Why did the little brown brother become a maid? To get to the other side. No, seriously. The migration of too many Filipino men who could travel with fewer restrictions (given the colonial relationship with the United States) was among the reasons motivating the United States to grant Philippine independence after World War II; in the following decades, the proliferation of nurses, maids, and other domestic workers signaled the political and economic strategies of the postcolonial nation.[1] Independence and national borders did not mean the Philippines would focus on developing a solid infrastructure—not when development initiatives from the west coupled with political corruption at the state level (and not only from Ferdinand Marcos) ensured a neocolonial dependence on importing goods and exporting workers.

Today, the numbers are staggering. Roughly one-tenth of the adult population of the Philippines works overseas, contributing somewhere around one-tenth ($20B and growing) of GDP. These are not immigrants who leave one country to settle elsewhere, but workers whose families remain in the Philippines awaiting economic remittances and text messages from their family members working abroad. About sixty percent of these workers are women; in places like Italy and Israel, the term “Filipina” is nearly synonymous with maid or caregiver.[2] Filipinas are preferred for their feminine and maternal characteristics, which are supposed to have eroded with the rise of modern, western feminisms but which have survived in the narratives and practices used to manage the traditional, global south.

While such Orientalist myths—namely that Filipinas are naturally hospitable, docile, and traditional—appear to explain why they figure prominently in overseas domestic work, scholars including Robyn Magalit Rodriguez and Anna Romina Guevarra demonstrate to what extent workers are trained by the nation-state in their subordination.[3] Training sessions routinely involve discussions about the lack of virtue among Filipinas: not only must Filipinas hide or transform their lack of virtue so that when they go abroad they do not encourage sexual violence, they must also represent the Philippines as informal ambassadors for the nation. At once, they are reminded that their actions determine whether they will experience sexual violence and that the Philippines has no jurisdiction to provide any legal protections for them. At once, they are expected to do more diplomatic work for the nation while the nation withdraws any efforts to work on their behalf (by providing legal recourse, formal and informal channels of support, etc.).

Meanwhile, at home, there is widespread fear that the Philippines and its motherless children are falling into dysfunction. Allegedly, the nation has been abandoned. Filipinas become bad mothers at home in order to become good mothers abroad, whose value as laborers comes precisely because of the essential maternal goodness attributed to them.[4] Apparently, Filipina motherhood is a zero-sum economy. Overseas Filipinas span the entire range of possibilities, from normal to abnormal, cherished to scapegoat, hero to villain, natural to disciplined. They can be abnormal subjects in need of disciplinary training; subjects whose traditional normativity facilitates the nation’s economic dependency on global capital; and subjects whose traditional normative influence on the family is disrupted by global capital, rendering the Philippine family abnormal.

But insofar as power is never totalizing, one can discern the seams that threaten to come undone at any moment, exposing the global and national management of workers’ identities—identities such as “Filipina” and “woman of color”—that are crucial factors conditioning their labor. We can witness these seams, for instance, in the online video resumés presenting these workers to prospective employers and unintended audiences like you and me. In a YouTube video that lasts all of forty-one seconds, Mylyn Jacobo introduces herself, in English, as “twenty-four years old, single.”[5] The lighting is dim, the wall behind her bare. She doesn't sit close to the lens; indeed, she doesn't look like she's sitting at all. She wears a pink parka with a green knit scarf. Her hair is pulled back. She continues talking about very intimate issues: “I was born on May 24, 1986. My place of origin is in Davao City, Philippines.”

When I show this video in class, most of my students are astounded by her age—not because she doesn't look young, but because she confirms just how young she is, making them realize both how similar to and different from her they are. They note the matter-of-fact attitude she uses to present herself. If you pause the video, it looks just like a passport photo, with the white wall behind her only tinted by the poor lighting of the room. It looks as if she had an appointment, arrived on a cold day, saw no reason to remove her outer clothing for the brief meeting, filmed her video, then left. Maybe another potential worker arrived for the same process, over and over again. Similar to how passports provide a means of verifying one’s identity, enabling her to cross the national borders that structure our world, these videos provide a measure of security and verification for prospective employers—all the while helping unintended audiences learn about instabilities and vulnerabilities in these narratives.     

