Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Lifetimes of Disposability and Surplus Entrepreneurs in Bagong Barrio, Manila

2016; Wiley; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/anti.12249

1467-8330

Geraldine Pratt, Caleb Johnston, Vanessa Banta,

Socioeconomic Development in Asia

Working in collaboration with Migrante International and drawing on testimony of residents in the remittance-dependent, migrant-sending community of Bagong Barrio in Caloocan City in Metro Manila, Philippines, we examine the systematic production of lifetimes of disposability that drives labour migration across the generations. The closure of factories and contractualisation of work in the 1980s created the conditions in which labour migration is not a choice but a necessity. Diligent use of remittances to pay for the education of their children in many cases has produced a new generation of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), and investment in housing often is another route to OFW status. Alongside this narrative of ongoing precarity, we listen closely to the testimony of residents for ways of living that are both subsumed within and somewhat excessive to accounts that might render their lives as merely waste or wasted. Sa tulong ng Migrante International at gamit ang ilang kwento ng mga residenteng patuloy na umaasa sa remittance o padala ng kanilang mga kamag anak na OFW, aming sisiyasatin sa papel na ito ang sistematikong produksyon ng tinatawag ni Neferti Tadiar na "life-times of disposability" na siyang nagtutulak sa pangingibang bansa ng libo libong Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) mula sa Bagong Barrio, isang barangay sa lungsod ng Caloocan, Maynila. Sa lugar na ito, ang pagsasara ng maraming pabrika at kontraktwalisasyon nung 1980s ay siyang nagtulak sa marami upang maghanap ng trabaho sa ibang bansa. Para sa mga residente ng Bagong Barrio na aming napanayam, ang pagalis ng Pilipinas para sa hanap buhay ay hindi lamang isang personal na pagpapasiya. Isa itong kasagutan sa matinding pangangailangan. Bukod pa rito, karamihan sa mga OFW, sa tulong na rin ng kanilang mga kamag anak ay napipilitang gamitin ang remittance para sa pagaaral ng mga anak o sa pagbili ng lupa at bahay bilang puhunan para sa kanilang mga anak, ang susunod na henerasyon ng OFW sa kanilang pamilya. Sa kontekstong ito ng pawang na siklo ng pangingibang bansa, nais naming pakinggang mabuti ang mga kwento ng mga residente ng Bagong Barrio upang mabigyang pansin ang iba pang uri ng pamumuhay na kontra sa karaniwang pagtingin sa buhay ng Pilipinong migrante, na ito ay nasasayang lamang o isa nang patapon na buhay. What long-term residents remember about Bagong Barrio from the 1960s and 1970s are vacant fields of tall weeds, mud, the absence of basic infrastructure, smells and garbage: "people would just wrap their shit and throw it in your backyard".1 North of central Manila and not yet incorporated into the metropolitan area (see Figure 1), the site was one of the region's largest garbage dumps, an area referred to as Pugad Baboy (which translates as swine's nest or pig fields). When informal settlers began to arrive, it was a place where garbage was thrown and people were literally salvaged, that is, killed and/or discarded.2 Early settlers at that time were themselves a kind of excess. Some were displaced from informal settlements located in the Intramuros and Sampaloc areas in central Manila: "when we were asked to leave [Intramuros], we moved here".3 Others came from poor rural areas from northern and other provinces. Bagong Barrio became a squatter's settlement of mostly shanty housing, where residents lined up with pails at 4 am to fetch water from the well of the local "business man of water". After Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos established the National Housing Authority (NHA) in 1975, an infrastructure of roads, sewage and electricity was slowly developed, and in 1980 Imelda Marcos came to Bagong Barrio during a local election, in her capacity as the Governor of the Metro Manila Commission. She sang the song Dahil Sa lyo [Because of You] and promised residents: "I will give you this land".4 Succeeding Presidents have persisted with this promise of land-titling, more recently President Arroyo in 2005 during her "de Soto tour" of poor communities in Metro Manila on the fourth anniversary of EDSA 2 (four days of political protest in 2001 that ousted then President Estrada).5 Despite these efforts to solidify the settlement, economies of excess and disposability persist in Bagong Barrio, and, in many ways, residents remain a surplus population. The slow temporality of neoliberalism in the Philippines over the last half century has created, in Neferti Tadiar's (2013:38) phrasing, lifetimes of disposability6 and the conditions for permanent, intergenerational stagnation among large populations, a phenomenon perceived not as "an event" or "immanent fate" but "simply a[n enduring] mode of life". A part of this enduring temporality of disposability