The Work of Mothering

Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora

Harrod J Suarez

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780252050046
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Women make up a majority of the Filipino workforce laboring overseas. Their frequent employment in nurturing, maternal jobs--nanny, maid, caretaker, nurse--has found expression in a significant but understudied body of Filipino and Filipino American literature and cinema.

Harrod J. Suarez's innovative readings of this cultural production explores issues of diaspora, gender, and labor. He details the ways literature and cinema play critical roles in encountering, addressing, and problematizing what we think we know about overseas Filipina workers. Though often seen as compliant subjects, the Filipina mother can also destabilize knowledge production that serves the interests of global empire, capitalism, and Philippine nationalism. Suarez examines canonical writers like Nick Joaquín, Carlos Bulosan, and Jessica Hagedorn to explore this disruption and understand the maternal specificity of the construction of overseas Filipina workers. The result is a series of readings that develop new ways of thinking through diasporic maternal labor that engages with the sociological imaginary.

CHAPTER 1

Excessive Writing and Filipina Time

Writing Women

In many respects, Republic Act 9710, prepared by the Philippine Commission on Women and signed into law by President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo on August 14, 2009, is a sweeping document aimed at providing legal protection and support for Filipina women. Recognizing women’s rights as “human rights,” it attends to a wide array of issues to account for different manifestations of gender inequality and discrimination, impressively identifying topics as diverse as food security, children, education, health, sports, military, violence, cultural representation, housing, and religion.1 It uses the language of “gender main-streaming” and affirms that women are “active agents of development and not just passive recipients of development assistance.”2 It is better known as the Magna Carta of Women, invoking the symbolism of guaranteeing and protecting personal liberty, and it cites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, and CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women), adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1979 in order to provide a bill of women’s rights.3

In the attempt to be comprehensive, the legislation reveals one entry point for critique. Specifying what it means by “marginalized” groups, RA 9710 lists categories such as “small farmers and rural workers,” “fisherfolk,” “urban poor,” “workers in the formal economy,” “workers in the informal economy,” “migrant workers,” “indigenous peoples,” “Moro,” “children,” “senior citizens,” “persons with disabilities,” and “solo parents.”4 The “migrant workers” category is expansive in its own right insofar as it covers workers “whether documented or undocumented,” which would appear to protect overseas workers in different industries, whether domestic, manufacturing, shipping, construction, entertainment, or the like.5 While such occupations are not delineated but have to be assumed, it is notable that one form of labor, which appears both domestically and abroad, is given coverage under the category of “Women in Difficult Circumstances.” Section 30 names “victims and survivors of sexual and physical abuse, illegal recruitment, prostitution, trafficking, armed conflict, women in detention, victims and survivors of rape and incest.”6 One of those terms is not necessarily like the others, for a variety of reasons that feminist critiques have taken on in depth.7

By writing sex work into a category marked by victimhood, the Magna Carta of Women establishes a certain moral code around sex work that is consonant with the rest of the act’s emphasis on women as wives and mothers. What is important for my purposes is not only how sex work functions in relation to other kinds of work, but especially how firmly it polices the moral boundary between sex work and the social. That boundary is far less discrete than the bill supposes; as I suggested in the introduction, the issue of morality is integral to the ways in which certain overseas populations gain visibility and how the nation manages visibility within the scope of globalization. Morality, that is, helps distinguish domestic labor from other kinds of overseas work, such as the entertainment and sex industries. The training and management of an overseas domestic workforce is contingent on Filipina/os behaving in morally prudent ways that will facilitate their employment, especially for those seeking work in intimate spaces they may share with the families who employ them. Overseas workers cannot be seen as threats to the order of middle-class families or as bad influences on the children they are in charge of nurturing. They also cannot be seen as threats to the economic opportunities these overseas jobs offer the Philippines, given their role as informal diplomats. Performing docility, sexual propriety, and diligence, overseas domestic workers are distanced from other workers who also participate in the global service-oriented economy. The moral discourse surrounding overseas domestic workers enables their labor to be represented as heroic sacrifice, allowing them to be recognized and valorized as bagong bayani (new national heroes) in ways that it is hard to see ever being applied to sex workers, even if workers from both groups generate income for their families.