Jacobo continues, “I work in Hong Kong, as a domestic helper. My duties are cooking, gardening, car-washing, cleaning and ironing,” concrete facts that are followed by more details about her personality, commingling labor and intimacy: “I am trustworthy, honest, patient … and hardworking. Currently, I am looking for a job. I hope you choose me as your helper. Thank you.”[6] These videos are all hosted by a single account, an employment agency in Hong Kong that specializes in managing overseas domestic workers, especially from the Philippines, sending them to metropoles all over the world (Rome, London, Los Angeles, Singapore, etc.).[7] Other agencies will likely follow, or find other ways to use technology. Since the primary objective of many of these workers is to work in someone’s private home, giving a sense of what it would be like to live with them is a reasonable, and indeed smart, strategy. It aims to provide assurances that she will not be a nuisance to the family, that she is homely and reliable, family-oriented and friendly, English-speaking and versatile around the home. The intimacy of the labor appears to justify the details that are otherwise reserved for narratives of romantic intimacy.[8]

But as anyone who has ever sought attention from another, whether for romance or employment, knows, the best foot that one puts forward is often a prosthetic fetish that we hope will last long enough to fulfill our short- or long-term objectives. We preen and pose for the world, seeking approval and acceptance, all the while knowing that we are something other than what we are showing, or at least that there are other aspects that will be revealed. They—the prospective lovers or bosses—know it, too, which helps explain the face-to-face interview or date, or when that isn’t possible, the video resumé. If the written word can hide much more than the spoken, real-time one (or so we are led to believe) then video resumés provide more credibility, allowing the viewer to judge her sincerity and authenticity far better than the text, always subject to the uncertainty of fiction, would allow.

Jacobo’s video centers her head and shoulders in the camera lens. The video is supposed to produce a reality effect whereby the prospective employer can confirm that she is who she says she is, that she is speaking authentically and sincerely, that she is trustworthy and compliant—everything a Filipina is supposed to be. But in moving time, the camera cannot help but record her repeated glances off-screen. Some students notice that you can see Jacobo’s eyes move left to right, slightly downward, then left to right again behind or adjacent to the camera. After all, she is reading a script, checking for cues. Her looking aside underscores that there is nothing natural about her suitability for domestic work. She is participating in the production of her labor, strategically using the interplay among language, body, and technology to find a job and in doing so revealing its artfulness.

It is a mise-en-scene: All the world’s a stage of Filipina labor. Anyway, there are always multiple scripts at work. There is not only the script that may sit behind the camera aiding the speaker. There is also the script that recruits and conditions her subjectivity as an overseas worker. There is the script that hails her as a gendered subject for the heteropatriarchal needs of the Philippine family as it has been organized under the auspices of colonialism, nationalism, and global capitalism. There is the script that inscribes her subjectivity as a Filipina in the early twenty-first century.

Most importantly, there is the script that works against all other scripts—call it a post-script, for this essay and for globalization and nationalism. It is the script for unintended audiences like you and me, and for unintended authors like Jacobo, the script no one writes or reads but that flares up to conjure alternative narratives of life, gender, and labor. The task of formulating a critical response is not only to document the dominant scripts whose power obtains from their invisibility. It also means accessing the unofficial, handwritten manuscripts whose governance is more powerful than we think. It means, at the very least, attending to questions of the imagination as part and parcel of the social and political. Rather than adhering steadfastly to the distinction between fact and fiction which still organizes even online booksellers—an unequal distinction that subordinates the imagination as the stuff of leisure and entertainment, but not knowledge and power—creative and unintended readings inspire us to better interrogate the world we live in.

The ethics of misreading sustains the possibilities and opportunities of which we are in dire need. Part of the problem then, is our own failures to bear witness to scriptural excess and lost gospels. We have been trained to read the script of overseas Filipinas in a way that masks our role as readers and forestalls critical readings. We aren't seeing Mylyn Jacobo in the YouTube video; we see our projections and don't realize it. But we aren't innocent bystanders to globalization. As Neferti Tadiar writes,

Scholars like myself write about the suffering, exploitation, and oppression experienced by Filipinas at the expense of ignoring the other ways in which their going is also a dreaming of other worlds. Sometimes their actions comprise a dreaming in other ways that we fail to co-imagine, a calling that we fail to hear or follow, a beckoning we fail to recognize because we ourselves are trapped by fantasy-ideals of critically-conscious, sovereign subject-agents of heroic resistance and change.[9]

The work never ends, theirs and ours.