Filipino Diaspora: Emergent Geographies of Labor and Love

Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World. Robyn Magalit Rodriguez. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 224 pp., photos, tables, bibliography, notes, index. $22.50 paper (ISBN 978-0-8166-6528-0).

Families Apart: Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love. Geraldine Pratt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 288 pp., photos, bibliography, notes, index. $22.50 paper (ISBN 978-0-8166-6999-8)

Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan. Lieba Faier. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. 304 pp., illustrations, appendices, bibliography, notes, index. $26.95 paper (ISBN 9780520252158).

Filipino Crosscurrents: Oceanographies of Seafaring, Masculinities, and Globalization. Kale Bantigue Fajardo. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 272 pp., photos, bibliography, notes, index. $25.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-8166-6757-4).

Recent years have witnessed an efflorescence of writing on the Philippine diaspora. Indeed, the Filipina/o migrant plays a central and growing role in contemporary transnationalism and diaspora studies, as well as gender, feminist, and sexuality research, Asian Studies, and critical labor and development studies (see, e.g., Tadiar 2009; Guevarra 2010; Parreñas 2011; McKay 2012). In recognition of this growing literature, and attentive to the topic's clear importance for a wide range of geographic conversations, four authors (Lieba Faier, Kale Fajardo, Geraldine Pratt, and Robyn Rodriguez) and two commentators (John Paul Catungal and Rachel Silvey) convened a panel for the Association of American Geographers Conference in 2012. ¹ Titled, “Sex, Love, Labor, and Spaces In-Between: New Books on Filipina/o Diaspora,” the panel described its focus in the conference program as:

Four books; four authors; four different sets of stories about Filipina/o laborers abroad. What does it mean to think the contemporary Philippine diaspora across these different perspectives and geographies? What can the situations, experiences, and perspectives of people in and from the Philippines tell us about the contemporary moment? This authors-meet-each-other panel is as much an inquiry into the ways we can productively encounter, engage and dialogue with others' work as it is an exploration of the Philippine diaspora. … How can we … theorize more collaborative forms of knowledge production?

During the panel, each of the four authors reviewed one of the books, and the two commentators identified some cross-cutting themes and questions from reading the four books in relation to one another. Despite the nominally unified topic that tied the collection together, each book and each set of comments offered distinct and complementary contributions to understanding the contours and significance of various aspects of the Philippine diaspora. Each invoked its own particular conceptual register, provided specific sets of analytical and political priorities, and opened up fresh methodological and representational territory. Yet it was in reading them as a collection, and in the conversations that emerged among them, that some of the most exciting conceptual sparks were generated.

It is perhaps not a coincidence that a panel focused on diasporic relationships would gather steam in conversation across books, disciplines, and positionalities. Relationality is a keyword for diaspora studies, and so methodologically it is fitting that dynamic interrelationships make up the core of these books, reviews, and commentaries. Each of the books opens up some novel ways of thinking about the connections among politics, identity, territory, mobility, and space. They reflect multi- and transdisciplinary backgrounds, ranging from sociology, geography, and anthropology to women, gender, and sexuality studies, and ethnic and racial studies. Some of the authors were born in the Philippines and continue to visit family there; some have spent long periods of time living and researching there; one carries out her field work in transnational activist spaces located in Canada. All are committed to thinking “outside the boxes” of the isolated individual, the nation, the past versus the present, tradition–modernity, and self–other. In unique ways, each seeks to engage the diasporic present in ways that expand possibilities for social justice. None of the books assume that it is possible to know in advance how social justice should appear, but all share a conviction that through praxis the potential for more just relations to emerge is deepened, “here,” “there,” and in the many geographies in between. All of the books reveal the gender politics of Filipino labor of various kinds, and its fundamental, constitutive role in the global political economy. Each sheds light on the affective attachments to family and nation—as ideal attachments that are both retrenched in historic forms and reconfigured in everyday lives—that figure centrally in the making of a wide range of transnational experiences.

Three specific aspects of diaspora studies stood out for me in these books. First, as a collection they confirm the arrival center stage of fully formed transnational methods at work. Not only do each of the books reflect multisited, often traveling ethnographies, connecting up with various locales and journeys that compose the diaspora, but they also turn a reflexive, relational lens on the place, home, origin and orientation of the research subjects and research process itself. These are narratives of traveling encounters, process-oriented perspectives on the meanings of mobility—not just the mobility of labor, but also the mobilities and entrapments of desire, affect, emotion, and intimacy. Each of the analyses entails malleability and its always-corresponding yet never fully predictable fixity and intransigence, as these unfold at multiple scales. Second, these books all gracefully interweave conceptual tools from a range of theoretical traditions, giving the lie (yet again) to any account of the state of theory that might posit unbridgeable divides between, for example, critical political economy, feminism, queer theory, or poststructuralism. They “hold theory lightly,” and as Stuart Hall (1988, 70) has long enjoined scholars to do, their goal is “not to generate another good theory, but to give a better theorized account of concrete historical reality.” Finally, the books do far more than describe or explain the politics of the Philippine diaspora: They actually deliver work that communicates the complexity and beauty of these labors of love. This is yet another indication that as postmillennial diasporic processes unfold, so, too, is the scholarship on these processes coming into its own. The reviews that follow, and the books and processes on which they reflect, speak for themselves.

Book Review of Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World

Kale Bantigue Fajardo, Department of American Studies and the Asian American Studies Program, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis, MN.

It has almost become common sense for Filipino/as and non-Filipino/as to know or acknowledge that Filipino/as labor in a massive diaspora that extends to every region of the world. When I was conducting ethnographic research, for example, on contemporary Filipino seafaring and the experiences of Filipino sea-based migrants working on industrial container ships in the global shipping industry, one Filipino seaman during field work on board a ship crossing the Pacific said to me, “We're all over the planet. Every port we go, if we get shore leave, we always meet Filipinos in that city. Filipinos are working all over. Domestics, construction workers, entertainers, nurses, doctors, you name it! If they need workers on Mars, I'm sure Pinoys (nickname for Filipinos) will be the first ones to go. Imagine: OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) on Mars!” This seaman was not alone. Other sea-based migrant men echoed his sensibilities about the prevalence of globalized Filipino/a labor. How did this now fairly common-sensical notion and socioeconomic practice, that is, of “Filipinos work[ing] all over the world” arise, even to the point that laboring on Mars appeared as a possible next logical step?

