 Thank you very much. So today I'm going to be talking about home. And I've got to say I feel at home here because I know so many of you, a few new friends to make. But the paper that I'm going to give is an academic paper and it's the kind of thing that I give to non-Igorot audiences. But I wanted to share it with a Filipino and Igorot audience to get your feedbacks. And the first thing I want to say is that the idea for this paper came to me, as many of my very good ideas have, through a long coffee-infused discussion at the kitchen table of the Takookan-born anthropologist, June, Martha Chayap and Pearl Brett. She's a lifelong friend and I burst into tears when I found out she wouldn't be joining us here at this workshop. I know how badly she wanted to come. We tried. I'm speaking about work that appears in my book An Archipelago of Care. There will be a sign up sheet outside if you would be interested in a copy. And this is a book that I wrote about field work I did with Igorot migrants here in London. So one of the interesting things I found in my work in London was people spoke to me about home, meaning the Philippines, and our house or a street name in London. So they made this distinction. Most of the people I was interviewing actually already knew me from time spent in the Philippines. So I was someone they could speak to about back home as I'm losing my Sagata Tapis. You can see this was acquired in the early 90s. So I've got it and I've lost the belt, but it's still with me. And I want to talk about home making because home is a problematic in a global world. And it's actually people who've already been displaced previously. People who are non-indigenous, who are people who migrate kind of well. And that means they have the sort of stereotypical 15 years to integration. They settle. For people who are indigenous and migrate, they have a different kind of attachment to their place of origin. So they tend to sojourn and split their affiliations, remaining committed to the home that sent them in very intense and emotion infused ways, political, emotional, social and material. So what this does for them is it produces practices of zoning in the daily life of migrants and of their communities back home and a series of material transformations. So I'm going to use this presentation to map those out. And I want to think about how home back in the Philippines, the back home home, is a space of accumulation, safety and social mobility. So what I want to say here is that Igrots are facing many of the same challenges as other people are facing, but they've got an advantage. And here was a surprise in my discussion with June. It's not that Igrots give up their culture, they strengthen their culture in diaspora. Because they've got strong norms for reciprocal exchange and distribution of wealth, they are able to open up a space of security and social progress for themselves in the Philippines if they hang on to their ancestral domain. So their whole dream of progress and future actually remained contingent on that home in the Philippines being secured. So I am not going to do a number of things for you as well. I'm certainly not going to try and define Igrot, not my job. People who carry the name get to do that. And I'm not going to become the cultural authenticity police. In fact, I will work against that. If you want to know is something authentic Igrot culture, if an Igrot is doing it, yeah, okay, real simple. And I will show you some stuff that you may think is not particularly Igrot, but Igrots are doing it. So we've got to adjust our perceptions and actually engage them with why and how and what is effective about that. So don't necessarily take everything I say about Igrots to seriously in that sense. If you think something different, let me know. If you're living something different, definitely let me know. And please notice that I will not use the word the. I don't want to bound people by this politics of saying there is some sort of essential thing happening. Culture is a broader dynamic shifting discussion. And it's also a source of great strength. So I'm going to start with my wonderful image of Kauai and Deguia's candy houses and talk about home making practices. So in the UK, Igrot migrants are funding projects back home. They're building these candy houses. They dream houses as family homes in the Philippines or they're renovating the homes they've left behind. But they've got a home making problematic because they've got a rental house and they need to live between that our house in London and back home. A lot of the people I worked with were in and around the East 17 area. And they had fairly small, quite crowded rental places with a lot of people cycling through. Pretty typical of migrant London, pretty typical of London in general. In the Philippines, you have your ideal candy house, beautiful red tiles, lots of grills, monster truck in the driveway. And then, of course, you have your reality, which is on the left, which is you're building this up floor by floor, build a floor, rent the bottom, transfer to the top. And the family are supporting this by driving taxis, by taking on bits of part-time work. They will be circulating from this place in the city, back to a home in the province, in one of the municipalities of Mountain Province, most likely. And this is a kind of multi-sided strategy. So this is the house. It's likely outside Baguio in the peri-urban fringe. And it is potentially going to become a family home. But we're split again with the house back and the municipality of origin that belongs to their family of origin. So you've got a lot of stuff moving around through these