Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work (review)

Constable, Nicole.

Journal of Asian American Studies, Volume 5, Number 1, February 2002, pp. 83-86 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/jaas.2002.0001

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consider the impossibly contradictory place of Taiwanese and Korean soldiers who fought for the Japanese Imperial army and were treated by the allies as enemy soldiers, but systematically stripped of citizenship and benefits by Japan following the war. George Lipsitz considers the ideological and rhetorical identification with Japan voiced by many African Americans during World War II. All of these are singular cases in one respect, but together form an important reminder of the ways in which individuals and groups of people can fall or leap outside the historicizing narratives of nationalism. Women are systemically excluded from virtually all nationalist memories of war. The volume concludes with Chungmoo Chois essay on the activist and artistic responses to the silenced suffering of the Korean comfort women, symbolically insisting that in the end it is the memory of womens particular place in war which must be remembered if the past is to be changed. There are many stunning essays included here which I have not even mentioned and which will no doubt be widely circulated and reprinted individually. But the radical strength of the volume is in the breadth of its reach as a whole, which challenges us to rethink what we already think we know about the Asian Pacific Wars of 19311941.
katherine kinney

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE

Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. By Rhacel

Salazar Parrenas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Servants of Globalization is an ambitious, important, and broad-reaching study of the way in which the lives of Filipina domestic workers in Italy and the United States are affected by and interwoven with broader patterns of global capitalism and transnationalism. Contributing to a growing literature on gendered migration and the Filipino diaspora, Rhacel Salazar Parrenas approaches the topic from three levels of analysis: (1) a macro level that considers how labor migration and gender are linked to global capitalism, (2) an intermediate level that focuses on the constitution of particular migration flows and the institutions of migration, and (3) a micro level that considers the way in which subject positions entail various dislocations, and subjects simultaneously resist and reinscribe existing power structures. Based primarily on in-depth interviews and popular literature by and for Filipina domestic workers, this cross-national, comparative study reveals what Parrenas considers surprising similarities in the parallel lives of domestic workers, given the differences between the U.S. and Italian contexts of reception.

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Italy and the United States are two of the most desirable and high-paying destinations for Filipino domestic workers, yet their demographics and government policies differ significantly. Filipino laborers, who began arriving in Los Angeles during the 1920s, now constitute the second largest Asian American group in the United States, with their numbers exceeding 1.4 million nationwide and over 200,000 in Los Angeles county alone by the early 1990s. Filipino migration to Italy is more recent and smaller in scale. Filipinos only became visible in Italy in the 1980s, but by the mid-1990s there were over 200,000 Filipinos, almost half of whom resided in Rome. In contrast to the United States, where Filipinos occupy diverse positions in the labor market ranging from large numbers of skilled professionals to those in low/semi-skilled occupations, the Filipino population in Italy is almost exclusively women domestic workers (whose work includes house cleaning, child care and elderly care) working alongside women immigrants from Peru, Cape Verde and elsewhere. Government policies also differ. Like most Filipino immigrants to the United States, the domestic workers that Parrenas encountered in Los Angeles mostly emigrated through legal channels, and qualified for permanent residency and eventually citizenship. Stricter labor importation policies in Italy recently increased the number of Filipinos who enter through illegal channels, yet once employed they qualify for seven-year (renewable) work permits but not for citizenship or permanent residency. Parrenas argues that domestic workers share four important experiences of dislocation as a result of their shared experience as low-wage laborers in global capitalism. These include (1) quasi-citizenship, (2) transnational households, (3) contradictory class mobility, and (4) alienation within the migrant community. Regarding quasi-citizenship Parrenas argues that domestic workers are not wholly citizens of the sending or receiving nation. Because the Philippine government lacks the power to protect its nationals, official and unofficial policies of the host communities often prevent the full incorporation of domestic workers as citizens. Racism and other factors in the host society in turn promote among the domestic workers the sense of the Philippines as their real home, which prevents them from claiming full membership or rights in receiving states, deters them from establishing localized families, and in turn increases the demand on their low wage labor. Parrenas chapters on the gendered international division of reproductive labor, and the dislocation of transnational families, are perhaps her most important and unique contributions. She asks how gender stratification interlocks with other systems of inequality to determine the causes of womens migration

