Redefining 'home'

Whenever I present my work at a conference, the coffee break question has always been, “So, why are you doing Brazil and Chile for your PhD?” My intuition tells me to lie and say something academic. After all, conferences have the pretense of everything as an intellectual exercise. But I always come clean and reply, “Because I am in love with samba, salsa and everything about Rio de Janeiro and Latin America.” This is the partial truth about why we pursue careers outside of our comfort zones, away from the place we often refer as ‘home’. Intellectual curiosity. Cultural immersion. Embracing tolerance. And in the end we discover more about our country by looking at how similar and different we are from peoples living in places unimaginable for us. I began my journey of discovering what it meant to be an overseas Filipino when I moved to Sweden for my postgraduate studies and then to Brazil and Chile for my doctoral studies.

Keeping it Filipino

The first lesson I learned is that no matter how distant the place is, there will always be a Filipino community embracing newcomers building their second home. In Sweden where the temperature drops easily as low as minus 10 degrees in the winter, there are as many as 17,000 Filipino migrants spread across the vast stretch of this Scandinavian country. Unlike in Manila where I usually go out for dinner, Swedish social life is confined in private homes and so making friends to fill in the long days and nights is a requisite. The challenge, of course, is that Swedes can be very quiet and usually have stern facial expressions. On top of that, the bits and bob of my life were shaped by weather conditions: private parties in the winter, barbecue and sitting in the park in spring, and swimming in cold lakes during summers. Notwithstanding these new experiences, we kept a little bit of Filipino-ness in each of our home. In weekends, you find us singing our hearts out, eating adobo and leche flan for Saturday dinner, and waiting for tinola from one of our friends to help us get through the massive hangover on Sundays.

Beyond the abrupt change in lifestyle, I lived in a country whose citizens pay taxes as high as 50% of their salaries. Now this is a shock. Why give half of your hard-earned money to the state when you can spend it yourself? The logic, as I experienced first hand, is simple: taxes are used for education and health, which in turn create a dynamic high skilled labor force, which overall induce wealth creation. Welfare states, which operate on public trust and credibility, are the foundations of the very high standards of living in Scandinavia. For me, this is the dream place. It is neither about being the best individual nor the need for a competitive spirit to grow as a nation. Scandinavians taught me the value of collective responsibility and relying on states to make things work. But what struck me the most is how much Swedes value social equality both in terms of gender and class. Perhaps there exists no comparable university module with as many references on women’s issues and sustainable development as the Swedish curriculum. No wonder my Filipino friends would never think of leaving this country despite the harsh weather conditions. They have indeed made themselves at home in this seemingly opposite environment from what they were used to back in Asia.

Globetrotting Pinoy scholar

Although Sweden was (and remains) my second home in Europe, I found myself in a small English city, Sheffield, two years after. From then on, I have been based in England while doing my research on Latin American politics. If the Scandinavian charm is the convenience of living in a safe haven, Britain is about lovely accents, impeccable sense of humor, and multiculturalism. To this day I see myself as very privileged to have been able to live in this city. For one, I get to have an informal, honorary Turkish citizenship for having one Turk beside me in all places I live. To my colleagues, I am the Filipino expatriate who spoke no Swedish yet decided to learn two more languages as if the PhD was not hard enough. So, if for many Filipinos America is the land of the promise, I suppose it is England for me. I had the chance to see another continent, which changed my life forever.

The first stop is Chile. I find this place interesting for many reasons. The country’s geographical landscape offers a variety of activities for all kinds of visitors ranging from mountain climbing in Santiago, experiencing to outdoors of Patagonia, and of course, traveling in the ghost towns of nitrate mines in Antofagasta and the geysers of the Atacama Desert. While doing my interviews in Northern Chile, I passed the copper mines on my way to Calama, which are symbolic of the long history of oppression and resistance of workers against North American mining firms. More and more, I began to notice how the same storylines ran across different settings in real life. In Chile, that strong sense of social activism of ordinary people reminiscent of the People Power Revolution (and the problems after the return of democracy) are all captured by the struggles of Chilean copper miners both in their past and present conflicts with organized business and a state that has been strongly branded as neoliberal.

While for many of you, the mining accident is simply one of those impersonal pieces in newspapers, for me as a researcher of Chilean politics, the event echoes a lot of the things Filipinos experience in everyday life – the frustrations and discontentment with the shortcomings of the government in dealing with one crisis after another. As well, it resembles the aspirations and hope we have for our country in making it a little bit better than in the past. Our traumatic history of creating a strong state under Ferdinand Marcos is matched by a rather more successful attempt at imposing order via repression by General Augusto Pinochet, not to mention that both dictatorial regimes were backed up by the American government in the 1970s. Such was my experience that I began thinking about Philippine politics as I did my interviews with union leaders in the mining regions of Chile. They told familiar stories of dysfunctional political systems: the repressive character of dictatorships, the politics of silencing the once militant organized workers, and the moderation of conflicts in society through social pacts between the governing elites.

The Brazilian connection

I was in Brazil last year for my field research, and I always told myself, this country is so much like the Philippines. It is not because they also have beaches and sunny days resembling the paradise of Europeans. Neither is it the colonial past (which is a common mistake because it was a Portuguese colony!) nor the assimilation of people with different origins creating one of the world’s most successful experiments of multiculturalism. While I was there, I remember the smiles and easy-going life of Brazilians despite the enormous problems they face on a daily basis. They are equally nauseated with corruption and pork barrel; there is poverty, social inequality, and high crimes even in the relatively well-off sections of their cities. I saw in them how our society deals with difficult times not only in politics but also in everyday problems of survival. In fact, I reckon samba and bossa nova are for the Brazilians as singing is for Filipinos. And it is through them I realized how patient Filipinos are.

As a country, we painstakingly participate in elections filled with fraud and violence hoping that new leadership can change the plight of our lives. We elected Joseph Estrada, among other celebrities, in response to popular disdain from the cautious, conservative and pro-elite democracy that we have installed since 1986. Our story reverberates so well in this continent. In 2002, Lula da Silva was elected president of Brazil. His humble origins of being from (poor) Northeastern Brazil, moving to work in Sao Paolo’s industrial center, and leading the labor movement to mobilize in favor of return to civilian government reflect this affinity for electing politicians who understand the masses. Lula embodies the unrelenting desire for change coming from outside of the conservative elite-driven political apparatus that is characteristic of Brazilian party politics. To this day, we remain hopeful of someone that would bring about the most sought after change in our political institutions.

And so after five years of experiencing different cultures and witnessing first hand two presidential elections in Latin America, I came to realize both how Latino we have become and how distinctive our culture and politics are. My postgraduate studies taught me not just to read the books that tell fascinating stories of ordinary citizens’ experiences of oppression and empowerment but to go out and see events unfold right before my eyes. It also led me to think about what it means to be Filipino, and what it entails to be one living abroad. For someone whose family has been thousands of miles apart, identity and social relations take different connotations. Distance compels us to build new relationships with people that withstand geographical spaces. Consequently, we redefine the social meanings of ‘home’. As cliché as it sounds, there is a grain of truth when they say that home is where your heart belongs. 

Jojo Nem Singh is PhD Candidate in Politics at the University of Sheffield, United Kingdom. He is finishing his most recent research in Latin America on the politics of natural resources.