Global Filipinos

Migrants' Lives in the Virtual Village

Deirdre McKay

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780253002228
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The author of An Archipelago of Care documents the experiences of Filipino contract workers from the same village, traveling abroad for jobs. Contract workers from the Philippines make up one of the world's largest movements of temporary labor migrants. Deirdre McKay follows Filipino migrants from one rural community to work sites overseas and then home again. Focusing on the experiences of individuals, McKay interrogates current approaches to globalization, multi-sited research, subjectivity, and the village itself. She shows that rather than weakening village ties, temporary labor migration gives the village a new global dimension created in and through the relationships, imaginations, and faith of its members in its potential as a site for a better future. "A unique and important study that adds a refreshing and necessary reminder that, on the most fundamental level, a village is part of the global world." —Nicole Constable, author of Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers "A luminous, elegant, and well-argued multi-sited ethnographic study." —Martin F. Manalansan IV, author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora "The problems of overseas Filipino workers with loneliness; long absences from spouses, children, and other relatives; abuse by employers and governments; and efforts to use their time and talent to further individual opportunities are understood easily in McKay's monograph. The photos of her Filipino informants... add a human touch to the topic of overseas workers.... Recommended." — Choice

CHAPTER 1

Finding the Village

TO FIND A VILLAGE like Haliap, we could locate a dot on a map or a cluster of buildings and fields on Google Earth. We could even use Google to map Haliap’s presence in the news or consult platforms such as Facebook or Friendster to chart the social networks of its inhabitants. Yet it would be a mistake to interpret any of these ways of representing the village as evidence that Haliap’s migrants depart from some stable, bounded place. Haliap’s name labels nodes, networks, and dynamic ties that both represent and elaborate on a complex history of local mobility. We can trace migration back to the founding of the village, itself an act of migrants. Yet this rich history is constantly obscured by the stories people are required to tell themselves about progress: the story they act out through the ethnic parade. Disjunctures between local history and its ritualized performance reveal to villagers that their claims to land, identity, and livelihood are fundamentally insecure. Villagers cope with this insecurity by innovating within a dynamic indigenous tradition and by departing for elsewhere.

Haliap is a particular example of a more general situation in which insecurity produces migration. Insecurity in Haliap is attached to people’s indigenous identity, but similar kinds of insecurity affect ordinary people living in rural and urban areas across the Philippines. Even middle-class citizens discover that the law deems them to be living as squatters on the properties of absentee landlords or corporations, find their previously secure titles to land disputed in the courts, or learn that records held in the local land registry have somehow been altered. People in these circumstances are pushed to migrate. They may try to out-argue and out-evidence those who would dispossess them, but they need money to do so. Moving on—either to explore the agrarian frontier, to seek work in the city, or to take up contract work abroad—allows them not only to earn money but also to reinvent themselves. This kind of insecurity is familiar across much of the migrant-sending developing world, but its specifics are always particular to the history of a local place.

Haliap: A Personal History

Haliap on a December day in 2005: I see seventeen wooden houses with galvanized iron rooftops. Garlanded by clothes drying under the eaves, the houses cluster around a T-junction. Most people are inside, avoiding the drizzle. The country’s 2000 census tells me that Haliap is home to 914 people in 177 households; the hamlet at the T-junction is a small part of a wider whole.¹ Its houses, several small shop fronts, and a water tank are dwarfed by a wrought-iron gateway reading “Barangay Haliap” that arches across the road. Behind the houses, the damp greenness of forests and fields stretches up to the mountainous horizon on all sides.

Luis and Angelina Dulnuan own one of these houses. They work in Hong Kong, and I am now an old friend, visiting their family home. Luis is his Christian name; friends and family call him Chanag, his native name. Dulnuan, his grandfather’s native name, is now the family surname. Luis marched as one of the parade’s progressive farmers. He spent some of his childhood in Manila, the national capital, where his father worked as a laborer. During their years in Manila, his family converted from Catholicism to the Philippine Protestant church, the Iglesia ni Cristo (Tagalog: Church of Christ). Despite new church-based networks in Manila, his father could not find a stable livelihood. Luis returned to Haliap with his parents and nine siblings in the middle years of his elementary schooling. The family brought their Iglesia faith back to the village. They continued to follow indigenous Ifugao practices for marriage and inheritance. As the fifth child, Luis did not inherit any land.

