Elaine Mosqueda, A Nurse Exemplifying Tradition of Filipino Nursing in America
Elaine Mosqueda has traveled far since moving from the Philippines to the United States at the age of 21. She found her passion for nursing at a young age, but she never expected to find her home and career at an institution like MSK.
“It has been a wonderful journey for the past 29 years,” says Ms. Mosqueda, Clinical Nurse II in MSK’s Molecular Imaging Therapy Services (MITS) Department.
“MSK has played a vital role in who I am now,” she says. “Working with cancer patients has taught me to be strong, to be courageous and resilient, and to value life more each day. I am blessed to have found my way to the number one cancer hospital in the country.”
A Childhood by the Sea
Ms. Mosqueda was born in Mangagoy, a village on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. She was one of seven children, with four sisters and two brothers, and grew up in a small house on the beach.
Some of her fondest childhood memories involve the ocean. She and her siblings spent countless hours exploring the beach, gathering seashells, discovering sea creatures, swimming in the surf, digging in the sand and making sandcastles, and boating in their family canoe.
They also spent a lot of time reading as their father was a “stern, strict disciplinarian,” who placed great value on literature. “He wanted us to excel at everything,” Ms. Mosqueda remembers. “He taught me to be a very disciplined person.”
Image of Elaine Mosqueda with 3 young men
Ms. Mosqueda and her two older sisters attended boarding school where she did indeed excel – in academics and extracurricular activities, including public speaking, choir, the spelling bee, drama club, and the school newspaper. She also became a platoon leader in her school’s Citizen Army Training, which was part of the country’s high school curriculum. At the time, military training was a fundamental component of the Philippines educational system.
What she appreciated most about boarding school was the opportunity to grow closer to her sisters. “I felt like a grown-up tagging along next to my two older sisters, and I became independent at a very young age,” she says. “Those are my most cherished memories.”
The American Dream
When Ms. Mosqueda graduated from high school, she imagined having a career as a doctor, ideally an ear, nose, and throat doctor or, even better, an eye doctor. “I had poor eyesight, so it was my dream to help people with poor vision,” she says. With that in mind, she majored in biology in college.
An aunt visiting from California, where she worked as a nurse, caused her to rethink her career plans.
“She encouraged me to become a nurse as a stepping-stone to America,” she says. “She told me of all the opportunities for nurses in the United States. I realized that having a college degree was a way out of poverty and coming to America became my dream.”
Ms. Mosqueda switched her major to nursing during her sophomore year. At 21, she and many other nurses from the Philippines were recruited by Saint Raphael Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut, which is now part of Yale New Haven Hospital. Venturing to a faraway continent was a scary experience, but Ms. Mosqueda was excited by this new opportunity and eager for the next chapter of her life to begin.
She received her nursing license in Connecticut but was homesick and moved to California to join her aunt and cousins a few months later.
Elaine on the summit of a mountain with a dog
The History of Filipino Nurses in America
Filipino immigrants represented 28 percent of all immigrants working as registered nurses in 2018, according to the Migration Policy Institute. This is the result of the long history between the Philippines and the United States, which has included the migration of thousands of Filipino nurses to the U.S. over a period of more than 70 years.
The Philippines became the first U.S. colony following the Spanish-American War in 1898. After the war, the U.S. established several nursing schools in the country with an American nursing curriculum.
Two years after the Philippines gained its independence in 1946, the U.S. created the Exchange Visitor Program, an international educational exchange program that allowed professional workers from different countries to come to the U.S. to work and learn about American culture. Many Filipino nurses, who were already trained in the American style of nursing, came to the U.S. at that time.
These mass movements of Filipino nurses helped address nursing shortages in the U.S. following World War II and inspired future generations of Filipino-American nurses and healthcare workers. Since the 1960s, more than 150,000 Filipino nurses have migrated to the US.
“I am proud to see more Filipino nurses in the medical world,” says Ms. Mosqueda. “We are natural givers and nurturers and we like to be completely hands-on while working alongside our colleagues.”
Finding MSK
After living and working as a traveling nurse throughout California for a year and a half, Ms. Mosqueda got married and moved to New York in 1990.
In March 1992, when she was 27 years old, she began her career at MSK after being recruited as a nurse on the Head and Neck Inpatient Service. She worked there for 14 years and helped care for patients who underwent extensive oral, facial, or neck surgeries. In November 2005, she transferred to the Nuclear Medicine department, where she assisted patients receiving diagnostic tests, such as PetScans, cardiac stress tests, bone scans and more, by injecting radioactive isotope agents into their bloodstreams.
“Understandably, these patients had high levels of anxiety,” says Ms. Mosqueda. “My role was to allay their fears and support them as they went through their imaging and the uncertainties of their life-changing diagnosis.”
In January 2018, she transferred to the MITS Department in Radiology, which uses molecularly targeted radionuclide therapy and sophisticated imaging technology, such as PET scans, to detect and treat cancer.
She currently oversees patients undergoing radioactive therapy, making sure they can tolerate their treatment, monitoring side effects, providing instructions upon discharge, and following up with them over the phone. She also works with patients participating in radionuclide research studies.
Like hundreds of nurses at MSK, Ms. Mosqueda worked onsite during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Sad, uncertain times for patients, their families, my own family and everyone around me,” she remembers.
Her daily routine of getting up early and reporting to work helped her cope with her own fears and uncertainties. She also found strength in continuing her favorite activities such as running, biking, kayaking, and hiking with her border collie, Picasso, at her lake cottage in New Hampshire. And feeling connected to the larger community during this perilous time, something she achieved by volunteering with New York Cares at a food pantry in Kew Gardens, Queens, was beneficial.
Ms. Mosqueda has always been an athlete and avid outdoorswoman. In the U.S., she has hiked all 48 of the 4,000-foot peaks in New Hampshire. Internationally, she has hiked to the Mount Everest base camp in Nepal and along the Inca Trail in Peru. She also ran the New York City Marathon in 2016, has participated in multiple half-marathons, and was a member of MSK’s competitive Dragon Boat team for three years.
Honoring the Asian Community in the United States
When she thinks about the Asian community in the U.S. and what it means to her to be part of it, Ms. Mosqueda thinks about setting a good example for her three sons and teaching them the importance of hard work and industry, just as she was taught. Following in her footsteps, two of her sons are pursuing nursing degrees. Her eldest son graduated from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 2019 with a degree in Computer Science in Engineering Technology.
Over the past year, as classes were remote, she worked hard to keep her sons motivated and productive at home. One of her sons volunteered 87 hours with New York Cares, providing meals to elderly and indigent residents of Manhattan. Another son worked with her on a bake sale to raise money for the animal shelter where she adopted her dog — she marketed the event and her son did all the baking. Together, they raised $1,000 for the Save a Mutt Kennel in North Carolina.
“Giving back to society makes me feel accomplished,” Ms. Mosqueda says. “And it’s a feeling I want my sons to know. Contributing to the greater good is part of their heritage.”
She also thinks of her older sister, Lindy, who is an emergency room nurse in Florida and was on the frontlines throughout the pandemic. Her sister had a huge impact on Ms. Mosqueda when she was growing up, and it was her sister who financed her college education.
Ms. Mosqueda is proud of the hard work and sacrifices of Filipino nurses during COVID-19, and the vital role Filipinos have played in caring for patients.
“I think of those who continue to have smiles on their faces regardless of how difficult life can be, as well as those who sacrificed and left their families behind to work abroad and send money back home,” she says. “I say to them, ‘You are all special! This month is for you!’”