2024 A.R. Davis Lecture

When Home is an Empty Italian Villa in the Philippines: The Semiotics of Consumption of Filipino Domestic Workers in Italy, 1980s-2018

Mina Roces
University of New South Wales

Abstract

Consumption is just as important to a Filipino migrant’s life as earning a living. It is the reward for all the hard work they endured overseas. Filipino domestic workers in Italy occupy transnational spaces working abroad but returning periodically to the Philippines. Their transnational location allows them to straddle two classes simultaneously: holding lower-class in Italy but achieving middle-class in the Philippines.

I argue that the remittance house, empty of permanent occupants but full of material objects, is where migrants have redefined ‘home’ as the place which expresses their new identities as middle class, Europeanized Filipinos. Despite the fact that they can dress, travel, and behave like middle-class Italians who are their employers during their leisure hours, in Italy, these migrants cannot escape from the stigma of domestic worker. When migrants return to the village for their bi-annual holiday, they are welcomed like celebrities.  Admired by all, no one talks about the reality of their employment such as cleaning toilets, bathing the elderly, etc.  Thus, their metamorphosis into middle-class Europeanized Filipinos can only be celebrated in the Philippines inside their magnificent house.

Mina Roces bio

Mina Roces is a Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of The Filipino Migration Experience: Global Agents of Change (Cornell University Press, 2021, winner of the 2022 NSW Premier’s General History Prize)