MIGRANT WATCH
Servants Resisting Globalization:
Agency and
Representation in Filipina Migrant Women’s Narratives
The seduction exercised on millions of Filipino men and women occurs in
the space of a wrecked or stagnant local economy is due chiefly to
indebtedness to the World Bank/transnational lenders and the oligarchic
greed of the native elite. Can one escape going abroad?
By E. SAN JUAN,
JR.
Contributed to
Bulatlat
Scarcely have we emerged from the
Angelo de la Cruz kidnapping crisis last year when two cases just hit the
headlines, pressuring civic-minded people to judge the responsibility of
the State to the plight of a whole nation: the kidnapping of Roberto
Tarongoy in Iraq and the unsolved murder of a Filipina migrant worker in
the Netherlands, one among numerous cases of Filipinos around the world
being humiliated, raped, assaulted, and killed every day. One can no
longer speculate humorously about “A Day Without Filipinos” in California
(next to Mexicans, Filipinos comprise the largest flow of immigrants);
thousands of Filipino workers right now are rotting in the jails of Saudi
Arabia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the U.S. without any loss of sleep for
the Arroyo administration. Meanwhile, the Philippine Daily Inquirer (16
June 2004) counted among the disappeared experienced Filipino airport
personnel fired for not being citizens, even as Filipinos were hired to
build the infamous prisons of Guantanamo and continue to service the
beleaguered camps of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
How long can this intolerable situation
be sustained without severe injury to the practice of Philippine
sovereignty and the dignity of its citizens?
More than ten million Filipinos, mostly
women domestics, now comprise the expanding Filipino diaspora of migrant
workers or Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW), as the official lexicon calls
them--all over the world. This is a historical phenomenon of unprecedented
proportions. How did this happen? Once a leader in industrial development
in Asia in the fifties, the Philippines today is arguably the most
economically backward and depressed society in the region, with over 75%
of 84 million Filipinos suffering incredible poverty, victimized by
successive tsunamis of imperialist violence and exploitation since formal
independence in 1946. Filipinos have now acquired the reputation and
status of "servants of globalization" (as one academic textbook labels
Pinays/Pinoys). Are these OFWs simply victims, or are they also cunning
and astute agents of their own self-emancipation?
Here I would like to explore briefly
the actualities and possibilities of their existential situation in the
hope of countering the fatalism and compensatory self-delusion that
vitiates government apologias and World Bank/IMF propaganda. Can
Filipinas resist their sexist, racist and national oppression by simply
coping? Is freedom forfeited by recognizing if not accepting the
determinate power of historical necessity?
Background to
Dislocation
The Cold War ended in 1989 with the
collapse of the Soviet Union. While the patrons of a triumphalist "New
World Order" celebrated freedom and democracy for the subjects of the
erstwhile "Evil Empire," thousands of people of color were displaced from
the oil-rich Arab states during the Gulf War. Prominent among the victims
of this reassertion of Western imperial hegemony were Third World contract
laborers, primarily women located in the reproductive sphere. Not only in
the Middle East but elsewhere, in Europe, Hong Kong, Japan, and elsewhere,
the drive to resolve the crisis of accumulation that began in the
seventies continues in the form of flexible, postFordist production and
the accelerated proletarianization of dependent/peripheral formations.
Given the exacerbated uneven
development of the world system, the patriarchal capitalism of the
industrialized nation-states (and its neocolonial client regimes) has been
able to displace the crisis by exploiting the reserve army of female labor
outside their national boundaries for unprecedented bargain prices. As
Robert Miles observes, "labour migration accentuated the process of uneven
development of the world capitalist economy" (1986, 60) and paradoxically
intensified the contradictions at the heart of the accumulation
crisis.
The global eventually finds its
geopolitical embodiment in local narratives. This process of displacement
acquires symbolic expression in the stories of Filipino women whose
textualization of their individual experience reveals both the pathos of
commodity fetishism and the possibilities of resistance or transcendence.
The plot begins with the breakdown of
realistic representation in the stories that domestics are able to
construct when they return. The logic of existence for migrant contracted
labor parodies the epic form: ushering us in medias where events soon
acquire fantastic proportions, we see how beginnings assume an apocryphal
coloring and the denouement becomes problematic, non sequitur,
indeterminate or undecidable.
The protagonist of this narrative tries
to acquire means to gain happiness from "donor" societies (money is the
mediator for security and success); but this quest is quickly foiled, and
she finds herself deceived and shortchanged. She is angry, enraged, but
often terrified and soon reduced to mute despair. She tries to accomplish
the task she has chosen for the sake of family and kin by physical
resistance and cunning ruses of self-defense. It seems that she behaves
without rational reflection, her sheer motion impelled by the compulsion
of a reversal that has overtaken her.
What does she learn from this sudden
turn of events? Contrary to the usual expectations, the shock of
recognition never fully materializes because many of these women return
drugged, still mesmerized by the amount of consumer durables their meager
savings has allowed them to bring home. So they are eager to venture out
again since local conditions provide no substitute way of fulfilling
dreams of consumption. This actantial model may be trite and hackneyed,
but the interest lies in its distortion and displacement by individual
experiences of change. Agonistically toned oral narratives give way to
solipsistic textuality (Ong 1982)--one obvious effect of commodification.
