Neoliberalizing Spaces In The Philippines

"Based on years of field research, this study examines the construction of urban and suburban space in the Philippines since a recent housing boom caused by an influx of wealth from returning Filipino migrants. It analyzes various developments, such as the rise of gated suburban communities and their effects on marginalized populations"--

Amidst the recent global financial crisis and housing busts in various countries, the Philippines’ booming housing industry has been heralded as “Southeast Asia’s hottest real estate hub” and the saving grace of a supposedly resilient Philippine economy. This growth has been fueled by demand from balikbayan (returnee) Overseas Filipinos and has facilitated the rise of gated suburban communities in Manila’s sprawling peri-urban fringe. But as the “Filipino dreams” of successful balikbayans are built inside these new gated residential developments, the lives of marginalized populations living in these spaces have been upended and thrown into turmoil as they face threats of expulsion. Based on almost four years of research, this book examines the tumultuous geographies of neoliberalization that link suburbanization, transnational mobilities, and accumulation by dispossession. Through an accounting of real estate and new suburban landscapes, it tells of a Filipino transnationalism that engenders a market-based and privatized suburban political economy that reworks socio-spatial relations and class dynamics. In presenting the literal and discursive transformations of spaces in Manila’s peri-urban fringe, the book details life inside new gated suburban communities and discusses the everyday geographies of “privileged” new property owners—mainly comprised of balikbayan families—and exposes the contradictions of gated suburban life, from resistance to Home Owner Association rules to alienating feelings of loss. It also reveals the darker side of the property boom by mapping the volatile spaces of the Philippines’ surplus populations comprised of the landless farmers, informal settler residents, and indigenous peoples. To make way for gated communities and other profitable developments in the peri-urban region, marginalized residents are systematically dispossessed and displaced while concomitantly offered relocation to isolated socialized housing projects, the last frontier for real estate accumulation. These compelling accounts illustrate how the territorial embeddedness of neoliberalization in the Philippines entails the consolidation of capital by political-economic elites and privatization of residential space for an idealized transnational property clientele. More than ever, as the Philippines is being reshaped by diaspora and accumulation by dispossession, the contemporary moment is a critical time to reflect on what it truly means to be a nation.

The Filipino Migration Experience introduces a new dimension to the usual depiction of migrants as disenfranchised workers or marginal ethnic groups. Mina Roces suggests alternative ways of conceptualizing Filipino migrantsas critics of the family and cultural constructions of sexuality, as consumers and investors, as philanthropists, as activists, and, as historians. They have been able to transform fundamental social institutions and well-entrenched traditional norms, as well as alter the business, economic and cultural landscapes of both the homeland and the host countries to which they have migrated. Mina Roces tells the story of the Filipino migration experience from the perspective of the migrants themselves, tapping into hitherto underused primary sources from the "migrant archives" and more than 70 interviews. Bringing the fields of Filipino migration studies and Filipina/o/x American studies together, this book analyzes some of the areas where Filipino migrants have forever changed the status quo.

The contributors to this volume examine the actual workings and on-the-ground effects of contemporary political economic shifts in the Global South, and implications for reconfiguring social networks, conceptions and practices of governance, and burgeoning social movements. How do various groups in the Global South respond to and manage chronic states of insecurity and precarity concomitant with contemporary globalization processes? While drawing on diverse ethnographic viewpoints in the Philippines, the authors analyze the impact of these processes through the conceptual framework of "emergent sociality," a purported connectedness among individuals fostered through interactions, copresence, and conviviality within a community over a long duration. In so doing, the case studies in this volume suggest, illuminate, and debate insecurities that may be commonly shared among populations in the Philippines and throughout the Global South. This anthology will be of great interest to students and scholars of cultural anthropology, globalization and Philippines society.

