Chris Martin
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London School of Economics and Political Science Generations of Migration: Schooling, Youth & Transnationalism in the Philippines Christopher A.T. Martin A thesis submitted to the Department of Anthropology of the London School of Economics for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, London, December 2015 !1 Declaration I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it). The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent. I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party. I declare that my thesis consists of 99,996 words. !2 Abstract The Philippines is one of the world’s largest ‘sending communities’ for international labour migrants, with roughly 10% of the population ‘absent’ due to emigrations associ- ated with permanent relocation or short-term contract work. Anthropologists studying Filipino migrations have often focussed on the migrants themselves, and particularly their experiences of diaspora and transnationalism in the present; this thesis instead looks at the perspectives of those who remain in the Philippines, particularly the children and young people who are affected by labour migration, and who often consider working overseas as part of their own futures. The thesis investigates children’s and young people’s social lives in the province of Batangas, exploring their labour practices, kinship relations and, most importantly, their education and schooling. Findings are based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in two educational institutions: a public secondary school in a small rural village, and a private vocational college in a larger ‘peri-urban’ town. Research was primarily conducted with children and young people who attended the school or college, as well as their teachers, families and communities. I argue that understandings of the purpose and practice of schooling have become thor- oughly entwined with the transnational economies of labour migration and remittances. This process has generated or contributed to wide-ranging cultural vocabularies for talk- ing about and acting on the future and the potential of young people, which encompass idioms pertaining to the moral value of children, concepts of movement and mobility, indebtedness across intergenerational relations, and the ‘domestication’ of external or for- eign sources power. My conclusions contribute to anthropologies of childhood and youth, critical analysis of the articulation of schooling and labour, theories of global capitalism and transnationalism, and themes within the wider ethnographic study of the Philippines and Southeast Asia. !3 Table of Contents Page 5 Acknowledgements Page 6 List of Diagrams, Tables & Photographs Page 7 Introduction Page 36 Chapter 1 - Competitiveness and Colonialism: Learning and labour at Palaw National High School Page 75 Chapter 2 - Uncanny Properties: Negotiating the new urbanisms of vacant lots, modern teachers and wealthy saints in rural Batangas Page 113 Chapter 3 - ‘Mr & Ms STEP 2012’: Performance, language and transformation in a school pageant Page 141 Chapter 4 - ‘Palaw Foundation Worldwide’ and the Remittance Economy: Money, kinship and the morality of childhood and youth Page 170 Chapter 5 - Helping and Hanging Out: ‘Barkada’, debt and intergenerational politics Page 196 Chapter 6 - Desirable Vocations: Labour migration, sexuality/gender and ‘tourate’ production Page 219 Chapter 7 - ‘Mag-abroad’: Geography, temporality and mobility in Batangas and beyond Page 251 Conclusion Page 262 Appendix 1 - Figures 2-8 Page 266 Appendix 2 - Glossary and Acronyms Page 274 Notes Page 281 Bibliography !4 Acknowledgements My greatest thanks go to the students and teachers who welcomed me into their class- rooms at the International Science Academy and Palaw National High School: I am huge- ly indebted to them all, and their hospitality and patience made my fieldwork possible. I am also hugely grateful to everyone who allowed me to stay in their homes in Batangas, particularly my hosts in Palaw. Many friends in the Philippines helped and encouraged me before I arrived in Batangas: special thanks go to Dottie de Mesa, Agnes Bibon and her family, and Monelli Ponce de Leon, who were all wonderful Tagalog teachers. While I conducted my fieldwork in the Philippines, I was a Visiting Research Associate at the Institute of Philippine Culture at the Ateneo de Manila University, a post for which I am very thankful, particularly to Czarina Saloma-Akpedonu and Elizabeth Macapagal for their kind invitation to join the IPC, and to Shyl Angelica Sales for her constant help and support. At the University of the Philippines, Sarah Raymundo and Neal Matherne were also encouraging and provocative influences. While in the Philippines I was visited by my parents and my wife, Katherine, who were all loving and supportive throughout my fieldwork. Parts of this