The Philippines

Mobilities, Identities, Globalization

James A. Tyner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415958073
• eBook ISBN: 9781135905460
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Nearly five million migrant workers from the Philippines are employed in over 190 countries and territories. They work as doctors and domestic helpers, engineers and entertainers, seamstresses and surveyors. It is through their collective labor that the Philippines has assumed a global presence.

For over five centuries the Philippines has been integrated into the world economy. Only recently, however, has the Philippines been a pro-active agent in the production of a global economy. Since the 1970s the Philippine state, in connection with myriad private institutions, has recruited, trained, marketed, and deployed a mobile work-force. Annually, approximately one million migrant workers travel to all corners of the world. The Philippines seeks to understand how the Philippines has become the world's largest exporter of government-sponsored temporary contract labor and, in the process, has dramatically reshaped both the processes of globalization and also our understanding of globalization as concept.

Notes

ONE

1. Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, Empowering the Global Filipino: POEA Annual Report 2006 (Mandaluyong City, Philippines: POEA, 2007), 8.

2. See, for example, Philip F. Kelly, “Urbanization and the Politics of Land in the Manila Region,” Annals, American Academy of Political and Social Science 590 (2003): 170–187; Gavin Shatkin, “Colonial Capital, Modernist Capital, Global Capital: The Changing Political Symbolism of Urban Space in Metro Manila, the Philippines,” Pacific Affairs 78 (2005–2006): 577–600.

3. Charles L. Choguill, “Urban Policy as Poverty Alleviation: The Experience of the Philippines,” Habitat International 25 (2001): 1–13; at 2.

4. James A. Tyner, Made in the Philippines: Gendered Discourses and the Making of Migrants (London: Routledge, 2004), 1. See also the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration’s Web site, www.poea.gov.ph for up-to-date statistics on migrant flows and remittances.

5. Sheila Coronel, ed., Pork and Other Perks: Corruption and Governance in the Philippines (Pasig City: Philippine Centre for Investigative Journalism, 1998). Some studies suggest that 30 to 50 percent of the entire Philippine population is dependent on migrant worker remittances. See Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000), 130.

6. Philip F. Kelly, Landscapes of Globalization: Human Geographies of Economic Change in the Philippines (New York: Routledge, 2000), 43.

7. See, for example, data provided in James A. Tyner, “Migrant Labor and the Politics of Scale: Gendering the Philippine State,” Asia Pacific Viewpoint 41 (2000): 131–154.

8. Overseas Performing Artists, also known as “entertainers,” are defined by the POEA as musicians, dancers, and other performers. The term, however, is often considered a euphemism for “sex workers,” in that many of these OPAs find employment in night-clubs, massage parlors, and so on. See, for example, Ma. Rosario P. Ballescas, Filipino Entertainers in Japan: An Introduction (Quezon City: the Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1992); James A. Tyner, “Constructions of Filipina Migrant Entertainers,” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 3 (1996): 77–93; James A. Tyner, “Constructing Images, Constructing Policy: The Case of Filipina Migrant Performing Artists,” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 4 (1997): 19–35; James A. Tyner, “Scaled Sexuality and the Migration of Filipina Overseas Contract Workers,” Philippine Population Review 1 (2002): 103–123.

9. Aurora de Dios, “Japayuki-san: Filipinas at Risk,” in Filipino Women Overseas Contract Workers … At What Cost?, edited by Mary R. Palma-Beltran and Aurora Javate de Dios (Manila: Goodwill Trading Co., 1992), 39–58; at 54.

10. Peter Dicken, Global Shift: The Internationalization of Economic Activity, 2^nd edition (New York: Guilford Press, 1992).

11. John Rennie Short and Yeong-Hyun Kim, Globalization and the City (Singapore: Longman, 1999).

12. N. Marshall and P. Wood, Services and Space: Key Aspects of Urban and Regional Development (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995).

13. Demetrios G. Papademetriou, “Managing Rapid and Deep Change in the Newest Age of Migration,” in Sarah Spencer, ed., The Politics of Migration: Managing Opportunity, Conflict and Change (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 39–58; at 39.

14. Victoria P. Cruz, Seasonal Orphans and Solo Parents: The Impact of Overseas Migration (Quezon City: Scalabrini Migration Center, 1987); Saskia Sassen, The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study in International Investment and Labor Flow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Ronald Skeldon, “International Migration Within and From the East and Southeast Asian Region: A Review Essay,” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 1 (1992): 19–63; Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (New York: Guilford Press, 1993); Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Rhacel S. Parreñas, “New Household Forms, Old Family Values: The Formation and Reproduction of the Filipino Transnational Family in Los Angeles,” in Contemporary Asian America: A Multidisciplinary Reader, edited by Min Zhou and J.V. Gatewood (New York: New York University Press, 2000).

15. There has been a tremendous amount of work conducted on the feminization of international migration in general, and the movement of domestic workers—the so-c...

Table of contents

• Global Realities: A Routledge Series
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Foreword
• One Local Contexts, Distant Horizons
• Two Manufacturing a Global Presence
• Three Manila’s Place in the World
• Four Global-Philippines.Com
• Five Performing Globalization
• Six Beyond the Philippines
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index