This is a poignant story about an undocumented housekeeper in New York. The author also writes about the great challenges faced by our fellow Filipinos who choose to work overseas and earn a living under dire circumstances to support their families back home. This was first featured in FSI Perspectives, a publication of the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), the training and research agency attached to the Department of Foreign Affairs. Published with permission from the DFA of the Philippines.
“Timing one’s departure from America is a precarious art.”
– Rachel Aviv
I lifted the above quote from Aviv’s story that appeared in the April 11, 2016, issue of the New Yorker magazine. The title is “The Cost of Caring” and I have said that it should be required reading for any and all DFA personnel training for Assistance to Nationals (ATN) work. It’s a very interesting and educational look at the lives of Filipino domestic and household workers in New York, with much of it told from the perspective of those workers.
I arrived in New York in 2014, the day after Christmas. It was my second foreign assignment, my first being to Guam. I was designated as Consul to the Philippine Consulate General, with my portfolio being Dual Citizenships, Civil Registry, Overseas Voting and ATN. It was an interesting portfolio, and familiar work, as I’d done most of them in my previous assignment.
My first ATN case would also be one of my longest. About two weeks after I reported for duty, when the holiday season in the city had died down and the city trash bins no longer overflowed with garbage, my assistant Art Romua asked me if I wanted to visit Ditas1 in the hospital. I said yes, of course.
This is the background: Ditas was a Filipina who had been working in New York as a nanny and housekeeper. Like most Filipino TNT’s2 in the US, she did whatever jobs she could get. She had arrived many years before. Exactly when she’d landed in New York we could not determine, but it had been a long time. One day, earlier in 2014, her friend noticed that she was in poor health. They had tried helping with over-the-counter medicines, but she did not get better. A short time later, a friend found her in her room, unresponsive. They called 911, but it was a bit late. The doctors at the hospital said that she had suffered a bad stroke. The chances of any recovery were small. She entered what health professionals call a “persistent vegetative state.” That was how I met her, around four or five months after she came through the doors of that hospital’s emergency room.
We extrapolated the figures for the number of undocumented Filipinos in our part of the United States. Derived from both the US Census and Immigration figures, it was an amount between 25,000 and 34,000. It’s a sum based on the population estimates of Filipinos living in the East Coast of the US. The exact figure will never really be known, for obvious reasons. It’s a large number, of course, but not as large as the number of Latinos, which easily reach the hundreds of thousands.
It was a cold day when we arrived at the hospital where Ditas was. New York takes pride in its eminence as the US’s greatest city, and it has hospitals to match that reputation. Many will dispute this assertion, of course, but I for one would say I would have no problems being a patient there. The hospital we went to was massive, but despite its size and the number of people there, both as patients and healthcare workers, it was clean and relatively well maintained.
Ditas was no longer on a ventilator, she could breathe on her own, but she was unconscious and, I assumed, asleep. She was in her late 60s, with wavy gray hair. She had obviously lost some weight, but overall, she looked remarkably fine. The room was well- lit and smelled faintly of the cleaning solution used in hospitals. The TV was off, as there was no one to watch it, and the main sound was the beep of the heart and breathing monitors. I held her hand and was surprised that her skin was a bit rough. A working woman’s hands. Her nails, however, were neatly trimmed. Every few minutes, the bed made as sound as it inflated in some places and deflated in others; an automatic function designed to relieve pressure points and prevent bedsores.
We spoke to the supervising nurse, who told us that there had been no changes in Ditas’ condition and informed us that her prognosis for recovery was poor. I gave her my number and requested her to call me at any time, if there was any change.
The driving force for most migration is economic. At the time of my arrival in New York, an undocumented nanny or housekeeper being paid under the table could expect a minimum of $120 a day. Some could commute to and from work. Others chose to stay in their employer’s residences if the employers resided outside the city or far from the bus or subway lines. If they chose to be stay-in nannies or housekeepers, the rate could be bumped up to $140 or $160 a day. You could make enough in four days to equal a teacher’s monthly pay in the Philippines. If you found a steady employer (and there is no shortage of employers in New York) you could earn a lot.
The nannies and housekeepers sent a lot of money home. Millions of dollars through the remittance service companies along Roosevelt Avenue, the Little Manila section of New York City. The first Jollibee in New York was sited there, not in Manhattan. Jollibee knows where the Pinoys are at. There are also numerous karinderias along Roosevelt where you can order your hot beef soup on a winter morning and catch up on the latest gossip. There’s also a Red Ribbon bakeshop for those occasions where you need to buy a Filipino-style cake. Really, you won’t miss much. I’m sure before her illness, Ditas walked the very same busy sidewalks and bought her pandesal and hopia from the Filipino bakeries there, under the roar of the 7 Train (the subway service between Flushing, Queens and 34th Street–Hudson Yards in Manhattan) and the chuch-chuch-chuch of the buses and delivery trucks.