Although the mass media imposes its reifying conventions, the genre of
migrant female labor narratives exhibits its performance as symptom of,
and protest against, the logos of general equivalence--of money as the
measure of all value (Goux 1990).
Episodes of the
Ordeal
In an article for The New Yorker
(November 16, 1992), Raymond Bonner describes in detail the horrendous
plight of women migrant labor in Kuwait--about 71,00 domestic servants
from India, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Of the 25,000
women from the Philippines, two thousand so far have fled from the
brutality of working long hours for meager pay, virtually imprisoned,
subjected to arbitrary physical violence (including rape), and even
killed.
There was the case of Jenny Casanova,
30 years old, mother of three daughters left in the Philippines, beaten
for days by her employer's wife, who finally sought refuge in the
Philippine Embassy. She began work at 5:30 a.m., allowed to sit down
during the day only for meals, took care of four children, did all the
cooking and cleaning. She had no day off, not even for going to church.
Another case was Shirley who worked from 6 AM to 9 PM, paid fifty cents an
hour for 15 hours a day, 6 days of the week, with one day off--she fled
after two weeks. And there was Josephine hit by a 29-year old son and
threatened with death. The labor laws of Kuwait and other Gulf states do
not cover such domestic workers who, in the absence of a contract,
virtually become slaves to those who "buy" them from unscrupulous
recruiting agencies. Unless "released" by their employer, it is
practically impossible for these women to secure another visa; hence they
become slaves, or if they escape, fugitives or refugees. No prior
intervention is given by nor secured from the Philippine government.
When Bonner interviewed these "domestic
helpers," to use the honorific euphemism, the Philippine Embassy had
become a home for battered women and runaways. Kuwait, newly liberated
from the Iraqi invaders, was a country where only Kuwaitis (28% of the
population) can vote and exercise the rights of citizenship; 80% of the
labor force was non-Kuwaiti; every Kuwaiti family had 5 or 6 servants.
These statistics don't really provide the context or theoretical framework
necessary for understanding the anecdotes of oppression and
exploitation--from swindling and insult to rape and daily battering--that
characterize the lives of thousands of women of color scattered all over
the globe.
One study confirmed the empirical
observations of many that the vast majority of workers in the Gulf suffer
for lack of protection for their basic human rights "due to the absence of
clearly defined legal rights, the ineffectiveness of local courts and
administrative procedures" (Owen 1985). Completely dependent on their
institutional or individual sponsor who confiscate their passports as soon
as they arrive in the host country, these workers are maltreated,
exploited, abused, beaten, and even killed. According to Women in the
World: An International Atlas, this new phenomenon of migrant women--the
poorest of the world's impoverished populations--are "triply burdened by
race, class and gender barriers" (1986, 17).
In the Philippines, a woman was
interviewed who once worked in a garment factory for eight years but left
for Kuwait and after two years of working in a jewelry store got married
to the owner, a military man who worked for the Kuwait National Petroleum
Company. She was converted to Islam, earning her 2,000 dinars on the spot.
Semaya Muhammad Mokhtar, formerly Shirley Arrieta, now owns a BMW and
testifies to her good fortune as a citizen of Kuwait, just before Saddam
Hussein's tanks rolled in:
"Imagine a place so clean, where if you
get sick all is taken care of for free. There is no place like Kuwait. If
you're a Kuwaiti, not only do you not pay any taxes, you can borrow money
to set up a business. No taxes. Where in the world will you find a place
where they give you money to set up a business, and you don't have to pay
taxes? If you give birth to a child, you also get money. Just to show you
the strength of the dinar, 10 dinars is enough to fill your grocery bags;
you'd have a hard time lugging them home.... My purpose there when I left
our country was to marry a Kuwaiti, because once you're married to one,
one was certain to live in great comfort. But one disadvantage was their
men want their wives to stay home" (Laurel 1990, 4).
Semaya Mokhtar's narrative exemplifies
the fulfillment of a quest that departs from the conventional pattern of
women alienating their time and energies to provide for an extended family
left at home. But where is home? Filipinos who return to the Philippines
at Christmas time are eager to go back to Kuwait where, although problems
also beset them, "over there"--they unanimously concur--"we have money,
and that makes a big difference." They frankly confess their motivation:
"The money is the attraction, nothing else, and it's as simple as that."
They cheer at the mention of the exchange rate: "If you've tasted earning
three thousand pesos a month [in dinars], and your husband is just a
jeepney driver, I think even you can bear the loneliness" (Laurel 1990,
5). The key motif of petty accumulation shrivels the montage of events
into an apocalypse of redemption from class oppression. Money decides the
unfolding of the plot and its mutation.
Awakening In the
Promised Land
For many Filipinos who have been forced
to sell their labor-power abroad, Saudi Arabia has become a symbol of the
new path to a simulacra of prosperity, even if the affluence is
superficial and transitory. Many seem to agree with this belief expressed
in the early eighties: "This 'Saudi Juice' has really helped our country a
lot.... Many things have changed in our lives. Before, only the rich can
afford to eat good food. Now, the rich can be equalled by someone who has
gone to Saudi Arabia" (Catholic Institute 1987, 79). By 1992, this juice
seemed to have gone sour, at least in Kuwait where 367 Filipinas sought
refuge in the Philippine Embassy, each one reporting physical, sexual or
psychological abuse at the hands of their employers. One badly cut and
bruised Filipina stated that her boss had thrown her out of a two-story
window.
The feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe
thinks that women's vigilance is either due to their new self-confidence
and awareness of their rights, or that Kuwaiti men have grown more violent
after the cessation of the Gulf War (1993, 185). People magazine
popularized the stories of the Kuwaiti families' atrocious and barbaric
conduct toward these hapless women. The most notorious case of abuse seems
to involve Lorna Laraquel, 44, who worked as the maid of Sheikha Latifa
Abdullah Jaber al-Sabah, a Princess in the royal family. According to one
testimony, the Sheikha forced Laraquel to eat her meals off the floor. She
also once threatened to cut off the Filipina's hands and tongue and gouge
out her eye. While traveling in Egypt in February 1992, Laraquel felt that
she could no longer tolerate the abuse and stabbed her mistress to death
with a kitchen knife. The last word is that she had been condemned to
death in Egypt. In a report in USA Today (21-23 February 1992), the
version of the event reads as follows:
"Foreign workers are bracing for more
violence after the stabbing death of a member of Kuwait's ruling family by
a Filipina housekeeper. Lourana Crow Rafaeil, 44, is accused of murdering
Sheikha Latifa Abdullah Al-Jaber Al-Sabah last week in Cairo after she
refused Rafaeil's request to travel to the Philippines. Kuwaiti and other
Arab newspapers are calling the foreign workers untrustworthy, and even
branding them as prostitutes."
With her name altered at every mention
of the incident, Lourana or Lorna becomes an emblem of a possible
resistance and her story an exemplum of vindication. She becomes the
archetypal victim warning of retribution, an allegorical stand-in for all
subalterns smoldering with vindictive ressentiment. Her mutilated name and
story register and refuse at the same time the claims of bourgeois realism
and surveillance. Here the Filipina narrative of exodus and return
acquires a nuanced complexity that defies the usual procedures of academic
rhetorical analysis and tropological deconstruction.
Decoding the Script
of Self-Liberation
A few weeks after having written the
above paragraphs, I received a packet of information about this case from
a friend working with overseas contract workers in Japan. The name of
Lorna Calda Laraquel, 42 years old, from the province of Oriental Mindoro,
has now been authenticated by the Philippine Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
It confirms her deed: she stabbed to death her employer, Princess Latifa
Abdullah Al Jaber Al-Sabah, in Cairo on 13 February 1992 at 3:30 PM. Some
personal letters she wrote to her children were reproduced in a chapter of
Ma. Ceres P. Doyo's book Journalist In Her Country. The letters are
confessions of Lorna Laraquel's painful sojourn in Kuwait, the inhumane
treatment she received from the Princess, and her anguish during the
travel to Cairo, Egypt; she was terrified that she would be killed at the
behest of her employer and simply disappear.
Do we need more facts, or further
interpretation? In a news report datelined Cairo, February 14, we learn
more detailed information: Laraquel wanted to get her passport because she
overheard her aristocratic mistress saying that she would never allow
Laraquel to go home. The Princess refused to give the passport, pushing
Laraquel violently until she fell. Laraquel told the prosecutor: "I could
not control myself, I rushed to the kitchen and took a knife and attacked
her." Enough was enough. This was the culmination of her ordeal which
began on July 21, 1991. On March 25, Laraquel was arraigned in the South
Cairo Preliminary Court, charged with premeditated homicide. There is no
mystery left to this plot, with the hermeneutic code completely anulled:
when asked if she killed the Sheikha, Laraquel told the court: "Yes" (Doyo
1993, 81.] The subaltern has spoken her unspeakable pain, grief and anger.
Interlude or
Postlude?
Meanwhile, many Filipinos continue to
feel no alternative to misery in the Philippines except to find work
abroad. In spite of repeated humiliation, hunger, brutal treatment, rape,
and the ravages of solitary confinement, these new "modern-day heroes" (to
quote former President Corazon Aquino's ironic praise of overseas
domestics) seem incapable of learning the lesson of refusal. Could it be
naivete, ignorance, or sheer bullheadedness? Or could it be a
deeply-ingrained susceptibility to fantasy and dreams of success? Or all
these?
One answer is given by Ricardo Lee and
Gil Portes' film Bukas...May Pangarap. The script concerns a man from the
peasantry who was swindled by a recruiter; after being deported from Saudi
Arabia, Udong (the main protagonist) returns to his family and struggles
to earn a living. Somehow feeling guilty for the failure of her husband's
adventure in Saudi Arabia, his wife Mering kills herself. After her
burial, Udong offers himself to another recruiter (not connected with
"Saudi") so as to be able to feed his children and pay back his debts. It
is the end of the rope for him; the only way out is to sell himself again
at a price higher than what he can get in the Philippines. Reminded by his
brother of his being swindled before, his "loss of face" and the suicide
of his wife, Udong seems unable to summon up the courage needed to give up
his dream (or delusion?) of being able to earn enough to support his
family and wipe away his debts by going abroad. The siren overseas
beckons; desire for proving one's worth, one's honor, to kins, loved ones
in the family and community, pushes each individual Filipino to try
his/her luck, even risk life itself in the process.
