Philippine President Bongbong Marcos visited San Francisco this month. He spoke to one of the largest communities of Filipino Americans in the United States, a community that includes numerous Filipino nurses, physicians, and healthcare workers.
Marcos said, "Our Filipino nurses, doctors, our first responders, essential workers have all demonstrated the timeless Filipino virtues of malasakit, pakikipagkapwa at ang [ka]bayanihan [concern, companionship, heroism]."
Kabayanihan. Heroism.
These comments reminded me of the "healthcare hero" rhetoric that many healthcare workers heard during the COVID-19 pandemic but that rang empty for some. "Hero" put a nice ring to the distressing, unsafe, and deadly working conditions that healthcare workers endured.
Similarly, Marcos's comments have glossed over the fact that many Filipino nurses in the U.S. died from being exposed to COVID-19 at work.
Marcos's comments also reminded me of sociologist Anna Guevarra's book, Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers (Rutgers University Press, 2009).
Guevarra called language like Marcos's a language of empowerment, one that celebrates Filipino migrant workers, but celebrates them in a way that packages them as ideal workers and ultimately, as "global commodities" (p. 8). In naming this kind of language, Guevarra reveals how it sugarcoats the ways it aligns migrant Filipino workers with the Philippine government's economy, which depends on its people migrating abroad for work and sending back money to their family in the Philippines as remittances.
Many Filipino healthcare workers take pride in their work. I hope—especially for the sake of the Filipino nurses who died during the COVID-19 pandemic—that their pride isn't co-opted.
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