different sites. And this home is perhaps not actually in the house, but on the landscape. So what I want to do here is track some of the stuff that moves. Because you can see where our home is, because that's where the really important stuff accumulates. Okay? So migrants are shipping goods back to the Philippines by the cubic meter in Balakabayan boxes. They're handled by freight-forwarding companies, often Filipino-owned. Very often, Igorot-owned. And you'll see a lot of pollutant forwarding because they've got the market here cornered. Are the pollutants here? Yes? You've got boxes in various stages of preparation, crowding the living space of migrants, East London houses. So these boxes are full of goods and gifts for making, sustaining and remaking the relations of home in the Philippines. And you can see that this was actually taken in the home of somebody who's more or less settled in East London. They've got their flowers and their family pictures and their knickknacks there. But they've also got people who are renting rooms from them who are storing their boxes. And in case anybody's reading in any great detail, I've chosen images from people who've gone home already. So yes, this person does know that I photographed their boxes, but I've sat on the photograph until they've actually departed the UK. So packing the box is a really important ritual element of lives lived in London. And I discovered this myself because I was sitting in a church service, and the people I was expecting to encounter at church were not there. They were not singing in the choir like they should have been. They were elsewhere. And I, yeah, well, no, not packing. They were at the car boot because I kind of said, you know, you're sitting at the back of the church and it's the sermon. So, you know, where's Andrew? And I heard, car boot, car boot, car boot, and people are looking at their phones, car boot. Okay, where's that? Okay, half of the choir has gone to the car boot. I better figure out what's happening at this car boot that people are sort of standing at church. So this is the car boot sale and it names both the place and the leisure activity as well as the class of items purchased to send home in buying boxes. So you go to car boot to get car boot and you pack up your car boot and you ship it. And it's this big social process. So it's quite fun and it's a big social event. People are hanging out with each other, picnicking on the grass, comparing purchases, but it's also kind of a friendly competition who can get the best bargains, who can find the best stuff, who gets their earliest, who can make Tawad, who can charm people into selling stuff you wouldn't believe, and who is discerning enough to realize that, well, iPads that turned out after the 2011 riots are probably not something you should purchase if you're going to turn them on in the UK versus other things that people are legitimately selling because they've fallen on hard times themselves and really need to raise some cash fast. So there's this whole politic of sorting out the stolen goods that could be tracked from the actual things you can send home. And people are using these car boot sales to fill up their ballot buy-in boxes. And these boxes should consist of mainly used goods which are then exempt from duty in the Philippines. In reality, you need a nice layer of used goods over the top and down sides and you can fit quite a lot of other stuff of varying amounts of value in the middle. And car boot becomes this Sunday ritual. It's not just about consumption. It's about a number of other things as well. So a lot of the space of the week and the house is taken up with the preparation, sorting, admiring, comparison, and packing of car boot. So here's some car boot drying on the line because these are things people are sending back to the Philippines. Believe it or not, this is especially important for Igarots. I mean, everybody will know this because in the Philippines, you don't necessarily get a lot of locally made products which are suitable for life in the mountains when it goes down to minus two in the cold season. Okay? So if you happen to live up in the hills, you know, you need a winter jacket and you need long pajamas and you want your thick sweatpants and it's good to have a nice thick pair of socks if you're working outside or going hiking, et cetera. And those are things that you're not going to find in Divisoria and you're only going to find them with ultra ridiculous prices in any kind of outdoor, outfitting store in Manila whereas if you're at the car boot, you can get them gently used for quite cheap. So this does make sense in terms of the material needs of people on the court. And the things that people said, quite fun, it's this kind of generalized shopping. So people are spotting things of value in the car boot and buying them in advance of actually having a recipient. And so one of my friends was really good at finding motorcycle leathers and was explaining to me the leather jacket, it's so nice. So I want to impress the person, but I just don't know him yet. I just don't know who he is. But he's going to be very happy with me that I care so much for him. So buying the motorcycle leathers, sending it home, putting them in the bodega and they're on reserve for when they can be redistributed to someone who needs a nice gift to build relationships. So what was going into the box? Well, there were a lot of dry goods going in. Massive box, things of coffee and corned beef. And people were really actually quite concerned about the material conditions of their families, particularly during typhoon season when sort of the roads might