COE, CATI. 2019. The New American Servitude: Political Belonging among African Immigrant Home Care Workers, New York University Press: New York, Series: Anthropologies of American Medicine: Culture, Power, and Practice, 304 pp., ISBN: 9781479808830

Through the lens of African immigrant home care workers and their clients, Cati Coe’s The New American Servitude: Political Belonging among African Immigrant Home Care Workers is an exposition of the contested political belongingness of African immigrants in the United States at the wake of heightened globalization, migration, and an aging population. These processes have brought the global world of immigration and immigrants to the home of the elderly in the United States, as well exposed immigrants to the elderly. The book in based on ethnographic research conducted among African immigrant home care workers on the East Coast of the United States, particularly in Northern New Jersey and Washington DC suburbs. On the elderly research population, the author indicates that, “in the Washington area, many of the patients I encountered were highly educated members of the upper-middle class socioeconomic status that includes retired academics, scientists, lawyers, and mid-to-high-level civil servants in the federal government” (p.16). These were clients that were able to afford home health care within the comforts of their own homes. They were also all white except for “one African American woman, a retired nurse” (p. 16). The author also categorizes them as being in the top 10%, with enough monetary resources from their many years of savings. While the ideal situation should mean a symbiotic relationship where care workers gain a sense of political belongingness and patients receive their perceived health care, the author argues that the situation is far from the truth and that most Africans in these health jobs feel a sense of less political belonginess based on their experiences.

Within labor migration in the United States, the author argues that African immigrants are perceived as having a niche employment in the home care work facilitated by a continuous pull for other African immigrants to continuously join this section of employment in the job market. This employment niche is projected by immigrants as the macro state treatments of political belongingness or lack of belongingness. The African migrants, the author posits, experience a challenged sense of political belongingness with some perceiving the United States as a temporary place to raise money but retire in Africa. For example, the author argues that the realization of the American dream of at least attaining a middle-class lifestyle becomes almost impossible as the home care profession stagnates them with no room for socioeconomic mobility, the very motivation for them to migrate to the US. The book elaborates on how the socioeconomic dynamic is augmented by social and cultural treatments in a racialized care workforce, which evoke stories of servitude almost equated to the past experiences of African Americans servitude. The authors present the book with six interludes and five chapters, giving detailed ethnographic accounts and literature comparisons to interrogate political belonginess on several topics. The author argues that “work conditions are interpreted by African care workers as indicative of the society at large” (p.4) and that “work is one site where political belonging is negotiated in everyday life” (p.8).

Beginning with the Introduction, the author problematizes the idea of political belongingness and brings in a nuanced position where political belonginess is based on the daily experiences of the immigrants at the local level of the workplace and their perception and use of these experiences and treatments as a base to evaluate their political belongingness. The author reveals that there is more to the political belonging of immigrants than being hosted, offered employment and even citizenship. Immigrants’ experiences and treatments by agencies and patients at the workplace reveals th