has been the respatialisation of family life through the massive expansion of labour migration. Drawing on periods of fieldwork in Bagong Barrio in 2014 and 2015, and working in collaboration with Migrante International, a migrant advocacy organisation, we focus here on the persistent intergenerational reproduction of entrenched precarity, and ongoing spatial economies of liquidity and disposability.7 Lifetimes of disposability evidence suffering, in Povinelli's phrasing, that is "ordinary, chronic and cruddy rather than catastrophic, crisis-laden, and sublime". Being less "eventful", this suffering is, she argues, less susceptible to the "ethical impulse" (2011:3–4). But documenting the temporality of intergenerational precarity opens critical opportunities as well. As Elizabeth Povinelli (2011) argues, sacrificial redemption is a technique of social tense that is often deployed to explain (away) social harm. A close appraisal of the repetition of disposability across generations puts a lie to this mode of deflection, used in the global North and South alike to legitimate labour migration, because it makes clear that sacrifice in the past and present is unlikely to be redeemed in the future. Precarity in Bagong Barrio is produced within the specifics of Philippine history: a history of Spanish and American colonialism, integration within the global capitalist economy through partnerships with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, an export-oriented industrial development strategy that has subjected the population to the effects of various structural adjustment policies (Bello et al. 2005; Raphael 2000; San Juan 2000, 2009; Tadiar 2009), and a home-grown version of crony capitalism, or what Paul Hutchcroft (1998) describes as booty capitalism. This history has been shadowed by a vigorous urban restructuring program for Manila during the Marcos era (the City of Man), accompanied by substantial urban dispossession: namely, the removal, containment, concealment and relocation of squatters (Benedicto 2014; Garrido 2013; Pinches 1994; Tadiar 2009; Tolentino 2001). Rather than waste to which the state is indifferent,8 in the Philippines, through a labour export program that dates from 1974, segments of this "disposable" population have served as valuable assets, who sustain their families and the post-colonial state through their remittances. In 2014, remittances from overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) were estimated to be US$26.0 billion or almost 15% of the country's GNP (Caraballo 2015; see also Guevarra 2010; Rodriquez 2010; Tadiar 2013).9 It is estimated that approximately 1 in 10 Philippine nationals works abroad as an OFW, between 34% and 53% of the national population depends on remittances for their daily subsistence, and at least nine million children in the Philippines (or 27% of the overall youth population) are growing up with at least one parent working overseas (Parreñas 2005a, 2005b, 2010). Bagong Barrio is a key site in which this global drama is played out. It is both a community and point of passage or node of mobility (PATAMABA-IUP n.d.). One resident referred to the barrio as "the entry point" to labour migration; another as a "strategic place". Indeed, migration is ubiquitous in Bagong Barrio. Everyone has a migration story to tell. It is both a direct source of OFW labour and a place where OFWs from the provinces, especially from the North, pass through while preparing their papers and attending the seminars and training courses necessary to leave as temporary labour migrants. There is good reason, then, that Migrante International is concentrating their organising efforts there, and for others to pay close attention to this community. Precarity in Bagong Barrio is also structured in relation to other urban places. We situate our analysis of life in Bagong Barrio within ongoing calls to rethink our engagement with and the way we theorise the urban and processes of neoliberalisation, which for Ananya Roy (2009:820, 821), must "be produced in place" in order to re(map) the "multiplicity of metropolitan modernities". In advocating for theory-making to emerge (as well) from within and across the global South, Roy writes that there is some urgency in tracing the "complex connections, exchanges and references through which cities (everywhere) are worlded" (2009:829; see also Brenner et al. 2010; Hall et al. 2013; Peake and Rieker 2013; Robinson 2011, 2016; Roy 2015). The worlding of cities such as Rome, Vancouver, Jeddah, Taipei, Singapore, and Hong Kong (to name just a few places heavily dependent on Filipino care workers) is intimately bound up with and only properly understood from the ground in places such as Bagong Barrio (and vice versa). Often excluded in predominant accounts of urbanisation, the varied, heterogenous urbanisms of the global South are themselves important sites of learning and theorising. Not only is the Philippine government an innovative manager of labour export, from which other labour exporting countries