Filipino TNTs have to time their return precisely. The window to come home is very small. After the children are done with their studies, and if they’ve somehow managed to save enough to retire on, they need to cut ties with the employers they work for, the city they called home for years, maybe decades, and get on their return flight, knowing they will never come back. The penalty for overstaying a US visa is a bar on returning. If you overstay for less than one year, the penalty is a three-year bar. If you overstay for more than a year, the bar is ten years. That’s how it is supposed to work. In practice, however, once you overstay, the U.S. will effectively never again give you a visa.
They transferred Ditas to another hospital sometime in 2016. She was still comatose. The persistent vegetative state continued to persist. It was a hospital located in an island in the middle of the East River. One evening, Art and I visited her. She was, as usual, unresponsive. I held her hand again and noticed how soft it had become. Her nails were still neatly trimmed – a testament to the quality of care she was getting. Her hair was washed and smelled faintly of shampoo. She had no bedsores. Her breathing was slow and steady. Again, the dominant sound in the room was the beep of the heart and breathing monitors. Occasionally, there would be eye movements, and she would open her mouth, but the attending nurse said these were involuntary actions.
Art and I went out of the hospital, and I took the time to stare at the lights of the Manhattan buildings reflecting on the river. I was composing the message about Ditas’ condition I was going to relay to her daughters, through the department. She had two. They were college graduates, both working. They had each been repeatedly denied visas by the US Embassy, although both had applied multiple times. I never got to know why they were denied. The visa section rarely, if ever, gives reasons for denial. The neons and flourescents twinkled on the dark water’s surface, flowing with the rhythm of millennia. It started to rain, a cold autumn shower, so I headed back to the car.
Ditas had missed her chance to come home. Many others did as well. Once the window to return closes, it closes tight. Once you say “yes” to supporting your grandchild’s education, you will work until you cannot physically do so. I met multitudes of 70-year-olds hustling, sending their salaries home to support families whose needs never ended. After the kids, it was the grandkids. Sometimes it was a sick husband. Maybe it was a child who’d never finished school and relied almost solely on Mama for support. The list is endless. They sent their balikbayan boxes home, and one day, if the worst happened, they’d go home in a box too.
Art and I would keep visiting on a semi-regular basis through the years. Art retired in 2019, a sad day. He is one of the most compassionate men I ever worked with. The pandemic hit in 2020. The city shut down a week before the spring equinox. In the span of a day, America’s biggest city turned into a ghost town. We holed up in our apartments, missing the bloom of spring flowers and tending to the growing number of COVID victims pleading for help.
We received a call sometime in the middle of the year, informing us of the passing of Ditas. Whether she was a COVID victim or had just finally succumbed to her latent condition, I never did find out. The routine of the day was to treat all deaths the same. She was processed and buried quickly, denied the rites that mark our passage from this world. The only thing I could do was say prayers for her repose and ask for peace for her family. Like her presence on New York’s streets, the track of Ditas was like footsteps in the snow, slowly fading with the passing of every hour.
Endnotes:
1. The patient’s name has been changed to protect her privacy.
2. TNT is of course the colloquial slang for undocumented migrants. For the unfamiliar, it is derived from the Filipino phrase “Tago Ng Tago” badly translated as “one who keeps hiding.” It is not pejorative.
The header is winter scene at a neighborhood in Queens, New York (credit: Getty Images).
About the author
KERWIN ORVILLE TATE was born in Naga City, Camarines Sur, to parents Orville F. Tate, a lawyer, and Teresita C. Tate, a public school teacher, in February 1973. He graduated from Ateneo de Naga University with a degree in English and earned a law degree from the University of the Philippines and Far Eastern University. He passed the Foreign Service Officer’s Exam in 2000 and joined the Department of Foreign Affairs in the same year. He has served in various capacities in the home office, including as Assistant Director and then Director of Engineering and Procurement, Director at the Office of Protocol and Director at the Office of Consular Affairs, and Executive Director at the Office of Asset Management and Support Services. He has been posted abroad to Guam, where he was a Consul, and to New York, where he served as the Deputy Consul General. He currently serves as the Deputy Consul General of the Philippine Consulate General in Toronto. Mr. Tate is widowed and has one child, Julian Rasheed.