“The people” famously ousted Ferdinand Marcos from power in the Philippines in 1986. After democratization, though, a fault line appeared that split the people into citizens and the masses. The former were members of the middle class who engaged in civic action against the restored elite-dominated democracy, and viewed themselves as moral citizens in contrast with the masses, who were poor, engaged in illicit activities and backed flawed leaders. The masses supported emerging populist counter-elites who promised to combat inequality, and saw themselves as morally upright in contrast to the arrogant and oppressive actions of the wealthy in arrogating resources to themselves. In 2001, the middle class toppled the populist president Joseph Estrada through an extra-constitutional movement that the masses denounced as illegitimate. Fearing a populist uprising, the middle class supported action against informal settlements and street vendors, and violent clashes erupted between state forces and the poor. Although solidarity of the people re-emerged in opposition to the corrupt presidency of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and propelled Benigno Aquino III to victory in 2010, inequality and elite rule continue to bedevil Philippine society. Each group considers the other as a threat to democracy, and the prevailing moral antagonism makes it difficult to overcome structural causes of inequality.

Providing a critical overview of transnationalism as a concept, this Handbook looks at its growing influence in an era of high-speed, globalised interconnectivity. It offers crucial insights on how approaches to transnationalism have altered how we think about social life from the family to the nation-state, whilst also challenging the predominance of methodologically nationalist analyses.

Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics explores the notoriously brutal Philippine war on drugs from below. Steffen Bo Jensen and Karl Hapal examine how the war on drugs folded itself into communal and intimate spheres in one Manila neighborhood, Bagong Silang. Police killings have been regular occurrences since the birth of Bagong Silang. Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics shows that although the drug war was introduced from the outside, it fit into and perpetuated already existing gendered and generational structures. In Bagong Silang, the war on drugs implicated local structures of authority, including a justice system that had always been deeply integrated into communal relations. The ways in which the war on drugs transformed these intimate relations between the state and its citizens, and between neighbors, may turn out to be the most lasting impact of Duterte's infamously violent policies.

In Migrant Returns Eric J. Pido examines the complicated relationship among the Philippine economy, Manila’s urban development, and balikbayans—Filipino migrants visiting or returning to their homeland—to reconceptualize migration as a process of connectivity. Focusing on the experiences of balikbayans returning to Manila from California, Pido shows how Philippine economic and labor policies have created an economy reliant upon property speculation, financial remittances, and the affective labor of Filipinos living abroad. As the initial generation of post-1965 Filipino migrants begin to age, they are encouraged to retire in their homeland through various state-sponsored incentives. Yet, once they arrive, balikbayans often find themselves in the paradoxical position of being neither foreign nor local. They must reconcile their memories of their Filipino upbringing with American conceptions of security, sociality, modernity, and class as their homecoming comes into collision with the Philippines’ deep economic and social inequality. Tracing the complexity of balikbayan migration, Pido shows that rather than being a unidirectional event marking the end of a journey, migration is a multidirectional and continuous process that results in ambivalence, anxiety, relief, and difficulty.

Seki presents an ethnography of uncertainty and precarity experienced by people in urban, rural, and transnational, communities in the Philippines as a case study of social protection without the possibility of a robust welfare state. He deals with topics including urban poverty, environmental degradation, and transnational migration. Throughout these chapters, Seki elaborates on the modes of security and protection that people living at the margins of global capitalism create through mobilizing their sociality and networks. He traces the emerging configuration of "the social," a collectivity and connectedness that ensures a sense of security in life among people. The social can be defined as an idea or institution, which had enabled formal and impersonal solidarity such as that which provided the underpinnings of the modern welfare states of the West during the mid-20th century. In the twenty-first century the social in this context is experiencing a fundamental reconfiguration as it faces deepening insecurity, risk, and the precariousness of the post-Welfare State or post-Fordist regime. What are the contours of the social emerging in an "unlikely place" of the Philippines amid contemporary insecurity and precariousness? A vital resource for scholars of the Philippines, and of anthropology and social policy in the Global South more widely.

The inter-disciplinary contributors to Developmentalist Cities offer a richly nuanced and critical account of how the urban has been integral to East Asian developmentalism, and, vice versa, how developmentalism has profoundly shaped the nature of the urban in East Asia.