Robyn Magalit Rodriguez's Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World reveals how this “culture of migration” (Rodriguez's term, which the seaman in my opening example also reveals) developed in the Philippines and how it is currently partially yet effectively maintained by the state. As the title suggests, Rodriguez is concerned with the social, economic, and political processes and functions of the Philippine state (apparatus). By focusing on how and also why the Philippine state “brokers labor”—that is, how the “labor brokerage Philippine state” (a term coined by Rodriguez) secures and manages labor for transnational and global capital—Rodriguez develops two critical points: First, she argues that brokering labor is a neoliberal economic strategy effectively developed (and perhaps “perfected”) by the Philippine state, and second, Rodriguez reveals how neoliberalism is connected to (U.S. American) colonialism and neocolonialism in the Philippines.

Neoliberal economic strategies are historically and theoretically associated with the privatization of once nationalized industries and public services, free trade zones, “austerity measures,” and structural adjustment programs. These are all certainly part of neoliberal economics in the Philippines. Rodriguez, however, reveals another dimension of neoliberalism in a global south and Southeast Asian context, specifically, that in the Philippines, overseas migration as a long-term economic plan developed and maintained by the state is key to the state's neoliberal agenda. Rodriguez opens the book by calling our attention to how the Philippine state is metaphorically and materially being corporatized before our very eyes, and the President (at the time of Rodriguez's research, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo) is a leading entrepreneur; in fact, she was CEO of the Philippine nation/corporation. Rodriguez quotes the former President: “Not only am I the head of state responsible for a nation of 80 million people. I'm also the CEO of a global Philippine enterprise of 8 million Filipinos who live and work abroad and generate billions of dollars a year in revenue for our country” (ix). Rodriguez reads Macapagal Arroyo's CEO mentality and her administration's policies as neoliberal because, “[i]t requires the responsibilization of Philippine citizens who are [socially and economically pressured] to directly bear the costs of neoliberal restructuring” (ix) by sending in remittances that pay for foreign debt servicing. Macapagal Arroyo did not start this socioeconomic trend, but she definitely deepened and extended it. Rodriguez suggests this state reliance on largely working-class Filipino/as global labor is a form of “trickle up development.” Rodriguez continues by discussing how access to and working in overseas employment markets also addresses Philippine citizens' dire need for livable wages (because the Philippines, overall, remains a poor country with high domestic unemployment). In this global south context, the state promotes and oversees a massive global migration program for its (migrant) citizens to continue making debt repayments, while also to some extent, managing possible or real social unrest in the archipelago.

As the labor brokerage Philippine state manages and disciplines Filipino/as through socioeconomic means—that is, through the state apparatus and a massive institutionalized global overseas migration program—according to Rodriguez, it must “simultaneously extend new kinds of ‘rights’ and benefits to overseas citizens, in order to mask the social inequalities that have deepened and the way in which entitlements in the Philippines are shrinking.” To elaborate on this, Rodriguez uses the term “migrant citizenship” (xix). She notes that on first reading, the term seems oxymoronic, but in the Philippines, that is how the state denaturalizes its neoliberal global migration apparatus and policies. By giving some socioeconomic benefits to migrant citizens (e.g., technical training before departure or upon returning, and I would add access to OFW housing programs, lower interest bank loans, educational scholarships for children of OFWs and special OFW awards, just to name some of the other newly developed benefits for OFWs), the labor brokerage Philippine state ironically and “deftly masks how the entitlements of Philippine citizenship are in fact dwindling under conditions of neoliberalism” (xx). Rodriguez concludes, “Neoliberal globalization does not necessarily hollow developing states. Rather these states have reconfigured notions of sovereignty, territoriality, and citizenship to produce citizen workers primed to respond to the demands of global capitalism” (143).

Meanwhile out in the Filipino/a diaspora or in the host countries, Rodriguez (like Geraldine Pratt in her discussion of Canada and Lieba Faier in her discussion of Japan) argues that host states benefit because migrants are extremely vulnerable as noncitizens (who can be deported because of their noncitizen or temporary migrant status). There are also usually wage differentials between native-born and foreign-born migrant workers, and because migrants are in a vulnerable position, employers can “take advantage of a temporary labor force that will not burden them with demands for wage increase or seniority benefits over time and is less likely to be organized by unions.” Host countries thus have access to a consistent stream of temporary migrants who are citizens of other nations (e.g., Philippines) who do not feel as entitled to public services. In other words, the labor sending or labor brokerage state (in this case, the Philippines) and host countries (e.g., Canada and Japan, among other nations) all operationalize neoliberal economics in a capitalist world system. By explaining how host states benefit, Rodriguez denaturalizes the other (transnational) side of migration. Here, Rodriguez's book strongly resonates with Pratt's economic and social analysis developed in Families Apart: Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love (2012). Pratt, for example, explains how the Live-In Caregiver Program functions in Canada and how the Canadian state and employers benefit by creating a second-class citizenry comprised of temporary female migrants such as the Filipina migrants with whom Pratt conducted activist research.

Rodriguez's second important scholarly intervention is that she also reveals how Philippine state brokerage and migration policies have roots in U.S. colonialism in the Philippines. This is an important economic, political, and epistemological intervention because these two projects of social, political, economic, and cultural control (i.e., neoliberal economics and U.S. colonialism) are often understood or analyzed as distinct entities or phenomena. Indeed, scholars usually do not strongly link the two in the way Rodriguez does in Migrants for Export. In the field of Philippine studies, Filipino/a diaspora studies, and Asian American studies, like Rodriguez, some scholars have begun to precisely show the connections between U.S. colonialism, U.S. and Philippine neocolonialism, and neoliberalism (see Fujita-Rony 2002; Choy 2003). In particular, Rodriguez contextualizes how a “culture of migration” developed in the Philippines by linking earlier waves of overseas Filipino/a workers such as sugar workers (in Hawaii) and elite Pensionado/as (Filipino/a students who studied in the metropole or continental United States) with more contemporary overseas Filipino/a workers who readers might be more familiar with; for example, Filipina entertainers and caregivers such as those discussed by Lieba Faier (2009) and Pratt (2012), respectively, showing us the historical trajectory of this Philippine or Filipino/a “culture of migration.” The sugar workers or overseas students in the early to mid-twentieth century often returned to the Philippines with stories of success. These earlier waves of migrants benefited (socially and economically) in the Philippines precisely because they had lived and traveled abroad and thus had social capital. Filipino/as who stayed at home in the archipelago often heard these stories told by their family members, friends, and town-mates who had tried to improve their lives by migrating to “America” (the United States). As a result, many Filipino/as residing in the Philippines also wanted to work and live abroad. Rodriguez, like Faier, stresses the role of “America” in Filipino/a migrant dreams and aspirations. (In Faier's case, Japan is often a stand-in for the United States.) It is these desires to find better luck abroad (along with the state's neoliberal brokerage desires discussed earlier) that helped to produce the Philippines “culture of migration” that Rodriguez contextualizes.

