Pinoys in Aotearoa: Family agency in the doing of family in the context of kapwa and structural migration
Philippine migration and remittance-sending has become common among Filipinos. Much of the sociological migration and remittance literature tend to focus on motivations, often drawing from western understandings based on individual agency, even when analysing migrants hailing from collectivist cultures. Focusing on individual agency silences a collective type of agency and its role in (re)constituting family relationality, and in defining, reinforcing or altering understandings of traditional collectivist family norms of intergenerational reciprocity among transnational families and communities. I address this gap in the literature by drawing from my kuwentuhan (storytelling or informal conversations; also an indigenous Filipino research method) with twenty-six Filipino migrants in Aotearoa New Zealand, investigating how structure and agency interface to produce migration, remittance-sending and transnational families. Viewed through the relational lens, I initially set out to interrogate how family relationality is done at home and in transnationalism. I found that within the context of structural migration, the possibilities for how family obligation and utang na loób (utang – debt, loób – inside; a Filipino cultural tradition which underpins intergenerational norms of reciprocity) are done were rewritten. Through the enactment of a collective type of agency, migration has become incorporated into how the participants and their families ‘do family’ in their home country. Post-migration, normative Filipino family practices of material and emotional nurturing have become transformed into transnational practices through remittance-sending. Moreover, focusing on emotions and emotional reflexivity, I was able to observe an attenuation of some participants’ adherence to utang na loób and the institution of the extended family. Based on the participants’ kuwento (storytelling), I theorised and introduced a nuanced family agency concept that provides a culturally appropriate way for thinking about Filipino migrants’ (transnational) family lives. I theorise family agency as collective, influencing the actions of family collectives relationally, pragmatically and intersubjectively. Family agency interfaces with individual agency to varying degrees, differentiating family agency into altruistic, bonded and attenuated. Family agency involves the (in)direct co-authoring and joint orchestration of actions towards achieving shared aspirations. Within structural and cultural migration, family agency is mobilised by Filipino families to realise migration and remittance-sending as enactments of family obligation and utang na loób, and as a way to maintain the transnational family.
agency, collective agency, family agency, bricolage, family relationality, transnational families, drivers of migration, culture of migration
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