In this episode, Veronica Uribe (she) talks to Dr. Maga Miranda (she/they), interdisciplinary scholar and Chau Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Pomona College. Maga shares with us her research and activist work with care workers in California and across the US border. At the beginning of the conversation, Maga reflects on her childhood in Los Angeles, their tías, and their motivation for starting this research project, and organizing work with care workers in Southern California.
The researcher also narrates her long-standing collaboration with the California Domestic Workers Coalition (CDWC). Maga has helped the coalition deploy efforts to leverage platforms to improve the quality of care workers' jobs. In particular, Maga and Veronica discuss Alia, a portable benefits platform that makes it easy for employers and clients to contribute to benefits for domestic workers.
Finally, the author discusses how platforms like Alia help workers connect and organize to improve working conditions and advance legislation in California.
California Domestic Workers Coalition
National Laboral Relations Board
Labor Laws Have Largely Excluded Domestic Workers. A Movement Is Changing That. | Truthout
The Death of a Gig Worker - The Atlantic
Other publications:
Miranda, Magally. “Familiar Interfaces: Norms of Domesticity and Immigrant Latina Workers on Digital Care Work Platforms” In Anthropology of Work Review, Special Issue: Racialization and the Gig Economy. (Forthcoming)
Miranda, Magally. “Chicanas/Latinas and Domestic Work” Latinx Labor Dossier. Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. (Forthcoming)
Akridge, Hunter; Ahmed, Alex; Bàssïbét , Free S.; Miranda Alcázar, Magally A.; Fox, Sarah. “Oh, you’re watching me: Care workers’ experiences of surveillant assemblages on the platform and in the home, New Media and Society, 2025.
Miranda, Magally. “The Future of (Care) Work: Ride-Hailing on the New Terrain of Social Reproduction.” Critical Ethnic Studies, 2023.
Miranda, Magally and Efren Lopez. “Con Che? The Specter of Communism in the 1968 Chicano Blowouts.” In “Unsettled Debts: 1968 and the Problem of Historical Memory.” International Journal of Communication, 2022.
Miranda Alcázar, Magally A. “America’s New Left: The Weakest Link.” New Left Review, Vol. 116 No. 117 , 2019.
Miranda Alcázar, Magally A. “Women Workers Make All Other Work Possible: Latina Immigrant Organizing at the Oakland Domestic Workers’ Center.” Where Freedom Starts: Sex, Power, Violence, #MeToo. New York, NY: Verso Books, 2018, 233-256.