I prefer ‘enslaved person’ not just because of that nod to humanization, but because of its closer proximity to the verb enslave. Especially in Pulido’s case—absent the generational and legal context of African American slavery—slavery is not a fixed state. Enslavement is not a single action, either. Rather, like emancipation, enslavement is a process. Enslaved people are made over decades by the process of enslavement, they are broken and bent, their persons warped against their wills. Calling Pulido a slave obscures the work that individuals did to assign that status.

I recognize in Tizon’s descriptions of his mother and “Lola” a pattern I have seen in my reporting: how one exhausted, single immigrant mother turns all her fury and shame into abuse of another, weaker woman in her emotional and physical bondage. They remind me of a Filipina woman I met in a shelter here, who told me how her madam had starved her, threatened to turn her over to the police, and beat her so badly she jumped out of an upstairs window, injuring her hip and spine, to survive. I wrote all of that in an article, but couldn’t fit what she told me about her madam: that she was also a lawyer, single mother, and bulimic. That she used to cry, binge, and throw up at home every day, and that the worst beatings usually came after angry, screaming phone calls with her estranged husband. For months, I’ve been watching and wrestling with how to articulate this specifically cruel way that women can dehumanize and harm other women. I’ve often wished I could include a footnote to these stories: Sometimes the victimizers are victims themselves.