Seduction for
Fugitives
It becomes evident that the seduction
exercised on millions of Filipino men and women occurs in the space of a
wrecked or stagnant local economy due chiefly to indebtedness to the World
Bank/transnational lenders and the oligarchic greed of the native elite.
Can one escape going abroad? Freedom to sell one's labor power to anyone
who will buy it is a freedom that crosses, nay, overturns national
boundaries and seems to leap barriers of all kinds. But soon one discovers
the concrete limits of this freedom. It is accomplished with the mediation
of petrodollars, Japanese yen, or any viable European currency, whose
use-value is precisely its exchange-value, its translation into
commodities.
What happens next? When these
subalterns find time to reflect and attempt to reconstitute their
identity, the montage of their fragmented lives revolves around the post
office (medium of communication with relatives or family members) and the
bank, the two loci where the diegesis of the world system as a
metanarrative of the global circulation of finance capital crystallizes.
In the Middle East, petrodollars are able to purchase the labor-power of
migrant workers in order not only to build infrastructures but also to
sustain and reproduce the patriarchal structures of power in tributary or
feudal social formations. But more important, the exchange of their time
and energies for money (which never really corresponds to what is socially
necessary to reproduce their human capacities) provides the foreign
exchange needed to bail out the Philippine elite who has mortgaged the
future of the country to the World Bank and financial consortiums of the
West.
Illuminating the
Stage
The Philippines is one of the world's
largest debtor nations. In 1984 it owed $27 billion. In the past ten years
during the Marcos dictatorship, the indices for the quality of life showed
a marked deterioration in rising poverty due to income inequality, lack of
employment, fall of real wages, with 3.6 million poor families. The oil
shock of 1979 and the international economic recession led to 64%
inflation and the precipitous decline in per capita income. Structural
adjustments recommended by the IMF/World Bank resulted in prolonged
stagnation, exacerbating unemployment and depressing the living condition
of the majority in the rural areas. Since the seventies, the Marcos
dictatorship encouraged the migration of domestic workers to relieve
unemployment and ease widespread political unrest. Filipinos working
abroad grew from 314,284 in 1982 to 449, 271 in 1987--40% of overseas
contract workers were women (majority of whom had college education) in
the entertainment, office work, and service sectors.
In the eighties, a survey found that
most of the 46,000 women domestic workers in the Middle East suffered from
"extreme degradation, humiliation, sexual harassment and even rape"; they
are faced with "hazardous working conditions, including contract
substitution, wage discrimination, ill-treatment by employers," and other
forms of harassment (Vickers 1993, 90). By 1984, there were 311, 157
Filipino contract workers in the Middle East; 43,385 in Asia; 5,905 in the
Americas; and 3,724 in Europe (Orozco 1985). Between 1977 and 1983,
Filipino migrants sent home more than $3.5 billion--the largest foreign
exchange earning (which used to come from commodity exports) sufficient to
temporarily relieve the government of its balance of payments deficit.
In 1995-1998, according to Elizabeth
Eviota, 4.5 million Filipinos working overseas (representing 17 percent of
the total employable force) remitted $5.2 billion (2004, 58). With over
nine million contract workers abroad today, overseas remittances now reach
$7 billion annually, with roughly $1.5 billion sent through the local
banking system.
The bodies of Filipino men and women,
as vehicles of the capacity to labor, are thus exchanged or traded as
commodities to generate the values remitted to the Philippines in order to
sustain the extravagant lifestyles of the oligarchic elite (less than one
percent of the total population) who, from the time of the U.S. colonial
invasion in 1898, has historically served corporate interests and their
drive for superprofits. With the huge increase of prostitution, women's
bodies literally prop up and maintain a flagrantly oppressive and
exploitative system.
Fables of Ruptures
and Silences
Is the experience of Filipino women in
the civilized centers of Europe any different? The cases I have noted are
replicated with only minor variations. Of the numerous testimonies
gathered by the London-based Anti-Slavery International, I cite Lulu's
story:
"I received a very low wage which I
accepted because there was no alternative. My employer did not follow the
contract. There was no day off. I was maltreated, overworked and [had] few
hours sleep. When I arrived in London my employer was always shouting at
me for whatever little mistakes I did in the housework. Whenever I said
that I was not feeling well my employer would shout back at me: 'Why are
you not feeling well? I did not pay for you in the agency to be sick. I
paid for you to work'... I wasn't feeling well because the food that I was
eating was not enough to sustain me to do all of my work. In the morning
I would eat a slice of bread and have a cup of tea. During lunch I would
usually have a bowl of rice and some water, and in the evening I would
have a slice of bread and a cup of tea again.... The lady wants me to
sleep in the garage if there is a carpet but I argue with her that the
garage is only for the car and it's very cold. I told her that I cannot
bear to sleep there" (Anderson 1993, 48).
Thus we see that the recollected
stories of Filipina workers are often interrupted, forced to repeat
themselves, or hang suspended, unable to sustain a logic of continuity.
