Review: Giving Back: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving, by L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano

Abstract

Giving Back is a compelling ethnography about the politics of diaspora giving, tying the personal, the family, the community, the state, and the global in a critical stroke of brilliance, empathy, and alternative visions of philanthropy and volunteerism in the lives of Filipinos in America. It presents the “simultaneities of unity and hierarchy, discourse and practice, the global and deeply personal, mobility and rootedness, home and abroad” (p. 22). Mariano elucidates the intersections of race, class, and empire in two phenotypes of Filipinos—overseas Filipino workers (OFW) and immigrants—and their expectations toward the Philippines. Giving Back examines how and why the notion of ‘giving back’ is connected to U.S. and Philippine historic ties, Philippine labor export policy, globalization, and neoliberalism.The introduction positions ‘giving back’ as a “prominent feature of Filipino American identity and communities, [that] is central to the moral economies of Filipino migration, immigration, and diasporic return” (p. 1). With “diaspora giving,” Filipinos in America are “implicated in a complex web of power relationships and conflicting identities” (p. 4). This section concerns the origin of official development programs and how the “imposition of charity was inseparable from empire as a racial project” (p. 12).Chapter 1 demonstrates the relationship between “doing good” and Filipino migration. Using critical perspectives and interviews with Filipino Americans, Mariano questions the “stakes of nationalist and identarian forms of collective identity” (p. 32) between the “ideological positioning” of the Filipino American and the OFW. “Doing good,” Mariano argues, “is channeled by the material, affective, and cultural forces that bring about its conditions” (p. 34). Philanthropy and remittances are attached to differing Filipino overseas phenotypes: the Filipino immigrant and the OFW. Mariano writes that “these forms of doing good correspond to moral valuations of giving that endow Filipino American immigrants with partnership in national economic development, but overseas Filipino labor migrants with obligatory economic duty” (pp. 44–45). The Filipino immigrant is oriented towards volunteerism and doing good to benefit those in the Philippines, while the OFW is under state control with compulsory routes of defining contributions for the good of the Philippines and the global economy.Chapter 2 examines the politics of diaspora giving, the “role of neoliberal privatization of social welfare,” and homeland orientations of Filipino Americans since the 1970s (p. 67). Dominant homeland orientations create varying immigrant subjectivities, as when Filipino Americans participate in philanthropy and social development without concern for transnational injustices. Divesting politics from homeland orientations reduces diaspora giving to a “declaration of love to the homeland” (p. 69). This chapter “counters dominant diasporic temporalities and spatialities,” including “imperial forms and forces in migration” (p. 78).Chapter 3 is a contestation of corporate social responsibility (CSR), examining one of the largest Philippine conglomerates and its influence in diaspora philanthropy. The network of foundations and associations shapes the “collective responsibility to what it means to be Filipino in diaspora” (p. 85), as well as “sites of struggle where dominant discourses of poverty and responsibility can be either secured or contested” (p. 86). Mariano critiques CSR and global capital in diaspora formation. Filipino America is the target of CSR’s “dual commitment to profit and the market” that “limits the nature of giving relationship” (p. 100) by positioning Filipino America as “making a difference in the Philippines” from a personal, apolitical stance. Mariano claims that the “marketization of Filipino America reduces diaspora giving to monetary exchange” (p. 102), noting that the “intermediary foundation that actively isolates society from history and political economy” fosters “global hierarchies that position and construct the Philippines as a premier labor exporter for the world” (p. 104).Chapter 4 shows how diaspora giving “can challenge the hierarchies of power at the intersection of neocolonialism, global capitalism, and developmentalism” (p. 114), for example, how the failed legal challenge by a transnational Filipino American organization to compel the U.S. military to clean up the environmental mess at former military bases led “to solidarity with Filipinos in the Philippines through issues that stem from the Philippine subordinate position in the global order” (pp. 114–15). Subsequent activities and programs created a “more critical Filipino American diaspora giving politics” (p. 127). Mariano argues that “transformative diasporic politics is formed through an identification as Filipino American mediated by critical associations of responsibility, accountability, and mutuality” (p. 129). This chapter provides examples of new articulations of diaspora-giving “connected to relevant issues and related struggles in other spaces” (pp. 128–29).Mariano’s critical examination of the politics of diaspora giving is a must-read for Filipinos and anyone participating in transnational philanthropy. I am and I do. Giving back is more than personal acts of charity, it is intrinsically connected to national and global politics of subject making.