The people who are social subjects (recipients, clients, targets) for empowerment interventions typically live in a home base described as a ‘community’. While empowerment is usually associated with a bedrock of ‘community’ and is thought about in localizing terms, threats to local empowerment are often seen as originating in processes of modernity and globalization. This chapter investigates empowerment through migration scenarios where community and a sense of what is local take on different connotations. It questions how migration scenarios can enhance our understanding of empowerment in a context of local–global processes. Migration engages local and global spaces, and produces multiple and mobile attachments to place, thereby detaching empowerment scenarios from one locale. The Philippine migrants described here traverse and negotiate mutually entangled local and global spaces and power structures. For them, globalization processes at the macro-level are rendered concrete in the micro-politics of daily routines that entail attachments to various people in the local spaces of communities far flung from the place where daily life is being lived. This applies to Philippine migrants living in the Philippines who desire to re-migrate as much as it does to migrants living overseas and longing to be back in the Philippines. The migrant narratives presented here extend over different configurations of community and nation. They express the spatially mobile yet contingent qualities of agency and empowerment. Their example provides a challenge to localized and community-based understandings of empowerment and how the articulation of the local with global processes is represented in development writing.
The shifting vistas of empowerment and migration invite further critical unpacking of how community development scenarios and their social dynamics are discursively located in time, not just in space. Migration reveals the ways in which development writing can over-represent the temporal continuity of social and cultural rhythms in the local, for example the expectation that communities are bearers of indigenous knowledge. Because of migration and other interruptions in communities, local continuities such as knowledge cannot be assumed and should be a matter for research. Where this is not done, empowerment discourses continue a ‘tradition’ of romanticizing notions of community in development writing (Li 1996; Agrawal 1997) where uncritical and untheorized reference to ‘community’ as a site for empowerment assumes social cohesion and avoids questions of social power differentials and divisions. In communities that experience migration, social power differentials are likely to be altered in obvious and less obvious ways. Migrants typically bring new perspectives and resources to their communities of origin. Thus, even when absent, migrants contribute to local empowerment dynamics.
For migrants, inasmuch as empowerment is a subjective matter, their sense of personal power is seen as relative to the various contexts they have lived and worked in over time. For migrants, personal power is fluid and subject to constant reworking. As time passes and they reflect on their experiences, migrants’ assessments of the positive and negative aspects of migration are subject to contradiction and shifts in meaning. In other words, empowerment for migrants is time and context sensitive – it is contingent. This is also true for the kin of migrants. Migration and its circular temporal qualities thus eclipse the linear formulation of time for those who travel and those who remain behind. This has implications for assessments of empowerment both for migrants and for their communities.
In effect, migration exposes an ambiguous relationship between empowerment and development. It also invites a different critical purchase for empowerment discourse, one that embraces the ambiguities of power and subject agency, how these are contingently processed in contexts that extend beyond the local. When thinking about migration and/as empowerment, it becomes difficult to isolate empowerment as a clear-cut condition. Rather, empowerment occurs within a process of ongoing micro-political negotiation – it is not a state or condition that once arrived at is achieved and moved on from. Empowerment is an ever-present possibility. However, Philippine migrants also reveal the interconnections between empowerment and disempowerment, especially when we consider the structural conditions that compel migration.
Communities are not as neatly configured socially, spatially and temporally as many who use the concept suggest. They are shot through with different sets of social interests, minimally those of social class, gender and age, plus other various local sub-sets based on identity-related differences in power and powerlessness. Moreover, communities and those who ‘belong’ to them are not contained in local named places (Appadurai 1991; Basch et al. 1994; Clifford 1994; Rouse 1995). Migrants, because they are out of sight locally, do not figure significantly in mainstream development imaginings of community, and their concerns are off the page in writing about empowerment in local communities. This is curious because migrants play a significant role in the livelihood practices of their families and their ‘home’ communities, and traces of their presence are evident (for example, migrants often contribute to housing upgrades, from wood to concrete). Disclosure of the ‘true value’ of such contributions by the ‘disempowered’ is an important stage in becoming ‘empowered’ (all too often the only stage). In many instances of empowerment ‘training’ for women, group discussion reveals the economic significance of their routine maternal and wifely duties, which are often double- and triple-tracked with various forms of household production, subsistence agriculture, community work and so on. How often do such activities include discussion of migration and local power flows? Migrants are important ‘behind the scene’ actors in shifts in livelihood and class and cultural practices in their Philippine and overseas communities. This chapter can be regarded as an invitation to write migrants into empowerment scenarios, albeit in a manner that challenges ideas about local continuities and definitions of empowerment. Philippine migration reveals local and global processes to be in ever-present tension, as are stability and flux. Time, space and places migrants call ‘home’ – ‘communities’ in our texts – are also reworked through migration. Class and cultural practices lie at the centre of migration and empowerment scenarios.
As this volume demonstrates, some feminist writers link empowerment to forms of collective political action explicitly and consciously concerned with social transformation. Some even dismiss the usefulness of attributing empowerment to individuated action and knowledge. In concluding the chapter, I caution against those theoretical models that insist upon collective political action as evidence that empowerment has occurred. This limitation is particularly germane to Western-based models that cast labour migrants as victims. As the migrants described here illustrate, agency and related empowerment dynamics can be interpreted in the light of culturally infused discourses of migrant sacrifice, suffering and romanticized notions of community, a reading that suggests all migrants are disempowered. The cultural ‘surface’ of such discourses, however, does not necessarily negate individual assessments of empowerment (see Chang and Groves 2000). Some migrants see migration as an opportunity; others express ambivalence. Nonetheless, the discourses of suffering and tragedy are often called upon to highlight the structural inequities that underlie Philippine migration generally. Thus, the cultural and positional politics associated with attributing agency and empowerment in migration scenarios are especially challenging and push beyond simple binary explanations about individual and collective politics and the matter of social transformation. In insisting that claims about social transformation and empowerment involve a dialogue between theoretical and socially located knowledge, this chapter navigates between structural understandings of migration and its classed aspects, and post-structural insights about the contingencies of migrant experience. Examples are drawn from my own fieldwork in the Philippines and Canada, and from other studies.