thesis have been presented to the London School of Economics Department of Anthropology in the graduate seminar, the Austronesia Research Seminar, and the 2014 workshop on methods for use during ethnographic fieldwork with children; elsewhere I have presented work from this thesis at the 2012 International Conference on the Philip- pines at Michigan State University, the 2014 IPC Summer School at the Ateneo de Mani- la, and the 2015 Philippine Studies UK Workshop at the University of Leicester. I want to thank everyone who has offered intellectual stimulation, comments and suggestions, in- cluding Philip Proudfoot, Andrea Pia, Natalia Buitron-Arias, Fernande Pool, Jovan Lewis, Desiree Remmert, Mark Stanford, Meadhbh McIvor, Agustin Diz, Gus Gatmay- tan, Johanna Whiteley, Dominik Schieder, Faith Kares, Andres Narros, Resto S. Cruz, Jeanne Illo, Emma Porio, Patricio N. Abinales, Filomeno V. Aguilar, Jonathan Corpus Ong, and my supervisors Fenella Cannell and Catherine Allerton. The research for this thesis was funded with an award from the Economic and Social Re- search Council, for which I am very grateful. !5 List of Diagrams, Tables & Photographs p.10 Fig.1 Map of the Philippines, showing Batangas Province and Metro Manila p.263 Fig.2 Results of survey at Palaw National High School p.264 Fig.3 Gawad Kalinga community. Photo credit: Gawad Kalinga, photo re- trieved from http://www.nyers-for-the-philippines.com/our-beneficiary/ p.264 Fig.4 Large house in Kanluran subdivision p.265 Fig.5 Rusted signpost in Kanluran subdivision p.265 Fig.6 Houses in the Co-op Subdivision p.266 Fig.7 Chapel of the Señor, Santa Clara p.266 Fig.8 Mr & Ms STEP 2012 trophies, certificates and sashes !6 Generations of Migration: Schooling, Youth & Transnationalism in the Philippines Introduction Education and Export in the Philippines In many towns and villages in the Philippines, it is hard to overstate the scale and public presence of schooling infrastructure. In small towns, the presence at 6am and 4pm of el- ementary and secondary-level schoolchildren in public spaces as they arrive at or leave schools is overwhelming: thousand-strong armies of crisp white shirts and tartan or checked skirts crowd into jeepneys and fast-food stalls. In the towns with big high schools and colleges, the presence of an ‘educational complex’ is even more apparent. Schools are always decorated with large tarpaulin banners triumphantly pronouncing the names of graduating or prizewinning students, and in public spaces - on placards on top of jeepneys, adorning marketplace stands, on flags at the side of the road, attached to barangay (neighbourhood) entrance gateways - there are a variety of adverts for new rounds of enrolment or discounted tuition fees. While I conducted my fieldwork in Batangas province, one chain of colleges, the In- ternational Science Academy, ran an advert that explicitly linked its educational program to the possibility of working overseas. The advert featured four smiling, youthful students dressed for a particular jobs: a chef in whites, engineer in a hard hat holding rolled-up blueprints, a woman in a suit, and a nurse in a pink uniform. This kind of imagery in itself was not an unusual tactic for promoting vocational colleges such as this; what was dis- tinctive was the skyline behind these characters, composed of several famous landmarks from around the world - the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Burj Khalifa, Big Ben - while an aeroplane soared over their heads. Overseas migration from the Philippines is not insignificant. For 2013, a stock estimate of the number of Filipinos living outside of the Philippines was placed at 10,238,614, repre- !7 senting roughly 10% of the total population of the Philippines (Philippine Statistics Au- thority 2013a). This group returns remittances to the country valued, in 2014, at 24.35 billion USD per year (Philippine Statistics Authority 2015b). The Philippines is remark- able in terms of its economic and demographic relationship with its citizens living over- seas: few countries receive more money from abroad than the Philippines, and it is also the homeland for the world’s third-largest diaspora (Agbola & Acupan 2010: 387). Politi- cal rhetoric in the Philippines surrounding OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) has per- sisted since large-scale labour emigration was first incorporated into macroeconomic pol- icy by Ferdinand Marcos in 1974: during my fieldwork, in November 2012, President of the Senate of the Philippines Juan Ponce Enrile commented that “Ang pinakamalaking export natin is OFW … Ang magpapalago ng bansa natin ay iyong excess population natin na sinanay natin na tumatanggap ng mga trabaho abroad that others don’t want to handle” (Our biggest export is OFWs … What will improve our economy is the excess population that is used to accepting jobs abroad that others don’t want to handle) (Macaraig 2012).