![Sample our Area Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5922/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Area-Studies.jpg"})
Abstract
This article analyses the migration of a religious ‘minority’ that is largely invisible within migration studies, namely Muslim Filipina domestic workers. More specifically, this research shows that the category of ‘minority’ is not fixed and is always negotiated through transnational spaces and boundary work. In doing so, the article highlights how religious belonging, the status of minority and migration intersect and are negotiated during the period prior to these women leaving their country, during their time in the country of destination, and when they return to the Philippines. How boundary work affects the religious belonging of this Muslim ‘minority’ is underlined by presenting the Middle East as an opportunity to perform norms of ‘Muslimness’. The performance of these norms as an opportunity for these women to challenge the status of being a ‘minority’ in the Philippines is also examined. Finally, this article shows how these Muslim ‘minorities’ gain access to a certain symbolic capital by becoming hajji and balikbayan (returnees) when they return home.
Acknowledgements
This article was written during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Social and Cultural Diversity, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (Göttingen, Germany), granted by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). I would like to thank these organisations for their support. I also would like to express my very great appreciation to Geraldine Brown, Catherine C. Choy, Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot and Gwenola Ricordeau for their valuable and constructive suggestions and comments regarding this paper.
Notes
[1] For more details about the history and the place of Islam and Mindanao-Muslims in the Philippines, see Abinales (Citation2010).
[2] The fourth, fifth and sixth parts of this article are structured around central migration stages, namely the ‘decision’ to leave, the migration experience overseas, and the return home. This linear perspective on migration should not hide the complexity of this process, since it also involves failures, departures from other countries, temporary returns, or intermediate stages. However, this linear perspective (departure / migration experience / return) represents here a theoretical construction which does not aim to essentialise migration trajectories but, rather, highlight situations in which religious belonging and boundary work are particularly effective.
[3] These training programmes provide information about the so-called ‘culture’ of the destination countries in order to help migrants adjust to their daily life abroad. This research has shown, however, that in the case of the Middle East, ‘culture’ is mostly interpreted by these training providers in terms of abuse and maltreatment, a perspective often not shared by Muslim migrant women who, rather, emphasised religious proximity (Debonneville Citation2014, 2016).
[4] While Malaysia had previously supplied migrant domestic helpers, since the 2000s it has acted as a receiving country for migrant domestic workers, primarily ‘high skilled’ workers.
[5] Israel is included here with Europe and North America as a preferred destination in terms of pay and conditions, but not in terms of gaining citizenship.
[6] While this article is based on 12 in-depth interviews only, it also draws on additional ethnographic work conducted by the author, such as observations, informal discussions and 60 interviews with institutional actors in the migration industry. Moreover, this paper also confirms and extends Mark Johnson’s (Citation2010) and Alicia Pingol’s (Citation2010) findings.
[7] While Muslim Filipinos live in others regions of the Philippines such as Palawan, Sulu and Manila, women from these regions were not encountered or interviewed during this fieldwork. Data gathered in this research refer only to Muslim women from Mindanao.
[8] Of 101 million Filipino citizens, 84 per cent are Catholics, 7 per cent Muslims (mostly Sunni), and 4 per cent Evangelical Protestants. Further, designated Muslim dominant regions (called IX, X, XI, XII) provided 12.2 per cent of the total number of OFWs in 2015. This number might include non-Muslim migrants who also live in these regions. https://psa.gov.ph/content/2016-survey-overseas-filipinos.
[9] Salaries can fluctuate, affected by the economic and political context. If certain supplier countries stop deploying workers for safety reasons, for instance like Indonesia in Saudi Arabia in 2013 or the Philippines to Kuwait in 2018 in order to challenge the Kafala system, this action can quickly raise the demand for migrant workers, and to a certain extent increase workers’ salaries (and recruitment agencies’ profits).
[10] All names are pseudonyms.
[11] This interview was conducted in Tagalog with my colleague Lea Rodriguez and then translated into English.