The first picture taken of Papa and his three eldest daughters
During my stay here in the Philippines, I have twice enjoyed the company of a father who has long been estranged to me. This is a blessing that, (until last quarter when I applied for this study abroad program), I never thought would be mine to cherish. The times we have together are well-documented, and I scroll through hundreds of photos wistful in knowing that years of his absence cannot be likewise brought up on my computer screen, edited with his presence stamped throughout the times I was growing up, and relived without the fears of abandonment, of hunger, of being lost and of being incomplete hovering over the formative years of my life.
However, for the times that he wasn’t there, and for the moments that can never be rewound, my mother was, and for this she has earned my lifelong gratitude, love and respect. She has been there for me, unfailing in both keeping a house and bringing home the bacon, and consistent in being the parent who, year after year, lays hard-earned medals upon my shoulders; she has been there for me, lighting my birthday candles once we could afford a cake to set them on, and managing to somehow light up my life through the times we couldn’t even afford a match.
Mama lighting my candles during my birthday last year
Likewise, I admire the many women in my life who have also had a hand in my upbringing, including my strict-but-supremely-loving Lola, my light-hearted and storyteller of an aunt, and my many kind and inspiring teachers.
Because of all of you, I have a high estimation of women and great expectations in our beauty, strength, and ability to change lives and to change the world.
It is also in thinking about all of you and being reminded of all that beauty, strength and ability that billboards like the one pictured below strikes me as extremely offensive.
A gigantic billboard displayed outside the CFO (Commission on Filipinos Overseas) building
Obscenely large, the billboard reads: “Fear Is Reserved For Our Mothers.” It is hard to miss as one scans the area surrounding the CFO building, where we had spent an afternoon learning about issues pertinent to Filipinos living overseas.
Perhaps the statement is a clever allusion to a television show or something of the like; perhaps I’m over-thinking it, but really now, what is this even supposed to mean? Why is fear linked with mothers? Why, out of all the other figures in society (like cowardly fathers who abandon their families, and political leaders who dare not challenge the system for fear of losing their place in it), is fear associated with those who have been nothing but straight pillars in our society? Did anyone even really think this through? Confusion and indignation constitute my first and last impression regarding this deplorable ad. Mindlessly-conceived advertisements like these that demean women and devalue the important role mothers and motherhood play in society do not merely discourage me from ever buying the company’s products, but also serves as a slap in the face, awakening my senses to the sharp, stinging system of oppression Filipinos, and especially Filipina women, are subjected to at home and abroad.
In the article “The Global Trade in Filipina Workers,” Grace Chang uncovers one of these systems of oppression in the form of the structural adjustment policies (SAPs) that international lending institutions based in the North have routinely prescribed to the governments of indebted countries of the South as pre-conditions for loans. In theory, SAPs are meant to promote efficiency and sustained economic growth in our “adjusting” country, but in reality, these policies only function as strategic wedges that leave the economies and peoples of a developing nation wide open to imperialist exploitation.According to Chang, “SAPs strike women in these nations the hardest and render them most vulnerable to exploitation both at home and in the global labor market” (397). At home, it is the mothers and wives who must manage how to tease out a life out of a meager budget when wages are cut; it is the women who must take care of the sick and the elderly members of the family when healthcare vanishes; and it is the young girls who are first to be kept from school in order to help the family when education becomes too expensive.
A box for change on a jeepney, because every drop really does count!
When the boat is about to sink and people are bailing out left and right, it is the women who step up to counter the stresses of life, and keep the family afloat. With this said, it should come as no surprise that it is also the Filipina women (70% of overseas workers) who migrate abroad in search of work, and whose remittances are the ones literally keeping this country from sinking under its $46 billion debt (Chang, 399).
Dickies, you messed with the wrong girls.
I have a friend back in the States – an African American friend – who depresses me with his incessant remarks about how oppressed we as colored people are, and how the system oppresses not only people of color but especially women of color. I would look at him and sigh, would look at him and think: I’m sorry that you feel that way, but I feel fine.
