Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers

Preface

Preface These are some of the terraces made by our men here. They certainly enhance the exquisite landscape and panoramic view of Wadi Derna. I intend to plant a huge billboard on the flat ground proclaiming “handiwork of filipino crusaders for libyan progress and development.” —Cornelius Guevarra, migrant worker, November 24, 1982 I arrived in Manila on September 2, 2001, with an overwhelming sense that I was entering a strangely familiar place. After sitting on a plane filled with a group of boisterous and animated Filipina workers who were returning home from Japan and then being immediately greeted at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport with a cardboard cutout of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo bearing a welcome sign hailing overseas Filipino workers as bagong bayani (modern-day heroes), I felt a momentary sense of validation that I was in the right place.While I was aware of the ways in which the Philippine state has imbued its overseas employment program with social value by recognizing Filipinos’ participation in it as a form of social heroism, I was ill prepared to embrace fully the degree to which the pursuit of overseas work directed people’s life goals to the extent that their hope of a “better” livelihood resides outside the Philippines. Mag abroad na lang tayo (let us go/work abroad). This sentiment echoed the everyday conversations of people I met, befriended, or observed while studying the Philippines and its culture of labor migration ; it was a place engulfed with the notion of overseas migration as Filipinos’ ultimate “opportunity.” Whether standing in a grocery checkout line, viewing television programs interrupted by news reports of ix overseas recruitment fairs, passing through the overseas remittance centers mushrooming throughout Manila’s crowded streets, or waiting in the lobbies of recruitment agencies, I sensed Filipinos’ hopelessness and desperation. I was astonished to hear Filipinos proclaim their pride in being Filipinos while in the same breath lamenting their dissatisfaction with the country’s economic progress and envisioning the promise of a golden future outside the Philippines. Perhaps this is the same kind of lament my late father, Cornelius Guevarra, faced as he pursued overseas work. He left the Philippines in 1982 for a two-year contract in Libya, which did not have the workforce to carry out its infrastructure development. During that period, the labor recruitment industry was unregulated, so employment agencies engaged freely in unscrupulous business practices such as withholding workers’ wages or not providing overseas workers adequate means to contact their families back home. My memory of these years was colored by the many times my mother and I, as a child of nine, waited in lines outside the agency that arranged my father’s overseas employment, along with a mass of other families, to demand the release of his wages, and by hours spent outside the airport awaiting his return because this same agency could not provide the exact date and time of his arrival back in the Philippines. During that period, as a transnational family, long before the ready availability of e-mail or phone cards, we communicated through letters and photographs exchanged and sent through workers who were going to the same work site as my father’s or through his friends who were returning home to the Philippines. A couple of years after his death in 1995, I uncovered one of the many photos he had sent. It bore the inscription I quoted above. At first glance, the photo seems to capture nothing but a desolate, red rocky land with a few scattered trees. But this seemingly empty space is now paved and developed, a suitable foundation for the country’s development projects. For me, this photograph is emblematic of not just the changes in the global economy that labor migrants like my father help to enable but also the economic and social transformations that migrants themselves hope to obtain in exchange for their labor. This paved and developed land may seem insignificant to passersby. But for labor migrants like my father, this is the“handiwork of Filipino crusaders” that he proudly proclaimed and made visible, and it represents the sacri- fices that serve as foundation and inspiration for this book. Preface x ...