Rodriguez also stresses the rise of a Philippine elite in the aftermath of colonialism, including their complicities in perpetuating feudal relations in the early twentieth century, as well as in the context of post-1960s when the U.S.-sponsored (Ferdinand) Marcos dictatorship powerfully oriented Philippine development policies toward a neoliberal labor brokerage economic agenda. It was precisely during the U.S.-sponsored dictatorship that governmental agencies such as the Overseas Employment Development Board, the Bureau of Employment Services, and the National Seaman's Board were developed in Metro Manila. As such, Rodriguez shows that it was during this point in the twentieth century that the Philippine state institutionalized overseas migration the Philippines.

While Rodriguez reveals the power of the Philippine state, the state denaturalizes its systems of labor brokerage, national corporate management, and social discipline. Like Pratt and Faier, she does not lose sight of Filipino/a migrants' agency. Pratt, for example, discusses how Filipinas use the Live-In Caregiver Program to bring their children to Canada, and Faier includes a discussion of how Filipinas living in rural Japan sometimes run away from bad marriages or from the social discipline exerted by in-laws (to name a few reasons). In Rodriguez's case, she includes a discussion of how local and global Filipino/as have organized themselves in grassroots political efforts, to advocate for migrant rights and human rights. Rodriguez writes that Migrante International (a nongovernmental organization) has, for example, developed translocal, transnational, and global responses that have proven to be effective in resisting and protesting abuses against Filipino/a migrants abroad. Because migrants are often noncitizens who have limited rights in host countries, Migrante International targets the Philippine state in the geographic context of the Philippines, but also strategically organizes Filipino/a workers geographically situated in other regions of the world. For example, in the past, Migrante International successfully organized OFWs, directing them not to send remittances home as a form of social and economic protest. This is clearly a strong political message and compelling tactic because as Rodriguez and other scholars have shown, the labor brokerage state is extremely addicted to remittances contributed by overseas Filipino/as. Thus, despite the Philippine labor brokerage state's power to interpellate and compel Filipino/as to participate and work in the nation's global migration system, Rodriguez, like Pratt, underscores spaces and moments of activist agency for Filipino/a migrants, and like Faier illustrates other avenues and forms of desire. The desires that Rodriguez writes about are not corporate like those of former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, but rather, they are rooted and routed in the fight for social justice for Filipino/a migrant workers.

The Labor and Ethics of Care

Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Department of Asian American Studies, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA.

Geraldine Pratt's Families Apart is a moving critique of Canada's Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP), which draws a significant number of women from the Philippines. Families Apart offers an important lens for understanding how territorial, imaginative, and perhaps most crucially relationship boundaries engendered by international migration are negotiated, struggled through, and breached; boundaries between researcher and researched, mother and child, migrant and citizen, as these boundaries are mapped onto the boundaries that both separate and bring together the Philippines and Canada.

I'll address (and raise questions of) each set of boundaries and the kinds of crossings Pratt's work both identifies and enables in turn.

Researcher and Researched

Families Apart is ultimately a collaborative project that emerges from Pratt's long-standing relationship with the Philippine Women's Center (PWC) in Vancouver along with the various organizations with which it is networked. Pratt attempts to decenter her authorial voice throughout the text to index the ways that her “subjects” have played a central role in the research, and in so doing she builds on feminist scholarly traditions, which are ever mindful and critical of authorial assertions.

Moreover, if Pratt's research, as I discuss in more depth later, invites (indeed, demands) affective attachment, her work is also a product of clear affective attachment—a mutual affective attachment (and therefore commitment)—felt by herself toward the Filipina migrants with whom she has worked and vice versa. In this way, Pratt's work is somewhat unique for placing an ethic of care at the center of the research agenda.

Indeed, Pratt participates in unexpected modalities of scholarly work such as incorporating interviews drawn from the research process into a theater production that is staged in Canada and participating in the witnessing of human rights violations in the Philippines even as Families Apart itself narrates the processes and products of this work.

Pratt's work, however, raises some important questions for consideration: Exactly how do we engage in collaboration with our “subjects”? How involved do our “collaborators” actually become in the research and writing process? To what extent can and should these collaborations and collaborative processes be made explicit? In what ways does (racialized, classed, or gendered) privilege work to allow for these collaborations to be made public and professionally fruitful and at what point does it become a liability and therefore foreclose the sorts of “witnessing” that scholarly work can do? To put it more directly, in what ways does Pratt's positionality as a white, middle-class scholar allow her a degree of privilege to stake a claim as an engaged and ethically committed researcher without professional consequence in ways that a working-class woman of color scholar might not be able to? What risks does ethical care and engagement with our research subjects pose to our legitimacy as scholars especially when we depend on that very legitimacy to play “witness” to state violence (much like the members of the fact-finding mission Pratt describes)? Can we imagine forms of knowledge dissemination similar to and beyond those described in the text?

Mother and Child

Given our focus on spatialities as migration scholars (and this is perhaps all the more true for geographers!) what I found striking in Pratt's work was the way she considers how different forms of temporarily structure relations between migrants and their relatives. This becomes especially central to her consideration of the space between mother and child and the way that spatiality is crucially marked by time. Pratt is especially focused on the issue of the waiting period between the time between when a migrant woman leaves the Philippines to take on employment in Canada and the time she is able to successfully petition for her children to join her. This waiting period can span many years and reconciliation is often marked by tensions that neither party anticipated.

Migrant and Citizen

More important, this book invites readers to be affected, that is to feel and not only feel, but to feel in such a way that we develop attachments to the people around whom the text centers and through attachment, be moved to action. Pratt challenges us as readers, but also as scholars, to think about what ways academic texts can invoke affective responses from the audiences they address. Is there a style and mode of writing that can get to that? How, too, to even get to the work of disseminating knowledge to broader publics? Might there be ways to imagine scholarly collaboration that allow for these sorts of interventions?

Pratt is asking her readers to reconfigure relations of care. If Filipinas are performing the work of care for Canadians, Pratt's text demands that Canadians reverse this “chain of care” to open themselves to transforming their relationships with Filipina migrants and their families. Indeed, Pratt uses her research praxis as a kind of model for the way that the affective boundaries between citizen and migrant (which can also be employer and worker) might be breeched. For instance, while sharing the narratives of Filipina migrant workers, narratives of the violence of family separation, Pratt interrupts it with photos of her own son, marking the time passed between when migrants are able to visit their own children with pictures of her son that captures his growth over the course of the same period. On one hand, it materializes time, ties it to the human body, to illustrate what is lost in family separation. On the other hand, by using photos of her own son, rather than the photos of migrants' sons, she aims to avoid the problematics of the victim narrative and invites audience members (many of whom are likely white Canadian) to identity with workers' stories less through (colonialist) pity but through shared experiences (that of parenting).