At the time, I didn’t feel particularly oppressed;
At the time, I had never even conceived of myself as a person “of color;”
At the time, I accounted for his behavior by reminding myself that African-Americans endured a walk through hell and back, with a history mired by enslavement, dehumanization, and colorful ways of passing through this life like being lynched, skinned, or burned to death. That’s an intensely horrific existence (not even a life, but an existence), and if I learned of even half of the same experiences having alighted upon my own people, I would be likewise traumatized and embittered.
I am learning and am finding myself likewise traumatized and embittered, but I’m fighting against these feelings because they are the sort that, with time, will render me immobile. It’s important to fight it because I don’t want to be a perpetrator in my own time. I don’t want to pass this on and inflict people around me with this disease.
Photos taken at Boracay of Caucasian men and Filipina women
In another article “Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor,” Rhacel Salazar Parrenas writes about the three-tier transfer of reproductive labor (or “the labor needed to sustain the productive labor force” (561), describing a chain of events spurred not only by forces of global capitalism but also by gender inequities that ultimately result in an ever-deepening oppression of women.
Parrenas describes this three-tier transfer writing, “While class-privileged women purchase the low-wage services of migrant Filipina domestic workers, migrant Filipina domestic workers simultaneously purchase the even lower-wage services of poorer women left behind in the Philippines” (561). Parrenas takes a step back to describe how Western patriarchal societies have historically relegated reproductive work to women, and how these women have often been shown to “use their class privilege to buy themselves out of their gender subordination” (562).
Laundry that the housekeepers here at UP delivered to me. Cost: P80.00 ($2.00)
While there is an obvious gender inequity at work between men and women when the women are socially assigned such work as household chores, the care of elderly, adults, and youth, the socialization of children, and the maintenance of social ties in the family (561), there is also an interesting division of labor when it comes to the private sphere itself over where women preside. Instead of gender, race and status are used to establish a two-tier hierarchy among women.
In one camp are the “clean mistresses,” on the other the “dirty servants” (562). Phyllis Palmer makes this distinction saying, “the more physically strenuous labor of the servant enabled the mistress to attain the markers of ideal femininity – fragility and cleanliness.”
This should definitely call to mind Diaz’s article on “Pappy’s House” where he cites Barbara Christian as also arguing that it is because colored domestic worker shoulder the work of their white mistresses that the latter is enabled to do as they please and become as beautiful ornaments in society. Christian writes, “men did not fight duels or protect the honor of a woman who was busy cooking, scrubbing floors, or minding children, since the exclusive performance of this kind of work precluded the intrigue necessary to be a person as ornament” (324).
In this way, one can see that gender-induced inequality can give birth to race- and class-based inequities. This is why I need to fight it, and we need to fight it. A person who feels him/herself oppressed will either consciously or subconsciously pass on the oppression to another in order to alleviate or completely liberate themselves from the burdens associated with their lower status in a patriarchal society.
When I return, I can no longer tell my friend: I’m sorry that you feel that way, but I feel fine. Because I don’t feel fine. As a person of color, as a woman of color, seeing traces of racism and sexism at every turn of the head highly disturbs me. I read of what others before me have gone through and it is painful.
In “U.S. Racism and Intervention in the Third World, Past and Present,” Daniel Schirmer describes the murders of Joseph Ileto (a Filipino postal worker), and Sam Hose (a black farmhand) as only two of the many racial atrocities that continue to be committed at the heels of past crimes.
Joseph Ileto, Filipion-American postal worker and victim of white supremacist ideology
Mindsets that evoke the idea that it is the duty of the United States “as a white Anglo-Saxon nation to uplift and civilize” Filipinos who are seen as a “colored” and “inferior race” are detrimental not only to the Filipinos but also to the soldiers and citizens of this supposed Anglo-Saxon savior of a nation. White supremacists like Furrow go around cleansing the land of those they consider “inferior” (Jews and non-whites), and innocent people like Ileto fall to the ground.
In response to these acts of racial violence Schirmer writes, “It is hard to believe that violence used by the U.S. military against the peoples of color in Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and the Caucasians of Serbia did not embolden U.S. white supremacists to inflict similar violence upon Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and other minorities here in the United States” (171).
This observation regarding the transfer of violence from one segment of the population to another is interesting. It reminds me of Parrenas’ three-tier transfer of reproductive labor, where a transfer of oppression from one class of women to another prevails.