learn, situating one's analysis in Bagong Barrio refocuses theoretical perspective. In particular, some categorical distinctions that drive theory and political debate in both the global North and the Philippines make little sense from the vantage of Bagong Barrio: distinctions between economic and forced migration, informal and formal land markets, and between the entrepreneurial and wasted subjects of neoliberalism. If it is too simplistic to map the entrepreneurial subject and surplus populations onto particular places (i.e. the global North and South respectively), it is arguable that the entrepreneurial subject also takes shape differently in different places; in the Philippines, not as an individual subject of freedom and choice but as a member of a family with deep obligations of care and responsibility.10 This entrepreneurial subject might be thought of as simultaneously surplus and entrepreneur: surplus-as-entrepreneur.11 At the same time, state reliance on remittances creates a distinctive relationship to the urban and rural poor, such that the Philippine state has a structural dependency on this surplus population, one that demands, not the eradication of the urban poor but the "elimination of its social contradictions by means of the latter's infinite fragmentation or disintegration". "Such comprises", Tadiar argues, "the continuous system of 'liquidation' of the potential capital of the urban poor" (2009:210–211). We pay close attention to these processes of liquidation and the social reproduction of OFW labour that sustain the ongoing production of labour migration within the global division of labour. Our analysis of migrant lives in Bagong Barrio draws extensively on the testimony of community residents, to whom we were introduced by (and in the company of) organisers of Migrante International.12 This representational strategy emerges from theoretical, political and ethical concerns. Rendering individuals as mass or surplus populations, while theoretically illuminating, can replicate the processes of dehumanisation that we criticise. As Melissa Wright (2006:4) notes, "few, if any, identify themselves as the bearer of the abstract condition of disposability". Disposable lives among surplus populations in the Philippines, vividly rendered by Neferti Tadiar as the "human rubble of global neoliberalism" (2013:33), can be brought into intelligibility in different ways, some of which repeat and deepen the devaluation of already stressed and devalued lives.13 Attending to both the singularity of OFWs' experiences and the repetition of these experiences across the globe is one possible way of refusing the further devaluation of already devalued workers. Recognising the challenging politics of testimony and witnessing across the global South and North (Cubilié 2005; Mohanty 1986; Pratt 2012; Spivak 1988; Taylor 2003), we nonetheless commit to this relationship of speaking and listening in the company of Migrante International.14 So too, migrant workers are often scripted into simplifying narratives, and these narratives structure political response (Gibson et al. 2001; Tadiar 2009). OFWs are often rendered in Philippine state narratives of development as sacrificing heroes of the nation, investors and ambassadors; in feminist and human rights discourse as gendered and racialised victims of patriarchy, racism, and global uneven development; and in political economy, as surplus populations or bare life. Paying close attention to detailed life stories opens opportunities to listen beyond these established scripts. In her dissatisfaction with reductive readings of migrants and other disposable lives in the Philippines, Tadiar (2009, 2013) reaches for what "falls away" from these accounts, for overlooked modes of social experience and social cooperation, and for forms of life-making that elude our existing narratives. "Attending to the uneven times of 'neoliberal' transformations through the life-times of disposability", she writes, "opens up the possibility of other genealogies for understanding those remaindered ways of living in the world that move and generate that world in ways we would otherwise be unable to take into political account" (2013:43). We have tried to listen closely to what residents of Bagong Barrio told us about their lives, for ways of living that are both subsumed within and somewhat excessive to accounts that might render their lives as merely waste or wasted within global capitalism. The Care Jeans [factory] is where I spent nights on strike in the picket area. All of that I already wrote down [but lost] because, when this area became a hot spot, we had to bury those papers. We organised many workers … The nuns. The priests. We were there with [the strikers] because they were already being harassed. It was real … When the police were there, and when night comes, or early morning, they would destroy the picket line. They would have things to hit you with. It hurt. We would be sleeping and resting … Then, suddenly, goons would approach. But, when the workers were organised