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Notes Chapter 1 Home of the Great Filipino Worker 1. Although the state typically refers to them as heroes, I call attention to the fact that women constitute the bulk of the overseas workforce deployment. At the time that the “modern-day hero” label was coined, then-president Corazon Aquino spoke before an audience of domestic workers in Hong Kong, to whom she referred as the bagong bayani—“modern-day heroes” of the Philippines. I argue that this increased participation of women forced the state to incorporate “gender-sensitive criteria” in its overseas employment framework (Guevarra 2006b). 2. Choy (2003) argues that a culture of migration helps explain the mass nurse migration of Filipinos to the United States and that this was made possible by critical exchanges between the media, travel agencies, the state, and nurses, all of whom contributed to constructing the United States as a promised land and migration as the most lucrative means of survival. Maruja Asis (2006) also attributes the desires of Filipinos to migrate overseas to a culture of migration in the Philippines. I extend their concept by illustrating concretely the political economic and cultural mechanisms that enable this national sentiment to proliferate through various levels of analysis (of the state, of the employment agencies, and of the workers). I also show how Filipinos themselves respond to, accommodate, or challenge this social imaginary. 3. I am not arguing that there is or should be a gendered and racialized moral economy but that this is a good description of how the Philippine state and employment agencies are trying to govern Filipinos as workers and citizens by infusing Filipino “moral” values regarding the family and femininity with Westernized notions of economic competitiveness in order to construct a particular kind of unique Filipino work ethic that the state can parade as one of the country’s trademarks (see Guevarra 2006b). Other scholars follow in this conceptualization, among them Aihwa Ong (2006), who describes the “moral economy of the female migrant,” and Rhacel Parreñas (2008), who writes about the “moral economy of the Philippine state.” I differ from their conceptualization in that I’m highlighting not only the ways that this moral economy is a gendered system but also how it is racialized through the work of various actors not limited to the Philippine state but also employment agencies and workers themselves. 4. Sassen (1996) explains that the partial denationalization of territory occurs through specific corporate practices that can involve the operation of activities beyond the regulatory umbrellas of nation-states so that firms are able to avoid local taxes and regulations. Hence, an actual piece of land becomes denationalized. Examples of such partially denationalized territories are the 211 export processing zones and free trade zones that have been established in many developing nations to house various garment manufacturing and electronic industries (see Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Kelly 2000; Ong 1987). 5. Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc (1994, 269) refer to as a “deterritorialized nation-state,” “in which the nation’s people may live anywhere in the world and still not live outside the state.” 6. I differ from her (Rodriguez 2005, forthcoming) in that I examine labor brokering not only from the perspective of the state but also in its partnership with other actors such as private employment agencies and workers.The brokering process I highlight is also specifically focused on the production of care workers and the gendered and racialized processes embedded in this. 7. See Barry, Osborne, and Rose, 1996; Burchell 1996; Foucault 1991; Rose and Miller 1992; Rose 1999. 8. Lee Kuan Yew (cited in Ong 1999, 72), senior minister of Singapore, stated that the Philippines, despite of its democratic structure, was unable to become an economic superpower primarily because of its “American style constitution,” which does not emphasize social discipline, and also because of its lack of Confucian values of hard work, filial piety, thrift, and national pride. 9. All dollar figures used in this book are in United States dollars, unless noted otherwise. 10. See, for example, Acker 2004; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002; Mohanty 1997; Mohanty, Russo, and Torres 1991; Nash and Kelly 2001; Ong 1991; Salzinger 2003, 2004; Sassen 2002;Ward 1990. 11. For production work, see Fernandez-Kelly 1983; Freeman 2000; Hossfeld 1990; Mies 1982; Ong 1987; Pellow and Park 2002; Safa 1995; Salzinger 2003; Samper 1997; Wolf 1992. For care work, see Anderson 2002; Bakan and Stasiulis 1997; Chang 2000; Chin 1998; Choy 2003; Constable 1997a; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001...

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