The politics of leisure and labor mobilities: discourses of tourism and transnational migration in Central Java, Indonesia

Abstract

This article presents narratives and tropes of transnational tourism from a less considered perspective: rural migrant-origin villagers of Central Java. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cilacap and Yogyakarta, I analyze how and why some former temporary labor migrants depict their typically harsh experiences in terms of tourism and leisure. Addressing the tendency in current research to approach labor migration and tourism as mutually exclusive or unrelated class categories and experiences, I consider the ways in which former migrants and non-migrant villagers evaluate or identify labor migration in terms of gender, class, religious, and ethno-national subjectivities associated with ‘tourist’ and/or ‘migrant’ categories. Popular and commercial imaginations of leisure travel and tourism importantly shape the subjectivities and positionalities of precarious labor migrants. Foregrounding the relations between tourism and labor migration reveals the multi-scalar ways in which associated discourses and infrastructures of both mutually shape and constitute global socio-economic inequalities.

Keywords:

• Tourism mobilities
• labor migration
• gender
• class
• Indonesia
• Southeast Asia

Acknowledgments

The article benefited from generous feedback by three anonymous reviewers, as well as colleagues and organizers of the conference ‘Trans-Asia Human Mobilities and Encounters: Exchange, Commodification, and Sustainability’ (23-24 January 2017), Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, where an earlier version was presented. To the anonymous participants of Central Java who shared their time and stories with me, I extend much gratitude.

Notes

1. All names used are pseudonyms according to ethical academic conventions.

2. I came to these three sites by serendipity. One site was the home village of a labor activist I met in Yogyakarta in 2012. On subsequent annual visits I cultivated closer ties with her family and neighbors until my main research period between 2014 and 2015. I was invited to stay in the second site through a former migrant who worked in Singapore, where we met previously. My entry to the third site was facilitated through another researcher who has been working closely with the residents on issues of migration and development for many years. As an ethnic-Chinese Singaporean who speaks fluent Indonesian, I negotiated multiple misrecognitions as a (potential) recruitment agent, employer, and NGO worker. Most of the time, however, as an obvious ‘outsider,’ many residents approached me to share their experiences, questions, and views about migration.

3. Ninety participants identified as women, while forty identified as men; sixty-nine of all interviewees were former migrants, not all of whom depicted their experiences in terms of tourism, as the following sections will show.