Development Of Sociology In The Philippines

Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario: Celebrating Glenda the Migrant Maid

She strode up to me after church on my first Sunday in Bangkok three years ago. She had just finished serving in the home of a US Embassy official and was in the market for a job. She was fast on her feet, ready with her references, and she breathed confidence. She handed me a cold soda as sweat formed on my forehead from the April humidity. All of five feet tall, Glenda oozed spunk. She cajoled her sister into leaving behind the home of both their youth, to come to Bangkok and luck it out in the Thai labor market. Folded in between their simple clothes was a suitcase of anxieties of life ahead in a country of tonal sounds and scarce English. Her passport read a twenty-one day permit to stay. Twelve years later, Glenda and her sister stand proud in their captured little urban space, a thirty-three square meter room they call their home. In the labyrinthine streets of Bangkok, she found her way into diplomatic circles. Over the years, the opportunities steadily unfolded. Her easy command of the English language was her best asset against the competition of Thai, Burmese, and Lao applicants. She had the swiftness of a gazelle, thorough in the ways of the household, a marvel with recipe books, a demeanor as cheerful as the blazing Bangkok sunlight. Always, she was the favored choice. “I study their habits, their practices at home.” We were exchanging stories of her past employers. “Some like their toilets smelling of lemongrass, others prefer food with oversized chilies. The Australian director, he only ate brown rice. But he always started with whiskey soda on one cube of ice, and the table should be covered with Irish linen.” For nearly two years, this was her cat-and-mouse routine with Thai immigration, until the Asian Development Bank Resident Representative came and we shared her halftime. She flew to Singapore for a week and arrived with fresh documents from the Thai Embassy. On her passport was stamped Section 15. She was no longer an illegal alien, but a grateful gift-bearing woman with chocolates in hand because her anxieties had just been lifted. Her wisdom, I decided, is brought on by raw courage and a stout spirit to face the everyday. She is unflappable, determined. Someday she will no longer be a maid, she proclaims. Perhaps a restaurateur, a chef, a maitre d’ all rolled into one. She wants her servant days to come to an end. And I believe her, because she has this steady refusal to surrender to her cultural “givens.” (Teresita Cruz-del Rosario is Visiting Associate Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. She was formerly Assistant Minister during the transition government of President Corazon Aquino. She has a background in sociology and social anthropology and specializes in development and development assistance, migration, governance, and social movements. She can be reached at delrosatess@gmail.

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Five students were honoured recently for their research on Asia or the Asian diaspora by the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR). For York PhD candidate Conely de Leon in the School of Women’s Studies, the money that came with the award will help her fund her dissertation fieldwork in Manila, Philippines, during the upcoming academic year.

The recipient of the 2011 , de Leon received her master’s degree in sociology & equity studies in education, and women & gender studies at the University of Toronto, and her honours bachelor degree in women’s studies and English language & literature from Queen’s University, before coming to York. Her research interests focus on critical race theory, transnational feminist praxis, gender and migration and the development of critical Filipino studies in Canada.

Left: Conely de Leon

Her research explores whether long-term family separation, for example as an outcome of Canada’s Live-In Caregiver Program, results in enduring and pervasive adverse effects on the socioeconomic, cultural and political engagement of children of Filipina migrant domestic workers as adults. Specifically, de Leon’s research in Manila will focus on the relationships that adult children now in Canada have to extended kin, often identified as grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and close family friends, who acted as their “primary” caregivers in the Philippines, while separated from their mothers.

By exploring these relationship dynamics through one-on-one, in-depth interviews, de Leon hopes to offer some insight into the complexities of long-term family separation.

The award is named for the Honourable Vivienne Poy and assists a graduate student in fulfilling the fieldwork requirement for the Graduate Diploma in Asian Studies. YCAR is grateful for Senator Poy’s support for this award.

Colin McGuire (right)  and Chad Walasek are the 2011 recipients of the YCAR Language Award . McGuire, a doctoral candidate in music, will continue to study languages and advance his abilities in Cantonese during a year in Hong Kong as an exchange student. Walasek, a master’s candidate in dance at York, will use the award funding to build on his Urdu language skills in a fall 2011 course in India.

McGuire plans to study at the Yale-China Chinese Language Centre for two semesters starting in September 2011. His research is on the music of the martial arts and his doctoral dissertation will focus on the percussion repertoire performed by Chinese-Canadian kung fu clubs. His approach is interdisciplinary and draws from ethnomusicology, hoplology, phenomenology, semiotics and Asian studies.

Introduction to Sociology and Antropology

Society & Culture

Philippine sociological review

Brains of the nation, Pedro Paterno, T.H. Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo de los Reyes, and the production of modern knowledge

General sociology; focus on the Philippines