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
For additional information about this article
Access provided by Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana (25 Apr 2013 15:05 GMT)
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jaas/summary/v005/5.1constable.html
REVIEWS 83
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.
84 JAAS 5:1
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
REVIEWS 85
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
86 JAAS 5:1
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