Description: In this pathbreaking and timely work, Hamal Gurung gives voice to the growing number of Nepali women who migrate to the United States to work in the informal economy. Highlighting the experiences of thirty-five women, mostly college educated and middle class, who take on domestic service and unskilled labor jobs, Hamal Gurung challenges conventional portraits of Third World women as victims forced into low-wage employment. Instead, she sheds light on Nepali women's strategic decisions to accept downwardly mobile positions in order to earn more income, thereby achieving greater agency in their home countries as well as in their diasporic communities in the United States. These women are not only investing in themselves and their families--they are building transnational communities through formal participation in NGOs and informal networks of migrant workers. In great detail, Hamal Gurung documents Nepali migrant women's lives, making visible the profound and far-reaching effects of their civic, economic, and political engagement.
Review Quotes: 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.-- "Mary Romero, Professor, Justice & Social Inquiry, School of Social Transformation, Arizona State University"