Migration has long been a feature of Philippine society. International labour migration and its diaspora have become the cornerstone of Philippine ‘development’, and a primary means for servicing national indebtedness. In 1995, the Philippine Overseas Workers’ Welfare Administration estimated the number of legal and undocumented Philippine workers abroad to be 4.2 million persons, some 43 per cent of whom were probably working illegally (Go 1997). International migration is but one of the legacies of colonial domination, first by Spain and then the USA (from 1898 until nominal independence in 1946). Underscoring the relatively recent escalation in migration is widespread poverty, caused in part by limited access to resources such as land and secure employment for many Filipinos.1
Historically, US colonial policies precipitated several waves of Philippine migration, namely, contract labourers in the agricultural industries of Hawaii and California, and professional and skilled workers in the USA and its regions in the Asian-Pacific. By the 1960s Philippine men were also becoming prominent in international seafaring labour markets (Go 1997). However, the scale and nature of Philippine international migration shifted dramatically during the 1970s as demand for male construction workers in the Middle East accelerated, and increasing numbers of Filipinos responded to economic disadvantage by taking on overseas contract work (Pertierra 1994; Margold 1995). As the economy worsened in the mid-1980s, Filipinos turned to Asian labour markets, encouraged by official policies that saw labour export as a means of generating revenue and easing local unemployment (CIIR 1987; Chant and McIlwaine 1995). Also during the 1980s, Philippine women who had long migrated domestically in search of employment (Koo and Smith 1983; Trager 1984, 1988; Findlay 1987; Eviota 1992), increased their employment overseas. At this time, there were well over one and a half million Filipinos employed as contract workers in over one hundred and twenty countries (CIIR 1987; Arao 1991). Even more remarkable than the overall size of the Philippine migrant labour force is the relatively recent, rapid change in its gender structure. In the early 1980s, men comprised the majority of land-based Filipino labour migrants – by 1994 women made up 60 per cent of neophyte migrant workers leaving the Philippines (Go 1997).
While Philippine colonial history clearly created many of the preconditions for Filipino mobility, shifts in the gender, class and racialized configurations of globalized labour markets are also important. Typically, male labour migrants continue to seek employment in shipping and construction trades while women work in all tiers of service sectors in Southeast Asian, North American, European and Middle Eastern labour markets. The majority of Philippine women labour migrants – 92 per cent of them in 1992 (Beltran and Rodriguez 1996) – work in domestic service, so much so that the word ‘Filipina’ has undergone a shift in meaning. Once proudly (and sometimes controversially) mobilized discursively by Philippine feminists and others who wished to distinguish Philippine women from the generic Filipino, ‘Filipina’ is becoming negatively coloured by the demeaned class and status connotations accorded paid domestic labour.2 To speak of Filipina now, particularly from outside of the Philippines, is to conjure up the idea of domestic service. For example, ‘Filipina’ has become synonymous with maid in Hong Kong (Constable 1997) and with nanny in some affluent urban neighbourhoods in Canada. To be a ‘maid’ overseas, however, does not have the same meaning in the Philippines that it does in Hong Kong and Canada.3
Sometimes Philippine women’s migration produces im/migrants elsewhere, as in Canada where the majority of Filipino migrants are women who have entered Canada with employment visas under the ‘Live-in Caregiver Programme’. This programme provides visas that allow women to apply for Canadian landed immigrant status as a prerequisite to permanent citizenship after a set period of time and various conditions have been met (Daenzer 1997). Bakan and Stasiulis’s (1997) investigation of foreign domestic workers in Canada found that women from the Philippines comprise the largest group of entrants under the Caregiver Programme, for example, 61 per cent in 1992 and 75 per cent in 1995.4 The number of visas awarded to domestic workers under this programme fluctuates dramatically (down from 10,739 in 1990 to around 2,000 in 1996) with shifting state assessments of economic priorities and desirable citizenship subjects. Put differently, visa allocations are based on state practices infused with class, gender and race concerns, both internal to Canada and in international relations.
As with other migrant destinations, estimates of Philippine women working illegally in major Canadian cities such as Toronto are high (Bakan and Stasiulis 1997: 50). Advocates for foreign domestic workers routinely protest declines in the numbers of legally issued visas on the grounds that this simply increases the number of illegal workers because the demand remains high. Moreover, the flow of workers continues because the transnational ‘infrastructure’ of recruitment agencies includes some who operate outside the reaches of official policy. The nannies in Toronto and other Canadian cities are, however, only one contour of the Philippine labour diaspora.