The reason is obvious. The condition of slavery for these domestic workers
explains why their testimonies are composed of flashbacks and analeptic
withdrawals to scenes of privation that need to be revisited in order to
effect a catharsis of the trauma (Rimmon-Kenan 1983). Meanwhile those who
have escaped, the runaways who have managed to get jobs by giving false
names, are haunted by the fear of being caught by immigration authorities
(see Mirkinson 1994).
In Britain, women engaged in hospital
and hotel work are driven to obtain two or three jobs to earn more to send
to their families and relatives. One of them rehearsed her plight: "I have
always worked in a hotel since coming here in 1975, first as a
chambermaid, then as a cashier. My weekly wage is 81 pounds for a 40-hour
week. I always split duty, 7:00 am to 11 am and 12:30 to 4:30 pm, or 12
noon to 3:30 and 7:30 pm to midnight. It doesn't matter even if I work
weekends or bank holidays. I never get any extra money, only time off
when we're not too busy, and now that business is not so good I never get
an opportunity to do overtime" (Catholic Institute [hereafter CIIR] 1987,
65).
For these modern "slaves," loss of
control over the rhythm of everyday life is compounded by the pressure of
a regime of surveillance. This experience is captured vividly by this
testimony:
"When they want me to do overtime, even
on my day off--I might be asleep--they just phone through and ask me to
work. Even if I am off sick, the supervisor comes to my room to
check--she doesn't believe I am telling the truth. Women feel unable to
invite friends, and feel perpetually under observation. Everybody knows
everything about you...they know if we go out, or if we bring someone in,
and I feel people are always gossiping about me. Sometimes I feel so
lonely and isolated, even though there are plenty of people here. My room
is so small and stuffy, but the bathroom is always so dirty, the toilet is
always out of order, but I cannot move out because I couldn't afford to
pay travelling expenses if I move too far from my work" (CIIR 66).
What are the consequences of this
interruption of the quest for financial security? Psychological maladies
of all sorts--loneliness, despair, recurrent headaches and psychosomatic
symptoms, profound anomie, withdrawal, even suicidal thoughts--beset this
group. Here are three confessions typical of the collective mood:
"I am pursued day and night thinking of
my family at home. Even while I work my thoughts wander far and I spend
my nights worrying or crying out of sheer helplessness....My husband seems
to be cooling off, he seldom writes to me now...I sometimes get dizzy and
often have stomach pains.... My doctor says, 'Sorry but you must learn to
live with it.' He gives me pills but they don't help."
"Look at me now, I'm old already, and I
still have to send 100 pounds a month home to educate my nieces and
nephews. How could I get married?...I got the opportunity to come to
Britain and it is my duty to help my family."
"I get so tired all the time, it's only
work, work, work, and now my family are asking for more money. I don't
think I'll be able to keep going much longer... I'm not so young any
more." (CIIR 1987, 67)
Deciphering Hidden
Transcripts
These reflections all generate enough
force to invert Freytag's pyramid--the scheme in which one mounts the
ladder of success without serious hindrance. They are anticlimactic
glosses to an anachronistic, nonlinear pattern of development where the
commodity-form (whose substance is comprised of the bodies of Filipino
women) is assigned a price quite out of proportion to the surplus value it
adds to their product: the reproduction of class inequality and a
hierarchical political economy of racialized gender/sexuality.
There may be utopian variations in the
unfolding of these vicissitudes. One is dramatized by a certain Ana
DelaCruz who escaped slavery and attempted rape; eventually she married an
Irishman in the building trade so that she was able to send 200 pounds per
month to her mother--but at the cost of her being permanently estranged
from her two children left at home in the Philippines (Asean-Far Easterm
Monitor, March 1993, 14). But here, too, the quantitative schema of the
transformation of Commodity-->>Money-->>Commodity hides the qualitative
relation of exploitation and oppression. Value as a social relation is
occluded by the exchange of the commodity labor-power, now converted into
abstract labor in order to be measured in terms of alienated time, so that
the material relations between humans mediated by the money wage become
fetishized, acquiring an enigmatic life of their own. Given the
geopolitics of uneven development, it is the sex/gender contradiction that
disrupts the fetishism of the neoliberal order and reveals the limits of
male physical power.
Orientalizing Scenarios
Let us look finally at the stories of
those working in Hong Kong (about 60,000 women) and Japan (of the 141,937
Filipinos in Japan, 32,636 are in the entertainment or "hostessing"
sector)--both destinations, replete with abundant bazaars and emporia, are
highly sought.
As domestic helpers and "hospitality
girls," Filipina domestic helpers function within the sphere of
reproduction--raising children, cooking and washing and cleaning, etc. (Himmelweit
1983). Cases of sexual abuse and even killing become more dominant and
sometimes exorbitant, as epitomized in the case of Anastacia in Hong Kong
who was victimized by William Chan, the millionaire chamption horse
trainer of Hong Kong. Anastacia was repeatedly assaulted by her employer;
after the fourth assault, she escaped and brought her case to court. Found
guilty by the British magistrate who chided him for behavior "contemptuous
of the woman's indignity," Chan was fined $643 for each of the five counts
of indecent assault for a grand total of $3,215. Eventually Anastacia
returned to the Philippines with a pittance of $3,213 after 11 years of
service (Maglipon 1990). With about 52,868 Filipina domestic "helpers" in
Hong Kong in 1989, the term "Filipina" has become synonymous with "maid"
in the idiom of Hong Kong residents.