Although Filipina migrants undergo various discriminations, injustices and exploitation in their workplaces abroad, neither the Philippine government nor organizations that should have the interests of women the world over (like NOW, the National Organization of Women) show any interest in protecting its overseas workers, its fellow women. According to Chang, the first would rather “sacrifice women’s lives to maintain good relations with its chief trade partners,” and the second may consist of privileged women of the First World who are actually “some of the primary consumers and beneficiaries in this trade” (405).
My mother working hard in the US in order to send as many dollars back to family in the Philippines
The system is incredible. My family has always been grateful that my mother ended up going to the US, instead of to Japan, where work might have tended more towards entertainment – whatever that means. However, even in the States, where she worked briefly as a caregiver, she was relegated to longer work hours and lower pay by management, and discriminated for her weak command of the English language and thick accent by her co-workers. I remember nights when she would come home exhausted and looking like she was on the verge of tears.
I would ask: “Ma, how was your day?” And, in trying to answer, she would burst into tears, un-consolable until the next day when she had to do it all over again. Over the years, she has reported less discrimination in the workplace, but every time something does happen, it makes my blood boil knowing that my mother was belittled, and I get the urge to drop by her work and speak on her behalf.
Why can’t the Philippine government and NOW feel the same way about protecting and defending women? Women who, in their attempt to provide a better life for their family back home, must endure racial, class, and citizenship inequalities in their “host countries.” However unfortunate the case, a similar process occurs on a domestic level with Filipina migrants knowingly or unknowingly helping to exploit the cheap labor of Filipina women left in the country by hiring them as domestic helpers to care for the aging parents and children they left behind.
At Starbucks, observing as a nanny plays with a toddler. There are many domestic workers here in the Philippines. I see them taking primary school-aged students to and from school, and feeding toddlers at the malls
Although Filipina migrant workers are paid abominably low wages and are denied public benefits or social services, and although these conditions may persist in their various occupations as domestic servants, nurses, sex workers, and entertainers, what they make abroad as domestic laborers is still significantly larger than what they would make in the Philippines as professionals (Chang, 399). The knowledge of their increased social status back home is part of what comforts Filipina migrants like Gloria Yogore in their vapid role as maids in other countries.
Yogore says, “In the Philippines, I have maids. When I came here, I kept on thinking that in the Philippines, I have maids and here I am one. I thought to myself that once I go back to the Philippines, I will not lift my finger and I will be the signora. [Laughs]. My hands will be rested and manicured and I will wake up a 12 o’clock noon” (575).
Yogore’s statement is a window whereby we can see how Filipino women who are too poor to be able to afford going abroad are consigned to even-lower-paying jobs as maids of those who serve as maids for higher-class women abroad.
When will the cycle stop? Parrenas has identified three tiers, but what if there were more on a micro level? Who will speak up for the women? Who will fight for them if, as Christian says, men do not fight duels or protect the honor of a woman busy cooking, scrubbing floors, and minding children?
I was raised by a household full of women: of Mama, Lola, and Auntie who also took care of children the majority of whom were girls who have now grown into young women. I knew that without men in the house we were in a precarious state, but I didn’t know just how vulnerable we all were at the time. Now that I am older, and now that I am learning about the precarious and vulnerable state of Filipina women all over the world, I am no less fearful or insecure about my position in the world. That is the honest truth. It is tough living in a patriarchal society where most of the men are absent from their family’s lives, and women are left to fend for not only themselves but for even more vulnerable citizens like children and the elderly. It is a tough way to live when you must choose between either sinking or stepping on someone positioned lower than yourself in order to keep on breathing, in order to keep on living.
The beauty, strength, and ability of women to change lives and change the world is often curtailed as each is misused and exploited by dominant cultures and industrialized nations. For their beauty, women are sold as sex slaves; and for their strength, women are exported as cheap labor.
Who will fight for the beautiful and strong Filipina? Where are the Filipino men and why don’t they get up and fight for the mothers, daughters, and wives who are “busy cooking, scrubbing floors and minding children”?
I found your blog in the process of doing some internet research on the invisible LABOUR of caregiving, and I was incredibly moved by this post. This was beautifully written and powerfully contextualized with your photographs - thank you!
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