Kuwentuhan Across Generations: Intergenerational Participatory Methods in Exploring Filipino Immigrant and Filipino American Transnational Experiences (Poster 5)

• In Event: Critical Participatory Inquiry in Transnational Research Contexts

Abstract

Participatory action research (PAR) in Migration Studies has often engaged migrants in the research process to explore migrants’ own experiences. The use of PAR with children of immigrants or 1.5-generation immigrants to learn about their interactions and experiences with first-generation immigrants in their lives has been less explored. In this paper, we explore how Filipino Americans (1.5 generation immigrants) in a PAR project used kuwentuhan or Filipino “talk-story” to elicit stories of the first-generation immigrant experiences and thus, reflected on the intergenerational dynamics of their own lives. Beginning in mid-2020, during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Filipinx Count! Survey was launched by the UC Davis Bulosan Center for Filipinx Studies. The survey questions included topics such as health, immigration, employment, mental and physical health, and access to healthcare. We partnered with the Bulosan Center and collaborated with the Pilipino Association of Workers and Immigrants (PAWIS) in Silicon Valley to use kuwentuhan as PAR methodology to collect stories to understand the experiences of caregivers under COVID-19.

In Filipino talk-story or kuwentuhan, researchers can explore deeply how Filipino care workers, first-generation migrants, come to understand and act on their health behaviors at their workplace and in their lives, especially in a pandemic, while also allowing for 1.5- and second-generation researchers to offer comments on those practices as a result of institutional and historical processes. While under unprecedented conditions, we crafted these methods that heeded a “culture-centered approach” (Dutta et al., 2018) that aimed to examine the health outcomes of migrant care workers as situated in the structural determinants of their migrancy and labor, rather than merely reflective of their individual choices and decisions. In this paper, we argue that intergenerational (across age cohorts) and intragenerational (within Filipino immigrant and Filipino American communities) kuwentuhan can contribute to an innovative practice of transnational critical participatory inquiry (T-CPI). We found that the PAR process, through kuwentuhan, validated the experiences of Filipino first-generation care workers. The process of collecting and listening to one another’s work conditions allowed first-generation care workers to gain an understanding that conditions of exploitation and abuse were not an indicator of individual failure on their part but a symptom of a structurally inequitable industry of care work in the United States. We also learned that involving first-, 1.5-, and second-generation Filipino/a immigrants as research collaborators allowed for intergenerational understanding through the intragenerational dialogue provided through kuwentuhan. The 1.5- and second-generation co-researchers reported that the data collection process indirectly helped them to connect their own family’s histories of migration and transnationalism to the experiences of first-generation migrants in the broader Filipino community. Overall, we demonstrate how transnational CPI can position immigrants and subsequent generations in conversation with one another to examine the lasting conditions of migration and transnationalism.

Authors

• Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, San Francisco State University

• Edwin Carlos, University of California - Berkeley