Pratt's work in rendering visible what is ultimately state violence in the seemingly mundane and routine aspects of household life, especially those that depend on care labor, is an important move. Yet to what extent does the staging of these violences the way it was done in the play actually displace responsibility from the state onto individuals?

Importantly, Pratt juxtaposes the everyday aspects of state violence with more “exceptional” and virulent acts as a further way to invoke affective responses from her readers even as this chapter also describes the kinds of affective responses that are invoked when Canadians attempt to engage in the practice of new care ethics with the people who populate their country as caregivers.

Filipina migrants have figured centrally in Canada's LCP. Although some, particularly people situated just south of the Canadian border, might consider Canada's immigration policies like the LCP to be more inclusionary for its “pathway to citizenship,” Geraldine Pratt's Families Apart offers up a moving critique that forces us to take pause.

Filipina Migrants, National Imaginaries, and Undomesticated Dreaming

Geraldine Pratt, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.

I have the pleasure and privilege of bringing Lieba Faier's book, Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan (2009), into a conversation that we are staging about and among four new(ish) books on the Filipino labor diaspora. Although one of our desires in staging such a conversation was to mark the collaborative nature of all knowledge production and take pleasure in the ways that we learn from, are indebted to, poach from, and prosper through the work of others, I want first to make a case for the stand-alone brilliance of Intimate Encounters before considering how interesting it is to read it alongside other books in this collection.

Lest this seem too celebratory, I begin by underlining the noninnocence of our trajectories of feminist collaboration and knowledge production. Although I do research on Filipina migration, I came to Lieba Faier's extraordinary book late, fully two years after it was published in 2009. The location of the ethnography in rural Japan is likely a reason for this. (For others, a focus on Filipina migration might only compound this; see San Juan [2000] for some thoughts on the marginal status of Philippines studies in the United States, an artifact he believes, of a kind of repression of U.S. imperialist history.) There is a politics, indeed a geopolitics, of which regions and places we see as sites of scholarly interest and innovation. Studies outside of North America and Europe are often particularized within Anglo-American scholarship in a way that work on the United States or Europe is not. The latter are more likely endowed with the capacity to carry and advance theory. Although I have quoted on numerous occasions a pointed criticism that Gayatri Spivak has made of Western feminists' preoccupation with migrant experiences in large metropolitan centers in the global north and their neglect of women's experiences in the global south, particularly in rural areas (Sharpe and Spivak 2002), my neglect of Intimate Encounters suggests that my own reading practices have been slow to absorb the implications of this critique.

Lieba Faier's ethnography is based primarily in Central Kiso, a region that is hemmed in and isolated by a steep mountainous terrain. She quotes in her book an offhand remark made by a tourist to the area who describes it as “a place where the sun does not shine” (15). She takes this to signify more than the literal number of hours of sunlight enjoyed in Kiso: The sun no longer shines on Kiso economically and it is viewed both nationally and even locally as a backwater, as a place left behind in time. With declining employment, there is little reason and there are few opportunities for younger people to stay and local men find it difficult to compel Japanese women to marry and live with them there. It is within this context that the migration of Filipina entertainers began in the 1970s. The first Filipina hostess bar opened in Kiso in 1980 and by the time Lieba arrived in 1998 to do her nearly two-year ethnography there were ten to fifteen of these bars in the town in which she lived and significant numbers of Filipina hostesses and entertainers. In this out-of-the-way place, she traces intimate encounters between Filipina women and local Japanese men and women, encounters that lead to some startling cultural innovations and adaptations. The book upends expectations of where cultural innovation and change occur and invites the reader to pay close attention to the lives of women and men living in an out-of-the-way place in rural Japan.

What innovations occur that warrant widespread scholarly interest? Faier tells a story—that she comes to understand through a working knowledge of Japanese and Tagalog—of Filipina women settling in Kiso, forming intimate relationships with local men, and often marrying them. And in a strange twist, some Filipina women, previously stigmatized as hostesses, come to be viewed locally as exemplary ii oyomesan (good brides and daughters-in-law) and as key participants in the maintenance of traditional Japanese values of family and home. In the process, she argues, they are redefining in profound ways what it means to be Japanese; that is, the criterion for national belonging. Although still required to assimilate into a national-racial sameness, traditional heteronormative gender performances are redefining the grounds for national identity by locating them in performance rather than biogenetics. This is an extraordinary study of the contingency of national culture and an exemplary demonstration of what feminist theorizing of performativity can bring to studies of national identification and belonging. It draws attention both to the ways that patriarchal national cultures extract and cohere through particular gender performances and the instability and slippages within these performances.

To say that Filipina immigrants are valued as ii oyomesan is not to say that this is a comfortable place for all or even most Filipinas in Kiso. Many Filipinas felt stuck between a desire to leave their lives in the Philippines, a dream of adventure that often takes shape as a dream of life in “America,” and the uncomfortable fact that they live in rural Japan as opposed to an urban center. Many felt that they were stuck in jobs that they understood to be stigmatizing, marriages they sometimes wanted to leave and a place they found empty and lonely. These women, Faier writes, “saw themselves as not yet having arrived in the place they want to be—a place that perhaps did not even yet exist.” This is “an uncomfortable kind of dwelling … a restless frustrated kind of being” (102). As well, their acceptance in rural Japanese society takes place within closely scripted patriarchal norms and practices. Respect and care for the elderly, dedication to preparing meals and tidying the house, giving priority to husband and children: It is these performances that provide the grounds for their social inclusion. It is through perceptions of shared patriarchal values and practices in the Philippines and Japan that intercultural acceptance and national inclusion are forged.

Feeling stuck, Filipina women circulated narratives about and sometimes actually did run away. Dreams, gossip, and rumor are carefully considered as integral to the intimate encounters between and among Filipina migrants and Japanese residents. Faier analyzes how narratives of running away (typically to urban centers in Japan) circulated as gossip and rumor among Filipinas in Kiso to evoke “undomesticated dreams” and “extra domestic spaces” (201), including a space beyond or excessive to national belonging defined by citizenship. She argues that stories of those who run away have runaway effects or a kind of runaway agency for those who stay, for instance by providing Filipina wives and daughters-in-law some, even minor, leverage to renegotiate relations within their households in rural Japan.

Intimate Encounters is already in conversation with the other works considered here; the author is a thorough, wide-ranging, and careful reader. But it is an exercise that might be usefully extended. It is thought provoking, for instance, to read the accounts of Filipina migrants' dissatisfactions and stalled, unfulfilled dreams in Intimate Encounters against Kale Fajardo's ethnographic description of seamen's lives. “There is no life here” one seaman told him, “The world is held at a distance.” “Life on a container ship is like a floating prison” (137). Both authors are keenly alert to the ways that Filipino migrant workers are so often entombed in victimhood in scholarly and popular narratives, and they each look for and detect gaps in relations of power and opportunities for agency. Each author articulates a spatial metaphorics of escape that they hear expressed among those they study: running away in the case of Filipina entertainers and jumping ship for seamen. But I am struck by how much more room Fajardo seems to find for this; it seems worth exploring the reasons.