The strikingly gendered character of Philippine migration and its classed qualities suggest a need to dislodge homogenizing discourses about migration and diaspora.5 Many critiques can be and have been made about the disruptive effects of national reliance upon women’s migration (Heyzer et al. 1994; Chant and McIlwaine 1995; Hernandez and Tigno 1995) and the subordinated character of their service sector employment, for example in Canada (Macklin 1994; Bakan and Stasiulis 1997) and in Hong Kong (Constable 1997). However, as Tyner (1994) has noted, much theoretical work remains to be done, particularly with regard to the gendered quality of Philippine migration. This is because migrant experience tends to be used strategically in writing that calls for political action and policy review. Understandably, the priorities have been to secure equitable employment through bilateral agreements and to hold Philippine and other states accountable, as when, for example, Philippine migrants are subjected to legal regimes Filipinos regard as unjust. As I have argued elsewhere (Barber 1996, 1997), one discursive outcome of these political interventions is that Philippine women migrants are alternatively construed as heroines (mostly in state-derived discourses) and/or victims (in advocacy discourses, including those from feminist perspectives). Such binary representations downplay migrant agency, the differences between migrants and the possibility that migration can lead to personal empowerment. They also obscure the class dynamics that migration engages. Here, I want to suggest the interrelationship between personal empowerment and its infusion into class and cultural politics. I also hope to make clear that disempowerment and empowerment can be different renderings of the same sets of experiences viewed from separate angles for different audiences. Political economy, however, frames relations of power that remain intransigent.
My research spans eight years of routine visits to several Philippine Visayan communities where I have tracked migration in conversations with migrants and their kin, including social networks extending to Canada.6 This work demonstrates how migration creates new conditions and spaces for the reworking of Philippine class, gender and cultural identities. On the one hand, daily life in many Philippine communities is now punctuated by the comings and goings of migration, the receipt of gifts and remittances, or the unrealized longings generated by these possibilities. On the other hand, the migrants themselves are inserted into various foreign contexts and the intimate environments of their workplaces, some stark and hostile, others more welcoming and alluring. Conditions and feelings can shift register. For example, migrant voices can be stoic for Philippine relatives, despondent with other migrants and social activists, but more positively animated about the class and cultural capital acquired through migration when a deeper temporality is invoked, such as occurred in Hong Kong in 1997 when Philippine migrants fretted over the effects of China’s impending governance (Constable 1999). Regardless of the character of the host country, its policies and employers, migrants strive to exert control over their lives as they negotiate their various local and global ‘homes’ and workplaces; they do so through mobilizing, reflectively, various social, cultural, political and economic resources.
In my conversations and review of media accounts, none of these women see themselves as disempowered, although they have experienced disempowering conditions. Neither are they victims. They are, however, exposed to serious risk; the nature of their migration and work makes them vulnerable to various forms of exploitation, harassment and even violence. Yet, the manner in which they seek control over such conditions, their strategic negotiation with such odds, is not often discussed. Exceptions include Hong Kong-based research by Constable (1997) and Groves and Chang (1999). The former explores agency and its relationship to collective political action addressing longer-term migration policy and its political and economic structural preconditions. The latter, in an interesting dialogical framework, explore different interpretive possibilities for understanding Philippine migrants’ agency and cultural politics, and the subtleties of this interplay. Both projects point, although not explicitly, to the Janus (double-faced) aspects of agency; how migrants’ actions to assert control and dignity in the personal nooks and crannies of their constrained living spaces and long working hours can be recast against them. Both studies reveal self-disciplining regimes for personal conduct.
Constable’s study examines the contradictions associated with Tinig Filipino, a migrant newsletter that includes correspondence extolling maids to be better, more polite (subservient) employees and more publicly demure, civic-minded Filipinos. This advice responds to negative commentaries in local media about the unreliability of Filipino maids and their purportedly raucous social demeanour when they congregate in public squares on their days off. Similarly construed racist challenges to Philippine maids are also present in Malaysia (Chin 1997) and Singapore (Yeoh et al. 1999). In Constable’s reading, Tinig Filipino articles represent a Foucauldian self-disciplining subversion of political potential. Similarly, Chang and Groves (2000) identify an ‘ethic of service’ among some Hong Kong-based Philippine women. Paradoxically, the ethic, they suggest, constitutes one expression of resistance from this structurally disempowered group (migrant Filipino women) to counter racialized public challenges to their sexuality and the lingering effects of their historical (colonial) association with prostitution (see also Groves and Chang 1999). Some women practise lesbian sexuality, others monitor the sexual expression of their peers, yet others experience overseas work as a respite from their sexually demanding partners. As Tacoli (1999) suggests in research on Philippine migrants in Italy, overseas work represents one avenue for women to escape an unhappy marriage, or to avoid the social stigma of marital breakdown. It also enables women who are mothers to practise self-interest (in travel and personal savings) disguised as maternal effort. None of these researchers explicitly engage with debates over empowerment but their work lends itself to my argument about the double-faced nature of power.
Most Philippine women migrants who exit their country legally are over-educated for the forms of employment they take on overseas. We would expect them, therefore, to hold strong images, empowering yet shifting imaginaries (in Anderson’s 1983 sense) of new lives – for themselves and their family members – beyond their tenuous location in the Philippine economy and their overseas underemployment. This is particularly true for the women who enter Canada where their predominance in the Live-in Caregiver’s Programme suggests both their desirability as employees and their longer-term im/migration strategies (Macklin 1994). As one Canadian newspaper editorial tellingly suggested, the normative middle-class Canadian family in the late 1990s includes a Philippine nanny and a four-wheel drive vehicle (Globe and Mail, 18 September 1997). The following sections present four different narratives, three from my own research, one from media voices. They reveal the shifting terrain of class processes, cultural politics and personal agency in the complexly articulated identities of the women who migrate. Empowerment issues for women like Christina, Maria and Portia (all pseudonyms) and Leticia Cables are influenced by events in the lives of other people they care about or feel obligated to in Philippine communities. Their decisions are affected by notions of femininity in Philippine culture politics, particularly with regard to mothers (Maria and Leticia) and daughters (Christina), but also aunts (Portia, Christina and Maria). The personally empowering aspects of migration for these and other migrant women are thus in flux, tied to contingencies and power flows in two (or more) locations. This would also be true for empowerment scenarios in any local community where ideas of community common interest can disguise the contingencies of micro-power.