Luis’s village of Haliap occupies the eastern slopes of the Antipolo valley in the municipality of Asipulo, Ifugao Province. At the 2000 census, the Asipulo municipality had a total population of 13,336 persons in 2,404 households and occupied an area of 11,980 hectares, while the province of Ifugao had 180,815 persons in 36,232 households, with an average household size of 5 persons and a population over age eighteen that was 51.5 percent male.² Asipulo lies in the foothills of the Cordillera Central, the mountain chain running parallel to the east coast of Luzon, the largest island of the Philippine archipelago. Its village of Haliap is approximately fourteen hours’ travel from Manila. Haliap proper or centro (central) is accessible by jeep via a gravel road. The village’s more remote hamlets lack road access and require a hike of an hour or more over rough trails. Settlements are nonnucleated in Ifugao, thus the village is spread out over the landscape. Hamlets are called sitios and are tucked into patches of forest on the slopes, separated by stacks of bench-terraced rice paddies. Haliap is a recent settlement by local standards. While some areas of the Cordillera have been cultivated since 500 ad, terraces in this part of Ifugao date only to the late 1800s, built by people from the lowland plains fleeing Spanish colonial rule.³ A former place of refuge, Haliap remains remote. It has no telephone landlines. Cell phone service and electricity are recent arrivals. Haliap is the kind of place metropolitan Filipinos call a “far-flung barangay.” By dint of its very location, it lacks progress and its inhabitants are thus considered backward yokels.

The green vista beyond the gateway reminds me that Haliap’s relationship with the government is a paradox. There really has never been much government here at all. Yet, other than a few government jobs in schools and local offices, there is still not much more formal economic activity other than that I first observed on my initial stay in the village in 1992. Beyond a few small stores and some—mostly visiting—traders in agricultural commodities, there is little evidence of a market. Villagers travel to buy food, goods, and services. They farm for their own subsistence and grow a few cash crops to sell at the weekly regional market—a forty-minute trip by public jeepney (passenger truck) to Ifugao’s provincial capital, Lagawe. On a day-to-day basis, people sustain themselves through exchanges with their neighbors.

Passing a familiar shop front, I recall how in 1996 I was sitting with Luis, listening to the radio, when we heard a snippet of opinion floating, without context, between music and news: “The ethnic—tobacco, G-strings, betel nut. Now we have Hope, Levi’s, Juicy Fruit—the modern Pinoy [Filipino]. The ethnic is now in the far barrios, never seen here in the center. Fading away … That is the fate of the ethnic.”⁴ Luis, sitting beside me on the shop’s bench, palpably recoiled. Many of his uncles and cousins were still such ethnic men. They smoked loose tobacco in pipes. They wore traditional loincloths, or “G-strings,” to plow their fields. Most men over about age thirty chewed the nut of the betel palm as a stimulant. These habits distinguished villagers as ethnics from the far barrios (villages) rather than Pinoy from the progressive center. When I first met him in 1992, Luis himself wore Levi’s jeans, chewed Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum, and smoked Hope cigarettes. Like his young, single contemporaries, Luis consumed things that helped him fit into a broader Filipino culture defined by the Tagalog-speaking, metropolitan lowlands. The radio DJ’s observations expressed a widespread understanding that ethnics were not part of the nation until they, too, joined in these projects of shared consumption. But Luis wanted to retain his cultural traditions while exploring the global world opening up to him.

In the mid-1990s I observed how villagers attempting to recreate Haliap as the parade’s site of progressive agriculture had engaged in a wide range of institutions and programs. Much as people wanted to have a united, progressive village, they found that history, economy, and religion were pulling them apart. Most Haliap people thus described their village to me as kurang (lacking or insufficient). The village was insufficient for their needs and ideals for security and prosperity and lay outside the imagined community of the nation. Villagers found themselves struggling to perform the kind of ethnic identity that would give them secure access to land while seeking economic and personal progress. Their fundamental problem seemed to be one of their ethnicity and its history. In this period Haliap was attempting to distinguish itself from its neighbors as being the territory of a distinct cultural group with a particular history and set of norms—customary laws—for self-government.

