Performing Elusive Homecomings: Mobility, Embodiment, and Diasporic Filipino Youth

• Main Author: Manalansan, Martin F., IV
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: balikbayan; cultural citizenship; identity; performance studies; popular culture; return migration
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss23/5; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/1578/viewcontent/_5BKKv00n23_2014_5D_202.4_Article_ManalansanIV.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

The Filipino global diaspora has precipitated the circulation of embodied modes of identification and belonging. This paper focuses on the experiences of Filipino young people who were born and/or raised abroad, and who have returned to the Philippines to seek fame and economic mobility in the entertainment industry. These migrant hopefuls, unlike older counterparts, enact the material tensions and semantic contradictions that form part of popular discourse around life abroad. As such, institutional media practices and mass audience perceptions mirror such conditions and create shifting systems of valuation around such things as skin color, accent, and bodily comportment. To respond and conform to these demands, these migrant returnees refashion cultural citizenship by deploying performances of locality and authenticity with varying successes. Such corporeal revisions enable the displacement of attachments to and affinities for various expressions of home, citizenship, and selfhood. The main contention of this ethnographic and media study is that these experiences constitute what is being called an “aesthetics of mobility” where the shifts and travels of meanings and value inherent among this group return migrants are embodied in ways that unravel notions of class, gender, race and national belonging. The experiences of this youth group provide a distinctive narrative about the travails and travel of bodies and generations of modern Filipinos in the world.