and educated, they would fight. They would stand up. They would rebuild the picket area. They would continue. Continuous. They fought the struggle. Residents active in the labour movement at the time estimate that the Bagong Barrio Labor Alliance had between 10,000 and 20,000 members in the 1970s and early 1980s, and "whenever there was a mobilisation, it was easy to get 7,000 workers to come".15 Organisers considered Bagong Barrio to be a base for mobilising the urban poor in the 1980s and even the 1990s.16 Substantial union organising did not, however, halt the closing of factories in the surrounding area, which began around 1983, and labour conditions in Bagong Barrio deteriorated further after the passage of the Herrera Law in 1989.17 Enacted during the Aquino presidency (1986–1992), this law created the legal grounds for contractualisation and police/military intervention in workers' strikes. Through the 1980s, many regularised workers in Bagong Barrio were ejected from their factory jobs as contractual hiring was outsourced to labour agencies (Ofreneo 2013). As one seasoned union activist, turned migrant organiser, noted, "It was the start of what they called 'Endo' [end of contract]. After five months, you are out [because work becomes regularised at six months]. Then, you have to apply again".18 Workers who were once highly organised and unionised were thus effectively transformed into a flexible and increasingly precarious labour force. It was within this context that survival became almost impossible and labour migration began on a massive scale. Over a third (35.8%) of the approximately 15,000 households in Bagong Barrio now depend on the remittances sent by family members who are working overseas (Migrante International n.d.), and community organisers estimate that between 60% and 70% of households have a relative who has worked abroad at some point in time. Whenever you want to go home, you think of money. When you arrive, you think of money … As long as I send what they need here, it doesn't matter so much if I come here … In my 26 years abroad, I went home four times. I don't regret it. I don't regret it. Because why? You will go home and there are people and things you love, yes. But even that causes you great pain. I would pawn the jewellery just so I have something to give so they could take their exams. I would pay tuition fees for two. Then, what will happen next is I will write a promissory note for the other one. Then, he [her husband] will send money, and I will pay the tuition of the one who gave the promissory note. Then, it will be time again to pay for the other one's tuition. The money he sent was able to help but it was also not that big and I had to budget it in the right way. Everything was budgeted. I already set aside the tuition of my children. The same with their allowance every month. All money I got, I stapled and divided. The money to pay for the electricity, water, tuition, transportation, allowance, school projects. You couldn't do anything beyond that. You couldn't subtract anything from that. Imagine in a day, in the morning I sold dried fish. Then, I would do the laundry for someone. At 3 pm, I would start selling [fish] again. At night, you know that Shell gasoline station over there, I will sell Balut. That SM [nearby shopping mall], I couldn't enter that … I told him [her husband], I teased him: "That SM, I will get lost in it". How would you enter it when all your money is already stapled? In 2014, Roberto was sent home permanently by the Saudi government because of his age: "The company let me go because of Saudisation. A policy of the government. You can't overstay and I was already 65. They asked me to go home". The same was true for Luis who was sent home at age 60, the national retirement age in Saudi Arabia: "I don't want to brag about myself", he said, "but [my employers] really didn't want me to go". In Manila, there are no jobs for either man, and although Luis has a number of health concerns, he is thinking of leaving again: "They say, there's an age limit. You're old, right? But, really your body can still work. We can't do anything [here] because there are so many Filipinos who are unemployed". Of his current health concerns: "I think that's what happens when you really do not have anything else to do. Your body will desire to work because you got used to. That's what I would consider my experience with work". Rendered disposable workers in the Philippines in the 1980s, literally exhausted through lifetimes of working in Saudi Arabia, they are further abandoned as returning OFWs: old, unemployed, and in ill health, with limited savings towards the future (see also Santos 2016). From those we interviewed, we learned that most of them don't know what's going on with their family members abroad. Of course, because they are told that everything is okay. Like that. But, one Tatay [father] we organized said [in a public forum], "Those are lies". He said that a mother whose head is pushed into the toilet by the employer will always