Lifetimes of Disposability and Surplus Entrepreneurs in Bagong Barrio, Manila

Geraldine Pratt,Caleb Johnston,Vanessa Banta

doi:10.1111/anti.12249

Geraldine Pratt, Caleb Johnston + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12249

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Abstract

Working in collaboration with Migrante International and drawing on testimony of residents in the remittance-dependent, migrant-sending community of Bagong Barrio in Caloocan City in Metro Manila, Philippines, we examine the systematic production of lifetimes of disposability that drives labour migration across the generations. The closure of factories and contractualisation of work in the 1980s created the conditions in which labour migration is not a choice but a necessity. Diligent use of remittances to pay for the education of their children in many cases has produced a new generation of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), and investment in housing often is another route to OFW status. Alongside this narrative of ongoing precarity, we listen closely to the testimony of residents for ways of living that are both subsumed within and somewhat excessive to accounts that might render their lives as merely waste or wasted.

Highlights

After Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos established the National Housing Authority (NHA) in 1975, an infrastructure of roads, sewage and electricity was slowly developed, and in 1980 Imelda Marcos came to Bagong Barrio during a local election, in her capacity as the Governor of the Metro Manila Commission
Drawing on periods of fieldwork in Bagong Barrio in 2014 and 2015, and working in collaboration with Migrante International, a migrant advocacy organisation, we focus here on the persistent intergenerational reproduction of entrenched precarity, and ongoing spatial economies of liquidity and disposability
A close appraisal of the repetition of disposability across generations puts a lie to this mode of deflection, used in the global North and South alike to legitimate labour migration, Figure 1: Bagong Barrio West within Metro Manila

Summary

Introduction

Over a third (35.8%) of the approximately 15,000 households in Bagong Barrio depend on the remittances sent by family members who are working overseas (Migrante International n.d.), and community organisers estimate that between 60% and 70% of households have a relative who has worked abroad at some point in time. After using remittances for survival, and in line with studies of remittance expenditures23 (Advincula-Lopez 2005; Bagasao et al 2004; Tabuga 2007a, 2007b; Yang 2005), OFWs in Bagong Barrio tend to invest what they can in the educations of their children: “Almost all [OFWs] start with the education”.24 When asked how she used the money sent by Roberto, his wife said : “For everything.

Results

Conclusion