be cut off and people might be stuck in the house. They wanted them to have tin goods, dry goods in reserve. And if people were saving up for something or minimizing their expenses somehow, they wanted to contribute to the daily needs of home, the daily needs of a household because they wanted to remain part of it. So they weren't giving a gift. Here's some designer perfume. I'm thinking of you. They were giving a, I'm a member of this family. Here's the corned beef. You can feed 12 at a meal, that kind of thing. And it's a bit embarrassing if you can't immediately feed 15 or 20 people from your stores. And you might need to feed five or six for a week. I remember trying to explain to Velia that I got stuck in her house in a typhoon and two of us... And an earthquake. And an earthquake. And two of us had eaten all the Kamota tops in the garden over the course of a week because there was nothing. We had rice and we had Kamota tops and my neighbors made sure we were in rice and it was just endless Kamota tops but everybody was doing this. So what we would have done if we had corned beef, man, that would have been a party. So next in, you've got your clothing. Toys, your linen, your personal and decorative items. And so here's where the stuff that's difficult to find in the Philippines. So really heavy duty cotton t-shirts, they're going to stand up to being washed in the river with rocks, okay? It takes a special kind of t-shirt. It's, you know, I brought some non-special t-shirts to the Philippines and as my friends said, whoa, your clothing is very easily destroyed. I'm like, yep. If you slap it around in the river with rocks, it falls apart. This is why. I mean, I got to the point where I'd hide certain things and only let them wash my long pant because that was the best way. You don't need to sandblast and just give it to Igarots with a river and, you know, a month later, you've got your weather jeans. They've sorted it. You know, this is good. So there's an ethos here that's really important. It is about the gift and reciprocity. So this is what my friend was explaining to me. This isn't about these things could be purchased more cheaply at SM in Baguio. Okay? It's a gift. You just don't think about it that way. So what if it would be cheaper for someone to go to SM and buy it for himself? Then it's not a gift. It's shopping already. And, you know, he'll just put the money to something else and no leather jacket. He'll deny himself. So I like to give to share what I have here. So the feeling is there for him when he's wearing it that someone abroad cares for him and that other people can see that, you know. So there's an ethics of homemaking here. And there are actually two. It comes in two parts. There is an ethos of recognition. So this t-shirt is for my son and this one is for my brother-in-law. Now, this is a remembrance. You're being thought of while your relatives are in London, but it's also a bounding and a diminution of expectations. For my brother-in-law, a t-shirt, I remember you. I think of you. This is something nice. But it is not 500 pounds for your next hair-brained investment in something. It is not an ongoing allowance. It is your respect, but it is limited. So there's a politics that plays out here about who gets what, who's remembered how. And then there is an ethos of salvage. And this is really important for people like migrants in my generation who grew up with not very, very much. They have a big heart-wrenching problem when they see things being discarded, neglected, going to waste. They are against waste. They are the original fixer uppers make doers, recyclers. So this is my friend explaining to me, and these bed sheets are still very good. Someone can use these, only £2.50. And this is someone thinking about the sheets that they grew up with in their home in Mountain Province versus what they're seeing here and how there's still life left in the sheets. So they're actually rescuing this stuff and giving it a home where they hope it will be appreciated. Whether that's true or not, it does help to make up the sort of used content of the box, which is always a good thing. So packing the boxes Sunday afternoon, a bit of a blowout, lots of cooking, lots of food, some drink. There's an after party. And what goes in the car boot? Some of the items are actually reserved for very personal shipments to decorate family homes, like the clocks and the metal piece here, these dream houses that people are trying to build. And the bulk rates mean that you can kind of wrap these in the sheets and get them back home, in your quarterly. So sending can be a very collective activity. And you're always trying to figure out where this box is going to go and who's going to open it and what they're actually going to do and will they follow the instructions or email or text them. And lots of discussion comparatively about who's got what, how much they paid for it, where it's off to and what people will make of it. So this ethos of gifting places strain on international marriages because so much of the value people are able to generate in excess of their daily needs is going into the creation, the curation packaging of these boxes. And it's a strain on housemates who have to navigate around packing in progress for months on end. Okay, so these go off every three months and after they go off you have about a two or three week period where you can actually walk through the hallways. Other than that, you're doing this crazy dance where you're like sidling through and there's bits of packing in the line as everybody's got their boxes there. I once had somebody who seriously texted me, sorry I can't