Refashioning Commodities: Women and the Sourcing of Secondhand Clothing in the Philippines

Abstract

With Asian Spirit's regular flights to Baguio City starting on October 25 [2002], pine-scented breezes, strawberry jam and even ukay-ukay adventures are just a flight away (Asian Spirit Airlines, 2002).Among teeners, the wagwag [secondhand clothing] craze is called WW.COM to give it a more Internet-like sound. Cell phone texters call it WAG2 (Sanidad, 2001: 4).Just check out the new wagwag line displayed at the city's first rummage festival last week: a checkered Prada Scots suit, a pair of conservative Gias Italia footwear, a body-fit dark blue Versace blouse.... The wagwag industry has blossomed into Baguio's official tourist attraction.... (Cabreza, 2001b: B1)Popular media releases like these, now common throughout the northern Philippines, highlight how traders and consumers have transformed the West's secondhand clothing into innovative and alternative practices in dress and work. Since the mid-1990s, the export of used clothing from North America and northwestern Europe to developing regions has increased dramatically. The southern flow of this commodity is not simply another marker of passive incorporation into a northern-dominated global capitalist system, but rather a process that traders and consumers have exploited to fashion personal statements of identity and new livelihood opportunities. Ukay-ukay (to dig) or wagwag (to shake and sell) are terms that graphically describe how people in the northern Philippines choose pieces of secondhand clothing from boxes and bales that are imported in ever-increasing volume and sold in shops and open markets throughout the region (see also Hansen, 2000b: 2). The brisk sales of these goods epitomize how people move a globally traded commodity across diverse cultural spaces and practices, shaping and redefining its meaning and value in each site along its trajectory.Following the players who enable such commodity flows, this paper argues that Philippine traders and consumers in the northern Cordillera provinces use secondhand clothing to reconfigure work and identity by incorporating cultural practices into a global economic trade marginal to state influence. As women are the primary family caregivers and work as the region's foremost ukay-ukay traders, I focus particularly on women's multiple activities in this emerging sector. Consumers, for example, selectively choose secondhand garments, tailoring them and combining pieces with new locally manufactured clothing, to fulfill their families' needs. Female traders in secondhand clothing build on their history in local and regional informal sector vending to engage in ukay-ukay at different levels of business-from part-time sales and trade to full-time work. Those who engage in trade full time (wholesale and retail) are the more successful ukay-ukay dealers and invest substantial capital in goods and in national, as well as international real estate (e.g., in Hong Kong) to secure the warehouse facilities they require for their growing businesses. Their forays into such transnational investments and activities distinguish them from female entrepreneurs in other locales who also use such cross-border trade to increase income. In the latter case, however, such as that outlined by Carla Freeman (2001) for contemporary Caribbean higglers, (female market intermediaries) women's earnings from such international trade tend to supplement their low formal-sector wages but do not involve investing capital and employing workers internationally or making the leap from part-time to full-time cross-border work.To understand how women in the Philippine Cordillera transform the international flow of secondhand clothing, I draw on recent scholarship that adopts a gendered window through which to analyze such global processes (e.g., Freeman, 2001). Seeing women's engagement in ukay-ukay, as instrumental in determining the character of the global movement of goods, (not as a result of them), introduces alternative renderings of the relationship between gender and globalization (Freeman, 2001: 1012). …