Part and Parcel: State Dreams and the Excesses of Home in the Pilipinx Balikbayan Box

The balikbayan box is a large cardboard box sent by Pilipinx migrants back to the homeland. Tax-free, duty-free, with no weight limit, the box is packed with everyday items, from clothes, toiletries, appliances, to, of course, the ubiquitous canned meats. While it is sent on the premise of economy and pragmatism, that logic quickly falls apart as the contents are often available locally and sometimes even criticized for their useless contents. The question of the practice turns from simply “why not send money” to what does sending a variety of objects do that sending only money could not? And so the balikbayan box emerges out of the ethos of migration fostered by the labor brokerage state of the Philippines that seeks to market out the labor of its population. In its form as a box full of seemingly valueless items, it is a critique of global capitalism, but is simultaneously imbued with the consumerist culture it seeks to devalue because of the economic aspirations that the ethos of migration inspires. It captures dreams that run beyond and through capitalism and seek imported commodities, but denies consumerism its valence by forming worth out of the wrong items, accumulating the objects that are supposed to be discarded. Instead, it values the priceless affect of home and family expressed through its waste. Footnotes in this project are also vignettes from the author’s memory, weaving the affect and excesses of the personal into the text, just as the box seeks to capture home

\u3ci\u3eDrosophila\u3c/i\u3e Muller F Elements Maintain a Distinct Set of Genomic Properties Over 40 Million Years of Evolution

The Muller F element (4.2 Mb, ~80 protein-coding genes) is an unusual autosome of Drosophila melanogaster; it is mostly heterochromatic with a low recombination rate. To investigate how these properties impact the evolution of repeats and genes, we manually improved the sequence and annotated the genes on the D. erecta, D. mojavensis, and D. grimshawi F elements and euchromatic domains from the Muller D element. We find that F elements have greater transposon density (25–50%) than euchromatic reference regions (3–11%). Among the F elements, D. grimshawi has the lowest transposon density (particularly DINE-1: 2% vs. 11–27%). F element genes have larger coding spans, more coding exons, larger introns, and lower codon bias. Comparison of the Effective Number of Codons with the Codon Adaptation Index shows that, in contrast to the other species, codon bias in D. grimshawi F element genes can be attributed primarily to selection instead of mutational biases, suggesting that density and types of transposons affect the degree of local heterochromatin formation. F element genes have lower estimated DNA melting temperatures than D element genes, potentially facilitating transcription through heterochromatin. Most F element genes (~90%) have remained on that element, but the F element has smaller syntenic blocks than genome averages (3.4–3.6 vs. 8.4–8.8 genes per block), indicating greater rates of inversion despite lower rates of recombination. Overall, the F element has maintained characteristics that are distinct from other autosomes in the Drosophila lineage, illuminating the constraints imposed by a heterochromatic milieu