Overseas Filipino Workers: A Good Provider is One Who Leaves?

By Claire | Tuesday, April 24, 2007 | 12 Comments

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Sunday’s New York Times Magazine examined the Overseas Filipino Worker phenomenon by chronicling the Comodases, a Filipino family now spanning two generations of members leaving the Philippines to work abroad, hoping to reach “the ultimate” United States.

I read this article with a heavy heart because in it, I see both the best and most frustrating aspects of my people: their balls-to-the-wall-for-family spirit, and the “they speak English and take orders” good little colonized brother/sister stereotype fostered by overseas employers.

I’ve never thought of the docile brown servant stereotype as accurate. Sometimes it only takes a certain detachment to take orders. However, it takes true nerve to suck it up and leave your children for sometimes years at a time in order to live in a foreign land where you are often defenseless against human rights violations, religious persecution and false imprisonment. All this in the hope that your children won’t have to do as you did; and that you won’t languish in regret or alienation when they don’t even recognize you.

Suffering from a post-modern case of ennui or angst about career choices or being a model minority? Reading the article may prove an effective remedy. It makes “the mommy war” seem like a privilege (my opinion: IT IS).

After I finished reading the NYT piece, politics and economic theories aside, a thought lingered that I suspect might be similar to what the Comodases think of all those OFW’s, including themselves: “They did the best they could.”

What would you do?

Categories:

FamilyLifestyles

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Akrypti

Hey Claire,
The following is unrelated to the content of your post, but I came across these passages during my research for this paper I have to write right now. I thought it might be of interest to you. It certainly interested (and enraged) me.

1.

Depictions of Filipinas as sexual commodities on the Internet have also been linked to the mail order bride industry in Australia. Researchers further speculate that online sexual commodification of Filipinas may at least partially explain why Filipinas experience disproportionate levels of domestic violence compared to non-Filipina women. The pornography industry markets Asian women as “passive, yet artful and eager to please,” a stereotype derived from the history of U.S. involvement in Asian wars.

(Source: Chris Cunneen and Julie Stubbs, Male Violence, Male Fantasy and the Commodification of Women Through the Internet, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE: GLOBAL RESPONSES 7:5-28 (2000))

2.

The musical Miss Saigon reworks Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly plot into a more contemporary setting—the Vietnam War. An American marine arranges a one-night-stand with Kim, a Vietnamese bar-girl in Saigon shortly before the fall of the city. After her village was destroyed, Kim fled to Saigon fantasizing about finding a “strong GI to protect her.” The American marine then leaves Vietnam, leaving Kim behind stranded in Ho Chi Minh City with their son, Tam. The marine returns home to the United States where he marries a white woman. He continues with his life happily. Meanwhile, Kim tries to escape and reunite with the marine. She ends up in Bangkok, Thailand with her son, where she works at a massage parlor. The marine and his white wife meet Kim there to adopt Tam. When Kim realizes her American lover has no intention of marrying her, she commits suicide, leaving Tam under the care of the marine and his new wife.

Filipina singer-actress Lea Salonga was cast as the first Kim ever. Following up on her success and enduring popularity, the producers now regularly hold casting calls in Manila and other places with a sizable Asian female population. The upshot: Kim has been played most often-if not always-by Filipinas . . . The message between the lines is that all these women in this kind of situation are usable bodies, interchangeable parts, messy complications behind the male games of military history and foreign affairs. Kim is an icon . . . of the sex tour industry that has grown up around military installations in the Philippines and in other Asian nations with a history of significant U.S. military presence.

(Source: Rachel Bundang, Scars ARE History: Colonialism, Written on the Body, in Nantawan Boonprasat Lewis and Marie M. Fortune, REMEMBERING CONQUEST: FEMINIST/WOMANIST PERSPECTIVES ON RELIGION, COLONIZATION, AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE 60 (Haworth Press 1999).)

3.

There are also a few law review articles I found published in 2005 and 2006 about sexual violence against mail order brides that will make your skin crawl. I’ll send those by e-mail.
Akrypti

One more thing:

During both WWII, Vietnam, and other East Asian wars where there was significant Euro-Western military presence, American GIs who were stationed in the Phillipines would wear uniform T-shirts that said “I love little brown fucking machines.” Strong evidence leads many scholars to believe that these T-shirts (and the prostitution stations themselves) were funded by the U.S. government.
Akrypti

Sorry to storm up your post, but just in case you’re STILL not mad….

