Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021. ix, 254 pp. US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 9781501760402.
In critical dialogue with the popular construction of the Filipino migrant as suffering martyr, and employing a transnational lens, historian Mina Roces threads together an inspirational overview of the complexities of Filipino migrants’ experiences of global migration. Migrants, she proposes, are typically rendered as peripheral or “liminal” subjects relegated to the margins of their home (as sacrificial victims in the global economy) and host societies (as ethnicized minorities), seldom positioned at the centre of the narrative as having “revolutionized” Philippine society. The book’s main argument, an indisputable one, is that migrants, regardless of their class backgrounds, motivations, and differing destination contexts, as contract workers in gendered labour markets, or professional residents and/or citizens of destination countries (sometimes both scenarios are encompassed in one migrant’s history) can be viewed as agents of change, permanently altered by their migration experiences and, in the main, concerned to influence positive change for their kin, communities, and country.
Migrants, Roces argues, want to tell their stories, and be heard. Throughout the volume care is taken to insert numerous examples of migrant voices and experiences drawn from multiple sites where records have been kept of migrant experiences, often in their own voices. With a timespan from the 1970s through to 2018, examples of sources include videos, migrant community histories, memoirs, diaries, short pieces including poems, and jokes assembled in anthologies and newsletters produced by migrant groups and advocates. Roces describes these sources as “migrant archives” which are well referenced and potentially useful for follow-up research. Archival work is complimented by Roces’ ethnographic participation in 2017 and 2019 in migrant literacy seminars (in Singapore and the Philippines) and in various other activities where migration-related gatherings and events occurred, for example in the US, Australia, Greece, Italy, and Hong Kong, but this aspect of her methodology is less articulated than her discussion of the migrant archive per se. The insertion of numerous migrant voices, reflecting on their migration experience and relations with kin and homeland constituencies, is a strength of the volume and makes for a compelling read.
Arenas of change are explored through seven chapters, with each chapter covering several geographical areas and more than one sector of migrants. As a result, the book assembles many differently classed voices, an authorial strategy that renders the central argument crucial to the volume’s continuity and demands the full attention of the reader. Part 1 addresses the gendered migration scenarios that accelerated in the post-Marcos period (from the mid-1980s) to a total figure of over one million migrants per year since the early 1990s, and looks at how migration, and the migrants themselves, have unsettled the idealized Filipino family and the binary gendered constructions seen as foundational to that family (and the nation). Roces argues that migrants have actively challenged gender and family “taboos,” directly and indirectly. Such actions include the withholding of certain requests from family for remittances, thereby altering the social norms on Filipino reciprocity and/or eschewing ungrateful family members by electing not to return “home.” While the general contours of the argument about the challenges to an idealized Filipino family are compelling, this argument invites further focused research on whether and how migration has reshaped gendered understandings of family.
Part 2 covers the economic landscapes that migrants have responded to as contributors to household livelihoods and as consumers in their varied engagements with the new forms of capital generated through a national dependency on remittances (totalling USD33.5 billion in 2019) (6). There are numerous economic beneficiaries of migration in businesses of various scales in the transnational locations of migrants’ affiliations; in the global destinations where they purchase goods and services for themselves and family members; and in their home communities, where merchants benefit from remittance spending. Migrant voices in the volume offer poignant examples of their awareness of the labour embodied in their remittances, a feature of their migration narratives Roces does not dwell upon. In accord with state policy, financial literacy seminars promoted by migrant advocates (as attended by Roces) encourage migrants to see themselves as investors and not simply as remitters called upon to address new forms of consumption. Migrants surely are contributors to the new forms of capital generated by migration, but whether they can invest their earnings is contingent on where they are situated in global labour hierarchies (class matters) and their resolve in managing the numerous requests most receive for remittances. Remittances equal a massive increase in local consumption in migrant-sending communities and have become a central platform of Philippine economic policy, especially with regards to how the state addresses national debt servicing. Here again, Roces’ discussion of migrants as economic change agents is compelling, an important reminder of the economic potency of migration as a national and personal agenda. However, it remains the case that despite their best intentions, class differences, cultural pressures, and transnational migration policies are crucial to how migrants fare as economic actors.
Part 3 reviews case studies of Filipino diasporic activism and philanthropy, coloured by state-promoted discourses of the heroic migrant narrative, a tale of struggle, suffering, and sacrifice in a hostile environment abroad which ends not in tragedy but in the triumph of a better life. Roces’ study renders this discourse in a more complex way by presenting examples of activism and philanthropy whereby the narrative is mobilized to promote Filipino achievements. For example, she describes multi-generational Filipino American contexts where Filipinos groups have worked politically and socially to reframe how Filipino Americans are received and revalued for their contributions to American society. Nonetheless, Roces argues, Filipino benefactors can be seen to legitimize the migration narrative. As intended, part 3’s examples of Filipino Americans as community historians, advocates, and philanthropists, eager to contribute to local and homeland migrant betterment projects (educational and social) and to recast the political and social identities of Filipino-Americans, bridges the relatively separate fields of Filipino American studies and Philippine migration studies. What is well captured in the volume, with its careful comparisons of geographical areas and different migrant constituencies, is the complexities of how class travels along migration pathways. Migrants residing in European countries such as Italy and Greece, for example, earn higher wages than migrants in the regional labour market (including Singapore and Hong Kong, two sites visited by Roces), and as such they present and are received as middle class in their Philippine home communities, yet they remain members of an ethnicized minority in their communities of destination. Social class, the volume demonstrates, is thus geographically relative, relational, and situational.
As intended, the volume offers a nuanced range of migrant voices which both confirm and contradict the pervasive research on the negative treatment of Filipino global migrants. But a discerning reader must probe the multidisciplinary transnational literature on Philippine global migration more deeply to gain a more robust account of the structural disadvantages confronting the vast majority of migrants departing the Philippines annually. Each national context hosting migrants presents different policies and histories that frame how migrants cross national boundaries and are positioned relative to local workers. For skilled migrants there are well-documented challenges surrounding Philippine credential recognition. Also germane is the literature on regulation failure for migration industries in the Philippines and beyond. This is the deeper context of Philippine global migration alluded to by Roces and provides supplemental reading to this innovative and guardedly optimistic volume.
Pauline Gardiner Barber
Dalhousie University, Halifax