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Author: Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

In Conversation with Martina Vandenberg

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, in conversation with Martina Vandenberg, presents her book "The Trafficker Next Door: How Household Employers Exploit Domestic Workers." Registration requested, not required.

This book launch is offered in recognition of Filipino American History Month. Learn more about this observance through the Filipino American National Historical Society's website.

About the Book (from the publisher):

“Kaya mo ba?” Can you take it? An instructor asks this of a group of migrant workers in the Philippines, as they prepare for domestic work in wealthier countries. Can you take the grueling work? “Kaya,” the women say. “We can.”

The phrase “human trafficking” often conjures nightmarish images of sexual exploitation, but Rhacel Salazar Parreñas reveals that the vast majority of trafficking victims are domestic workers who suffer abuse not at the hands of shadowy crime lords but rather “ordinary” family employers.

Drawing on twenty years of groundbreaking research across three continents, Parreñas exposes the grim realities faced by migrant workers ensnared in forced labor due to poverty and debt bondage. She uncovers how entrenched social and legal norms, coupled with a patronizing “employer savior complex,” foster a troubling sense of ownership among employers over “their” domestic workers.

Through powerful firsthand accounts—including harrowing stories of workers living in hot, windowless rooms, experiencing food deprivation, having their makeup, jewelry, and phones confiscated, and having their wages stolen—Parreñas illustrates the migrants’ desperation, and the power dynamics that lead to a global network of exploitation. Parreñas’s urgent narrative challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths about everyday household arrangements and calls for justice and fair treatment for all workers.

In Conversation:

Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is the Doris Stevens Professor in Women’s Studies and Professor of Sociology and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. Her research examines the experiences of women from the Philippines to understand how gender shapes migration, how states manage migration, how gendered economies operate in globalization and how worker unfreedom is a constitutive element of development. She is a scholar of gender, migration, labor, and economic sociology. She has completed four ethnographic studies including "Unfree: Migrant Domestic Work in Arab States," which was recognized with the 2023 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award by the American Sociological Association. Her other books include "Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work;" "Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes;" and "Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo." She is the co-editor of a book series for Stanford University Press, Globalization in Everyday Life. Her articles have been published in American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology and Gender & Society. In 2019, she received the Jessie Bernard Award from the American Sociological Association, which is the discipline’s highest award given to a gender scholar. For her commitment to transformative scholarship, she received the 2018 Feminist Activist Award from the ASA Sex and Gender Section. Her mentorship of junior scholars was recognized in 2020 with a Mentoring Award from Sociologists for Women in Society. Professor Parreñas has received research funding from the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and National Science Foundation, and fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the Institute for Advanced Study. Her writings have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Spanish. She has given keynote and named lectures in over 20 countries. 

Photo by Carolina Ramirez Paez

Martina E. Vandenberg is the founder and president of The Human Trafficking Legal Center, an organization dedicated to providing pro bono counsel to trafficking survivors. Vandenberg has spent more than two decades fighting human trafficking, forced labor, rape as a war crime, and violence against women. Vandenberg has represented victims of human trafficking pro bono in immigration, criminal, and civil cases. She has trained more than 5,000 pro bono attorneys nationwide to handle human trafficking matters. Prior to founding the Human Trafficking Legal Center, Vandenberg was a partner in the law firm of Jenner & Block, where her practice focused on anti-bribery investigations related to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, First Amendment litigation, and pro bono human trafficking cases. A former Human Rights Watch researcher, Vandenberg spearheaded investigations into human rights violations against women in the Russian Federation, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Uzbekistan, Kosovo, Israel, and Ukraine. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as Rhodes Scholar and a Truman Scholar. She is the recipient of the American Bar Association’s 2025 John Minor Wisdom Award.

Presented in partnership with the Princeton Filipino Community and with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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