Note the dynamic spatial-temporal perspectives at play in the narratives. Through the process of ordering their memories, the women reflect on their pre-migration and post-migration experiences, in effect their past personal histories. Because they are citizens of Canada, Maria and Portia, and potentially Leticia, represent most directly the contingencies of empowerment. In their present circumstances they are concerned about a future that is cast in terms of different scenarios of ‘community’, where should they live, with whom, how to determine this? Also informing this research are conversations with other women in Philippine communities about an imagined future migration. These women articulate the reworking of gendered cultural and class understandings of migration and diaspora. They show how ‘local’ cultural knowledge (the sub-text in empowerment processes) is constantly being infused with novel understandings of migration both from returning migrants, communications from friends and kin overseas, and media pronouncements about the pitfalls and opportunities posed by overseas work.
During a research trip to the Philippines in 1997, I met Christina, a 30-year-old woman who had just returned to her home in Iloilo city after completing a two-year employment contract with a five-star hotel in Dubai. She carried with her an array of expensive consumer goods, such as leather products and gold jewellery, to distribute to family and friends in the customary gift exchange of homecoming Filipinos, or balikbayans (Basch et al. 1994: 257). After a respite of several months in Iloilo, Christina returned to Dubai for a further contract with the same employer. In several meetings she told me her overseas experience has been relatively successful from her point of view. Of course, the work has been tedious at times but she has felt relatively safe given the misfortunes of some fellow travellers she knows about (particularly illegal Russian women migrants and Philippine women who have risked sexual liaisons and become pregnant). As she put it ‘there have been no major surprises for me’. Most importantly, she feels she has done well through the ‘help’ she has provided to her parents and younger siblings.
As all migrants desire, Christina’s efforts interrupt class and gender certainties in Philippine society. Her remittances to family members contribute to the education of younger siblings, and she expects her savings to afford a more secure, personally independent future than seemed possible given her family background. There have been costs, however, and overseas employment is the culmination of years of hard struggle, first to complete university education and then to earn sufficient wages that, as she puts it: ‘I would not be working just for myself, but also for my family.’ For single women in Christina’s position, negotiating these obstacles represents a personally satisfying process of class transition, especially in terms of cultural norms. However, the experience is also contradictory. This is especially so when read against gender and class geopolitics. Her work (in a gendered job in an overseas tourist sector) contributes to Philippine national foreign debt repayments even as it represents her underemployment and the loss of benefit from her skills and education in her ‘home’ community. On the other hand, for a woman to contribute to the well-being of her family fulfils one of the dictates of Philippine femininity. Morally, she is a good and dutiful daughter both in terms of the family and the Philippine state that calculates the export of gendered labour into its development policies. And this is what Christina finds personally rewarding, empowering even, however constrained it might seem through ‘Western eyes’.
Christina’s agency in class and cultural processes is of wider significance. After graduating from a local university with a Bachelor of Science, she travelled to Manila where she took secretarial work for 4,000 pesos per month (approximately US$160), barely sufficient to meet her living expenses. Frustrated with her underemployment, she investigated overseas employment opportunities before settling on the Dubai contract. It appeared less risky than some of the more exploitative and degrading scenarios she had heard about from the media and first hand from friends. For example, she knew lesser-ranked hotels often called upon staff to provide sexual services to hotel guests. Recruitment fees and charges for travel documents amounted to three months wages and were paid for with money loaned from kin. Since her salary increased by 1,000 pesos and the hotel provided her with accommodation and meals, the loan seemed manageable. Friends working in Dubai hotels and official state-sponsored seminars provided information about Philippine and Dubai regulatory regimes and prepared her for periodic pregnancy testing and state-enforced celibacy when in Dubai. Because of the commonplace nature of the comings and goings of overseas workers in Philippine communities, these invasions of personal privacy – embodied discipline in Foucault’s sense (cf. Constable 1997; Ong 1995; Margold 1994) – are seen as ‘normal’ to migration time–space.
Christina is the seventh daughter in a family of twelve children, four of whom have become overseas workers. A brother works in shipping, one older sister is in Malaysia and a younger sister, her confidence bolstered by the apparent success of the others, moved to Hong Kong early in 1998. Before retirement, both parents worked in domestic service in a Philippine middle-class professional household, her mother as a housekeeper, her father as a driver and gardener. Members of the employer’s family continue to provide economic support to the elderly parents and one of Christina’s other sisters works in the household of one of the children of her parents’ employers, such is the mutually negotiated imbrication of domestic service employment in middle-class Philippine society. Indeed, it continues to be common for middle-class families to ‘take-in’ a young person from a poor household, usually a female but sometimes a male. In return for domestic service, what Filipinos term ‘helping’, the youth is typically provided with the resources, social and economic, necessary to complete high school and sometimes university. On university campuses, this relationship may be mirrored in arrangements that place students in faculty housing and allow them to pay for their accommodation and food with labour.