By invoking one of the early written documents of Western history as contributing to modern theories of political freedom and legal rights and part of whose importance is precisely that it was written and recorded, RA 9710 gives priority to writing as a tool in advocating for contemporary human and women’s rights. In doing so, though, it occludes other kinds of writing that participate in inscribing the diasporic maternal. In the effort to inscribe women into global capital, that is, the Magna Carta for Women cannot imagine, much less take on, other kinds of writing that surround the diasporic circulation of Filipina/os overseas and the ways that writing complicates the moral logics providing legitimacy and legibility for overseas domestic labor. For instance, in a fortysecond-long YouTube video, a Filipina looking for work overseas speaks the following into the camera: “Good day to all employers. I am Mylyn Jacobo, twenty-four years old, single. I was born on May 24, 1986. My place of origin is in Davao City, Philippines. I work in Hong Kong. My duties are cooking, gardening, car-washing, cleaning and ironing. I am trustworthy, honest, patient … and hardworking. Currently, I am looking for a job. I hope you choose me as your helper. Thank you.”8 Since the primary objective of many of these workers is to work in someone’s private home, giving a sense of what it would be like to live with them is a reasonable, and indeed smart, strategy. It aims to assure you, the viewer and prospective employer, that she will not be a nuisance to the family, that she won’t steal from you, that she is demure and reliable, family oriented and friendly, English speaking and versatile around the home.

After all, it is not simply intimacy that is being conveyed, but morality. The video thus works according to the same moral logic of RA 9710, as Jacobo strives to exhibit her moral credibility—a credibility that is consistent across dozens of similar videos, wherein workers seek employment by promoting themselves in terms of their compliance and docility. Videos like Jacobo’s “function to allow prospective employers to see, scrutinize, and evaluate the physical characteristics and communication skills of prospective maids.”9 They provide a measure of security and verification for prospective employers across the world who cannot meet their employees before hiring them. But that moral aura distinguishing overseas domestic labor from sex work, separating a “marginalized” position from a “difficult circumstance,” is only stable within the unevenness of globalization and nationalism. In other words, it is globalization and nationalism that demand that some Filipina/os act within moral grounds in order to reassure their employers and maintain good work and diplomatic relations while at the same time allowing sex work and entertainment to thrive with very little pretense of regulation or oversight.

It is here that a different kind of writing disrupts the moral imperative behind overseas domestic labor. A striking detail emerges as Jacobo performs her docility for YouTube audiences. Rather than look directly into the camera lens to convince us of her sincerity, Jacobo’s eyes move left to right, slightly downward, then left to right again. It becomes apparent that she is reading from a script, or at least checking for cues, behind the camera. She has not memorized her pitch, and she is not addressing us extemporaneously. The timing is off; or, she needs time to read. There is writing happening before our eyes. Anna Romina Guevarra writes that in extended videos of this sort, potential employees “receive a scripted narrative that contains a detailed description of what they need to project on screen. Not only are they instructed to memorize and recite this narrative verbatim on video but they are supposed to do it without blinking, smiling, or stuttering.”10 There is a strategy being deployed in her performance, and yet it is not executed well, as Jacobo haltingly recites what she has not memorized. It interrupts the flow of the video, and even its time; the supposedly smooth flow of globalization—here, global labor and global communication—is broken up in its very execution. In the effort to secure employment by performing docility for viewers, it may also unsettle us as we bear witness to how this alternative writing counters the writing of the moral. How can we finally trust Jacobo, considering that every other prospective employee on video also reads from a similar script providing their supposedly unique attributes?

It is important to recognize this writing and its disruptive operations at work so that we do not mistake, for instance, these video résumés as evidence of a neoliberal “ideology of empowerment” driving overseas workers to the specific line of work they seek within nationalism and globalization.11 Jacobo’s off-screen glances point us away from such narratives. To be sure, the evidence of her reading does not position her to escape her inscription; insofar as the glances help her stick to the script and get hired, they actually facilitate it. But in looking to the script she must address, Jacobo reveals the constructedness of the moment. Her looking-aside underscores that there is nothing natural about her suitability for the work.12 She is participating in the production of her labor, strategically using the interplay among language, body, and technology to find a job and in doing so revealing its artfulness. Ambivalence is charted in Jacobo’s very performance in the video, the way she obviously reads from a script, revealing the seams in the face of the allegedly seamless and natural narrative of the diasporic maternal.13

In this chapter I examine modes of writing that do not cohere with globalization and that do not help globalization cohere. In what ways does writing itself become a means within which the diasporic maternal is not simply articulated but also fought for, policed, and negotiated? How do different kinds of writing become the strategies used to position oneself in relation to the diasporic maternal? What happens when different modes of writing become entangled in the articulation and representation of the diasporic maternal? It is important to assert that there is no definitive way to discuss writing’s relationship to the diasporic maternal, but to see its dispersal as itself an effect of globalization. Its lack of homogeneity speaks directly against efforts to consolidate the narrative of globalization, and recognizing the different ways that writing functions reveals the impossibility for the consensual narratives linking nationalism to globalization to achieve closure, to confirm its supposed destiny. While official forms of writing such as RA 9710 strive to persuade us of their authority, to generate not writing but its end, the permanence guaranteed by its legal context and by its position within the consensual politics marking the end of history, the texts I examine will demonstrate not just that writing emerges differentially within globalization, but also and especially that thinking about the consequences of this dispersal of writing allows us to access other modes of knowing and being not legible within the hegemonic discourse of the diasporic maternal.

