In the early twenty-first century, Filipino migrants working overseas comprised the third-largest group of migrant labourers in the world. This global phenomenon has impacted the lives and livelihoods of Filipinos across the Philippine archipelago including indigenous villagers in rural areas in the northern Philippines. How do villagers, both those who migrate to work overseas and those who stay behind, view and interpret migration? How do villagers feel and think about themselves in the world? In Global Filipinos, Deirdre McKay tackles these questions in a multi-sited ethnographic case study of the lives of the villagers of Haliap in Ifugao province, many of whom migrate across the Philippines and overseas. Diverging from previous ethnographic studies of Filipino international migration that have focused on the Philippine government's labour export programme and institutions like the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, McKay persuasively argues for the enduring significance of villagers' relationships and their desires for economic security and dignity as central features of late twentieth and early twenty-first century international labour migration.
McKay's fieldwork took place in the 1990s and 2000s, a period of dramatic change in the municipality of Asipulo, where Haliap is located. By the end of the 1990s, Haliap respondents characterised those villages with many workers abroad as ‘developed’ and ‘progressive’ places. Progress was made visible by patterns of consumption — most notably new houses outfitted with modern appliances, and specific brands of clothing, such as Merrell shoes — enabled by the remittances sent by workers overseas. It also involved the increasing use of specific technologies such as cell phones, which resulted in the development of two cellular networks in Asipulo by 2002. Perhaps the most dramatic change was that overseas employment created a new category of elite persons in Haliap. Those villagers who had worked overseas became Haliap's ‘new kadangyans’, a term that referred to the old landed elite.
While the chronological focus of the book is the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, McKay emphasises that migration is not a new phenomenon for Haliap villagers. ‘Villagers led mobile lives, even before overseas migration really took off’ (p. 4). They engaged in migration within the region to cope with a local shortage of irrigated paddy fields. Parental migration was a common practice that enabled their eldest children to inherit the family's most fertile fields.
However, by the late twentieth century, overseas migration offered new and exciting opportunities for socioeconomic mobility. Earnings abroad transformed some Haliap villagers into a new class of persons who built modern homes, bought new cars, and could afford professional education for their children. These changes also wrought several downsides: villagers' perceptions of the limitless wealth of overseas workers; overseas workers' excessive borrowing that fuelled these misperceptions; and the resultant misunderstandings that created tensions among family and neighbours. And yet, by 2000, McKay observed, ‘it seemed there was always someone from Haliap traveling abroad’ (p. 92). The allure of migration abroad derived in part from the failure of development projects (funded by Canadian, European, and US organisations) in the village. In order to be eligible for these development funds, villagers had to demonstrate conditions of need, which, from the villagers' perspectives, denoted a lack of dignity and human value in addition to money. By contrast, villagers interpreted overseas work as having greater potential for achieving economic security and providing respect and recognition for their talents and skills.
McKay's data includes interviews of Haliap villagers and long-term participant observation in the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Canada as well as surveys, media reports, oral histories, archival data, photographs, video grabs, voice calls, text messages, and supplementary interviews. Much of Global Filipinos follows the lives of a married couple, Luis and Angelina, and those of their neighbours in Haliap. McKay follows Angelina and Luis as they depart for work overseas in Hong Kong (and later when Luis works in Canada), and upon their returns home. Readers learn about their struggles, disappointments, and successes while working overseas. Some of these struggles, such as homesickness and exploitation by overseas employers, echo the findings of other ethnographic studies that have focused on workers' circumstances abroad. The major original contribution of McKay's study is her exploration of the resilience of village relationships in an age of heightened geographic mobility. Unlike previous studies that emphasise the loss of caring familial relationships as a social cost of work overseas, McKay argues that intimacy in Haliap is characterised by creating shared narratives rather than physical proximity.
A key conceptual contribution of Global Filipinos is what McKay calls the ‘virtual village’. The virtual village refers to how Haliap villagers use migration to bring together their sense of place, their sense of themselves in the world, and their engagements with the government. Village ties are maintained and even strengthened beyond the geographical boundaries of the village through new communication technologies, villagers' shared imaginary of the village as a place of underdevelopment, and their re-envisioning of the village as a potential place of progress and development.
Global Filipinos will be of interest to students and scholars of Philippine and Southeast Asian studies, globalisation, labour, and migration studies. It is a thoughtful and engaging study that reminds us of the significance of people's desires in order to create change in a global realm.