Such arrangements challenge class boundaries as young women from rural and working-class urban households obtain education not otherwise possible. As a result of their engagement with the norms of middle-class culture in the households they work in, they acquire what Bourdieu (1984) calls ‘cultural capital’ in their exposure to otherwise unfamiliar class practices. This kind of shift, as Christina’s example indicates, helps some to achieve their personal goals. But most importantly, the class practices Christina’s case exposes are foundational to the scale and form of gendered Philippine labour migration. Many of the well-qualified women who migrate overseas originate from households defined by economic hardship, yet they present middle-class cultural capital confidently, just as they are the bearers of the highly regarded conventions of Philippine cultural femininity in overseas labour markets. Again, this reveals that migration can be construed as personally empowering in economic and class terms, at least subjectively, even when the results suggest otherwise.
Christina is but one of many women I have encountered who has benefited from the migration of female kin and gone on to reproduce that same relationship for younger relatives. This process of generationally gendered class negotiation remains invisible in many accounts of Philippine migration, particularly those emphasizing victimization. In Christina’s case and for her friends contemplating overseas work, the contingencies of migration are set aside through reference to the Filipino cultural idiom of bahala na, which communicates something equivalent to ‘so be it’, the rest lies ‘in God’s hands.’ By the same token, fate is negotiated with agency and agency has links, however tenuous, to empowerment. Of course, not all plans will flow as smoothly as those recounted here. Eventually, Christina hopes to settle in the Philippines and develop a pig farming business. Many return migrants want to start businesses with the financial capital from overseas wages but few achieve these goals (see also Cruz and Paganoni 1989; Lane 1992; Osteria 1994). Instead, capital is exhausted through debt repayment, emergency expenses and requests for consumer goods from kin – often leading to sequential labour. Indeed, Christina has taken a further contract.
For migrants who travel to Canada where wage rates are minimal by Canadian standards, but relatively high for overseas domestic labour markets, migration trajectories differ from those in Asia and the Middle East. As mentioned, Philippine women entering Canada are eligible for more permanent immigration status, which many take up, thus diasporic possibilities for long-term resettlement are more likely. In Asian and Middle Eastern states, repressive migrant labour regulations proscribe citizenship claims. In Canada, however, resettlement remains conditional upon familial and community relations in Canadian and Philippine locales. Such conditionality tempers feelings of personal empowerment.
This is true for Maria, now a Canadian living in Ottawa. Like Christina, her migration history began with underemployment in Manila. Maria is from Negros Oriental. She is ten years older than Christina and has less formal education. Her experiences, however, also include her negotiation of different class practices and locales, the successes from which rebound in her Philippine home community where I first met her in 1993 on one of her periodic visits with family. Maria’s path to Canada included a sojourn in Hong Kong, a popular destination for Visayan women seeking overseas employment and a means to migrate to Canada. In Hong Kong, she worked for employers of different nationalities in the sizeable expatriate community before moving to Canada with her Canadian employers. As for Christina, Maria’s many siblings have benefited from having female kin dispersed through Southeast Asian countries and in Canada. The remittances provide housing and education for younger relatives.
Maria’s migration, paradoxically, originated in her need to provide for her son after her separation from his father. When I first met her, she was trying to bring her son to Canada where she is employed as a community care nurse and holds citizenship. It had been ten years of struggle to arrive at that point and while there had been some challenging moments, such as her de facto detention by one Hong Kong employer, she has accomplished much and has few regrets. As is common for women who came to Canada under the Live-in Caregiver Programme, her Canadian employers hired her sister.
Maria’s migration goal has always been to secure her son’s future and to provide for her parents. She has succeeded in the latter: her parents live with Maria’s son (in his late teens when I first met her), in one of the few two-level concrete houses in their coastal barangay (the smallest political unit in the Philippines). There has been, however, a glitch in Maria’s plans. Apparently, her son is reluctant to relocate to Canada. He visited Maria in Ottawa during the winter of 1997 where he experienced severe ‘homesickness’. After three months, the draw of his Philippine ‘home’, kin and friendships proved too strong and his mother’s dreams of their better life too remote from his own experience. He returned to his grandparents’ household in the Philippines. Maria’s Canadian ‘home base’ thus remains provisional. She returns regularly to her Philippine ‘home’ fearing that her son could be ‘entrapped’ by a local family keen to tap into her remittances. An accidental pregnancy of a daughter would be one vehicle for entrapment. Maria’s concerns are such that ‘she would drop everything and go there to try to stop this’. In Canada, however, she enjoys her work, maintains an active social life with other Filipino migrants, mostly through church-based Philippine networks (Nagata 1987) and is politically active around issues of justice for Philippine migrants.
In contrast, Portia, who travelled from a Visayan community to Halifax some twelve years ago, migrated mainly out of curiosity and a desire for travel. The support she has extended to Philippine kin has been elective, not obligatory. Friends and kin also preceded and followed her as domestic service workers, and they provide an important Philippine social community for her in Canada. She is a member of a church-based group of Filipinos, mostly from the Visayas, who hold monthly suppers and evenings of entertainment where Philippine news and cultural experiences are exchanged. In this diasporic niche, Philippine cultural affinities take precedence over the class loyalties that otherwise mark Halifax society socially and spatially. Were it not for the cultural politics set in motion by diaspora and the class distortions of Philippine development, prominent members of the Halifax medical establishment – once themselves migrants from the Philippines – might not so readily mingle socially with care-giving service providers and, on occasion, Philippine crew members from the busy Halifax container port. However, class differences are muddied by the vagaries of Philippine development and muted by the draw of sharing Filipino culture with fellow travellers. Cultural differentness thus serves to diminish the usual social lines drawn by Halifax’s medical hierarchies and Philippine cultural loyalties remain strong, even as they are reworked within this particular configuration of class and community.