make the interview today we've got a new housemate moving in and I've got three boxes on her bed in various states of packing and I've got to get them out. I really have to get them. This is really serious. I'm not standing you up and I'm laughing because yes, I know this. I totally understand you need the rent money but you're actually using her space as your bodega for the boxes that haven't been picked up yet. So you also have a strain on the transnational family at the other end because these items sent home for future use are often redistributed otherwise by the receiving family rather than stored for the sender's eventual return. Largely because the receiving family is looking at them going, how much space have we got left in our bodega? Like what's this for? Do we want that? Where am I going to put it? What are my immediate needs? There's a politics that happens there as well. So you have a sense of clutter and you also have these resentments building up about the stuff. And the boxes themselves and the imperative to produce them can become a barrier in some ways to what would be effective settlement if we want to think about it from that usual story of migration, 15 years people are integrated, that's where they belong. As one of my respondents looking out at a boxed room living room as we just done the dance around the boxes to talk to each other. Explained. What I observe here in the community and this is an ignorant respondent is that people do not stay in education. They look for their indefinite leave to remain but then they work 60 hours a week because they need the money. But it's only short term thinking. If they go to college, if they take a course, they could earn another 10,000 pounds a year. If they could reclassify their position or apply for a higher position, they could invest in themselves to improve their chances here in the UK. That won't happen like this. He gestures out at the boxes, throwing the floor. Not just by working extra hours, extra hours at the same low rate and spending their money on these gifts. So he saw it as counterproductive to settlement. And some people really did share his assessment of this but they also felt very deeply attached in an emotional material way to the process. So if you visit one of these bodegas here's what you see. My family that received my boxes, they put it all in a room at the back of our house and that is a family home back in the municipality. But that room's overflowing and everyone who visits can see what I'm sending. My belt sender, my circular saw, all these tools. So through the car boot sales and sales and local shops, a whole workshop has been sent back to the Philippines wrapped in used t-shirts and used sheets. These are so expensive at home so it's good that I've also got something nice to give others that I'm sharing my leather jackets. You know, they won't be so jealous. So thinking about what's in the bodega, what other people are going to see and how there's going to be something there that can be for them. So that the more valuable and productive assets can be reserved for someone's eventual return. And then you see the transnational pantry and this is one for Velia because you can see exactly where the other members of the family are. You've got to practice where siblings who are working in different countries coordinate their sending of boxes and supply of dry goods to keep the home stock year round. So this is a family with a migrant in the UK but also with a migrant family member in Canada. And UK and Canada coordinate on Skype to see who's shipping what to the family home in the Philippines. And when I got to the house, the UK stuff was largely consumed. There was some in the bodega but the fridge was filled with bilingual French-English package goods from Canada at that moment. So people cycle through and they said, oh, just wait another three months, it'll be Australia. I'm like, okay, so depending on the time of year, you get a food heavy shipment from whichever kid because the kids are Skyping to make sure the parents and their grandkids are taking care of. So, you know, interesting Igarot cultural practices, coordination of bilingual Jell-O. So, my argument here is that box is actually materialized distance, disconnection and unhoming because some of this stuff is impersonal. It's inappropriate. It doesn't fit its recipient or what they want. So it's actually unwanted. It might be soiled, it might be damaged, it might not fit in cut. It may be too generalized, it may be too cheap, it may be not what was asked for. People in the Philippines sometimes open these boxes and go, what? But much can go wrong between the car boot, the packing party and the opening of the box. The message isn't always carried through. The recognition may be insufficient to the recipient's understanding of the steam in which they should be held or the respect to which they're entitled. They may get less than they'd hoped for. The salvage practices often go unappreciated with new goods providing more evidence of care and social mobility than old. And then that is also a message from the migrants saying, hey, I can't afford to fit out my entire extended family in this year's Nikes. Right? Get a grip on your expectations here. We're not Baknaan. We're not Nikes yet. Yes, you have a family member abroad, but that doesn't mean that you've entered the local elite and you can't present yourself and consume things as if you have. So it is very much about keeping some of those expectations modest. And that's what some of those use t-shirts of good quality say. So one of the things that happened and I'm going to now share with you an authentic