Deirdre McKay is Senior Lecturer in Geography and Environmental Politics at Keele University.

Global Filipinos

Migrants' Lives in the Virtual Village

By Deirdre McKay

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2012 Deirdre McKay
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00205-1

Contents

Acknowledgments,
On Transliteration,
Introduction: The Parade,
1 * Finding the Village,
2 * Becoming a Global Kind of Woman,
3 * Failing to Progress,
4 * New Territories,
5 * Haunted by Images,
6 * Moving On,
7 * Come What May,
Conclusion: The Virtual Village,
On Affect: A Methodological Note,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Finding the Village

TO FIND A VILLAGE like Haliap, we could locate a dot on a map or a cluster of buildings and fields on Google Earth. We could even use Google to map Haliap's presence in the news or consult platforms such as Facebook or Friendster to chart the social networks of its inhabitants. Yet it would be a mistake to interpret any of these ways of representing the village as evidence that Haliap's migrants depart from some stable, bounded place. Haliap's name labels nodes, networks, and dynamic ties that both represent and elaborate on a complex history of local mobility. We can trace migration back to the founding of the village, itself an act of migrants. Yet this rich history is constantly obscured by the stories people are required to tell themselves about progress: the story they act out through the ethnic parade. Disjunctures between local history and its ritualized performance reveal to villagers that their claims to land, identity, and livelihood are fundamentally insecure. Villagers cope with this insecurity by innovating within a dynamic indigenous tradition and by departing for elsewhere.

Haliap is a particular example of a more general situation in which insecurity produces migration. Insecurity in Haliap is attached to people's indigenous identity, but similar kinds of insecurity affect ordinary people living in rural and urban areas across the Philippines. Even middle-class citizens discover that the law deems them to be living as squatters on the properties of absentee landlords or corporations, find their previously secure titles to land disputed in the courts, or learn that records held in the local land registry have somehow been altered. People in these circumstances are pushed to migrate. They may try to out-argue and out-evidence those who would dispossess them, but they need money to do so. Moving on—either to explore the agrarian frontier, to seek work in the city, or to take up contract work abroad—allows them not only to earn money but also to reinvent themselves. This kind of insecurity is familiar across much of the migrant-sending developing world, but its specifics are always particular to the history of a local place.

Haliap: A Personal History

Haliap on a December day in 2005: I see seventeen wooden houses with galvanized iron rooftops. Garlanded by clothes drying under the eaves, the houses cluster around a T-junction. Most people are inside, avoiding the drizzle. The country's 2000 census tells me that Haliap is home to 914 people in 177 households; the hamlet at the T-junction is a small part of a wider whole. Its houses, several small shop fronts, and a water tank are dwarfed by a wrought-iron gateway reading "Barangay Haliap" that arches across the road. Behind the houses, the damp greenness of forests and fields stretches up to the mountainous horizon on all sides.

Luis and Angelina Dulnuan own one of these houses. They work in Hong Kong, and I am now an old friend, visiting their family home. Luis is his Christian name; friends and family call him Chanag, his native name. Dulnuan, his grandfather's native name, is now the family surname. Luis marched as one of the parade's progressive farmers. He spent some of his childhood in Manila, the national capital, where his father worked as a laborer. During their years in Manila, his family converted from Catholicism to the Philippine Protestant church, the Iglesia ni Cristo (Tagalog: Church of Christ). Despite new church-based networks in Manila, his father could not find a stable livelihood. Luis returned to Haliap with his parents and nine siblings in the middle years of his elementary schooling. The family brought their Iglesia faith back to the village. They continued to follow indigenous Ifugao practices for marriage and inheritance. As the fifth child, Luis did not inherit any land.

Luis's village of Haliap occupies the eastern slopes of the Antipolo valley in the municipality of Asipulo, Ifugao Province. At the 2000 census, the Asipulo municipality had a total population of 13,336 persons in 2,404 households and occupied an area of 11,980 hectares, while the province of Ifugao had 180,815 persons in 36,232 households, with an average household size of 5 persons and a population over age eighteen that was 51.5 percent male. Asipulo lies in the foothills of the Cordillera Central, the mountain chain running parallel to the east coast of Luzon, the largest island of the Philippine archipelago. Its village of Haliap is approximately fourteen hours' travel from Manila. Haliap proper or centro (central) is accessible by jeep via a gravel road. The village's more remote hamlets lack road access and require a hike of an hour or more over rough trails. Settlements are nonnucleated in Ifugao, thus the village is spread out over the landscape. Hamlets are called sitios and are tucked into patches of forest on the slopes, separated by stacks of bench-terraced rice paddies. Haliap is a recent settlement by local standards. While some areas of the Cordillera have been cultivated since 500 ad, terraces in this part of Ifugao date only to the late 1800s, built by people from the lowland plains fleeing Spanish colonial rule. A former place of refuge, Haliap remains remote. It has no telephone landlines. Cell phone service and electricity are recent arrivals. Haliap is the kind of place metropolitan Filipinos call a "far-flung barangay." By dint of its very location, it lacks progress and its inhabitants are thus considered backward yokels.

The green vista beyond the gateway reminds me that Haliap's relationship with the government is a paradox. There really has never been much government here at all. Yet, other than a few government jobs in schools and local offices, there is still not much more formal economic activity other than that I first observed on my initial stay in the village in 1992. Beyond a few small stores and some—mostly visiting—traders in agricultural commodities, there is little evidence of a market. Villagers travel to buy food, goods, and services. They farm for their own subsistence and grow a few cash crops to sell at the weekly regional market—a forty-minute trip by public jeepney (passenger truck) to Ifugao's provincial capital, Lagawe. On a day-to-day basis, people sustain themselves through exchanges with their neighbors.

Passing a familiar shop front, I recall how in 1996 I was sitting with Luis, listening to the radio, when we heard a snippet of opinion floating, without context, between music and news: "The ethnic—tobacco, G-strings, betel nut. Now we have Hope, Levi's, Juicy Fruit—the modern Pinoy [Filipino]. The ethnic is now in the far barrios, never seen here in the center. Fading away ... That is the fate of the ethnic." Luis, sitting beside me on the shop's bench, palpably recoiled. Many of his uncles and cousins were still such ethnic men. They smoked loose tobacco in pipes. They wore traditional...