When I first met Portia she was ‘content’ with her life in Halifax ‘for the time being at least’. She said, ‘It is my choice to stay here or go there.’ Unlike Maria, familial disruption does not draw Portia to an imagined future return ‘home’. Rather, it is memories of familial continuity and its absence in her Halifax home that fuel her somewhat romantic vision of a Philippine-based retirement. She sees it as a place where she could enjoy the company of her nieces’ and nephews’ children, some of whom she has helped to educate. This image is particularly acute because her employment entails care-giving to an elderly woman whose children reside outside of Canada. On bad days, she finds her responsibilities daunting, and cannot see herself remaining in Canada in her old age, despite her Canadian citizenship, pension and health benefits. Portia’s elderly employer has recently passed away. Portia’s contract was extended to prepare the employer’s house for sale. Subsequently she moved to a rented apartment and is supporting herself doing housekeeping for members of her parish. She would prefer to work for a single employer and to maintain her own residence. The fact that she returned despite the fact that her employer died while she was on ‘vacation’ in the Philippines suggests Canada’s draw continues despite future uncertainties.
This is also true for Leticia Cables who is arguably the most well-known Philippine woman working in Canada. Unlike other Philippine women migrants such as Flor Contemplacion and Sarah Balabagan,7 whose criminal prosecution and severe sentencing in foreign states (Singapore and the United Arab Emirates respectively) received widespread international coverage in 1995, Leticia Cables’s reputation is localized in Canada. I include her as a final ‘reading’ of the complexities of agency and empowerment for individual migrants.
On 17 February 2000, the Globe and Mail headline read, ‘Filipina nanny agrees to leave Canada.’ So begins the penultimate article in a series of commentaries about Leticia Cables, all of which seemed calculated to encourage support for her claim to remain in Canada. She is described in this particular piece as ‘The popular Edmonton nanny who ran afoul of immigration authorities because she worked too hard.’ Leticia Cables violated the terms of her visa that restricted her to one employer for an initial two-year period. She took additional part-time work, we are told, because her employer, a lawyer, agreed her wages were too low. Apparently, she was highly valued by her employer and members of the parish in which she twice sought sanctuary. Some months earlier, after the first threat of deportation, Leticia had fled to her church where she remained for four months while attempting to overturn the deportation order. She was partially successful in November when the Immigration Minister allowed the case to undergo review by the Federal Court. On 24 December she was granted a temporary work visa while she awaited the court’s decision.
Globe and Mail readers were introduced to Leticia Cables in a series of articles extending back to the beginning of her church ‘exile’ and intensifying in December 1999. For example, on 24 December, the banner was ‘“Let me work again”, the Christmas wish of Filipina nanny: The threat of deportation has ended but she still cannot provide for children back home.’ At this moment, with her deportation order under appeal, Leticia joined her employer’s household which in February publicly noted their distress about the possible loss of their new but beloved nanny. Despite the publicity, the court declined to review the case, and Leticia returned to her church while calling for a reprieve from the minister. ‘Why are they being so mean to me?’, she is reported to have said. Nonetheless, by mid-February, she agreed to leave Canada and was escorted to Manila by two immigration officers on 29 February 2000.
Six days later, the paper provided an update: ‘Philippine nanny wants to return to Canada. Leticia Cables is praying that she’ll soon be back in Canada’ begins the account. We are told that she considers Canada ‘the best country in the world’ and, despite her extreme fatigue, soon after her arrival in Manila she visited the Canadian embassy to begin the process of filing papers, obtaining policy and medical clearances to apply for a second Canadian live-in care-giver’s visa. One has to ask here how her medical circumstances and her relationship to criminality in the Philippines might have shifted over the forty-eight hour period since her arrival. On the other hand, the Philippine (and Canadian) state’s bureaucratic processing of im/migration generates significant revenue. In order for her reapplication to be successful, it was necessary for Leticia to receive special written ministerial consent. Such consent is a condition of re-entry for a deportee and was verbally promised in the negotiations over deportation. The article concludes with a pronouncement by Leticia on the generosity of the Canadian people and the mainly fair treatment she feels compelled to report, although she declared the Federal Court of Appeal’s dismissal of her case to be unfair.
On 28 June 2000, maintaining the same tone, the headline was ‘Industrious nanny can return to Canada.’ On 6 July, the paper carried a picture of her thoughtfully studying her Filipinas passport. The caption read: ‘Back to work. Filipina Leticia Cables checks her passport and her new Canadian work visa during a stopover at Vancouver Airport yesterday, on her way to Edmonton … she was deported from Canada for working more than federal rules allow so she could supplement her nanny wages.’ This may be the last Canadians learn about Leticia Cables but my research suggests she will continue to negotiate the policy and personal environments she deems vital to her own and her family’s future. Media reports suggest remittances supported her husband and two adolescent children in the Philippines.
