In this pathbreaking and timely work, Hamal Gurung gives voice to the growing number of Nepali women who migrate to the United States to work in the informal economy. Highlighting the experiences of thirty-five women, mostly college educated and middle class, who take on domestic service and unskilled labor jobs, Hamal Gurung challenges conventional portraits of Third World women as victims forced into low-wage employment. Instead, she sheds light on Nepali women’s strategic decisions to accept downwardly mobile positions in order to earn more income, thereby achieving greater agency in their home countries as well as in their diasporic communities in the United States. These women are not only investing in themselves and their families—they are building transnational communities through formal participation in NGOs and informal networks of migrant workers. In great detail, Hamal Gurung documents Nepali migrant women’s lives, making visible the profound and far-reaching effects of their civic, economic, and political engagement.

This volume studies the new migratory flows among Asian women, focusing particularly on poverty and the attendant issues of powerlessness that mediate women′s migration. While gender provides the conceptual tool for mapping differential experiences of social reality, by identifying poverty and migration as significant axes around which social relations and processes unfold, the volume unravels the complex layers of needs, networks and choices that come into play in poverty-driven migration.

In Far West Nepal - an area extremely impoverished also by Nepalese standards - labour migration to India has been an integral part of the livelihood strategies of the majority of people for several generations. This research is based on case studies among male and female migrants in Delhi coming from four villages of Far West Nepal. The analysis focuses on selected aspects of the migrants' daily lives, such as working and living conditions, management of loans and savings, and remittance transfer. It was found, that the whole migration process is mainly facilitated by transnational kin and friendship networks. To grasp the geographical and social dimensions of the migrant's lives an integrative approach in joining the sustainable livelihoods approach, Bourdieu's theory of practice, the concept of social capital and the concept of transnational migration was developed. Further results show, that the majority of the migrants are male. The unskilled migrants occupy a distinct niche, in which men have been working as watchmen and car cleaners for generations. The job market is highly organized since jobs are handed over and sold within networks. If wives of migrants are in Delhi for longer periods, they engage in housekeeping. For financial needs migrants established their own informal savings and credit associations. Although migration is firstly seen as an opportunity by the migrants, it can as well perpetuate debt and dependency and entail that they remain migrants for their whole lives.

The South Asian diaspora is a diverse group who settled in different parts of the world, often concentrated in developed countries. This volume explores how transnational politics overlap with religious ideologies, media and culture amongst the diaspora, contributing to diasporic identity building in host countries.

In this pathbreaking and timely work, Hamal Gurung gives voice to the growing number of Nepali women who migrate to the United States to work in the informal economy. Highlighting the experiences of thirty-five women, mostly college educated and middle class, who take on domestic service and unskilled labor jobs, Hamal Gurung challenges conventional portraits of Third World women as victims forced into low-wage employment. Instead, she sheds light on Nepali women’s strategic decisions to accept downwardly mobile positions in order to earn more income, thereby achieving greater agency in their home countries as well as in their diasporic communities in the United States. These women are not only investing in themselves and their families—they are building transnational communities through formal participation in NGOs and informal networks of migrant workers. In great detail, Hamal Gurung documents Nepali migrant women’s lives, making visible the profound and far-reaching effects of their civic, economic, and political engagement.