Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood and Class Relations in a Globalized Age by Filomeno V. Aguilar (review)

Aguilar’s argument, threading through all of the essays in this collection, is that migration has transformed the Philippines’ collective understanding of itself as a state, a nation and an identity. He frames this transformation as a “revolution”. Moreover, one must see this reformulated sense of self as both racialized and classed, since these two axes of difference are seldom far from the conceptual categories used by either Filipinos themselves or their others. All of the essays in this volume are revised versions of publications that go back almost twenty years — the earliest from 1996 and the latest from 2012 — but none feels outdated or stale. This is because Aguilar has skillfully woven new material into each essay, and also because the original articles tackled enduring themes in insightful ways.

Aguilar’s style of writing and argumentation is that of an essayist, not unlike that of his Cornell University mentor Benedict R. O’G. Anderson. While Aguilar’s other writings include research drawing on archival work and ethnography (Aguilar 1998 and 2009, respectively), the empirical basis of this book is provided by an extensive reading of existing studies, close attention to contemporary news media and drawing on and interpreting personal experiences. For this reason, it would be hard to pin any particular disciplinary label on Aguilar’s newest book, as it draws upon historical, sociological and anthropological traditions without necessarily conforming fully to the methodological expectations of any of them. Nevertheless, all of the essays are elegantly written and convincing.

As a scholar of Filipino migration, Aguilar writes from a unique vantage point. Born and raised in the Philippines, he completed his graduate training in the United States, before pursuing an academic career in Singapore, Australia, Japan and back in the Philippines, where he was until recently dean of social sciences at Ateneo de Manila University. Aguilar has thus lived and worked in the colonial heartland, in significant sites of contract labour migration, and in a prime destination for permanent migrants. Understanding the experience of Filipino migration requires that these varied sites be viscerally appreciated, and Aguilar is at his most compelling when providing personal insights into the everyday experiences and perspectives of migrants.

Aguilar started out as an economic and social historian, and these sensibilities are evident in the first chapter of the book, which establishes the historical lineage of out-migration from the Philippines and its effects on nascent forms of nationalism. While scholars have long cited the nineteenth-century European sojourns of elite ilustrados as the origins of Filipino nationalism, Aguilar shows that lower-class seafarers, known as “Manilamen” (p. 37), appeared to identify with the Philippines as their homeland from the late eighteenth century onwards — long before the nationalists of the local elite conceived of a Filipino identity.

Concepts of class and the need for an analysis centred on class are a consistent theme in Aguilar’s work. He pursues class as a process of economic value extraction in Chapter Two. Aguilar argues convincingly that global labour migration must be seen as a transnational process in which surplus value is extracted in one place, often through export-oriented production, and then wages are remitted to migrant source communities, where they in turn lead to upward class mobility. It is therefore no longer possible to see class as a national formation.

Class is, however, more than a set of economic processes, and Aguilar also pays attention to the cultural registers of class and to the intersection of class with national and racialized identities. In this respect, the oldest essay in the book is also, for me, its highlight. Chapter Three is an updated version of his 1996 essay on transnational shame and national identity, in which Aguilar gets inside both individual and collective ways of thinking about the Philippines, the United States and the...