Home and The Filipino Channel: Stabilizing Economic Security, Migration Patterns, and Diaspora through New Technologies

• In Event: 479 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 05. Migration

Abstract

In recent years, scholars from various disciplines have interrogated what circumscribes the concept of “home” (see, for example, Barros (2008; Cieraad (2010). Because of my own research on transnational movements of various peoples and images between the Philippines and other places in the world, particularly, the United States (for which they once served as a colony), I have been increasingly pushed towards asking that key question: What does it mean to be “home”?
Drawing on Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed, Foucault’s ideas of what it means to be “free”; and, Reagon’s (1983) musings and warnings the difficulties of feeling “home” in this house that race, gender, class and colonization built, I ask how it is possible for those of us who have been negatively impacted, but have simultaneously greatly benefitted, from these various oppressions to feel home, anywhere. Specifically, I illustrate the role of new technologies, particularly The Filipino Channel, in maintaining the Philippines’ economic security via brokering Filipino labor by defining and redefining our notions of “home.”
Although many who have experienced various intersections of power have reflected and engaged in discussions about “home,” I focus, more specifically on members of diasporas of present or former colonies whose countries are still deeply dependent on the countries that colonized them. Whether Puerto Ricans in the US, Algerians in France, or Filipinos in the US, our notions of “home,” our positions, and ourselves reflect our past and present social, political, economic, and cultural relationships with this (technically, former) colonial power.

Author

• Emily Noelle Ignacio, University of Washington-Tacoma