The case of sixteen year old Liza
(investigated and reconstructed by the journalist Maglipon) may not be
typical but is exemplary in foregrounding the use value of the erotic in
the traffic of women's bodies. This attractive girl from a quiet home in
Laguna province in the Philippines was lured by the promise of a job as
waitress in Hong Kong. The man who accompanied her to Hong Kong threatened
her with jail if she complained that her name in her passport was
different; after being raped by her companion, "she was turned over to her
customers in a brothel managed by a Chinese resident. In her testimony to
the police, she stated "that she was made to work every night from 10 pm
to 7 am" and had 20 to 30 customers every night (Maglipon 1990, 16).
On the 16th day of her captivity, she
succumbed to an epileptic seizure. Instead of being sent to the hospital,
the immigration authorities threw her in jail for the crime of faking a
passport. In prison for three months, she was subjected to all kinds of
indignities and given pills that bloated her body and induced a liver
ailment. When she became pregnant, she had to demand an abortion. Upon her
release, the doctors told her that she had a brain tumor. Surprisingly
enough, the narrative ends with the note that Liza has rejoined her mother
in the province and that she "has become beautiful again."
This recalls somewhat the story of Liza
Mamac, a handsome woman who was forced into white slavery in Holland; she
was rescued through the efforts of Johan Agricola who later married her
and helped prosecute her victimizer (Parel 1990)--a paradigm with
functions and roles that evoke those in the narratological schemas of the
Russian critic Vladimir Propp and the French semiotician Algirdas Greimas.
Revisiting the
Outrage
The Japanese scenario has been played
out for some time now, replete with horrendous consequences. It has
generated narratives that are now archetypal and exemplary in illustrating
the contradiction embodied in labor as commodity: the value form--the
social form of abstract labor--and its concrete use value that is
exchanged and depreciated owing to the political, economic, and cultural
asymmetry between Japan as an economic superpower and the Philippines as a
dependent, neocolonial formation. In short, it is no longer a surprise to
find Filipinas in Japan always equated to prostitutes, also
euphemistically known as "hospitality girls."
In Japan, Filipina women service the
libidinal needs and psychosexual fantasies of Japanese businessmen,
selling "a particular brand of female sexuality" (De Dios 1992, 49).
Japayukis, as Filipina entertainers are called, suffer from the violence
of this kind of trafficking in women--female sexual slavery: once in
Japan, their passports are immediately confiscated by their employers. And
instead of being paid monthly salaries (lower than that promised in the
Philippines), they are given cash advances for food and basic necessities;
when and if they are finally remunerated at the airport after the
stipulated six months, they are unable to complain. During their contract,
they are subjected to all kinds of abuse, humiliation, and physical
violence. The scandalous dossier of what happened to Filipina entertainers
like Maricris Sioson (killed under mysterious circumstances), Jocelyn
Guanezo, and Cecilia Gelio-Agan, among others, illustrate the ultimate
climax of commodification: in the case of Sioson, an autopsy of her
brutalized body that conflicts with the Japanese hospital's diagnosis of
her death, a death the circumstances of which are permanently suspect.
Profits are literally squeezed from the
cadavers of these victims. The expenditure of concrete labor (the sexual
instrumentalization of women's bodies) whose use value is measured by a
drastically reduced price constitutes the necessary condition for
sustained accumulation for the metropole elite. Both use value and
exchange value are relational categories that operate within the logic of
accumulation. Their tension produces uneven development, that geopolitical
inequality I mentioned earlier. Why the diaspora of Third World workers?
Samir Amin sums up the explanation: "The world capitalist system embodies
a structure of labor-market segmentation wherein workers in peripheral
countries receive no more than one-sixth of the wages received by their
counterparts in the advanced industrial center" (1980, 26).
Regime of Sacrifice
The seduction of finally becoming a
consumer is almost irresistible. Most of the women entertainers recruited
by the Japanese are seduced by the offer of high wages especially if
converted into pesos. Why not accept the offer if the only alternative is
hunger and hopelessness? These promises are made to applicants (most of
them from poor rural families) in the Philippines, reinforced by token
advance money. At the airport in Japan, they are given "show money" to
prove to immigration officers that they have money to spend; but that is
taken away from them, together with their passports, when they are
assigned to different "houses" and shuttled from one club to another.
In 'Club 229' and the 'Jump Club' in
Osaka the women worked from 6 pm (and sometimes earlier) until 11 am the
following morning. They did everything: they were dancers, waitresses,
dish washers, cleaners, and hostesses. They were also forced to go out
with customers for which they only get less than one-third of the
money...The women did not talk about their problems. 'We were undergoing
the same things, perhaps we were ashamed.... The only thing we really
cried aloud was our longing for home..." (CIIR 1987, 99). The clubs are
raided, the women arrested and eventually deported. Why don't they
complain? One woman responded: "I was so afraid I would read my story in
the papers. Besides there was nothing I could do. If the Philippine
authorities in Japan didn't help me there, why would they now? Right now
I just want to forget it all."
Forget it all? Not for the relatives
of Sioson, Gelio-Agan, and many others.
