition to the scholarship on migration and labor, gender and power, and internationalism and offers new insights into the unique intersections of the unregulated economy for women working for co-ethnic employers. Chronicles the experiences of educated Nepali migrant women working in low-paid, informal jobs in U.S. metropolitan cities of Boston and New York. . . . Gurung’s work is rich in detail with personal narratives embedded in the larger discourse on immigrant women in the U.S. informal sector. Overall this book deals in a very respectful and dignifying way with the lives, struggles, sacrifices, and achievements of middle-class Nepali migrant women working as domestic workers in the United States. Shobha Hamal Gurung does honor both to herself as a scholar and to the 35 women who generously shared their stories. We need more telling done from within women’s lives, and this book is an exemplary model.