"Could not be more timely."

Vicente Rafael, professor of Southeast Asian History, University of Washington, Seattle

"As a “Philippine history of Denmark,” Labor Pioneers is a fascinating and multilayered narrative of Filipinas migrating to an unlikely destination in Europe starting in the 1960s, with the story following the rise and fall of the Marcos regime and the succeeding decades. Driven by oral histories, the book’s richly textured accounts feature a host of transnational actors ranging from Philippine and Danish policy makers, Gunnar Myrdal and the ILO, Danish hotels and labor unions, and the intrepid women who worked as chambermaids in Copenhagen. With much empathy, Andersen shows how migrants, amid structures and changing circumstances, created “new societies,” lived their faith, reworked ties to the homeland, and raised families—a second generation coming into its own and having to negotiate Filipino identity."

—Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jr., Editor, Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints

"Resultaterne af Nina Triges forskning og interviews er vigtige at lære at kende for venstrefløjsaktivister, hvad enten de er engagerede i fagbevægelsen, i antiracistisk arbejde eller i et politisk parti med internationalt fokus. “Labor Pioneers” er derfor ikke blot arbejderhistorie, men i høj grad også et oplysningsprojekt, der griber ind i nutiden og kan være med til at give venstrefløjens beslutningstagere et mere oplyst grundlag at arbejde på."

—Vibeke Nielsen, bibliotekar
og anmelder på Solidaritet.dk

"Nina Trige Andersen’s Labor Pioneers is a highly original and provocative history of the entanglement of the Philippines and Denmark through the lens of Filipino women’s labor and marriage migration. Her study presents a fascinating look into the dynamic economic, political, and legal regimes that facilitate transnational migration in the second half of the twentieth century. It also features the many different actors, most notably the women migrants themselves, who shape Danish and Philippine societies through their individual and collective actions and agendas."

—Catherine Ceniza Choy, University of California, Berkeley, author of Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History

"Although much has been written about labor migration from the Philippines, Nina Trige Andersen’s book, Labor Pioneers, offers fresh insights on the Philippines-Denmark migration corridor and beyond. Andersen wove existing literature, oral histories, and archives of the pioneering 49ers who became the nucleus of the Filipino community in Denmark, interviewed key informants, and immersed herself in Philippine realities in the making of this book. The result is an insightful analysis that depicts, quoting Andersen in her conclusion, “workers and policymakers attempting to craft new societies—often under conditions and within contexts that they only marginally influence—and it provides a vantage point for studying economy, labor, and migration as it transformed from the mid-twentieth century into the next.”"

—Maruja M.B. Asis, Scalabrini Migration Center