Listening for spaces of ordinariness: Filipino-Canadian youths' transnational lives

Abstract

I consider different ways that Filipino-Canadian immigrant youths and their mothers tell their stories of their transnational experiences. Second-generation youths tell of coming into Filipino identity in their teens and developing a strong sense of transnational identification. Filipino youths who have migrated recently to Canada through their mothers' involvement in the Live-in Caregiver Program provide a less fulsome picture of their transnational experiences. I puzzle over why this is so, reasoning that their experiences are more difficult to talk about because they involve revealing intimate details of family life, and because children often have little agency or information about family migration plans. Beyond this, there is the possibility that I simply failed to hear what they were saying because of the manner in which it was said. They do not construct their experiences in narrative form. Instead they tell of their experience in fragments, in what I call – following Berlant, spaces of ordinariness. I consider the practical and political implications of listening for different forms of agency and subjecthood.

Keywords:

• Filipino
• migration
• children of domestic workers
• second-generation youths
• agency

Acknowledgements

Thanks so much to Chris Harker and Lauren Martin for commenting on a draft of this paper, to an anonymous referee, and to the organizers of and participants at the Mapping North American Youth Cultures: Local Settings of Global Lives workshop, held at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies of Youth and Space San Diego State University.

Notes

I was not at many of the interviews with youth because the Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance (FCYA), my research collaborators, felt that youths would be more open if interviewed by a Filipino peer only.

In this, it is different from what Wolf (2002) has labelled ‘emotional transnationalism’, that is, an emotional attachment that does not involve actual visits to the Philippines.

There are notable exceptions to this generalization, for example Cahill (2007) and Cahill and Hart (2007).

We interviewed 20 mothers and 17 youths, some times together, in most cases apart. To develop a depth of understanding, we returned to interview two mothers and seven youths twice. In addition a number of focus groups were done with 12 youths. Interviews and focus groups were always conducted by a Filipino member of the PWC of BC or the FCYA, often in Tagalog or some mixture of Tagalog and English. Women interviewed women, youth interviewed youth.

The play, Nanay; a testimonial play, has been staged in Vancouver's PuSH Festival in February 2009 (http://pushfestival.ca/index.php?mpage=shows&spage=main&id=81) and at the HAU in Berlin in June 2009.

There is, as well, a question of class and education distinguishing some first- and second-generation youths.

The reasons for my preoccupation with the nuclear family are two pronged: it may reflect an ethnocentric bias, but it is also an attempt to resist the assumption held by many white Canadian families that children being left in the care of aunts and grandmothers is ‘normal’ for Filipino families and thus family separation is a less painful experience for ‘them’ as opposed to ‘us’.