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Skills Bleed
“History has no present, only a past rushing into the future,” John F. Kenndy once warned. To mark thepast, University of San Carlos and Filipinos of Hawaii presented, this week, “Mabuhay with Aloha”. This documentary recalls the arrival, a century ago, of the first 15 sakadas in Hawaii’s sugar cane fields. That exodus triggered a “rush into the future”. Today, some 3,752 Filipinos leave daily, in search for jobs in 190 countries. More than 1.376 million flew or sailed out last year. “Filipinos now make up 23 percent of Hawaii’s population,” multi-awarde TV producer Emme Tomimbang notes. Herfather was one of the sakadas from Siquijor. The Hawaii Filipino Centennial Commission and USC’s Cebuano Studies Center, produced the film. It excerpts 50 interviews with surviving sakadas and families, in Oahu and Kauai by USC’s Dr Erlinda Kintanar-Alburo. The landscape has radically changed. There were 7.63 million Filipinos when Cebuano sacadas sailed for Hawaii. Today, Filipinos number 93.2 million. They make up the second largest group of US immigrants (1.07 million). Composed of farm hands, Hawaii’s sacadas constituted “a brawn drain”. In contrast, almost 40 percent of Filipino emigrants to the US had a college education. Honolulu Star Bulletin cartoonist Corky Trinidad and East-West professor Belinda Aquino exemplify this “skills bleed”. When Trinidad passed away last year, his cartoons were syndicated from Sao Paolo to Copenhagen. Alburo analyzes the tug-and-pull on “actors in a dramatic chapter in Philippine history not in our textbooks” On one side were recruiting plantations, desperate for workers. Writers, on the other side, “used the press to discourage sakadas.” Between 1909-1934, Cebu became a major recruiting point for the Visayas. The Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association published the Manual for the Progressive Laborer in Ilokano and Cebuano-Visayan. Ilokanos and Bisayans outnumbered Tagalogs then. The Manual publicized facilities such as school houses, hospitals, etc, plus it “package”: free passage to Hawaii; three years of work at $36 a month for men and $24 for women; housing, medical services, free wood fuel, water--and return fare. Chapter Three seems written for OFWs of 2009. It is titled: “Work and Sending Money Home”. Will padalas or remittances from OFWs exceed $18.3 billion this year? Abangan. Separately, USC professor emeritus Resil Mojares analyzed 150 newspaper articles of the period. The critical features swamped “the positive items at a ratio of 8:2”. A 1925 Bagong Kusog editorial, for example, has a two part-cartoon. On the left, recruits board a ship with happy faces. “Hawaii is paradise for the Filipino laborer.”, the caption reads. On the right, the same workers return looking bone-weary. “We departed young and return old and sick!” Mojares pinpoints four grounds for the negative coverage: (1) deceit in recruitment; (2) exploitation in a foreign land; (3) adverse effect on internal economic development; and (4) “lack of patriotism” among migrants. Cebu media highlighted the plantation strike of 1924. Many of the 16 sacadas killed were Visayans. This resulted in a shift from Cebu to Ilocos as primary source of labor. For whom the 1930 manual was written? Alburo wonders. After the Hanapepe strike of 1924, recruiters accepted only illiterate workers. As early as 1920, already half of laborers in California, for example, came from Hawaii. Thus employers tried to hold on to their labor. Women stabilize social life. But scarcity of Filipino women in the US ratcheted temptations against fidelity. The plantation jargon for wife-snatching was “cowboy.” This was a misnomer. “A serious proportion of adultery and remarriage is due to the unusual strains upon a wife’s loyalty where her sex is at such a premium”. Many came from very simple home environments and found it difficult to adjust. “Through time, important changes were introduced. With the more progressive Japanese family as example, plantation managers allowed Filipinos to bring their families. ‘Cowboy’ became a thing of the past’. Overall, the interviewees agreed: Plantation life was hard. But still their life in the early part of the 20th century was something they wished for their own children, who now embrace the new values. "Manang Mirang wasn’t sure how her stories were told by University of Hawaii researchers. She could not speak the language of the interviewer: Tagalog. At last, she said, she could tell her story freely in her own tongue". What of the future? Women now make up 65 to 73 percent of migrants from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Bangaladesh. Country studies show continuing "skills bleed" for labor exporting nations. Asian governments are just beginning to think about long term plans, notes Migration Policy Institute. When today’s recession eases, East and Southeast Asiamn countries are likely to pull in large numbers of migrant workers. Social and political consequences will be far-reaching. “The 21st century has been dubbed the "Pacific century" in terms of economic and political development,” the Institute notes. “But it may also be an epoch of rapidly growing migration and population streams. E-mail: juanlmercado@gmail.com |
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