Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood and Class Relations in a Globalized Age

Chapter 4: Ritual Passage and the Making of Labor Migrant Subjectivities

Ritual Passage and the Making of Labor Migrant Subjectivities 127 127 CHAPTER 4 Ritual Passage and the Making of Labor Migrant Subjectivities The immigration card used by the Philippines is probably unique in containing a section where Filipino migrant workers are asked to indicate their Overseas Contract Worker Number as issued to them by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration. Although many labor migrants are devoid of proper documentation and so do not possess a serial number, overseas employment as an activity has been subsumed nonetheless under the serializing and tracking functions of the state. The Philippine embarkation card is thus emblematic of the routinization of international labor migration. At the global level, the large-scale flows of migrant workers in a global ethnoscape are regularized by a complex set of international, transnational, and national institutions, networks, conventions, and everyday practices as well as by the logic of capitalism (Appadurai 1990; Goss and Lindquist 1995; Sassen 1998; Gibson and Graham 2002). That state institutions encourage, regulate, control, discipline , and assist migrant workers, without directly engaging in recruitment while profiting from their labor, is now an established practice (see Gonzalez 1998; Tyner 2004, 2009; Rodriguez 2010). Private recruitment agencies and other firms and enterprises that capitalize on labor migrants have carved their own market niches. Migrant associations, kinship networks, and other groups and alliances have emerged to make their respective contributions to labor migration across state borders. Nongovernmental organizations specializing in foreign labor advocacy have proliferated, along with academic and nonacademic entities that have spawned migrant-labor research industries as well as corporate and noncorporate entities that specialize in diasporic philanthropy. The economics of overseas labor migrations are now indelibly etched upon the social landscape, both global and local. 128 Migration Revolution In the case of the Philippines, after the events of 1995 surrounding the execution of Flor Contemplacion in Singapore, which marked the denouement of that stage of Filipino workers’ overseas migration that emerged in the late 1960s (see Chapter 3), there now seems to be little that is unpredictable or shocking about overseas work. The occasional news about the death or abuse of this or that worker no longer elicits strong public reactions. A similar trend is observable in Thailand, where no furor was stirred by the hanging of five Thai workers in Singapore in March 1996, unlike the controversy that attended Singapore’s caning of illegal Thai workers in 1989. The loss of employment by labor migrants resulting from the periodic economic crises in Asia and other parts of the world does not provoke a sense of national crisis in origin states such as the Philippines. International labor migration has become prosaic. Even at the village level, such as in upland Paraiso in Batangas Province, where overseas migration commenced in the 1970s, departures for overseas work are now so ordinary that the elaborate good-byes through the narrow streets of this upland barangay are already a thing of the past (Aguilar 2009b: 35–6). The routinization and institutionalization of international migration by the 1990s may even be suggestive of the limited space for spontaneous human action. Nonetheless, for the individual migrant, leaving the country for the first time to work overseas is irreducible to sheer routine. The alignments of feelings may be predictable, but for the firsttime migrant the sensations are fresh and unrehearsed. The very act of departing for overseas work is a complex assertion of subjectivity. Labor Migrant Subjectivities International labor migration occurs within a complex system of formal and informal institutions and networks, and migration streams adjust to macrosocial economic and political forces. However, although the individual is confronted by formidable structural forces, the actor’s subjectivity is not extinguished. As Sherry Ortner (2005: 34) argues, human agency “takes shape as specific desires and intentions within a matrix of subjectivity—of (culturally constituted) feelings, thoughts, and meanings” and these can be analyzed to understand “how people (try to) act on the world even as they are acted upon.” Labor migrants as human agents negotiate and navigate institutions and structures and in the process act upon the global landscape of labor migration. Their complex subjectivities Ritual Passage and the Making of Labor Migrant Subjectivities 129 make them “always more than the occupants of particular positions and the holders of particular identities” (Ortner 2005: 37). In undergoing the travails of overseas work, the labor migrant’s subjectivity is realigned and transformed in ways only partially glimpsed...