Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood and Class Relations in a Globalized Age

Abstract

Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood and Class Relations in a Globalized AgeFILOMENO V. AGUILAR JR.Singapore: NUS Press in association with Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2014, xii+293p.The central argument made by Filomeno Aguilar in Migration Revolution is that overseas migration, as it is occurring since 1960s, has brought about important social, cultural, and institutional changes in Philippine society. The migration of Filipinos overseas has become a crucial economic factor because of enormous remittances that they have generated every year. Migration has accordingly reconfigured class structure, transnationalized social relations, and engendered legal and discursive shifts pertaining to migrants' political participation and inclusion in Philippine state. It has also rekindled a sense of nationhood and national identity among migrant Filipinos, contributing to a profound reinterpretation of national narrative. Migration Revolution offers us a thorough examination of these changes and their consequences.Contemporary cross-border migration has enabled Philippine nation to envision itself within a plurality of nations, pushing Philippine state to reorient its foreign policy and redefined boundaries of both citizenship and nation across borders. It has also important emotive implications. The public outcry caused by execution of Flor Contemplacion in 1995, for example, marked not only a traumatic moment pointing at vulnerability of overseas labor migrants, but also produced unprecedented surges in Filipino transnationalism.The book is a collection of essays written by Aguilar over past decade and a half, mostly during his sojourns outside Philippines. He focused on Filipino migrants because the situations described here1) are somehow internal to, albeit not identical with, my own life experiences as one of them (p. 174). An important strength of book-and of Aguilar's scholarship in general-lies in his positionality as an itinerant scholar. Aguilar has generated precious data from his field research among migrant laborers and professionals in Southeast Asia as well as United States throughout his academic career. This research enabled him to draw important comparisons and analyze migrant transnationalism in its various manifestations. The result is an empirically grounded work that has greatly contributed to exploration and discussion of migrant transnationalism, challenging some of findings in academic work on migrant transnationalism that emerged in early 1990s. For instance Aguilar notes that same group of migrants is either considered as reneging on patriotism and thus to nation, or described as newfound transnationalists, thus identifying an academic discourse in South that runs counter to that in North (p. 175).The tensions generated by execution of Contemplacion in Singapore in 1995, where Aguilar was employed at time, led him to study of Philippine labor migration. His empathy for overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) is strongly evident in his writings, and his interest in labor migration from angles of social class and nationhood reveals his concerns for questions of status, belonging, and place as they relate to sentiments of nationhood and shame. In exploring these relationships, Aguilar looks back to nascent nationalism among young ilustrados2) in Europe, drawing an interesting parallel between Jose Rizal's and his comrades' reaction to colonial racism and its shaming of nation-cum-race, and today's sense of shame experienced by educated middle- and upper-class Filipinos for nationality they share with low-status OFWs. Underpinning these sentiments is not merely exasperation over being stereotyped, but also Filipino elite's discontent with having lost control over international image of nation.While labor migrants are being labeled as shameful export (p. …