A Mother Who Leaves is a Mother Who Loves: Labor Migration as Part of the Filipina Life Course and Motherhood

Filipinas have accepted that migration is a part of the rubric of their life course and motherhood, a simple and perhaps basic principle in the study of Filipina migration.¹ However, this straightforward idea shifts how Filipinas are redefining their understanding of what it means to be a mother in their life course often choosing migration in middle age (forty-five to fifty-five) to attend to maternal responsibilities from abroad. This article explores the dynamic of mother's migration and interrogates the assumption that, in fact, it is a disruption in the lives of Filipinas. When maternal obligation is couched in the long-standing culture and institutionalization of labor export in the Philippines, the seemingly individuated logic and disruption of motherhood vis-à-vis migration becomes a part of a system of labor export that has transformed the decision to migrate into a normalized and acceptable performance of Filipino mothering.

And yet, so much of the institutional investment in gendered migration is in naturalizing the view that women must fuse their identities as domestic and economic providers. I argue that there is a fundamental shift in the Philippines regarding what mothering means emerging from both a broader cultural milieu and migrant women's redefinitions of transnational mothering. I turn to the complicated narratives of Filipinas to examine the class contradictions from their and their families' aspirations and the opportunities available to them in the Philippines. I submit that their ambivalent ideas of womanhood, motherhood, and family duty are informed by the political and economic conditions under which they mother from afar. More importantly, inherent in this redefinition is a critique of the systems that produce their transnationality. I center the Filipina experiences in this article to demonstrate their fused roles as emotional and economic sustainers of the family, an instrumental identity favored by the Philippine labor-brokerage state. I turn to the narrative of Brenda to elucidate my argument.

In my visit to Brenda's home during our interview, I could tell that she was a highly motivated and organized person. As we sat down for our interview in her rented room in Queens, New York, in 2010, I noticed that Brenda's space was clean, her bills neatly labeled on a file folder rack atop her dresser, which was one of the few pieces of furniture in her minimalist room. Her T-shirts on a rack near her made-up bed were folded in the same manner, and her employee of the month award from her employer's veterinary office was hanging on the wall next to a collage frame with pictures of her children in the Philippines. When she began to tell me her migration story, she started with the fact that she worked in an executive position in a financial company in the Philippines. Beginning with her description of her past career, I understood that she took pride in the fact that she was a high-powered executive and that her occupation was an anchor in her identity formation. Because her longtime employer moved their services to Hong Kong, she decided to explore the option to migrate because she could not find a position that offered equal pay for the position she held in the past. She was unwilling to compromise her status and also her family's welfare by taking a position below her pay scale. In some ways this is a classed decision—a way of maintaining a kind of class status for her family through the maintenance of specific kinds of income and consumption habits. She wanted her two children, Kenneth and Angelica, who were five and seven years old when she migrated, to be able to get a good education and secure a good future. Brenda was convinced that her only option was to migrate abroad because she wanted to keep a certain lifestyle for her family: private schools for the children, a car to take them to and from schools and family functions, and a home that was suitable to her standards. Brenda's husband...