Importing Care, Faithful Service
254 pages, 6 x 9
13 b&w images
Paperback
Release Date:17 Jun 2022
ISBN:9781978826335
Hardcover
Release Date:17 Jun 2022
ISBN:9781978826342
Importing Care, Faithful Service
Filipino and Indian American Nurses at a Veterans Hospital
Rutgers University Press
Every year thousands of foreign-born Filipino and Indian nurses immigrate to the United States. Despite being well trained and desperately needed, they enter the country at a time, not unlike the past, when the American social and political climate is once again increasingly unwelcoming to them as immigrants. Drawing on rich ethnographic and survey data, collected over a four-year period, this study explores the role Catholicism plays in shaping the professional and community lives of foreign-born Filipino and Indian American nurses in the face of these challenges, while working at a Veterans hospital. Their stories provide unique insights into the often-unseen roles race, religion and gender play in the daily lives of new immigrants employed in American healthcare. In many ways, these nurses find themselves foreign in more ways than just their nativity. Seeing nursing as a religious calling, they care for their patients, both at the hospital and in the wider community, with a sense of divine purpose but must also confront the cultural tensions and disconnects between how they were raised and trained in another country and the legal separation of church and state. How they cope with and engage these tensions and disconnects plays an important role in not only shaping how they see themselves as Catholic nurses but their place in the new American story.
This book is important for its examination of the role of Catholicism within the context of nursing in a U.S. government hospital. It will capture the attention of many audiences as we think about what it means to be Catholic and Asian American in the United States today. How Filipino and Indian American nurses have influenced nursing in America, and how they, in turn, have been challenged by American culture are vital issues of study.
Cherry does an excellent job bringing us inside the experiences of nurses working at the Houston VA and putting their work there—and the VA itself—in broader historical contexts. The material gathered and shared is richly descriptive and informative. Every chapter made me think about something I had not before, and to consider the experiences of healthcare providers in new ways.
This book is important for its examination of the role of Catholicism within the context of nursing in a U.S. government hospital. It will capture the attention of many audiences as we think about what it means to be Catholic and Asian American in the United States today. How Filipino and Indian American nurses have influenced nursing in America, and how they, in turn, have been challenged by American culture are vital issues of study.
Cherry does an excellent job bringing us inside the experiences of nurses working at the Houston VA and putting their work there—and the VA itself—in broader historical contexts. The material gathered and shared is richly descriptive and informative. Every chapter made me think about something I had not before, and to consider the experiences of healthcare providers in new ways.
STEPHEN M. CHERRY is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Houston–Clear Lake in Texas. He is the author of Faith, Family, and Filipino American Community Life (Rutgers University Press).
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Chapter One: Veterans and a Crisis of Care
Chapter Two: Colonialism, Christian Culture and Nursing Care
Chapter Three: New American Battlefields
Chapter Four: Understanding and Coping with the Trauma of War
Chapter Five: Faith and the Practice of Care
Chapter Six: Extending Health and Care to Community
Chapter Seven: Who Will Care for America?