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and argues that migration is a movement away from one distinct patriarchal system to another, bound by race and class, in transnational capitalism (78). While privileged women purchase the reproductive labor of Filipinas, Filipinas in turn purchase or utilize the reproductive labor of poorer women in the Philippines and dream of the time when they will have saved enough capital to return home and enjoy household servants of their own. In addition to her poignant discussion of the pain of separation from the viewpoint of mothers and their children, Parrenas sensitively depicts the way in which the commodification of caretaking reduces family ties to commodity-based relationships, in which love is expressed through a flow of gifts and remittances. The winners in this situation are not the families in the Philippines who receive material gains, but the families that benefit from the displaced reproductive labor of foreign workers, and the host societies which are freed of the reproductive costs of a large segment of their productive labor force (250). Contradictory class mobility and dislocation result from the simultaneous increase in financial status and decrease in social status as educated, middle class Filipinas become domestic workers in other parts of the world. As Parrenas argues workers neither passively acquiesce to the disciplining mechanisms of employers nor do they internalize the pain inflicted by contradictory class mobility (195). They manipulate meanings and threaten the authority of their employers, but not to the extent of questioning the subservience of domestic workers (196). Domestic workers also experience dislocation and alienation within the migrant community, although this takes a different form in Rome and Los Angeles. In both locations, Parrenas argues that domestic workers encounter support and solidarity, and experience alienation and anomie, but in Rome they are primarily alienated from the wider Italian community, whereas in Los Angeles they experience alienation in relation to the wider Filipino community. In Rome, we are introduced to a rich array of social practices, economic competition, and pockets of gathering (204). The description of the Los Angeles community, in contrast, lacks similar depth, perhaps because of its dispersal and diversity. Parrenas shows how domestic workers view themselves as alienated from the wider Filipino community, but she does not consider how middle class Filipinos might promote divisions within the ethnic community regardless of their claims to the contrary. Servants of Globalization successfully combines macro and micro approaches to create a provocative, insightful, and moving study of gendered labor migration and globalization. For those with an interest in Asian American studies, this book provides less of a case study of Filipinos in Los Angeles than a wider challenge

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and an innovative theoretical framework for understanding immigrant communities within the context of transnationalism and global capitalism.
nicole constable

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond. By Rob Wilson. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

A few years ago, as I was sitting in the Honolulu International Airport waiting for my flight back to Michigan, I heard another personclearly a touristmake the following comment: Honolulu is like New York City in the middle of the ocean. If you want to see the real Hawaii you need to go to the neighbor islands. As someone born and raised in Honolulu, I was slightly put off by the remark and even contemplated a response: What do you mean the real Hawaii? Of course it became clear that what this person imagined as Hawaii and what I did were competing ideological expressions of what we understood the function of Hawaii to be: for him it needed to fulfill a Mainland American expectation of idyllic paradise ostensibly free from the ever-increasing forces of global capitalism (as represented by New York City); for me Hawaii has been a place that has always had to grapple with complicated global and local pressures, trying to manage a fragile economy (once built on plantations; now dependent on tourism and the U.S. military) while also contending with issues of identity for its diverse residents as well as for the state (or Nation for Native Hawaiians) in its relations with the rest of the U.S. and the world. A type of schizophrenia, perhaps ambivalence and/ or anxiety, becomes the state of things as a place like Hawaii must deal with the rest of the world. Rob Wilsons Reimagining the American Pacific takes on this complicated task of unpacking the many ideological projects that construct Hawaii and the Pacific, from nineteenth century and early twentieth century American literary tourism to late twentieth century transnational multimedia to the specific local literary and cultural movements in Hawaii represented by Bamboo Ridge Press and a variety of local writers. In the Preface, Wilson defines his study as an attempt to understand these localist drives and place-based orientations as part of a complex Pacific and American affiliation that does not fully fit the Eurocentric and/or exceptional model of American studies as it is now obligated and (as field imaginary) installed (ix). This strikes me as analogous to the place of Hawaii in Asian Pacific American Studies where it serves as a model for