In reaction to the feminization of migrant labor, so ably documented in Robyn Rodriguez's Migrants for Export, Kale Fajardo argues that the Philippine state has attempted to remasculinize Filipino global migration through the figure of the heteronormative masculine seaman. Very much in conversation with Anglo-American queer and transgender studies and with an eye to decolonizing established narratives about masculinity, he detects a multiplicity of masculinities already sitting alongside and within heterosexual Filipino masculinity. Tracing the fluidity and nonduality of the Filipino language, which has neither gendered pronouns (he and she) nor strict separations between gender and sex, and drawing on ethnographic experiences aboard ships, he argues that Filipino who inhabit heterosexual masculinities are at ease with emotional intimacy and accepting of tomboy transgender masculinity. “Social and interpersonal contexts and self and social identifications are more important than rigid anatomical understandings or biological readings of ‘the body’” (154) such that there are “connections, fluidities, and nondualities” among and between conventional and alternative Filipino masculinities that are less apparent in Euro-American contexts. Given this, he sees existing opportunities to construct alternative gender narratives to the ones codified by the Philippine state.

My questions are these: Are Filipino femininities as fluid as masculinities or is there an interesting gendering to this? Certainly, Intimate Encounters documents remarkable movement of individuals from one version of femininity to another (whore to mother) and a capacity for communities to relearn their relationship to individual or cultural groups of women. Filipina women own bars and in a few cases Japanese husbands grapple with their wives' continued employment. But Filipina entertainers seem to be largely redeemed through their performance of ii oyomesan, and the presumed similarity of patriarchal practices in the Philippines and Japan forms the basis for Japanese understandings of intercultural compatibility. Is femininity more stuck than masculinity? Or is it feminist theory that is more sticky or stuck than queer or transgender theory? Is the object of analysis or frame of analysis at issue here? How does our framing direct our attention to possibilities for social change? In the case of Intimate Encounters such possibilities seem tied to life beyond the restrictions of citizenship and national belonging; for Filipino Crosscurrents to identity beyond gender. Perhaps one of the real benefits of a reading and writing community is that we keep different possibilities open to each other, some that our theoretical framings foreclose or simply ignore.

The same might be said for disciplinary perspective. Migrants for Export bears traces of training in labor sociology, whereas Intimate Encounters and Filipino Crosscurrents are written within and out of the discipline of anthropology. Decolonizing knowledge production is a minor theme that runs through the latter two, reaching deeply into the ways that the books are theorized and written. As one example, Faier traces Benedict Anderson's conceptual borrowing of “specters of comparison” from Jose Rizal, a late nineteenth-century Filipino nationalist and writer. She also attempts to decolonize her ethnography through her writing strategies: for instance by representing her informants in all of their complexity, sometimes in an unflattering light. Her informants have a right, she argues, not to be simplified and rendered innocent (i.e., as victim) by a patron ethnographer. The strategies deployed in Filipino Crosscurrents are somewhat different, both theoretically and textually: Insisting on the particularity of gender and transgender possibilities within Filipino cultures is an important theoretical intervention; refusing to italicize non-English phrases in the text to mark them as other or different is a smaller but nonetheless significant textual one.

Gathered together through their common focus on the Filipino labor diaspora, these books make important and different theoretical and methodological interventions within and beyond Philippines studies: Rodriguez within theories of the state and citizenship, Faier in conceptualizations of national culture and belonging beyond citizenship, and Fajardo within queer and transgender studies. If your reading proclivities are as geographically bounded as mine (to my embarrassment) appear to be, I hope that the “larger” theoretical ambitions of these books will draw you to them and lead you beyond the narrow confines of your usual reading practice.

Ethnographic Echolocation and the Spatial and Temporal Politics of Transnational Filipina/o Migration

Lieba Faier, Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.

How can ethnographic attention to recent labor migration from the Philippines better help us understand the unequal spatial and temporal dynamics of contemporary transnational processes? Understanding these dynamics is at once a theoretical and a political project. It requires attention not only to the ways transnational political economic practices figure in the everyday experiences of Filipina/o migrants, but also to the politics embedded in the narrative strategies through which their stories are told. In this essay, I juxtapose two recent ethnographies about the Philippine diaspora—Kale Fajardo's Filipino Crosscurrents (2011) and Geraldine Pratt's (2012) Families Apart—to consider how reading across narratives about different groups of Filipina/o migrants can help us better understand the contemporary globalized moment. I suggest that both Fajardo and Pratt engage a writing technique that I call echolocative writing, which in different ways enables them to illuminate the spatial and temporal dimensions of contemporary political economic processes through a focus on Filipina/o migrants' transnational lives. I suggest, too, that by reading these texts together, we can gain a richer understanding of the central ways that affect and gender shape the experiences of labor migrants and the political economic relations in which their lives are embedded.

First, let me explain my use of the term echolocative writing. I use this term to refer to a narrative strategy that involves situating ideas or practices by bouncing them off the experiences or perspectives of others. Echolocation—the ability to navigate through spaces by interpreting reflected sounds—is not a sense usually associated with humans. Rather, it is one usually attributed to bats, toothed whales, and some birds. Fajardo and Pratt's texts can be understood as engaging echolocative narrative strategies insofar as they both, albeit in divergent ways, reflect and refract different perspectives and experiences of others in their writing. This is a relational practice that insists on the connections between the parties involved. It entails considering how different perspectives and experiences play off each other as part of the same social world. In the remainder of this essay, I consider the distinctive ways that Fajardo and Pratt engage this strategy to complementary ends. I begin with Fajardo's text and then move on to Pratt's.

Filipino Crosscurrents asks what the everyday practices of Filipino seamen can tell us about economic and cultural globalization. Much work on recent migration from the Philippines, including the other three books in our panel, has tended to center on women migrants. Consequently, the experiences of male or masculine-identified migrants, and correspondingly questions of masculinity and migration, have received limited attention. Fajardo's book fills this gap by focusing on the experiences of Filipino seamen. He explores how differently situated government officials, seafarers' advocates, and the seamen themselves imagine and produce Filipino masculinities through seafaring. The Philippine state champions Filipino seamen's masculinity to counter neocolonial and orientalist narratives that feminize the country. Fajardo, however, suggests alternative, queer, ways to read these masculinities, challenging their interpellation by Philippine nationalisms. He enriches our understanding of the politics of masculinity by drawing attention to Filipino seafarers' masculinities as working class, adrift, and produced through the cross-currents between different trajectories of power. Masculinity in Fajardo's text is both attractive and oppressive. It is relationally produced, and it is cross-cut along axes of race, class, sexuality, and citizenship.