Igarat digital artifact was when I started this work, a particular video went viral across my Igarat Facebook contents and this was shared to me by one of the executive members of the Igarat UK at the time with the small heading and this was totally brilliant. There we are. So this Igarat cultural object reflects a sense of humor which has a really tongue in cheek grasp of culture. People laughed at this and commented on it because it encapsulated for them the contradictions of their own situation and their own practices. They thought this was actually very true to life. They're spending their time and their money looking through used sheets of the car boot in hopes of giving their family something nice, something durable, something that improves their life. Meanwhile the family back home are looking for the Nikes and looking through all this other stuff and going, why are they sending like that? This is not what I imagined I would get. So there is this kind of incommensibility in expectations and ability to provide that people are caught in, but it is all about care and the material stuff there's an imperative to send it and get away from the person who sent that. I got in touch with him and said yeah that was hilariously funny and he's like well yes it's hilariously true but I cannot not send boxes because everybody else who has a kid abroad is getting boxes at their houses well and if I just send money they haven't got the stuff. They're not going to have the right stuff that shows the social mobility that shows the care of people abroad it's really important to make that material tangible visible. So even though it seems a counterproductive practice producing home in a material way back in the Philippines means that home in London isn't that comfortable is cluttered is crowded has got strife going on with flatmates and potentially British partners and it's not really about settlement. So that's why I'm talking about home against home. So the boxes are working against UK homemaking but people are ambivalent about that because what's happened in the last 15-20 years is that the possibility of a comfortable settlement has slid out of sight for people who are largely taking urban based service and care work. So it's one of my respondents explained even for me it's better not to be a permanent here. Those ones who are people settled here they're even more struggling with their life. If you hear that a Filipino is committing abuses against employers or the ones they're caring for it's usually a permanent isn't it? It's having projects back home, something to go back to family who will receive you with love because of the care you've extended that keeps you from feeling yourself small so you can swallow your feeling and you know you can see right across the Cordillera the material culture has shifted you've got your Putin forwarding calendars all over the place but you've also got people dressing in these wonderful color blocked outfits that come out of the these sort of vibrant expressions you know turquoise blue and orange that you wouldn't have seen 20 or 30 years ago. There's this kind of creativity that's coming onto that landscape out of the material culture of sending back these great boxes even with the ambivalence about their contents. So these home choices are being read into the boxes and I'm not going to go through this in huge detail but I had a pair of sisters, one in Baguio City, one here in London, the sister in Baguio was looking at the boxes and saying you know hey the kind of content's going to degenerate it over time she just sends the regular stuff that everybody gets it's just a maintenance box, yeah I remember you it's a bunch of used t-shirts it's you know a few small things, bit of chocolate things. Whereas the person in London is thinking I'm putting all this effort into it I'm giving the family a lot of money I'll be received back there with great love and respect when I retire meanwhile the people in Baguio are thinking well I hope she doesn't plan to retire back here that's going to be a lot to care for she hasn't really made that much of a contribution so you have this kind of bifurcation incommensurability and people are aware of this so they still want to send their boxes to say actually look here's my circular saw here's my work table I'm really coming back I'm really going to have a business I'm really going to live here this is not a maintenance box this is my commitment to come home I'm going to be with you it's really important for people to make those statements, not with cash but with goods as well so unpacking the boxes reveals two classes of gift objects you have objects that materialize and delimit specific kinds of relationships and then set parameters within those relationships they can create disappointment and refuse obligation but they can also reaffirm commitment to the Cordillera as a lifelong home and then you have these objects that append a global and socially mobile ontology onto the donor in that generalized exchange they perform social mobility and geographical distance or superiority like those leather motorcycle jackets look that's a really important part of Cordillera, Turkey, masculinity so you know like let's go for that it's good to have those leather jackets out there they're very valuable to ignorant men so unpacking boxes shows us how migration works differentially across space to reterritorialize big academic word but to make migrants home onto this virtual space that is existing somewhere between and our house in London and the back home in the Philippines that back home is yearned for and migrants eventual return is not always what they