Prior to her arrival in Canada, Leticia, like Maria, had worked for ten years as a ‘maid’ in Hong Kong. Her work history suggests she has not lived with her Philippine family during most of her children’s childhood, some eleven years. What is quite striking in the Canadian media coverage is the insistence that being deported from Canada constitutes the deprivation, that hard-hearted ‘mean’ officials victimized her. Interestingly, unlike many discussions of Philippine women overseas workers, both academic and popular, the Globe and Mail reports said little about any familial or maternal deprivation arising from her overseas employment. This silence may be partially explained by Leticia’s agency in directing the public discourse dissecting her life; that for her to express some measure of joy in deportation would be an easing of her seemingly tight control of the media storyline about her Canadian future. But more than this, the media accounts reveal how Philippine migrants transcend their victimizing representation. Leticia Cables’s struggles acquired a public profile that she and her supporters (described in one report as her ‘adoptive’ group) skilfully employed to advantage. However, all migrants contend with migration legalities, the vagaries of official policy, unfounded ‘friendly’ advice (Leticia’s downfall, she claimed) and unreliable employers. Here it is useful to consider Leticia Cable’s negotiation of her Canadian visa in terms of empowerment discourse.
Researchers on Philippine women working in regional labour markets have only recently begun to explore the cultural politics surrounding Philippine women’s migration and to discuss forms of ambivalence about returning ‘home’ to the Philippines. As noted, Constable (1999) and Chang and Groves (2000) explore the possibility that migration may free some women from their husband’s sexual demands and control. Both studies describe Philippine women’s economic entrepreneurialism on their days off, where they generate income through selling goods and services to each other as one means to counter their exploitative work environments. Similarly, they maintain Filipino social networks in church settings and in other organizations where activist politics are expressed. This research demonstrates some women’s commitment to living and working outside of the Philippines, just as others struggle with a pull toward home in the face of certain repeat labour contracts. Other studies of domestic service workers (for example, in the USA, Romero 1994) demonstrate that, and as Portia and Maria make clear, live-out employment is preferable because it allows time for personal pursuits beyond the scrutiny of employers.
For Maria, Portia, Leticia and many other Philippine women living in diaspora space (Brah 1996), their imagined futures are constantly reworked, in part because their form of labour migration requires that they travel and live alone. Their family relations are maintained around the edges of employment and state dictates in home and host locations. Some women find freedom from the cultural constraints of marriage liberating (Parrenas 1997). This is quite likely true for Leticia Cables and for some women interviewed by Constable (1999) in Hong Kong who expressed their ambivalence about returning to Philippine cultural and familial constraints. Others, such as Maria, worry that their economic gains occur at the expense of a more personally fulfilling life, ‘what might have been’ as she puts it in a darker moment. All of the women I have met negotiate confining and liberating tendencies in Philippine culture as they live it. For them and other diasporic Filipinos, their culture is both mobile and gendered. Likewise, the structural and personal dynamics of their particular form of employment pose many challenges because the work is transacted in intimate spaces where exploitation is emotionally loaded and abuse more readily disguised (Barber 2000). These conditions can be read simultaneously as empowering and disempowering.
To conclude, the frames (temporal and spatial) and the social realities within which power is negotiated are not locally bounded; that is they can only be minimally construed as community centred. Here I think of the changing class and gender connotations of the ‘Filipina’ as a result of negative ‘feedback’ from international migration experiences and other contingent processes of identity construction and interpretation. Also relevant here is Maria’s struggle to be a good ‘mother’ to her son, in absentia, understood through a filter of Philippine and Canadian cultural politics. Normatively, Philippine families are emotionally ‘close’ and supposed to live together, as Portia suggests, in layers of generations when this is not interrupted through migration. This makes Maria’s distance from her son emotionally difficult. Alternatively, by Canadian middle-class standards, she is a ‘good mother’ in her concern over his education and future. Yet he remains disaffected from his mother’s ambition. Maria’s situation guides my earlier reference to the silence surrounding Leticia Cables’s family. In both cases, ambivalence and contradiction attend any attribution of dis/empowerment.
Further translocal dynamics arise from the national and international policies that circumscribe Philippine labour migration – for example, Christina’s need to finance her overseas work with funds borrowed from relatives. And in terms of micro-politics and disciplined subjects, there are the ways in which migrants adapt to controlling state and employer practices; for example, the manner in which Christina uncritically subjected herself to state scrutiny and employer surveillance. However, despite the fact that domestic service is demeaning, low-waged and often risky, it is constructed as a viable livelihood strategy by many of the women university students I have talked to (with emergent middle-class orientations) and in the working-class environs of coastal Visayan communities. Migration thus sustains its draw in contemporary Philippine cultural politics – by class and gender – with plenty of encouragement from the Philippine state. For all that is known about the reasons not to migrate, women still leave encouraged by their kin. Their acts fall within a regime of power and discipline from an engendered global political economy that manages to capture their future vision. Does this structural disempowerment preclude individual agency and its empowering possibilities? I think not.
Migration inflects local class practices in ways that tempt visions of empowerment. Ethnographically this is revealed through the quotidian character of Philippine migration, seen in the comings and goings of people, the cash and commodities they carry, and the ideas exchanged about these flows in the migrant-sending communities. Global processes are ‘localized’ through the anticipation of departures and the enthusiasm created by returning migrants. At such moments it is possible to overlook that the Philippine state orchestrates and depends economically upon labour migration and the funds it generates. Also set aside are remonstrations that many others profit from labour migration both in smaller and larger ways, by providing financial and employment placement services, often with exorbitant fees (Bakan and Stasiulis 1995). Most remarkably, Philippine women’s migration encompasses complex shifts in gender and class, and these include the assumption of cultural capital by women during their tenure as domestic workers in better-off households. The shifts seem modest when placed alongside the patterns of cyclical contracts, the risks that the work entails and the fact that women beneficiaries of migration remittances may well end up in the same circuits of labour migration, even in Canada – as we saw in the case of Maria’s sister and Portia’s nieces. Nonetheless, the desires compelling migration remain strong in Philippine communities and can withstand the test of the realities of structural, actual and symbolic violence in Bourdieu’s (1977) sense of emotional indebtedness (Barber 2000).
