Becoming Pilgrims in the Holy Land: On Filipina Domestic Workers’ Struggles and Pilgrimages for a Cause in Israel

Abstract

Filipino Christian care and domestic workers’ migration to Israel is a deeply transformative process of embodied subjectification, imbuing their religious practice with imaginative meanings rather than merely economic. Filipino pilgrimages to holy sites in Israel sacralise the humdrum and sometimes demeaning realities of their work, enabling them to transcend through performance the ‘migrant’ label assigned to them by contemporary migration regimes in the international division of labour. Becoming pilgrims (and tourists) in the Holy Land, migrants discover alternative life narratives, which position them on a journey within a sacred geography at the centre of Christian devotion, suffusing their movements along transnational networks and migration routes. By interpreting Holy Land pilgrimages as dynamic and at times awkward encounters with the sacred, inflected by Filipinos’ legal, social and economic status in Israel, I show the creative fusion of pilgrimage, tourism and migration achieved by migrants in their transnational journeys.