The Anxieties of Mobility: Migration and Tourism in the Indonesian Borderlands

2. The Diluted Enclave

The Diluted Enclave 2 Batam is rapidly becoming a modern city, increasingly connected to international forces. Because of this anyone who wants to come here has to have some kind of special skill. Batam mayor R. A. Aziz (quoted in Suara Pembaruan, November 20, 1995) Wati gets off the ojek (motorcycle taxi), pulls a one-thousandrupiah bill out of her pocket, and pays the driver. It is just past seven and the morning air is still cool. She has just finished a twelve-hour shift at a Singaporean electronics company in the Batamindo Industrial Park, where she is in the middle of a terminal two-year contract that began in 2002. As she exits the park through the main gate and crosses the busy street crowded with taxis, a young man, a calo, or tout, waves aggressively at her, trying to get her attention. For each taxi he fills the driver pays him one thousand rupiah (about ten U.S. cents). But she looks right through him, stopping at one of a long line of liar food stalls that crowd the other side of the street. A large billboard above them advertises a new housing estate by depicting a couple and their two children getting out of a car parked on their driveway. The caption reads, in English, “Family Dream.” Wati buys a breakfast snack and continues down the street past the wide variety of liar shops and stalls selling everything from food to pirated jeans and VCDs (video compact disks). After a couple hundred meters, she turns left and walks through a gateway with a sign that reads “Gampung Aceh” (Aceh Village).1 The pavement turns to dirt as she follows a path that leads through the liar community, across a small bridge, before finally reaching the house where she lives with her two brothers. Wati sits down on the bench on her porch and takes off her shoes before entering the house. 44 : chapter 2 Once inside she removes her jilbab (headscarf or veil), carefully folds it over a hanger, and changes out of her work clothes. Quickly she eats her breakfast before washing the pile of clothing that is waiting for her. Within an hour she is asleep; in eleven more she will begin her next shift. unraveling the enclave More than any other project, the opening of the Batamindo Industrial Park in 1991 symbolized the emergence of the Growth Triangle.2 Located on 320 hectares of land, Batamindo houses around one hundred multinational corporations such as Philips, Sony, and Hitachi and employs around seventy thousand workers, more than 80 percent women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. The park is at the center of a particular imaginary of the contemporary global economy. Young women such as Wati are the “paradigmatic subject” (Sen 1998, 36) within this imaginary, a subject that takes a more specific form in the electronics industry as the “nimblefingered ” female factory worker (A. Ong 1987, 151–153; Salzinger 2003, 9–10).3 Batamindo is generally considered an example of an “enclave” form of development (Van Grunsven 1998, 197), “a gated and policed space The Batamindo Industrial Park. Photo by author. the diluted enclave : 45 of labour control” (Phelps 2004, 212) where workers are subject to the disciplinary power of multinational corporations (A. Ong 1999, 222). In an important sense, Batamindo is self-sustaining. It has its own electricity and water plants. There is an air-conditioned mall, outdoor food courts, markets, small variety shops, telephone shops, ATMs, and health clinics, as well as restaurants catering mainly to the foreign managerial staff. A community center with a basketball court, a soccer field, table tennis, and spaces for other activities is located at the center of the park, as is a large mosque. The park is dominated by the seemingly endless rows of factories and dormitory housing surrounded by fences and divided between men and women. In order to enter each particular dormitory area one has to pass through guard posts that are often manned by security guards. The inside of the park is more reminiscent of Singapore than of Batam, with clean, tree-lined streets and functional sidewalks, something of a rarity in Indonesia . As one commentator has noted, “The aim [of Batamindo] is to offer a Singapore-type environment with cheap labor and land costs in order to make investors feel at home; to feel as if they were...