tell her children that everything is okay because she doesn't want them to know. She's just covering it up so her family will not worry. There will be a few who would tell but that's rare. This is why families here have high expectations from the people who go abroad. They don't know how hard the life is abroad. Families that expect remittances, they don't know … they don't remember how big the sacrifices are.20 Residents in Bagong Barrio go to some of the most dangerous destinations available to OFWs. Most of the women OFWs (about half of the OFWs in the community) work as domestic servants for wealthy families in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Libya, Bahrain, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, as well as more favoured destinations in Canada and the United States. According to the United Nation's International Labour Organization, domestic workers are some of the most likely workers to face abuse and exploitation in their place of work, and the International Trade Union Confederation (2014) estimates that 2.4 million domestic workers face conditions of slavery in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries alone. As another kind of dangerous occupation, Filipinos comprise a large number of private military contract personnel servicing other national militaries in various armed conflicts in the Middle East. For instance, as reported in Private Warriors, a Frontline (2005) PBS documentary, of the 200,000 military contractors hired by Kellog Brown & Root (a Halliburton subsidiary and the United States' largest military logistical support provider) during the US-led invasion of Iraq, 50,000 Filipinos worked as weathermen, cooks, carpenters, and mechanics (see Lee and Pratt 2012; Singer 2007). The Philippine Overseas Employment Agency issues periodic bans on deployment of OFWs to particular countries, a running indicator of the danger zones in which OFWs are working.21 During that time, it was the first attack of the Iraqis on Kuwait. One night, there was a meeting with all workers at the hospital. No one could go home. It wasn't safe they said … Who would not be afraid? Our first orientation was about the weapons Sadam used at that time. Chemical war. We were afraid because we were told that they had five kinds of weapons to kill … We were very afraid of that. They first taught us how to use the injections issued to us. We were also given chemical suits. Gas mask. Who would not be afraid if you were given those things, right? … That was our job: we had to seal everything. Even air conditioners … Once, when we were at the villa where we lived, there was a missile dropped on the base. We were far from the base but all the glass in our villa shattered because of the impact of the bomb. Don't say you aren't going to cry if you experience that. Lita's experience as a domestic helper in Kuwait was of an entirely different order of violence. As one example, caring for the "children" of a retired general, the 21-year-old son would steal into her room, take her panties, masturbate on them (as well as his own clothes), and return them to her to wash. As another: the food that her employers made available to her dated from the last time the family had employed a domestic worker and had been frozen for at least two years: "When you touch it, you'd think it's still fresh, but when you thaw it out and put it in the water, it will just crumble. That's what I ate. And my rice stocked in the bodega had worms in it. That's why I just ate the bread mostly. If you wash the rice, you will just get so many worms". After two months of this she returned to her agency. Discovering that she had purchased a cell phone with her savings, the agent destroyed the phone, hitting her face as he threw it at her. She was made to strip to her underwear and wait standing in a cubicle (disallowed from sitting) for 16 hours. After five days, she was sent to another employer, whose previous domestic helper had just been repatriated. After the efforts of her mother and Migrante, Lita was also repatriated from this employer to the Philippines. A second trip to Malaysia was no less disastrous, financially perhaps more so. Lita was illegally recruited and arrived in Malaysia with a tourist visa. There she was forced to relinquish her identity papers to employers and pay what she owed the illegal recruiter and her employers who promised to file for her official working visa. Lita worked day and night with barely anything to eat. After two months of not receiving any salary, she went on a hunger strike and lied that her mother in the Philippines had filed a legal case against her employers. They bought her a ticket, put her in jail for a night and took her to airport. Lita returned home after three months, financially destitute, with so little money that she was forced to walk home from the airport. She did not go straight to her house but rather to the house of her uncle, where she recuperated for three days. When she finally went home late one night, she cried when she saw her