Is this the lesson of the circulation
of social energies in the continuing saga of Filipino migrant labor? We
have seen how the socially necessary labor time needed to produce the
power to work, the value of the women's labor power, has been reduced to
the minimum. In the case of women in Britain and elsewhere, the "free"
laborer collapses all of time into the expenditure of labor power that is
measured and translated into money wage. The time left to recuperate, or
reproduce that same labor power, is either absent or left to coincide with
the purchased time. In short, production and reproduction of the worker's
life have become identical. The value of abstract labor is represented by
the money commodity, its exchange into consumer goods. Hence the dream of
every Filipina to advance her lot by crossing boundaries and inhabiting
the dreamworld of a consumer's paradise overseas--even if vicariously
because what she earns is really enjoyed by her parents, children, or
relatives in the impoverished homeland.
Remapping Carnal
Cartographies
Value translated into
commodity-fetishism is mediated through the cash-nexus. Money as social
power and as the form of value, not as money capital, and the commodities
it is equivalent to, conceal the social meaning of value itself. It also
hides the character of private labor and the social relations between
workers and their employers. While the market system--the commercial
exchange of labor as commodity--seems to dictate the price of quantities
of use values expended by these "sexual slaves," it is actually the
political and economic domination of the Philippines by Japan, and also by
the Western industralized states (and their Arab clients) that explains
how the exchange value of the Filipino women's capacity to produce value
results in their super-exploitation. Both the conditions of work as well
as the intensity of the labor process--symptomized by the gaps, absences,
and elisions in the narratives--are wholly controlled by the employer
despite efforts by the Philippine government to negotiate more humane
terms.
We see then that the freedom of the
labor market is an illusion. In these narratives of spatial adventures, we
find a temporal process that deconstructs the Eurocentric paradigm of the
"free laborer" emerging from the dissolution of feudal serfdom. Inserted
into the configuration of the world system with its sex-gender and
racialized class hierarchies, women from the Philippines and elsewhere are
reduced into modern-day slaves. Their bodies become commodities whose
exchange is severely delimited by their virtual "ownership" by Western or
Japanese businessmen and gangsters even while the institutional framework
defining the status of overseas contract workers superimposes the illusion
of the "free" circulation of labor power exchanging according to fair
market prices.
This disjunction between the classic
paradigm of the free market of commodities and the tributary relations
between nation-states--the underdeveloped peripheries like the Philippines
supplying cheap labor--has shaped the plots of women's stories into either
a pathetic or sentimental one: pathetic in that a sequence of misfortunes
cuts down our protagonists who do not deserve such suffering and so arouse
our sympathy, sentimental in that despite the blows of adversities, our
attractive and weak protagonists triumph in the end--through marriage or
safe return to the homeland (Ducrot and Todorov 1979). In any case, one
can perceive a moment of agency in the twist of representation. Whether it
is simply consolation, or real efficacy in transforming one's class
position, depends on the context of social changes involving the whole
nation.
In Quest of An Ending
We scarcely find any plots of education
or revelation in the accounts of their travels since most Overseas
Filipino Workers seem not to have learned the lesson of avoiding
repetition. Instead we find them confessing their desire to either return
to the same place of misfortune, or travel to another place where tales of
opportunities abound. At the very least, a change occurs in their specific
attitudes but not their central belief that the economic improvement of
their lives will not happen in their homeland but abroad.
This perception matches the reality of
unrelenting immiseration, which in turn hides the dangers of exploitation
abroad. Some are tested, reformed and enlightened; others become
disillusioned. Rarely do these veterans give warning to their compatriots
to desist from exploring unknown territory. So, in effect, the
commodity-fetishism of the system of dependency continues to mediate the
dispersal of libidinal investments by people of color in narratives where
the process of mediation or transformation of their lives is determined by
a combination of brute physical power, state regulations, callous neglect
and indifference of governments, and hypocritical moralists.
It is only recently that OFWs in
Europe, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, have begun to organize. Amelioration of
the "hospitality" women's condition and a halt to the traffic of sexual
slaves will surely begin when and if a critical mass of Filipina and other
Third World women are conscientized enough to organize and revolt against
the whole system. Lacking this, we can for the moment be consoled by one
woman's ironic quest and personal sacrifice for justice and freedom--I
have in mind the fate of Lourana or Lorna Crow Rafaeil, condemned by a
whole system of racist exploitation and oppression, whose testimony
remains to be exhumed and liberated from the archive of an inhuman "New
World Order." For Flor Contemplacion and many others, it is difficult to
superimpose a conventional tragic stereotype on their lives because the
norm of justice remains to be imposed.
Is there another form of agency in the
trajectory of Filipina workers' lives? In a play entitled Pitik-Bulag Sa
Buwan ng Pebrero, Ricardo Lee captures the existential vibrance and power
of this testimony in the words of Yolly who narrates and also reflects in
a Brechtian gesture her life as a Filipina "dancer" in Japan:
"Nagputa ako hanggang gusto nila.
Pinag-aral ko lahat. May malaking aquarium, nakababad kami d'on sa tubig,
may mga numero sa dibdib, parang mga ipinagbibiling isda. Tiniis ko lahat.
Nag-cultural dance ako nang naka-bikini. Nakipag-sex nang may nanonood.
