Idaho to Apra: Filipino Migrant Labor and the U.S. Military’s Sea of Bases

• In Event: Global Capitalism, Migrations, and the Creation of the "Asia"/"Pacific World": 1850-1970

Abstract

The paper examines the mass migration of Filipino laborers to Guam beginning in the late 1940s, revealing one way that the remobilization of the U.S. military in the Pacific altered the geography of Philippine and Pacific Islander labor. A shared history of Spanish, American, and Japanese colonization connected the Philippine archipelago to Guam; travel between the two sites originated centuries prior to the post-WWII influx of Filipino migrant labor. Even though travel routes between the islands predated the postwar era, the hundreds of billions of dollars that flooded the region as U.S. military projects expanded in the post-war Pacific produced new and accelerated circulations of labor and capital.

Private construction companies, eager to earn profit off of government contracts, rushed into the region, offering a range of services for nearly every possible task, from laundering services to laying drainage pipes. The ability to profit from military spending demanded highly mobile corporations with institutional and bureaucratic structures flexible and coordinated enough to stretch across thousands of miles. These new routes of labor and capital and labor linked the breakwaters of Guam’s Apra Harbor to the offices of Morrison-Knudsen in Boise, Idaho, J.H. Pomeroy in San Francisco, and Brown & Root in Texas. Yet, while the accumulation of capital required the free flow of capital into and out of Pacific islands, the ability for private contractors to profit relied upon procuring an inexpensive labor force whose mobility corporations could both make possible, but also limit.

Author

• Colleen Woods, University of Maryland