Linda Oalican and Riya Ortiz, featured in this keynote conversation, are a mother and daughter who have led Damayan Migrant Workers Association since its inception twenty-five years ago. A Filipino organization based in Queens, New York with a membership comprised primarily of domestic workers, Damayan assists workers in escaping from labor trafficking situations. It is one of the leading anti-trafficking organizations in the country and was a founding member of the National Domestic Workers Alliance in 2007.
In this discussion Linda shares her experiences as a domestic worker, including overwork and underpayment, monitoring of the food she ate, and separate entrances for “the help.” Her story is indicative of that of millions of Filipinos who travel abroad for work. A protracted history of colonialism, imperialism, militarism, and neocolonial structural adjustment policies destroyed Filipino subsistence agriculture and domestic production, making it beholden to, and dependent upon, the vicissitudes of powerful western countries. The Philippine economy today is deeply dependent on the export of labor: a state sanctioned program that arranges for Filipinos to work abroad and send remittances back home to family. These workers travel to the United States and other parts of the world in search of a better life, only to find themselves in conditions of servitude.
A lifelong anti-imperialist, antiracist, and anticapitalist feminist organizer, Linda has dedicated her life to fighting for socialism. Linda’s political analysis was forged on the front lines of a battle against the regime of Ferdinand Marcos Sr., a US-backed military dictator in the Philippines. As a student activist and labor organizer in Manila, Linda labored alongside peasants and other workers. Her political organizing and commitment to a socialist alternative led to her imprisonment and solidarity confinement. Linda’s years of organizing in the colonial periphery of the Philippines informs her organizing in the imperial core of the US. Shortly after arriving in the US, in the context of another US imperial incursion into Iraq and a growing upsurge among domestic workers in the US, Linda co-founded Damayan.
A generation later, after her mother had left for the US, Riya got her start as a student organizer in the Philippines and, much like her mother, encountered the repressive tactics of the military regime. After coming to the US Riya worked alongside her mother as an organizer until she applied for and was hired as the Executive Director of Damayan after Linda stepped down in 2025. Linda and Riya have a deep comradely relationship. They each bring their own generational perspective to their organizing. They do not always see eye to eye but are deeply committed to collective transformation.
Linda’s and Riya’s story is emblematic of the transnational circulation of political knowledge: migrant care work brought not only low-wage laborers, but seasoned political organizers who had the experience of radical left internationalism, a framework that informed their organizing in the US. As they explain, the exploitation central to care work is rooted in structures of colonialism, racism, and slavery, which explains the large number of people of African descent and postcolonial migrants in low-wage service sector work. Abuse and underpayment were facilitated by the racialized construction of domestic workers as second class citizens, not citizens at all, or as distinct, different, and less than human. This generated possibilities for common cause among the many people battling US hegemonic political and economic power.
Also important in this conversation is the narrative of migrant care work and transnational family separation and connection. The stories about transnational motherhood are often referentially tied to the care work these women performed in the countries where they migrated, generating what Rhacel Parreñas has called the “international division of reproductive labor,” where poor women from the Global South leave their own children often in the care of relatives or other care workers, and move abroad to care for the children of families in the wealthier Global North.1 Scholarship has centered on the pain of the separation, which Arlie Hochschild referred to as “a global heart transplant,” and the simultaneous emotional bonds formed with employers’ children.2 For Linda, there was no transference of love. She understood her employment as a childcare provider as a job and maintained strong emotional ties with her own children in the Philippines.
This keynote illuminates Linda’s deep love and commitment to her own family, the pain that both Linda and Riya experienced through separation, and how the employment relationship cut even deeper into their pain. The trauma associated with forced labor and family separation undergird this conversation. Traumatic experiences are often a conduit for and insistence on the importance of self-care. Linda and Riya reject individualistic notions of self-care, which they believe are fostered by and reinforce neoliberalism and further entrenches the inequalities of the social and political order. At the same time, their work to reunite families and the community they have built in New York City resonates with a growing body of literature that examines how families maintain bonds of connection despite physical separation.3
Damayan’s narratives of care incorporate individual safety, economic support, and well-being within a broader framework of structural transformation and collective change. Their practice of radical care is embodied in the extensive service they provide to trafficking survivors and their families — housing, food, legal assistance, family reunification — alongside political education and leadership training. In addition, Damayan fights for reforms, such as the T-visa, a humanitarian relief visa for labor trafficking survivors. Such reforms are crucial to ensure basic survival and protection. Yet, in this conversation Linda insists that reforms are not enough. They are, she explains, “cracks in the system,” but cracks that have thus far proven to be insufficient for real transformation. She challenges us to reflect on how reform struggles may have hindered the goal of structural transformation and cautions us to never assume that reform leads to revolution.
Both Linda and Riya remain committed to building worker power for fundamental transformation. Damayan was founded explicitly as a worker-centered organization to cultivate leadership among member-leaders and to enact change through collective action. It stands out in an era when so many advocacy organizations have little direct worker involvement in decision making. The politics of racial capitalism, social reproduction, and care come full circle in the work of Damayan. For Linda and Riya, care work is inseparable from colonialism and the global structures of inequality. They are attuned to the value of this work for employer families and the reliance of the Filipino community on their practice of radical care for survival. Through their political agenda, personal connections, and community care, they offer a vision of a socialist alternative rooted in the experiences of poor women of color migrant workers and forged through collective worker power.
— Premilla Nadasen
Endnotes
- Rhacel Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work (Stanford University Press, 2001).[↑]
- Arlie Hochschild, “Love and Gold” in Global Women: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (Owl Books, 2002).[↑]
- Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, The Labor of Care: Filipina Migrants and Transnational Families in the Digital Age (University of Illinois Press, 2018).[↑]