I was living in Haliap while studying land tenure as part of a Canadian-funded development project. Local leaders and elders found me a willing student for their auto-ethnographic version of a village study. Villagers were retrieving and rehearsing their history in order to support their claims to land. Their strategy was to make use of my research activities on land tenure to present themselves as a culturally distinct ethnic group, possessing their own well-defined customs and traditions. While the overview of village culture I have reconstructed from my interviews and reading, below, reflects their classic ethnographic checklist, what I learned about their village through this exercise explains the social networks and life histories of my migrant respondents.

Being Indigenous

In the Philippines progress has long been understood as people evolving from one social stage to the next. The idea dates from the American colonial era (1898–1946) when administrators used an evolutionary ladder to distinguish between the ethnic groups they had inherited from the previous colonizers, the Spanish. Americans classified some groups as primitive and assessed others as comparatively more evolved and thus better prepared for self-government. People from Ifugao exemplified this “Upper Primitive” category.⁵ The colonial idea of an evolutionary hierarchy of ethnicity continues to inform popular Filipino understandings of the ties between people and place. Metropolitan Filipinos tend to imagine villages like Haliap as untouched by progress and globalization. Some commentators argue that such communities should resist the demands of the external world and be left alone to conserve their supposedly authentic culture. Others claim that this cultural authenticity is already lost, irretrievably transformed by colonialism, development, and, now, globalization. Either way, villages like Haliap, ranked at the bottom of the hierarchy of development and located far from metropolitan Manila, are usually considered to lie beyond the political boundaries of the imagined nation.

Haliap is what Filipinos call a barangay. The smallest Philippine political unit, a barangay is equivalent to an urban neighborhood or ward. The word comes from the Filipino term for boat. Before the Spanish arrived, each barangay was distinct from other communities, its people joined together by personal allegiances based on kinship. Thirty to one hundred households led by a datu (a hereditary chief) comprised the typical barangay.⁶ In most precolonial Filipino societies, people owed allegiance to this datu rather than to any wider community that could be described as a tribe or a nation. The Spanish found that this highly localized form of governance facilitated colonial rule. The barangay became a useful unit through which to collect taxes and organize labor. The Spanish made the barangay a formal political unit by appointing leaders, presidente, to replace the datu, sometimes appointing the former datu himself. In places like Ifugao, where people were organized into acephalous societies rather than hereditary chiefdoms, the appointment of a presidente consolidated local elites. The Spanish then applied the political term barangay to what they had called a barrio or, in rural areas of sparse settlement like Ifugao, what they had called a rancheria (a small native village). Later, under American rule, appointed presidente were replaced with democratically elected barangay captains, a system that has persisted. Because so many relationships in a village are based on kinship and affinity, barangay politics are emotionally intense, multiplex, and intricate. This is the view from the village, where one’s belonging is contingent on engaging in this politics through its exchanges and rituals.

Belonging in the Philippine nation is defined through ties of mutual obligation that are rather like those forming the village. Scaling up village relations explains much of how Filipinos experience nation and national government. Collectively, Filipinos form the bayan (Tagalog: people, town, or countryside). Bayan signifies nation in the sense of being a people, a collective public, or a mother/fatherland—a kind of metaphorical national body. The president is pangulo (Tagalog: at the head) and is leader of the national body. As president of the republic, he or she also leads bansa (country or nation). People expect the president and other senior elected officials to govern wisely by redistributing care and progress to those who have elected them. Every election thus sees numerous projects and programs launched or relabeled to suggest they are gifts to the voters from the president or other senior politicians. The term bayan, in the sense of people or town, or the countryside more generally, is often used in much more local ways. Kababayan (meaning co-ethnic or fellow national) describes someone who shares commonalities with others, being from the same village, town, or ethnic group. Filipinos are kababayans for one another abroad, but at home the term applies to people from the same language group or region, if not village. Bansa is about membership that can encompass difference, while bayan is about commonality and belonging, describing the nation as a more homogeneous space in terms of culture and social ties—a timeless, collective body of the people. Thus it is possible for indigenous people, with their distinctive cultures and languages, to be governed within the political and administrative networks of bansa but not considered to fully belong within the collective Filipino bayan. In the Philippines I found it rare for a Haliap person to refer to lowland Filipinos as kababayans and vice versa. The term usually refers to someone located in interlocking networks of meaning and exchange at a much more local level.

