Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Through in-depth interviews and observations, I have begun to explore the meanings and implications of female coming-of-age rituals for the lives and experiences of the immigrant individuals, families, and communities who celebrate them in the United States. In particular, I ask: What can Filipino American debutantes and Mexican American quinceañeras tell us about the individuals, families, and communities who organize and participate in them? And, what can studying quinceañeras and debutantes reveal about how actors can transform “culture”?

This paper-in-progress explores how debutantes and quinceañeras are sites for the production of multiple and intersecting identities, including gender, race and ethnicity, class, and age, and can therefore help us better understand immigrants, the fastest growing proportion of the US population; as well as the processes by which by which we are shaped into gendered, racialized, socioeconomic, and national beings; and/ or how we might be able to change the conditions that disadvantage certain beings over others.

Preliminary findings discussed include debutantes and quinceañeras as immigrant strategies for trying to survive and transcend “multiple liminalities,” and experiences of limited economic and social mobility. Also discussed is the hypothesis that quinceañeras and debutantes are methods of culturally socializing younger generations, especially young women.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: With the case of Filipina international marriage migrants in South Korea, this paper show how the women’s motherhood is integral to constructing their citizen-subject status, yet the construction of Filipinas’ maternal citizenship does not guarantee their full citizenship. International marriage migration which is to cross borders to create family involves unique circumstances different from labor migration or family migration, yet this phenomenon has not comprehensively studied. Primarily with the phenomenon of “mail-order” marriages, literatures on international marriage migration have been focusing on its relation to human trafficking, women’s economic motivation, and the issues related to legal citizenship. However, a growing scale of international marriage migration, especially intra-regional migration in Asia, has been transforming ethnoscape in many destination countries, and their governments have taken actions different from those for other labor migrants. Based on Foucault’s idea of “technologies of government,” I will show how individual marriage migrants as well as Korean families, communities as well as the state actively participate in constructing a citizenship status for international marriage migrants through motherhood – maternal citizenship. However, this process of constructing Korean citizenship through mothering calls for questioning the intersection of gender and race/ethnicity vis-à-vis maternal citizenship as it is challenging for international marriage migrants to achieve both maternal and cultural citizenship in a patriarchal state of South Korea.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: No abstract available at this time.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: My presentation addresses the applicability to the situation of migrant Filipina hostesses in Japan of the top to bottom solution of “rescue, rehabilitation, and reintegration” that the U.S. universally imposes in its anti-trafficking campaign. My discussion is based on 62 in-depth interviews that I conducted with migrant hostesses in Japan as well as participant observation gathered from working for three months as a hostess in a Philippine pub in Tokyo. In my discussion, I establish that Filipina migrant contract workers in Japan are trafficked (but not for the same reason cited by the U.S. Department of State.) Then, I illustrate that the universal solution that the U.S. bullies other governments (by ranking in the Trafficking in Persons Report) and funds local organizations to implement ironically increases the likelihood of migrant Filipina hostesses of being trafficked. In my presentation, I call attention to the hegemony of the U.S. anti-trafficking campaign over trafficking as a political issue so as to reclaim the use of the term “trafficked” and rid it of its political stigma and association with the hegemonic campaign of “rescue” posed by the government of the United States. In so doing, I call attention to our need to reject the universal top to bottom solution imposed by the United States to combat all forms of trafficking and our need to develop multiple strategies and action plans to fight trafficking in the twenty-first century.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The Philippine’s ongoing labor export policy since the early 1970s has resulted in one of the largest national outflow of skilled labor and service workers and in the proliferation of gendered Filipino diasporic and migrant communities around the world. Poverty and very few economic opportunities in the Philippines explain a significant portion of this outflow. The labor export policy thus creates a structural opening for many to seek livelihood outside the Philippines. The government fosters this policy so that temporary migrant workers and immigrants settlers send remittances back to the Philippines, bolstering the national economy. Since the 1980s, Filipino migration globally exhibits significant gender differences in job recruitment and social network ties.
However, since September 11, 2001, the United States and several countries with sizable Filipina and Filipino migrants have passed legislations and enacted policies that dramatically target Filipina and Filipino migrants for mass deportation and removal. This study examines, in particular, post-9/11 governmental activities to start and implement the mass removals of Filipinas and Filipinos in Malaysia, Italy, and the United States.
The study argues that their forced returned migration is becoming an emerging transnational gendered regime of labor regulation within neoliberalism and global militarism since 2001. It finds that forced returned migration is becoming an emerging gendered pattern for Filipinos transnationally since the late 1990s. It highlights the general issues of work, belonging, and removal faced by these potential deportees and how they forge new racial-ethnic, diasporic identifications, and transnational meanings of migrancy and residency.