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Chapter Six engages the themes of misfortune, crisis, catastrophe, and war in Marian apparitions at the same time that it further widens the question of Filipinos’ intensifying role in Christian mission by examining two events that were heavily mass mediated and decidedly global in scope. The first of these events took place in September 1999 and was staged by a Filipino Marian devotional group in New York City. Known as the World Marian Peace Regatta, this festival was a daylong birthday celebration honoring the Virgin Mary, and performed as a ritual to invoke her protection over the world. Framing this event is a seemingly unrelated diplomatic incident: the 2004 kidnapping of an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) by a group demanding that the Philippine government withdraw its coalition forces from Iraq. One extraordinary coincidence and the appeal for divine intervention immediately links the two. But what further draws these two events into relatedness is that they both entail imaginaries of the global Philippines that are rooted in a shared history of transnational movement, yet diverge owing to significant differences in socioeconomic status, physical vulnerability, and the present place of the Philippines and Filipinos in the world.

This chapter examines how the Philippine government works to open up markets for Philippine workers. Migration officials closely monitor the economic and political trends and transformations created by neoliberal globalization, and subsequently attempt to exploit potential opportunities to export workers through so-called “market promotions.” Since the global mobility of Philippine labor is also dependent on the host’s willingness to open their borders to foreign workers, the Philippine state engages in diplomatic negotiations with labor-receiving countries to formalize transfers of labor. Private recruitment agencies do not have the capacity to map global labor market trends in the way the Philippine government can, and are in fact dependent on the state’s efforts to open up markets for workers.

This chapter focuses on the outcomes and processes of a sudden strike by Philippine migrant workers in Brunei, who exercised some of the rights constituted in the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act by enlisting the assistance of Philippine state representatives to advocate for higher wages and working conditions. This conflict illustrates the limits of Philippine migrant citizenship, which are manifested in the nature of the strike, the role of the Philippine state in the negotiations process, and its outcome. The chapter ends with a discussion of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s state visit to Brunei where she intended to restore friendly relations with its government, causing the imperatives of labor brokerage to prevail.

This chapter shows how the overseas Filipino community is transformed into a transnational migrant market. Advertisements and marketing campaigns to Filipinos overseas reinforce Philippine state-based discourse that frames labor migration as a source of Philippine national development and overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) as modern heroes. These neoliberal characterizations privilege the notion that Filipino labor migration functions as a demonstration of familial love and a path to social mobility, rather than a neocolonial process of racial and gender exploitation. As such, they represent efforts by state and market actors to make Filipinos' individual and familial aspirations compatible with the large-scale neoliberal fantasies of Philippine national development and a global free market. Philippine state and corporate actors are similarly invested in the continued reproduction of Filipino labor migration and the transformation of Filipino workers and their families into transnational consumer subjects.

This chapter examines an audiovisual tribute to Filipino seafarers, Tagumpay Nating Lahat, to discuss the image of overseas Filipino workers as the new heroes of the Philippines. The video portrayed Filipino seamen as responsible, hardworking, cooperative, devoutly Catholic, and heroically patriots. It also described the quasi-military orientation of seafaring and its docility. The chapter explains the behavior of seamen who are considered to be “deserters,” or those who jump ship in ports outside of the Philippines and relate it to the subordinate masculinities of Filipino seafarers.

This chapter explicates the perspective of migrant influences by highlighting the previous discussion of their roles as consumers, investors, historians, and philanthropists. In 1988, President Corazon Aquino referred to Filipino migrant workers as bagong bayani which elevated their status as noble citizens on par with national heroes. Additionally, the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) honors outstanding overseas Filipino workers through the Bagong Bayani Awards. There were debates on how the Philippine government used the bagong bayani discourse to justify labor export and labor out-migration. However, Filipino migrants are not shy in using the label to empower or legitimize migrant activism.

This chapter asks how western researchers might do other than recycle orientalist representations of ‘third world women’. It is an experiment in performative writing that considers two kinds of narratives: conventional oral testimony of individual domestic workers and a more playful transcript of role-playing among Filipina domestic workers. The chapter raises questions about what counts as empirical evidence, the attractions of victim narratives, and social scientific distrust of stereotypes, humour and play. It asks that researchers envision the space of research as a more varied space, not only as a space of authentic testimony and confession but as a more riotous theatre for transgression in which we create spaces from which to speak and perform the unspeakable.

Chapter Five focuses on the structuring effect of political economy on commercial fishers in Scotland (and elsewhere). It outlines how sea creatures like crabs and lobsters were made into tradeable commodities, and how commodity relations affected ownership of boats and gear, and the distribution of fishing surplus among owners and crew. Commodity relations extended to the commodification of people’s own labour, and permeated and structured social relations between fishermen, generating new forms of class relations. Following Henry Bernstein’s key questions of political economy, the chapter investigates ‘who owns what’ and ‘who gets what’ and how these relations have changed historically. Over time, ownership of boats has been centralised and the fishing share system has been modified so that owners appropriated a greater portion of the fishing surplus. The position of crew has moved in the opposite direction, as they have shifted from being part owners of boats and gear, to a pool of casual waged labourers, to migrant workers (mainly Filipino) on very low wages. In ecological terms, commodity relations encouraged a strategy of catching tiny prawns in bulk, a fishing strategy which is facilitated the employment of low-waged fishers.

This chapter examines some dynamics of transnational families in the context of the Philippines, one of the largest source countries of migrant workers in contemporary globalization. It focuses on how young adult children of migrant mothers interpret their transnational life. It also identifies the challenges that geographic distance poses for transnational families, including marital strain, emotional distance, and the pain of family separation. Philippine society abides by the integrative model of the family and measures transnational mothering against this model. Holding on to the views of the integrative model on the family aggravates the difficulties experienced by children by encouraging them to view their mother's redefinition of mothering as not only an abandonment of traditional duties but also the abandonment of them as children. Following the diversity model would not only facilitate children's recognition of nontraditional forms of care provided by extended kin up close and mothers from afar, but would also ease the emotional difficulties imposed on them by the geographic distance in their family.