Nilaspag-laspag nila ako, lahat na nang bagay ay pumasok sa katawan ko,
pero lagi pa rin akong at your service, omese, anything you say.
Nakakulong kami, may kandado at bantay, pinupurga sa contraceptives at
penicillin, binubugbog kapag nagreklamo. Kagaya ni Esper [a "mail order
bride" beaten up by her Australian master] ay marami rin akong hiwa at
pilat sa katawan. Tinanggap ko lahat nang mga iyan. May nakaplaster na
ngiti sa mga labi ko pero putang ina, sabi ng dibdib ko, putang ina."
[I became a whore up to the hilt. I
studied everything. They had a large aquarium, there we were immersed in
the water, with numbers on our chests, like fish being hawked. I endured
everything. I did cultural dances with a bikini. I had sexual intercourse
with spectators around. I was thoroughly bruised, almost all kinds of
objects went into my body, but I was still at your service, yes, anything
you say. We were imprisoned, with lock and guard, purged with
contraceptives and penicillin, beaten up if you complain. Like Esper, I
have many cuts and scars all over my body. I accepted all these. There was
a smile plastered on my lips but son of a bitch, my chest cried out, son
of a bitch. (translated by E.San Juan, Jr.)]
Once Upon A Time
The real denouement, however, is
suspended in the larger diasporic agon of Filipina domestic workers. On
March 17, Singapore's government hanged Flor Contemplacion for the alleged
killing of a fellow maid and her four-year old charge. Despite the patent
implausibility of such an accusation, belied by witnesses who testified
that Contemplacion was innocent (she was in fact tortured by the
Singaporean police and forced to confess to the alleged crime), her story
was given no credence--even by the Filipino officials who, doubting
Contemplacion's own disavowal, made the motion of setting up its own
bureaucratic inquisition.
The cover-up could not be tolerated.
Millions of Filipinos, enraged by such injustice, exploded into rallies of
indignation all over the islands; urban guerillas as well as local town
and provincial administrators threatened Singaporeans and their
businesses. In response to then President Fidel Ramos' plea for clemency,
the Singaporean president was quoted as saying that his cabinet "found no
special circumstances to justify commutation of her sentence" and cited
Section 302 of his country's penal code to the effect that anyone
convicted of murder is meted the death penalty "regardless of nationality"
(Philippine News, March 15-21, 1995, A6).
It was a classic tautology to wash
bloody hands and also conceal the real criminals. Ramos, of course,
assumed that the woman was guilty. In the reports in Singapore's
newspapers, Contemplacion was portrayed as hearing voices that told her to
kill the Filipina maid and the Singaporean boy. In a last-ditch effort,
the Philippine government tried to appeal to the United Nations to
intervene, but apparently this was all a gesture meant to appease the
infuriated citizens (Philippine News, March 22-28, 1995, A1, A14).
In the immediate aftermath, the Ramos
administration mounted an all-out display of concern for our latter-day
"national heroes," hundreds of thousands of contract workers exploited and
brutalized daily in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and other cities in the
Middle East, Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Somehow we want to
affirm our national dignity, our conscience, our sense of solidarity.
Rallies, vigils, flag-burning, funeral marches, massive protests, and
unrelenting cries for vengeance--these interruptions of the comic plot (or
aborted tragedy) are symptomatic of an impending breakdown of the entire
symbolic economy of globalized labor-exchange on which the ideology of
individual success through work, thrift, and self-sacrifice rests. Perhaps
the lesson here is that aesthetics and philosophy cannot really capture
the complete and full trajectory of Filipina lives and that, to quote
Delia Aguilar, "only with an unequivocal articulation of the global order
that women can be adequately grasped in their complexity as laboring and
desiring subjects" (2004, 21). Such more unequivocal inquiry remains the
agenda for another occasion. Meanwhile, let me conclude provisionally
these preliminary notes on this unfolding international drama (San Juan
2001).
The Flor Contemplacion story is not
over yet despite the deluge of films, official documents, police blotters,
sentimental blogs, etc. attempting to bury the whole affair. When the
masses explode, it is clear that empathy is no longer needed, vicarious
identification no longer avails. Peripeteia (a reversal of fortune)
short-circuits the shock of recognition. Finally, the sacrifice of bodies
for the sake of Gross National Product and IMF conditionalities--of
sensuous use-value for the abstracted or reified exchange-value--has found
a precise dramatic embodiment in the execution of Flor Contemplacion by
the rabidly self-righteous authoritarian capitalists of Singapore whose
worship of the commodity and money-fetish eludes the descriptive reach of
ordinary language.
A historical-materialist analysis will
not let us repress or elude the voices of the victims. Who is ultimately
responsible for all these outrages on Filipinas? Where is the Philippine
nation-state with its extortive agencies, its parasitic labor bureaucrats
and its overseas employment machine? A collective judgment of
accountability is imperative, otherwise each person will take revenge.
Indeed, these questions seem superfluous, for there are no more stories or
tales to recount, only this uncanny quiet of the vigil and intimations of
"the fire next time." Slowly, the winds of revolution are blasting the
continuum of normal history, dissolving the boundaries of past and future,
dream and reality, into the dialectical Now of Pinay power.
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