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CHAPTER7 ◆ Come What May ANGELINA’S AND LUIS’S LIVES reveal how the new kinds of identities created by the global realm’s new economic forms—here, temporary labor migration—shape dynamic cultures both at home and abroad. As Angelina struggled with being reidentified as balikbayan and Luis negotiated his new Temporary Foreign Worker status in Canada, their experience of virtual village life remade their intimate inner processes: intimacy, memory, feelings, and their senses of being selves in the world. The reverse has also been true. It is their village-shaped sense of self that in turn has scripted how they have interacted with family, neighbors, governments, agents, brokers, and employers, and thus shaped globalization—and the emergent global realm—itself, through interactions with different forms of the state. Luis in Calgary Initially, Luis felt that his life was going as well as might be expected with his work in Calgary. “I can accept my situation here,” he explained to me. When I visited him in the summer of 2009, Luis was sharing a room in the two-bedroom, ground-floor condominium in southwest Calgary previously occupied by his employer’s mother. Outside, in the parking lot that formed the forecourt of the apartment block, sat an old, dented sedan. Luis and his workmates had purchased the car secondhand to ferry their landscaping team around the Calgary area. Luis was not one of the drivers, but he helped pay for gas. His typical daily routine involved traveling to jobs, working for nine or ten hours, returning to the apartment and cooking with the group, then phoning Angelina, whom he had already texted early in the morning, using a discount phone card and the apartment’s landline. The time difference between Haliap and Calgary meant Angelina received his morning text as she went to bed, and then they spoke on the phone mid-morning, her time. Once a week, or more often if he was able, he took the C-train (aboveground subway) to attend Iglesia services with his new Calgary congregation. He had met most of his nonwork Filipino friends through the church. Once a month he would travel on the C-train to Pacific Mall in the northeastern part of the city. There, at a business called I-Remit, he would send what money he could to Angelina’s Lagawe bank 180 ◆ GLOBAL FILIPINOS account. Every month or so he would attend a Filipino social event, usually with members of his church, and eat Filipino food. In the few hours he had at the apartment outside his working time, he did laundry or went shopping in the stores in the sizable strip mall three blocks to the east. The complex was dominated by a massive Walmart, where Luis and I spent several hours shopping for work clothes during my stay at the nearby Big 8 motel. The vista to the south from Luis’s apartment and the Walmart parking lot was an open prairie that rolled away toward the United States. Looking south, Luis lamented that his papers would not allow him to cross the Canada-U.S. border. But after all, this was not such a disappointment. “My purpose here is to earn,” he told me. “Maybe later I can become a tourist.” Luis responded to the circumstance he found in Calgary by living up to the stereotypes of Filipinos as uncomplaining and hardworking. He concentrated on building good relations with his employer and with Ben, Albert, and Marlon, the three other Filipino TFWs on his landscaping team, who were also his roommates. In July 2009 he had not yet raised the question of working conditions with his boss, even though TFW conditions stipulate that workers should work no more than forty hours per week. Instead, he and his coworkers had been working to become the most efficient team in his boss’s business. They could landscape in a day, he reported, what it took a Canadian team three days to do. They were thus a credit to their boss. But they were also vulnerable. The same labor broker had recruited all the members of Luis’s team. Since their broker was now being investigated for breaking the rules of theTFW program, any applications she had made for them to transfer their labor market orders between employers were being scrutinized very closely by Citizenship and Immigration Canada. At the end of July 2009, Luis was focused on the increasingly fragile relations within...

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