"The Filipino is a truly global labour force. Filipino workers can be found in hundreds of countries around the world.  It is astounding to think that this archipelago in the middle of the Pacific can produce so many people who leave for so many destinations around the world,"

says Dr Robyn Rodriguez, assistant professor of Asian American Studies and author of Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World.

In this podcast, first made for New Books in Asian American Studies, part of the New Books Network,  Robyn Rodriguez explores 'labour brokerage' with Christopher Patterson of University of Washington. Labour brokerage describes how the Philippine state mobilises its citizens and sends them abroad to work for employers throughout the world while generating profit from the remittances that migrants send back to their families and loved ones remaining in the Philippines.

Christopher started by asking Robyn how she came to write about ‘labour brokerage’.

Robyn Rodriguez:   I was born and raised in the bay area, and spent most of my growing up in Union City  California, which has a sizeable Filipino immigrant population.  For many Filipinos in the US, Union City is in our constellation of key sites for Filipino settlement.  I grew up in a place where literally the whole block was Filipino immigrants.  My schools – from kindergarten to high school - had a good number of Filipinos (it felt as if we were the majority, even if we weren’t!).  And my growing up in Union City shaped a lot of what would eventually become my research questions, and the core of my political activism, because so much of my academic work emerges from my political work as an immigrant rights advocate.

When I think and talk about my work, I’m talking about my scholarly work, but also about my activism.

I recall in high school, one of the big issues in the 80s was the proliferation of gangs and gang violence – particularly among Filipino Americans – and I started getting really involved with the different community based projects that were responding to gang violence, initiated by the Filipinos for Affirmative Action based in Oakland, now Filipino Advocates for Justice.  I got involved in different dialogues organised to facilitate better communication between the youth and their parents, dialogues between the police and the youth and parents – a number of different activities.  I think that was where my interest in Ethnic Studies began and that carried through into my undergraduate career.

I eventually attended UC Santa Barbara, where there was an Asian American Studies programme, and where I began to encounter ethnic studies as a student, and to think seriously about being an Asian American scholar.  Along the way I continued my organising work around immigration issues.  As student activists we also took Asian American studies into our own hands, not necessarily waiting to take courses, but to take what we were learning and to educate our peers, creating our own curriculum. That is where a lot of my work as a teacher and scholar began.

That shaped the questions that I would eventually seek to answer in my book, in large part because I continued to do activist organising work.

I entered graduate school in 1996 in the Department of Sociology, at UC Berkeley.  I continued to be involved in social justice work and was taking a keen interest in what was happening to Filipino migration.  1996 was just a year after the hanging of a Filipino domestic worker by the Singaporean government.  Many Filipinos had been falsely accused, there seemed to be a lot of elements to her conviction that seemed to be off (she was convicted of murder).

Christopher Patterson: Was this Flor Contemplacion?

RR: Yes.  A lot of Filipinos were concerned she might have been set up.