Care to Work? How Latinx Students Care to Pursue the Collectivist Immigrant Bargain

Sociologists have long examined care within the realms of family, work, and school. Specifically, feminist sociologists have critiqued neoliberalism and its role in exacerbating the care crisis—a condition where care work continues to be externalized onto already overburdened immigrant women of color. While previous work has investigated women of color participating in unrecognized and unpaid care work in colleges, few researchers have studied how children of immigrants navigate such work. To address this gap, I center the experiences of Latinx college students, proposing a re-situation of the collectivist immigrant bargain—a caring commitment that aims to repay immigrant parents' sacrifices through academic success. Drawing on twelve in-depth interviews with Latinx college students socialized as women, I bring forth how a proximity to gendered care work defines the bargain, and influences the strategies immigrant daughters employ to fulfill it. This paper asks: How does the crisis of care shape students' approaches to the collectivist immigrant bargain in college? My findings suggest that due to the structure of neoliberal colleges, feminized students pursue academic success by relying on their proximity to care work in the family, particularly within the creation and maintenance of student care-networks. I argue that under the care crisis, students collectively support each other’s pursuit of the bargain by negotiating the costs and rewards of caring, engaging with care work as both an exploitative form of labor and a liberatory practice.