https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7325-2135
![Sample our Tourism, Hospitality and Events journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5950/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Tourism-Hospitality-Events.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The mobilities literature often draws on a maritime vocabulary, but has more seldom engaged with the everyday lives of maritime workers. With ninety percent of all goods transported by sea, seafarers literally move the world. Since the 1970s, Filipino sailors in particular have emerged as the most important nationality within this global mobile labor force. Often facing discrimination, racialized representations and obstacles to social mobility onboard their moving worksites, these workers draw on certain vernacular narratives to claim historical authenticity and a natural propensity to seafaring, thereby justify their right to belong in contemporary shipping. This article uses ethnography from onboard cargo ships and ashore in the Philippines to show how such narratives themselves become forces of production for the mobile labor of Filipino seafarers. Drawing on Cresswell’s concept of ‘constellations of mobility,’ the article explores how the mobile labor of Filipino seafarers is narrated as geographically and historically formed and how this shapes Filipino seafarers’ everyday experiences onboard ships today. By critically examining the historical production of maritime labor, as well as its contemporary social reproduction through such narratives, this ethnography of Filipino seafarers’ ‘mobile labor’ shows the coproduction of labor, racialization and mobility in the shipping industry.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Camelia Dewan, Nataya Friedan, Hege Høyer Leivestad, Agneta Markkula, Kaj Markkula, Camilla Mevik, Elisabeth Schober and the editors of the special issue, Cristiana Bastos, Andre Novoa and Noel Salazar, for carefully reading and commenting on the article in its different stages. I also wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and constructive criticism. Most importantly, I thank the seafarers who welcomed me into their lives onboard the ships and ashore and shared their experiences with me.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Cadets are navigational officer or marine engineer students.
2. Benedict Anderson (Citation1998) has argued that one of the main ways in which Spanish colonialism shaped Philippine society was through the disinterestedness it showed in the archipelago beyond the port of Manila. Tellingly, the Spanish language never became commonly spoken in the Philippines as it did in Spain’s American colonies.
3. Miguel López de Legazpi was a Spanish navigator and the governor of the first Spanish settlement in the Philippines, established in 1565.
4. Ferdinand Marcos was the president of the Philippines from 1965–1986.
5. MARINA has since moved its central office to a new building of its own, inaugurated in 2018, after decades of renting.
6. Young graduates from maritime colleges who have not yet secured work onboard, typically work for months, sometimes years, running errands for manning agencies for little or no pay.
7. Lakad, literally means ‘a walk’, but is used to refer to plans, things to do, errands to run.
8. Pauline Gardiner Barber’s (Citation2008) work describes how domestic workers are similarly trained in workshops how to behave, dress and present themselves in ways that are appealing to potential employers and that live up to expectations of Filipina women as submissive, hardworking and caring. They have to appear educated (but not too educated so not to become a threat to employers), submissive, loyal and hardworking. Barber emphasizes that the women are aware of these projections and consciously manipulate them in order to sell their labor.
9. While this commodification and racialized representation of a mobile labor niche for Filipino workers is not specific to seafarers (c.f Amrith, this issue), the case of a predominantly male global mobile labor force of Filipino sailors provides an important contribution to the rich existing literature (Choy Citation2003; Barber Citation2008; Parreñas Citation2001) on an equally gendered, but in this case female, mobile labor force of domestic workers, nurses and caretakers from the Philippines.