Fajardo aims in part to illustrate how seafarer masculinities are shaped by their experiences on ship. To evoke this point, he engages echolocative strategies, relaying how seafarers describe their experiences to him and situating their narratives alongside others of the global. For instance, he explains how one seafarer shares: “Walang buhay dito (There is no life here). … The world is held at a distance …. Life on a container ship is like a floating prison …. The four hours on the bridge are the slowest four hours ever. Everything is so monotonous” (131). Fajardo bounces this working-class, diasporic experience off of Harvey's (1990) famous characterization of the condition of postmodernity as involving “time-space compression”—the annihilation of space through time. By echolocating his interlocutors' experiences with Harvey's privileged one, Fajardo reveals the ways class, race, and citizenship inflect Harvey's theory. Fajardo contrasts Harvey's model with an alternative—heterotopic (Foucault 1986)—space-time of globalization. The space-time conjured by Fajardo's seafarers—is not compressed but suspended; not “at large” as Appadurai (1996) specified it, but entrapped. It is a “queer” space-time (Halberstam 2005), a space-time not of nine-to-five days but of four-four rotations—four hours on the bridge, four hours off. This is a space-time belonging to a world adrift in the uneven, sluggish aquatic solution that corporations and governments have developed to transport mass quantities of commodities around the world.

Second, in addition to considering how Filipino seafarers' perspectives echolocate with those of scholars like Harvey, Fajardo also discusses how the seafarers echolocated with him. For example, he tells us that the seafarers assumed he was tomboy, a term that in the Philippines refers to male- or masculine-identified females who have relationships with females who identify as “women.” Fajardo's tomboy presence thus inspired these men to relationally craft their own masculinities through memories and encounters with other tomboys they know back home. Fajardo uses the term “transportation” (156), to refer to this process of mental and emotional relocation vis-à-vis transgendered subjects, and it is this dynamic that figures as another form of echolocation in his text. Fajardo's notion of transportation also underpins another key theoretical move: his queering of masculinity by illustrating how it is produced in the cross-currents of differently situated discourses of it.

We can see here how Fajardo's theoretical interventions are tied to the ways he allows differently positioned perspectives to bounce off and refract each other. His echolocative techniques are also situated, however. Fajardo describes his research methods as “situated traveling fieldwork” (32), and throughout his text he draws attention to how his positioning informs the stories he hears. For instance, he discusses how he tempers his elite status in the Philippines as balikbayan (a visiting emigrant from the United States) by sharing stories with his informants about his family's humble roots in Malolos, Bulacan. This personal disclosure enables the seafarers to identify with him and open up. This tack contrasts with Pratt's approach, which engages a differently oriented echolocative strategy. Let me now turn to her book. I suggest that Fajardo's and Pratt's discrepant positionalities vis-à-vis their interlocutors lead them to different echolocative techniques.

Pratt's text focuses on the experiences and perspectives of Filipina women who go to Canada through the Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP). Rather than identifying with her interlocutors, as Fajardo did, Pratt positions herself as a middle-class, white Canadian woman who could conceivably be their employer. Consequently, from the first page of her text, Pratt draws attention to the discomfort, embarrassment, and worry she experiences in her research. She is troubled by the ways she is interpellated by the LCP and embarrassed by those thoughtless moments her privilege seeps out. She also worries about reinforcing dominant stereotypes.

Pratt draws attention to her own uncomfortable positioning as part of her “effort to unsettle complacency around temporary labor migration” (163). Her intentions are activist-oriented: She aims to mobilize her audience by communicating the pain and trauma of family separation that Filipina women and their children and partners experience. For example, in Chapter 3, Pratt discusses the experience of one Filipina caregiver named Marlena, sharing this woman's story of loss over her separation from her young son whom she has left behind in the Philippines. While Pratt discusses Marlena's grief over her separation from her son and the important moments of his life she has missed, Pratt intersperses photographs of her own son at different ages. In doing so, Pratt draws attention not only to the similarities but also to the differences between Marlena's experiences and her own, implicating herself, and by association her audience, in destabilizing ways. The story becomes, as Pratt explains, “no longer simply about Marlena's loss but is an encounter between Marlena and me (and possibly you). I am inscribed in the text, not only in the anticipated role of research collaborator, but in a more directly compromised way: as a middle-class white mother with the need and resources to employ Marlena” (88).

Pratt wants us not only to identify with her subjects' pain, but also to feel estranged from them. Her text repeatedly calls on the reader to bear ethical witness. She pushes us to ask: If we are aware of these women's pain, if we recognize their anguish, where do we go from here? It is her desire to create an uneasy dialogue between her informants and her audience that is part of what I am referring to as the echolocative impulse in Pratt's text. Pratt wants us to reflect our own experiences off those of her research subjects and thereby to acknowledge how their experiences refract our own. This strategy is different than Fajardo's. The two authors are differently positioned vis-à-vis their research subjects. Thus, whereas Fajardo's book offers a situated discussion of how he and his interlocutors echolocate with each other and other scholars like Harvey, Pratt's book aims to become a conduit or medium for her readers to echolocate themselves.

In conclusion, what I am calling echolocative writing is a politically engaged narrative strategy that involves reflecting experiences and perspective off others, and refracting these experiences in the process. We can understand Fajardo and Pratt's echolocative strategies as responses to the critiques of ethnographic writing that have come about since the publication of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Whereas this earlier collection broached questions about the fixity and boundedness of culture, and the partiality and positionality of ethnographic representation, it paid less attention to issues of gender and affect, including questions of familial love and loss, and sacrifice and sympathy.

Pratt and Fajardo's texts use echolocative techniques to evoke the gendered and affective dimensions of contemporary global processes. They bounce differently positioned experiences off each other to draw attention to forms of longing, loss, and sacrifice that constitute the spatial and temporal dynamics of labor migration from the Philippines. In this regard, they offer two examples of how echolocative writing can help us incorporate such considerations into our understandings of questions of culture, labor, power, and place in an interconnected world.

These texts also help us better understand the political-economic stakes of contemporary global processes. Engaging differently situated echolocative narrative techniques, Fajardo and Pratt evoke space-times that are unsettlingly resonant. Both the Filipina domestics in Canada about whom Pratt writes and the Filipino seamen in Fajardo's text live in, what we might call, “space-times of sacrifice.” That is, members of these groups both share experiences of endless waiting and delayed gratification in the hopes their sacrifices will benefit their families in the Philippines. Taken together, these parallel spatio-temporal experiences offer important counterpoints to current theorizing of the global as characterized by flows, border crossings, and the annihilation of space through time. Rather, these space-times of sacrifice draw attention to the painful, suspended ways that different groups of Filipina and Filipino labor migrants participate in an interconnected world. They offer an important and critical lens for understanding questions of global interconnection today and provide us with an opportunity for considering the ways ethnographic narratives can become tools for political engagement.

