Transnational lives, cosmopolitan women: Filipina domestic workers and expressive culture in Rome, Italy

With most of its members employed as domestic workers, the Filipino transmigrant community in Rome, Italy, face spatial and temporal restraints on the performance of their expressive culture. Although their labor migration began as one of “temporary” status in the early 1970s, it is now rapidly turning into one of permanent settlement making it the largest Filipino community in Europe. Using ethnographic fieldwork and an experiential approach, this dissertation examines through a transnational framework how labor migration can lead to cultural resettlement in the Filipino diaspora. Through consideration of the enactments and performances of Filipino expressive culture by the mostly female migrant community, I explore the ways they establish locality through sensory experiences, and how social and material remittances enable them to create a sense of Filipino-ness. Transnational practices like balikbayan boxes exhibit the nation-state\u27s attempts for control, but such practices also generate more of an “ethnic” imagination, rather than a national one. With Italy not prepared to deal with its immigrants, Filipinos must scramble to find ways and carve space largely with the help of the Roman Catholic Church. What results is a religiously-defined ethnicity influencing the occurrence of most formal cultural expressions in “sacred space.” How does this affect the performance of more secular cultural productions? A tension stemming from what I call “a dialectic of temporality” impacts both formal and informal cultural expressions. The combination of the Christian ethic of servitude with that of economic servitude has influenced in part certain modes of domination. Although the Church can offer empowerment to some, for others it leads to further subservience in the form of unpaid emotional labor. However, labor migration allows the women to have cosmopolitan experiences via travel and exposure to expressive culture other than their own. The result is that despite the spatial and temporal constraints, the women have some agency to negotiate representations of the self

Transnational lives, cosmopolitan women: Filipina domestic workers and expressive culture in Rome, Italy

With most of its members employed as domestic workers, the Filipino transmigrant community in Rome, Italy, face spatial and temporal restraints on the performance of their expressive culture. Although their labor migration began as one of “temporary” status in the early 1970s, it is now rapidly turning into one of permanent settlement making it the largest Filipino community in Europe. Using ethnographic fieldwork and an experiential approach, this dissertation examines through a transnational framework how labor migration can lead to cultural resettlement in the Filipino diaspora. Through consideration of the enactments and performances of Filipino expressive culture by the mostly female migrant community, I explore the ways they establish locality through sensory experiences, and how social and material remittances enable them to create a sense of Filipino-ness. Transnational practices like balikbayan boxes exhibit the nation-state\u27s attempts for control, but such practices also generate more of an “ethnic” imagination, rather than a national one. With Italy not prepared to deal with its immigrants, Filipinos must scramble to find ways and carve space largely with the help of the Roman Catholic Church. What results is a religiously-defined ethnicity influencing the occurrence of most formal cultural expressions in “sacred space.” How does this affect the performance of more secular cultural productions? A tension stemming from what I call “a dialectic of temporality” impacts both formal and informal cultural expressions. The combination of the Christian ethic of servitude with that of economic servitude has influenced in part certain modes of domination. Although the Church can offer empowerment to some, for others it leads to further subservience in the form of unpaid emotional labor. However, labor migration allows the women to have cosmopolitan experiences via travel and exposure to expressive culture other than their own. The result is that despite the spatial and temporal constraints, the women have some agency to negotiate representations of the self