If there is something bringing together the different modes of writing I discuss here, it is a strict, rigorous relationship to excess, which official modes of writing must strive to contain. Writing resists order, even as it has become the primary way of establishing order in modern society, where written documentation confers authority. But before those disciplinary imperatives are imposed on the process, one glimpses writing as a dispersal of meaning. The political implications of the relationship between writing and excess are hard to pin down, which is what makes politics hard to ascertain. The excessive quality of writing partly explains the entire bureaucratic apparatus that structures the ideology of empowerment, from newspaper ads to employment agencies, from training sessions to awards ceremonies honoring “model” overseas workers and their families—there exists an entire system of writing stretching from the political to the personal that works to produce docility and compliance in the face of writing’s excessive character. But it is not as if politics itself can resist it, as if politics somehow exists outside of writing. Jacques Rancière reminds us that politics is also a poetics, that there is “no division between a rational order of argument from a poetic, if not irrational, order of commentary and metaphor.”14

Politics is thus “caught in the circuit of a literariness that undoes the relationships between the order of words and the order of bodies that determine the place of each.”15 The texts I analyze here attest to the relationship between words and bodies, and between efforts to impose order over and against what writing does, which is to generate excess. In Nick Joaquin’s novella The Woman Who Had Two Navels, the earlier version that served as the foundation for the longer novel version but which continues to be anthologized and remains an important work in its own right, I inquire into how the diasporic maternal is given language, a language that is not simply an abstract tool with which to describe and narrate life, but which is encoded with precisely the questions pertaining to the diasporic maternal. The lack of a grammar, that is, is linked to the absence of masculine order, together delivering a chaos that ensues when women are left to manage the nation. The deviant body of the story’s eponymous character, while only a rumor designed to organize the drama, nevertheless points to an articulation, and perhaps a kind of writing, maligned and scapegoated for the nation’s ills.

Building on the question of how the feminized body frames the question of writing, Mia Alvar’s short story “In the Country” suggests a tension between a politicized writing and, not unlike Joaquin’s novella, a kind of writing that exceeds political order. The story situates that tension within the era of martial law, raising the stakes of the question especially in relation to the institutionalization of overseas labor. Milagros herself becomes the manuscript in which journalistic critiques of the Marcos regime are written, through but also over and against her personal desires. Here, a diasporic formation arrives only in response to the failures of writing. Alvar’s “A Contract Overseas” takes on these questions from a different perspective, thinking about the contrast between journalism and fiction. Also set in the Marcos era, the story works through the thicket of gender, class, and nationalism as the narrator negotiates her career path and her brother’s overseas work through the act of fiction writing. Literary writing does not arrive as an alternative solution but only illuminates a different set of tensions among writing, the national, and the political. The story points to the limits of a writerly imagination divorced from the political task it has authorized for itself, one that gets lost in fantasy in order to grieve and mourn for the diaspora. My analyses of writing in its diverse forms underscore how it is charged with political and national force, but also where that force ends, especially when other registers of experience interrupt such projects.

Writing the Body Maternal

In Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961), things are not what they seem.16 The novella, set in Hong Kong, begins when Connie Escovar, a thirty-year-old Filipina, visits Pepe Monson, a horse doctor, just hours after getting married. She figures that “if he could fix up horses,” he could do something about her two navels, a condition that has embarrassed her and, anticipating her first night with her husband, now threatens to spoil her marriage.17 “When I was a little girl I thought everybody else had two navels”:18 she explains that she discovered her bodily aberration as a child, playing with a doll; at first, she pitied that it had “only one navel” so much that she “dropped her into the pond.”19 She admits to being confused even then, though—“But whom was I sorry for? Which of us was wrong?”—as if uncertain whose body was aberrant.20 Now, she worries not just about the revelation of the navel (or two), but how it could ruin her family’s reputation and social...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1 Excessive Writing and Filipina Time
• 2 Filming the Dream Nevertheless
• 3 Listening to Cinematic Orphans
• 4 Multicultural Belonging and a Potent Silence
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index