children. Her children, on the other hand, were angry because she came home empty handed. My cousin was working [in bars] as a GRO [Guest Relations Officer]22 here in the Philippines before. Now, of course, she was not earning enough and she can't work that way forever. She dared to leave the country because she couldn't provide. Then she went to Dubai. No one knows what her job is. We were all surprised then when she called to tell us she's in jail. I think that was last year. When she called, I was about to ask her to send me something, "Ate, buy me a t-shirt". Then my aunt said, "How would she buy that for you if she's in jail? Hala! She's in jail". My aunt said that her visa and papers were confiscated and hidden. Of course, if you get caught doing something and you don't have your documents, you will be put in jail. When [my aunt and cousin] finally got to talk, that was the time my cousin was just released. She was crying, she wanted to come home. But, of course, because she couldn't find a good job here, she went back to Dubai to take chances again. She was here briefly. She was here for a week. Then she was gone. [Interviewer: How did your family take it?] Of course, if it's your relative, you really worry. However, everyone who lives here is poor and having a difficult time. They can only focus on one thing. For example, on work. My eldest daughter is in Saudi. She's a nurse. Then my other one, she went abroad too. She studied computer science but she took CSSD. Medical sterilisation. Sterilisation of all medical instruments in the hospital. But, she only stayed there for a year. She encountered a problem there, but she was able to get out. If she wasn't able to do that, maybe she'd be decapitated. Of course, she cried and cried. I told her not to worry. Whatever the problem is, we can solve it. We can do it. Even her sister was crying. I told them "Don't panic. Let's be light. What's most important is that we are the ones to resolve this problem". They eventually understood. In a classic ethnography of the reproduction of working class culture, in the 1970s Paul Willis studied the oppositional culture of British working class male youths at schools ("having a laff" and rejecting and ridiculing educational aspirations): their laughter, he argued, lasted just long enough to deliver them through the factory gates as manual workers (Willis 1977). In another time and place, where unionised jobs have vanished, the opposite—that is, diligence and ambitious academic goals—perversely has much the same effect: in this case, of delivering university graduates in Bagong Barrio to OFW jobs. Such is the responsibilisation of the entrepreneurial subject and the cruelty of the fantasy of upward social mobility through post-secondary education in our neoliberal times (Berlant 2011). This cruelty is lived viscerally although perhaps distinctively in Bagong Barrio, inflected as it is within the obligations and sociability of family. I told him: "Her name is about to be called. I will let you listen." … I told him: "When her name gets called you will hear it." I always cry when I remember. I always did that: "Listen, your child is being called." We did that for the first, second, third, until all of them finished. In the case of Roberto's family, his college-educated daughters continue to live in their rented family home in Bagong Barrio, along with their husbands and a grandchild. For many others, college educations open the door for new generations of OFWs. Yoly, a co-founder and current board member of what is now a large community cooperative savings and loan society (worth roughly 80 million pesos in assets or ~C$2 million), also observed (and as a board member of the coop she is in a good position to make this observation) that the first thing OFWs spend their remittances on is "their children's schooling.25 They won't forget their children's school". She spoke of how hard she and her neighbours worked to pay for their children's educations. One neighbour "really had a hard time sending her children to school. She would do the laundry. Feed pigs. All kinds of hardships she endured. She would work as a domestic helper". The nursing educations that this neighbour was able to buy for her daughters through such hard work have allowed them to migrate to the United States and sponsor their mother to join them. In this case they were apparently successful in the education/migration gamble. In Yoly's case, she used all of her savings to educate her daughters, one as a nurse and another as a physiotherapist: "That [paying for their education] was no joke". But "whatever you sow, you will reap. If you sow something not good, then you will not reap anything from that. That's my principle. I sowed a good thing. I sent my children to school. Sacrifice". Two of her three daughters are OFWs, one now a permanent resident in Canada through the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP), the other working as a physiotherapist on cruise ships. Not everyone who goes abroad succeeds and gets a good life.