| At the end of the Twentieth Century, the Philippines was the largest labor exporting nation in the world, with seven million of its citizens working in 187 countries worldwide. Filipino overseas migration has been significantly feminized since the 1980s, as women comprise 55% of migrant workers. Among migrant men, seafaring was and continues to be an important labor niche. In 1998, the Philippines provided the highest numbers of seafarers to the global shipping industry, with over 180,000 Filipino men working as seafarers (20% of shipping labor).; Although at the end of the Twentieth Century, cyberspace and air travel were key imaginaries to understand the global, the maritime is also central to globalizations. Indeed, ships transport 90% of international trade. For the Philippines, seafaring and the maritime play important roles in defining culture, national identity, masculinities, and globalizations. In this dissertation, I address these critical issues in the context of the feminization of Filipino migrant labor, the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis, and the competition for capital at the end of the Twentieth Century.; The methodology used for this dissertation includes: fieldwork in Manila, Philippines and Oakland, California, United States (1997--2000); interviews with seafarers, maritime leaders and advocates in both cities, including the Port of Manila and Port of Oakland; participant-observation; historical research; discourse analyses; documentary photography; development and implementation of a "cross currents" approach (a maritime enhancement of "borderlands" approach); and reflexive ethnographic writing.; In Filipino Cross Currents, I argue that differently situated Filipinos engage the maritime to imagine and produce gendered trajectories of globalization. Using ethnographic data from Filipino cross current spaces, I address my subject-position in relation to Filipino overseas migration, masculinities, and globalization; illustrate how the Philippine State deploys maritime history to promote globalization, overseas migration, and a masculine Filipino national identity; demonstrate how seafarers and other men contest or support the State's notions of masculinity, migration and globalization; and analyze how maritime leaders and advocates in Manila and Oakland imagine, experience and produce globalization heterogeneously. |
