Entangled Care in Immigrant Communities: A Post-Pandemic Lexicon of Care Dynamics in Queens

During the pandemic, a common scene worldwide involved a mother preparing lunch in the kitchen, a grandfather on a phone call, a child attending an elementary school class on Zoom, a dog barking, and a baby crying—all at the same time, in the same space. In immigrant neighborhoods of Queens, this situation was even more complicated: Queens was the epicenter of the pandemic in New York, immigrants disproportionately assumed essential care roles in the city (such as nurses, schoolteachers, food delivery workers, maids), and immigrant communities already faced a deficit in care infrastructure (schools, hospitals, and household support) before the pandemic, which worsened during the lockdowns. Although these scenes have become less intense in the post-pandemic era, the question remains: How do these multiple layers and crises of care (caregivers, care recipients, institutions, and infrastructure) interact? What are the forces and conditions that support a healthy care system, and what are the forces that burden it?

Drawing on semi-structured interviews with immigrant families, we propose four typologies of care-to-care interactions—antagonistic, complementary, supplementary, and constitutive—that describe the conditions under which care dynamics are sustained, strengthened, and overloaded. We conclude that sharing caregiving knowledge and establishing consistent care routines are essential for the sustainment and expansion of care dynamics, while failure often stems from unilateral decision-making and inflexibility in caregiving practices.