Running Away from Filipina/o Studies …

John Paul Catungal, Department of Geography, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.

Filipina/o studies remains a haunting presence in my academic and personal life. I ran away from my original dissertation topic (urban planning in the colonial Philippines) to instead investigate the emergence of ethno-specific AIDS organizing in Toronto. Similarly, I was accepted into the MA program at the University of British Columbia to research training schools for prospective domestic workers in the Philippines. I went on to write an MA thesis on student voluntarism at the University of Toronto.

Shortly after starting my MA, the University of Toronto hired Roland Sintos Coloma, a Filipino-American scholar, as an education faculty member. One of his first courses of action at the University of Toronto was the establishment of the Kritikal Kolektibo, a network of scholars with academic and personal interests in Filipino-Canadian studies. Under Dr. Coloma's leadership, the Kolektibo organized a symposium in 2009 titled Spectres of (In)Visibility: Filipina/o Lives in Canada. Many of the papers from this symposium, along with other submissions, were collated and submitted to the University of Toronto Press for consideration. The resulting volume, titled Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility (Coloma et al. 2012), is now out, and I am proud to be one of its co-editors and contributors.

For someone who has been running away from Filipina/o studies, I have been busy—to the simultaneous chagrin and support of my supervisory committee—doing work on Filipino-Canadian issues. Despite my best attempts to run away, I continue to gravitate toward this literature, particularly work that deals with Filipina/os in the Canadian context to understand my family history of migration, which began in earnest with my maternal aunt Belen moving first to Hong Kong, and then to Vancouver, in the 1980s to work as a domestic worker. My aunt's migration to Vancouver paved the way for my extended family's chain migration to Canada in the 1990s and 2000s. These short snippets of familial autobiography serve to illustrate how personal Filipina/o studies can be for scholars of Philippine descent.

As both a research subject and an academic interlocutor, I approached my role as critic in the panel, and in this review forum, in the spirit of situated praxis that feminist geographers have long advocated. I consider this review an opportunity to hold scholars, including myself, accountable both to fellow academics and to people whose lives populate our work. As a Filipino-Canadian academic, I felt it important to engage the books from my own location without the illusion of speaking for all Filipina/os. It is my hope that this accountability can happen partly through the sorts of conversations that Gerry Pratt and Lieba Faier championed in the form of our book review panel at the AAG and that we all hope to continue through this forum.

Circulating Geographies, Mobilizing Bodies

The books on review deal respectively with what I call the spatial politics of global human circulation. Eschewing the seemingly voluntaristic figure of the “mobile subject,” I argue that, collectively, the authors focus on the production of Filipina/os as “mobilizable subjects.” I use this term to highlight the importance of acts through which bodies are put into global circulation (i.e., made mobile). Refusing to theorize mobility as natural, each of the authors examines how—that is, through what discourses and processes—Filipina/o bodies come to move around globally. Refusing to reduce Filipina/os to pawns of a neoliberal Philippine state or to mere units of labor-power in “receiving” countries, the authors also show that Filipina/os exceed their construction as mobilizable subjects through acts of agency.

The books' focus on the spatial politics of circulation brings into sharp relief various processes that produce Filipina/os as mobilizable subjects. Given space constraints, I focus on two. The first is a colonial Philippine present that is situated in contemporary neoliberal globalization and born out of Spanish and American imperialisms. Of the authors, Rodriguez and Fajardo were most thorough in their analyses of the Philippines' colonial histories of the present as a condition underpinning the circulation of Filipina/os globally. Rodriguez traces the emergence of the Philippines as a labor broker to “the historical context of US colonialism” (1). She also argues that any attempt to examine the Philippines as a global labor broker must keep in mind not only this history, but also that “neoliberalism in the formerly colonized global South is a contemporary form of coloniality” (xvii).

Fajardo develops this point further in his book, which begins by examining spatial histories of Spanish colonialism, particularly the Manila–Acapulco galleon trade, as an important precursor for Filipino participation in global seafaring. He powerfully illustrates the political utility of this history in linking workers' participation in the contemporary global maritime industry and specific constructions of Filipino masculinities as brave and a “source of pride” (43). He concludes the book with a call to decolonize Filipino masculinities, highlighting the possibilities offered in everyday forms of resistance, such as when seafarers create time-spaces to thrive amidst the racial, gendered, classed, and sexualized tropes and practices through which they experience neoliberal globalization.

Although they devote less space to discussing the links between colonial histories and contemporary migration, both Pratt and Faier recognize these connections. Pratt, for example, notes that current conditions in the Philippines are tied to longer histories of occupation (144), and that these conditions encourage migrants to seek lives elsewhere. For her part, Faier makes clear that this “elsewhere” is often understood by Filipinas in rural Japan as “America,” not the nation-state, but a space characterized by “success and racial and class privilege” (98). This geographical imagination of “America” as privilege, Faier makes clear, is tied directly to U.S. imperialism in the Philippines.

The second focus that the books share is on the nation-state as an agent in global circulation. All four books draw attention to the governmental capacities of nation-states to shape migrant lives. A focus on policymaking as one such capacity is apparent. All authors make clear that policies, and the programs they create and sustain, help position the Philippines as a global source of labor power. For example, Rodriguez begins her ethnography of the state with a quotation from former Philippine President Arroyo, in which she identifies herself as an ersatz CEO of a labor-sending nation-qua-corporation. This self-positioning highlights the conscious effort of the Philippine nation-state to brand itself as a sending nation with a vast bureaucracy that supports its goals as a labor broker. It not only trains and processes migrants for circulation, but also engages in diplomatic missions to identify labor-sending opportunities, to sell the Philippines as a source country for receiving nations and to smooth over relations when conflict arises. By tracing how the Philippines acts as a sending nation through bureaucratic agents, Rodriguez shows how migrant labor circulation is organized through policy and diplomatic decisions.

Many scholars, especially in geography and women's studies, have emphasized the feminization of labor migration from the Philippines (e.g., Parreñas 2001). This literature has focused largely on the geographical context of North America and, to a certain extent, Singapore, Australia, and the Middle East. Faier's ethnography of Filipina entertainers in rural Japan expands our intellectual geography. Japan has not been a central focus in Filipina/o studies, despite the fact that Japan has been a crucial destination especially for Filipina labor migrants who work as entertainers. Faier documents how Filipina migration to Japan was organized partly through the Philippines' attempts to “‘integrate’ into the world economy” through partnerships in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s with the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the U.S. government (50–51). Her book is not an ethnography of the state, per se, but she does point to how technologies of the state—visas, for example—strongly affect how Filipinas in rural Japan experience and live their lives.