Given the contradictions and contingencies, both cultural and strategically personal in migrant narratives, it is striking that migrant Philippine women are unwilling to construe their lives as disempowered in ways that match up with international discourses of victimized domestic workers. Most media coverage of migrant Philippine women that I have read in Philippine and Canadian papers discusses their abuse. This is why the media examination of Leticia Cables, her inspirational courage and strength is remarkable. Nonetheless, her story holds some parallels to the portrayal in the media of Sara Balabagan’s story (see note 7). Both accounts embody central contradictions with respect to Philippine gendered cultural politics. As with Cables, Balabagan’s status as a contemporary heroine arises in part because, initially, she took desperate measures to defend herself against injustice. Balabagan also had moral appeal because she acted in defence of her honour, a gendered example of Filipino triumph against adversity. In Catholic Philippines, different actors can read the Balabagan story strategically to extract different sorts of meanings. For the state, it is a story about its care-taking role in assisting distressed migrants. For potential migrants it provides a narrative of hope about fateful suffering as well as survival against great odds. For non-governmental organizations it becomes a cautionary tale about the pitfalls of migration and the need to address domestic and international policies. However, as I hope I have demonstrated here, migration experiences are more varied and complexly articulated (historically, culturally, socially) than is suggested through the telling and retelling of the Contemplacion tragedy and the Balabagan travesty. The reading of empowerment into these scenarios is politically fraught, not the least because the attribution of empowerment to individual acts of agency invites a liberal view of empowerment that seems untenable given the structural disadvantage of Philippine women.
Taking a longer view, however, the class environments that migration engages – both working class and middle class – provide sites for new personal and collective empowerment politics. In keeping with Margold’s (1999) compelling argument about Philippine working-class political activism, it seems premature to discount the links between acts of self-disciplining resistance (those which refuse collective mobilization) and change-oriented (transformative?) actions expressing empowerment. I leave the last Janus vision to two Hong Kong contributors to Tinig Filipino (cited in Chang and Groves 2000). Where do their voices position development as empowerment discourse? I suggest their personally empowering narrative coincides with Philippine development priorities even as it suggests class shifts in their own lives and their vision for a different Philippines that they contribute to.
Through your good works in those places where you are temporarily working, you will become instruments in the economic improvement or progress of your ‘sick nation’ through the dollars you send back home. In the future, through your perseverance and hard work, your children and your children’s children will be the ones to benefit from your nation’s progress.
(Layosa 1994: 6)
With this very inspiring title ‘hero’, I could walk straight with my head up high in the busy streets of the hot city of Manila. It is indeed very flattering. Whew! I’m a hero. In my little peaceful town of Sanchez, Mia, I’m improving my life and most of all, I’m a dollar earner – much more than other people in higher ranks.
(Estabillo 1994: 10)
1 Official estimates of the number of Filipinos who live below the poverty line vary from slightly over 50 to 70 per cent. In the Visayan communities I am familiar with in Negros Oriental, poverty hovers around 60 per cent. Here, the poorest communities reside in the uplands, along the coast and on sugar hacienda lands they are unable to cultivate. In urban areas, poverty is typically associated with districts where people live in makeshift forms of accommodation. It is also disguised, however, through the living arrangements of migrants who are employed as poorly paid domestic and service sector workers residing with their employers, or who squeeze into sub-standard shared accommodation to extend their modest incomes.
2 My understanding of the current cultural politics surrounding usages of ‘Filipina’ is based on personal correspondence with feminist friends and colleagues in an area where women’s migration rates are particularly high.
3 In their ‘home’ communities in the Philippines these women are often referred to as ‘domestic helpers’ (DHs for short), or as in official discourse ‘OCWs’ (overseas contract workers).
4 During the 1940s and 1950s, most foreign domestic workers in Canada were British or European. By 1989, 50 per cent came from the Philippines (Daenzer 1997).
5 See Brah (1996) and Ong and Nonini (1997) for further discussion on this point.
6 This research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Other Philippine research has been supported by two Dalhousie University projects with the University of the Philippines (UPV) at Los Banos and Iloilo, and Silliman University, funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Andrea Alviola and Maria Bueros worked with me under the Environmental Resource Management Project (ERMP) on gender and household livelihood – Andrea continues her generous support. Betty Abregana (Silliman) and Rosaria Asong and Meloy Mabunay (UPV, Iloilo) continue collaboration and friendship. I am forever grateful to all of them and others too numerous to mention here.
7 In September 1995, in the United Arab Emirates, 16-year-old Sara Balabagan was found guilty of stabbing her male employer whom she claimed had attempted to rape her soon after she arrived. In response to Philippine domestic protests and with widespread international support, the Philippine state managed to have her death sentence reduced to public flogging plus one year in jail. Earlier that same year, in Singapore, Flor Contemplacion had been tried for murder, ostensibly the outcome of a quarrel between friends. She was executed, despite much public agitation in the Philippines. Since Balabagan’s case, official Philippine reactions to migrant misfortune are now more assertive and proactive. Philippine overseas workers are now proclaimed as ‘hero/ines’ and 2000 was officially dedicated to their honour – the ‘Year of OFWs’. Sara Balabagan returned home to a heroine’s welcome in 1996 and has become associated with celebrity, even in Canada. While Balabagan and Contemplacion are emblematic of the darker, ‘victimized’ side of migration, Sara Balabagan might equally serve as an empowerment example over time and through subsequent experience.
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