Mia Alvar’s debut collection, In the Country, depicts diverse Filipino/a dia-sporic experiences, such as Filipino laborers in Saudi Arabia, Filipina teach-ers and maids in Bahrain, and Filipino exiles in America. The stories follow
Alvar’s routes from her birth in Manila to growing up in Bahrain, attending Harvard and Columbia University in the United States, and returning to live in Manila. While the collection mostly concentrates on Filipino political figures and events, the collection’s fourth story, “Shadow Families,” which is about Filipina housewives who offer gifts to Filipina helpers, seems to take a lighthearted tone. Alvar’s political dexterity emerges in the story’s first-person plural narrative, which captures the Filipina housewives as smug wannabe royals. The story differs from previous conceptions of domestic workers in that it makes no serious attempt to authentically interiorize the maids’ thoughts and motivations; nor does it cast them as martyrs. Rather, Alvar’s story depicts the bourgeois desire to rescue these maids and ques-tions how this desire reinforces sexual norms and produces the maids as others to cosmopolitan, upper-class migrants. By depicting these upper-class migrants from a shared gaze, Alvar’s story lays bare assumptions that indi-vidual narratives would otherwise attempt to tone down or complicate through first-person narratives that emphasize the complexities of individu-als imbricated within global capitalism. With no narrative burden to indi-vidualize the upper-class migrant’s point of view, the plural narrative uncovers the crucial self-making that reconstitutes the upper-class house-wives as sexual, intelligent, and charitable.
Alvar’s story traces the ambiguous relationship of human rights and the migrant domestic worker when the “lucky” housewives mentioned at the outset of this chapter encounter the office cleaner Baby, a katulong who seems to “walk on air” in her translucent heels and straps. Unlike the other migrant helpers, Baby refuses to act thankful for the housewives’ gifts but instead receives their hospitality as “her birthright” (100). Rather than act matronly, Baby provocatively flirts with the housewives’ husbands and later accuses the husbands of attempting to touch her whenever they drive her home. While these charges may or may not be true, Baby’s attitude toward the husbands, who almost all work in Bahrain’s oil industry, is to feel
“tickle[d]” rather than offended (101). “If you’re gonna touch, touch,” Baby says between laughs, “Don’t pretend you want a cigarette” (101). As Baby’s accusations appear after every ride home, the group of upper-class house-wives become concerned for their own position as caretakers of their hus-bands, thinking that “even the least jealous wife among us couldn’t resist questioning her designated driver afterward” (103).
Baby’s visible sexuality contests narratives of migrant feminine obedi-ence. Her danger is not so much in departing from the Philippines nation but in the shame she brings as a representative of that nation who has “the potential to circulate as unauthorized and inauthentic” (Cruz 193). Indeed, Baby’s sexual promiscuity and accusations upset the safety of the family unit, challenging the matronly maid figure as a simplistic symbol of Filipina language, religion, and culture, a figure that has been accepted into the
inti-mate spaces of domestic work. Baby claims she forgot her Tagalog, and when Baby mysteriously disappears, the women wonder about their own class se-curity: “Just how far up did we live,” they ask, “from the slop sink and the soil?” (108). With Baby’s disappearance, the housewives realize that class movement does not merely go up—from the island provinces to the wives of successful Filipino men—but can, at any moment, also plummet downward.
Baby is later rediscovered on the street wearing a “black abaya” and liv-ing in an apartment for Muslims. Immediately the housewives begin to frame Baby’s newfound freedom as a form of “descent”: “Losing Baby to a world of mosques and abayas and possible polygamy set off a more desperate alarm, as if one of our children had woken with a fever and was speaking in tongues” (109). The “lucky” women assume that Baby is a second or third wife of a Bahraini and seek immediately to provide rescue. While losing Baby to prostitution (her mother’s profession) seems at the bottom of the ladder of success that the housewives have climbed, the thought of mixed marriage (and perhaps mixed children) represents an altogether different descent, a “world of mosques and abayas” where the lucky women have little understanding or influence. With Baby’s disappearance, the housewives cannot help but expose their own interests in policing the katulong’s sexual-ity and cultural pursexual-ity, thus replacing the role of the church, family, and nation that these migrant women have all but escaped. When Baby finally reappears at her old flatmate’s wedding pregnant, she claims that the father of her child is one of the housewives’ husbands. “While you were cooking in your kitchen,” Baby says, “rip[ping]” with laughter, “while you were shop-ping in the mall, while you were in the Philippines—where did you think he was?” (112). Confronted with their greatest fear, the first-person plural nar-rative responds, “We didn’t try to catch her eye just then, or ask who you and he were” (112).
Alvar’s refusal to individualize the group of housewives through the story’s group narrative keeps the story from reiterating a narrative of per-sonal journeys, one that might turn the housewives into lifelong victims who have somehow “earned” their upper-class status (through personal adversity and personal traumas). Their personal stories remain untold, leaving only their status as upper-class housewives who seek to manage and influence the helper. As Baby never reveals the father of her child, the housewives’ suspi-cion for their husbands remains a shared rather than an individual anxiety.
They all knowingly conform to the anxieties of monogamous, heterosexual marriage and, in turn, endeavor to take revenge against Baby by threatening to report her pregnancy to the Bahraini police, leaving her with the choice of either prison or repatriation. Tellingly, their successful attempt to deport Baby simultaneously maintains their identities as charitable women, as they take it upon themselves to “rescue” Baby from her trespasses: “Even the so-called playground of the Gulf had no room for an unwed mother” (116).
When the housewives fail to manage Baby themselves, they appeal to the higher power of the Bahrain immigration laws: “The only law that could contain her,” they declare, “was the one that ruled us all” (116). Bahrain’s laws policing women’s bodies line up uniformly with the sisterhood’s inter-ests in maintaining their social power, as such laws “renewed our awe and obligation toward our hosts” (116).
Alvar’s story exposes the multiple hegemonic forces of family, religion, and local laws to which migrant workers are subjected. In Bahrain’s capital city, Manama, the “playground” of the Middle East where Saudis and Egyp-tians mix to gamble, drink, and trade with sex workers, migrant domestic workers are subject to puritanical notions of family, sexuality, and miscege-nation. In remaining hidden, domestic workers are more subject to placement agents using legal loopholes to ensure contracts limit worker movement, and to weak inspection systems that make it nearly impossible for workers to take legal action (Buhejji). That most employers confiscate employee passports makes legal recourse even more unlikely. As in many Gulf States, employers rely on the kafala system that restricts migrant workers’ abilities to change employers and enables employers to revoke sponsorship at will, triggering deportation. Due to the hidden nature of migrant labor and the need to adjust to local cultural norms, human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch are limited to seeing human rights violations in terms of trafficking or forced labor. In places such as Bahrain, the exploitation of migrant workers seems a norm in itself from which the lucky women of Alvar’s story unknow-ingly benefit as it increases their own security and safety in the family.