In contrast, Canada has been an important geographical focus, owing in part to the work of Canada-based scholars who are interested in the lives of Filipina/os in the country. Canada is unique in having the LCP as simultaneously a labor import policy and an ersatz immigration entryway. Geraldine Pratt has spent the last couple of decades documenting the lived geographies of Filipinas working as live-in caregivers under the LCP. Her latest work emphasizes the politics and effects of family separation that arise when Filipinas move to Canada as LCP workers. She limits her analysis mostly to mother–child separations, but her book gets us a long way toward understanding that policies and programs such as the LCP make the Canadian nation-state complicit in sanctioning—in fact, requiring—family separations and, therefore, also the violences that they engender.

Partly because of the gendered patterns of Filipina/o diaspora formation, gender remains a central theme within the books and in the broader literature on the Filipina/o diaspora. Although Fajardo (180) echoes Pratt, Rodriguez, Faier, and others in insisting on the continued feminization of Philippine labor circulation, he complicates the picture by highlighting Philippine masculinities in global circulation. One of his noteworthy arguments concerns a paradox: that seafarers are (hyper)masculinized by the Philippine state (Chapter 2) at the same time that they experience racialized and classed feminization when they encounter fellow seafarers who are in positions of power (11–14). At the same time, Fajardo discusses novel practices of resistance and survival, such as the practice of “jumping ship” through which seafarers escape atrocious conditions and attempt other lives away from the purview of the nation-state and their bosses (94–110). This practice is similar to the ways that Filipina women in rural Japan run away from their husbands' homes as an uncertain attempt to find a better world for themselves. These practices illustrate something that policymakers and other elites often forget or ignore: the very humanity of Philippine labor in global circulation. These acts of agency show how migrants “[resist] state narratives and practices” (Fajardo, 94) and technologies of containment, which “[reveal] the limits, fractures and fragility of power as it shapes migrants' lives” (Faier, 194).

Circulating Ideas and Knowledges

In her intervention, Faier calls the conversations that happen among scholars and between scholars and their research participants “echo-locations.” A thought-provoking metaphor, echo-location is seductive because it highlights the productive capacities of conversation. I want to ask us, though, to reflect on how our echo-locations potentially reproduce particular relations and foreclose others. Which bodies of knowledge (in both senses of fields of study and scholars) do we echo-locate with? Which ones do we not engage with?

The four books are differently positioned in terms of their echo-locations, with Fajardo most successful and thorough in engaging explicitly with indigenous Filipino ideas about sociospatial categories and processes (especially regarding masculinities). He positions his analysis not only alongside arguably canonical works of feminist, queer, and postcolonial thought, but also alongside Filipino scholars, historical figures and cultural works that are not as well circulated (e.g., his use of Philippines-based newspapers and discussion of Jose Rizal on. 7–10). This is a tactic that Rodriguez also takes up in her use of Philippine media and policy sources. These interventions are important as they subtly dislodge the centrality of Western-based knowledges in understanding the lives of Filipina/os in the diaspora.

For her part, Pratt stays closer to canonical works, although she deserves credit for a different sort of echo-location: her sustained history of engagement and partnership with Filipino-Canadian organizations, notably the Philippine Women's Centre in British Columbia, a scholarly political approach that she continues in Families Apart. She also deserves credit for challenging academics and activists to expand on their repertoires of engagement, pointing to testimonial theatre as a method through which academic work can be mobilized toward affecting many audiences. Her Chapter 3 has similar affective politics: By juxtaposing her son's photographs with the narratives of nannies, she aims to affect her readers into questioning their complicity with the LCP. This juxtaposition is a powerful, if limited, strategy, assuming both a universal child and an unraced reader. This is not to say that Pratt does not recognize how nonwhite audiences might relate to this juxtaposition. Indeed, in endnote 46 for Chapter 3, she invites Filipina/s and other people of color into a complicated relationship with the LCP. Although I agree with her that Filipina/os need to examine their own complicities, especially Filipina/os who themselves are LCP employers, the political strategies needed for such an echo-location need to be different. Despite these limits, her focus on the politics of complicities is important and much needed.

Faier's ethnography also offers complicated echo-locations, weaving Japanese and Filipina/o understandings of gender, family, and other social constructs along with Western academic analyses. One of the most important contributions of her work is her astute analysis of the ways that Filipinas in rural Japan are produced as gendered and racialized subjects partly through their encounters with Japanese cultural constructions of social life. She makes clear that Filipinas are not mere recipients of some indelibly Japanese “culture,” but are also important in reshaping these very understandings of possible subjectivities. In her work, we see generally fleshed out Filipina women encountering rural Japanese social worlds, but we see less of the ethnographer as an actor in this encounter. If ethnography requires ethnographers to echo-locate with people they meet, where does Faier, a white North American body of knowledge analyzing encounters between two racialized groups, fit? The pronoun I is used throughout the book to signal authorial analysis and ethnographic action—“I use the term,” “I attended”—but it was rarely used to interrogate the centrality of the ethnographer in the encounter.

The Importance of Claims-Making in Filipina/o Studies

I would like to end my portion of this forum by asking us to consider the types of claims we are making in our scholarship. The books we have considered in this forum have all positioned themselves as overt political interventions as much as they are academic ones. Perhaps there should not be a distinction. But what political claims are we making? Recognition? Truth? Place? To whom are we making them? The state? Capital? Each other? The academy? And finally, for whom are we making them? For ourselves? For workers? For noncitizens? For our webs of social relations?

I ask these questions to reiterate the importance of considering the politics of our scholarship. Each of the books positions itself somewhat differently, and the authors, engaging each other in this forum, have explicitly taken up the merits and limits of each other's' claims. I do not wish to recount them, but I do want to note that we can learn from the books' politics and echo-locations. Moving forward, more spaces for productive echo-locations are needed. In the academy, creative echo-locative forms and spaces are welcome because they provide potential sites not only for challenges and accountability, but also for possible mentorship and community building. Beyond the academy, an important space that Rodriguez and Pratt adeptly and most explicitly engage with in their community work, our echo-locations can be powerful political practices, potentially turning our encounters with peers, friends, family, community groups, politicians, and bureaucrats into opportunities for transformation and change.

This is to say that the future of Filipina/o studies will necessarily be politicized. But we need to consider explicitly the types of interventions and claims that we make, and we need to remain accountable, as scholars, to each other and to people with and through whom we do our academic work.

Notes

1. This session was sponsored by the Asian Geography, Economic Geography, Gender Perspectives on Women (GPOW), and Sexuality and Space specialty groups.