DRAWING BOUNDARIES

Daily life in Haliap is less defined by any imagined national culture than by the complexities of local ethnic groups and networks. People in Asipulo speak several indigenous languages of the Ifugao subgroups across the municipality: Tuwali (found in south and central Ifugao, also known as Kiangan Ifugao), Hanglulo (also known as Kallahan or Kalanguya, in western Ifugao), and Ayangan (eastern Ifugao). In Haliap, people are Ayangan speakers, a term they pronounce and spell with an extra d, as Adyangan (and sometimes spell Adyjangan).⁷ Adyangans also speak the Tuwali Ifugao dialect as a common language across the province. The Tuwali word Ayangan has become the name of Haliap’s dominant ethnic group in Filipino English.⁸ Haliap villagers learn both Filipino (Tagalog) and English in school, and they access radio, newspapers, books, and videos in both. They often use Ilokano, the language spoken in neighboring lowland provinces, for regional travel and marketing. When Haliap people talk about kababayans, they usually mean village-mates, other Adyangans, or fellow Ifugaos. Haliap and its neighbor, Panubtuban, are the only Adyangan-speaking barangays in the municipality of Asipulo. To the north, villagers identify people as Tuwali speakers; to the east, Hanglulo (or Kalanguya); and to the south, Keley-i (a distinct dialect of Kalanguya). The boundaries between these ethno-linguistic groups have become blurred at the edges by intermarriage and land transfers, particularly along the main road.

The ways Haliap Adyangans hold land and act politically have never fit with the national government’s administrative frameworks. Many Haliap residents cultivate rice fields that lie in Barangay Panubtuban, to the west. Together, Haliap and Panubtuban form one contiguous area, and people living in both barangays long considered themselves a single community.⁹ But not all of the people who claim rights to cultivate land inhabit houses within the village’s administrative boundaries. One cluster of Haliap houses lies within the boundaries of Keley-i-speaking Barangay Antipolo to the south. Several more hamlets lie on the north side of the Hagalap River, in Tuwali-speaking Barangay Duit, part of the Kiangan municipality. Following Asipulo’s inception as a separate municipality in 1992, the setting of its administrative boundaries, four years later, adjudicated between conflicting land claims by drawing a boundary along the Hagalap River. Thus some of Luis’s family’s rice fields and his father’s house lot are now in Kiangan. When it comes to deciding where to reside, accessing public services, and choosing which party’s list of candidates to support in local and national elections, Luis juggles conflicting advice and claims on his loyalty.

KINSHIP AND EXCHANGE

Adyangan kinship, like English kinship, is bilateral or cognatic. People typically acknowledge relatedness to both maternal and paternal kin to descendants of common great-great-grandparents. Village social relations are shaped by customary exchanges between relatives and links to other villages through intermarriages. Haliap people can draw on their relatives for support but must in turn support them. Adyangans accord people status to recognize their generosity and willingness to redistribute their wealth, so redistributing money, food, or connections brings prestige. Close relatives are expected to assist each other with regular exchanges of goods and labor. More distant relatives can make claims on one another on special occasions, such as religious festivals. Villagers also tend to be tied to their neighbors by cash debts and food exchanges associated with life-cycle events and religious festivals, just like urban-dwelling Filipinos. But their indigenous customs also stipulate exchanges of a wide variety of gifts, days of labor, and cash donations, which occur across the agricultural calendar, mark public rituals, and discharge obligations to kin.

Haliap’s sense of place is founded on shared labor: “We work together so that we will eat.” Exchanges of labor between households locate people in the village social network, whether people cultiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• On Transliteration
• Introduction: The Parade
• 1 Finding the Village
• 2 Becoming a Global Kind of Woman
• 3 Failing to Progress
• 4 New Territories
• 5 Haunted by Images
• 6 Moving On
• 7 Come What May
• Conclusion: The Virtual Village
• On Affect: A Methodological Note
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index