In the late 1800s when the Philippines were revolting against Spanish inquisition, the Americans came, promising to help. Initially, Filipinos didn’t want the help, suspecting that Americans may have less than benign motives. However, President McKinley gave his word that the U.S. “had no design of aggrandizement and no ambition of conquest.” Thus, the alliance formed and the U.S. helped the Filipinos defeat the Spanish.

Before the Filipinos could establish the Republic of the Philippines, however, the U.S. refused to recognize the republic and instead issued the Proclamation of Benevolent Assimilation in which President McKinley announced the U.S.’s intention to annex the Philippines. To make it legal, the U.S. paid Spain 20 million silver pesos–or two silver pesos per Filipino.

Filipinos again resisted. The Philippine American war raged on for more than a decade, murdering over 250,000 Filipinos…and that’s just the death toll they could count officially. Whole towns were decimated by famine and disease, not to mention the U.S. used slash-and-burn techniques sweeping across the villages. More than half of the Phillipines laid in waste from the destruction. Did any of us learn about THAT in U.S. history?

This was when they started referring to Filipinas as “little brown fucking machinese powered by rice.” The sex industry there offered U.S. military men “a girl for the price of a burger.” It was the imperialistic conquest of the islands by the Americans that really jump-started the sex entertainment industry there. It sucked in women and children, sometimes girls as young as 7 or 8 years old. The U.S. military men didn’t care. All Asian women looked young anyway. UNICEF did a study recently on women prostitutes in the Phillipines. Of 500,000 women prostitutes, 100,000 were children. The Philippines now ranks 4th among 9 countries with the most number of prostituted children, all of which originated predominantly from the Philippine-American war.

(Source: Rachel Bundang, Scars ARE History: Colonialism, Written on the Body, On the Occasion of the Centennial of Philippine “Independence,” in Remembering Conquest: Feminist/Womanist Perspectives on Religion, Colonization, and Sexual Violence (1999).)

Ok. I swear I’m done ranting….
Claire

Akrypti, thanks for the sources! Perhaps I’ll use them in a future post!
http://www.gengoid.com Genghis

This is a great entry Claire. My recent visit to families back in the Philippines, was eye opening, and inspiring. President Arroyo calls the migrant workers hero’s to their country, sustaining the Filipino economy with the money they send home. I’m in the middle of writing another entry along these same lines.
nemogbr

As a so-called economist, Arroyo does not give one a sense of confidence.
Embarrassing when she starts saying that the country is now in the second world…sheeesh.
Brazas Regar

The bottom line is that the Philippines needs to develop a sizable middle-class and play down the influence of the Roman Carholic Church, which I believe under crappy leadership is contributing to the chaoic high birth rate in the country. White men and Filipino-Americans need to be told in simple terms that the images of Filipino prostitutes they see in the movies “are not reality.” Once these issues are addressed, dilemmas such as poverty, prostitution (adult and child), and domestic violence will cease to exist.

P.S. Cola cola needs to stop giving away free cans to people living near the factories and contributing to modern day imperialism by the West.
WhatvererJomega

This is sad to say, but the Philippines is becoming tooo dependent upon remittances.
Though its economy improved in the last few years as a result, this cash flow can be the life long answer or solution to its economic woes. Inflation created by this increased remittance demand attacks the middle class. The population is just placing itself on the welfare roll of its diaspora. America and particularly the nyc metro area is hurting, while the philippines as a whole is not recovering. We are not seeing the underlying hidden social and economic troubles in the Philippines and any economist would be wrong not to agree that hyper inflation is a major problem in Manilla.
WhatvererJomega

Also, the Philippines (the population) is way too dependent upon remittances from elsewhere. Though increased remittances gave assistance to the Philippine economy in the past few years, it is still a country with a lot of hidden shameful social and economic problems. Any economist would be stupid enough not to agree that the Philippines is on the welfare roll of its diaspora. This increased flow of cash is not helping the Philippines; the remittances are hurting America and the New York City metro area in particular.

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