imagine it would be I've talked to some migrants about their ambivalence on return because that back home doesn't fully recognize the sacrifices migrants make to sustain that place so that full return is rarely possible our house in London is a storage depot it's a boarding house it's a site of sojourn and transient relationships against which back home is reconstructed as ideal our house is kind of a permanent impermanence and people transfer and transfer across London for a whole variety of reasons to live in the virtual home space migrants set out the making of that one home in the Philippines against that of the one they're living in in London so they defer both their return and their settlement they live out of the boxed strewn house and their bodega back in their family home betwixt in between immaterial goods but also in security familiarity and community and the possibility remains for them in the imagined back home that they cannot quite reach so if you come and look at theories of home and recent work on home Igarats show us something new yes home is an effective construct may not be nearby or every day but it remains a driving force that people imagine about long-term security familiarity, community and a sense of possibility home for Igarats is the site of accumulation not just of financial capital but of security and social capital the sense of home works up and down from the micro level to the geopolitical so migration and regulation and settlement policies affect what's seen, heard smelled and touched in homes, intimate spaces and they do that in London and they do that in the Philippines but migrants definitely use the sensory and material encounters of migration to resist homemaking in their country of soldier and settlement against what people say about migrants settling they are very much unsettling themselves tossing up church to go to the car boot migrants seek to control themselves and their home-based subjectivities using stuff and that works against settlement but with only a sort of partial success because of the ways the stuff is received so there's this incredible traffic in a kind of material politics and migrants deny themselves home conference to resist homemaking and the home building process as they resist that they forego social economic and personal growth that might make them settle effectively so for Igarats home remains in the Philippines and this is not to say that Igarats are not good migrants this is to say that Igarats are facing many of the same challenges others have but they have an advantage in this because of their very strong cultural norms they can keep each other going they can share their struggles and sustain each other in the migration sojourn but it only works if they are able to hang on to their ancestral domain as their spiritual economic and physical home in the Philippines which grounds the entire process so this is a contingent success and contingent security and it sets up this politics for Igarats of a very problematic set of material practices of migration which they find quite funny but from which they can't escape ta-da! so we have a few minutes for questions does anybody have a question? apart from how did you take pictures of all my friends and how did you get in my house ah your mother let me yes you live of living migrants here I am focusing on the Kordeliara group the girls my question is have you looked at discrimination ah for me it's very important that a psychological ah perspective should be brought in because history is important literature is important sociology is important but psychological is also very important because what I'm getting now is a feedback on discrimination not by the others within themselves okay I worked with Igarats in London between 2009 and 2014 and part of that has to do with my positionality so I'm not Igarat I've spent reasonable amount of time in the Kordeliara but when people were in social psychological distress ah and with discrimination I would listen and try to support them personally and try and direct them to appropriate social services ah and support in the community either religious or through NGOs but I didn't do any in-depth study or assessment because I really think that's something that needs to be done by an Igarat researcher ah who's got a very nuanced grasp of what people are dealing with so as I framed my study I did initial interviews with 60 something people and I scope things down and down and down to focus on people who agreed in more depth and that was because they were not people who were really struggling they understood what I was doing and why I was doing it and the purpose of my study and they didn't need anything from me so they were not hoping that I would somehow find them a new employer or sort their problems with the border agency etc so that for me was an ethical way for me to work that I felt confident and this is difficult work because I was working with people where you know I met them in the UK then one partner in a relationship went home and the other partner stayed here in the UK and I saw more of them than they did of each other for several years it's not ah this is not ah something where you'd want to look at generalized experiences I think people did tell me about discrimination and I've captured some of the comments they made in the book but I didn't want to make that the focus of my study I wanted to look at resilience at culture at good management and success I've got to say and I make this point in the book my sort of major respondent and I sat down and went through our finances together and discovered we had the same after we basically earned the same amount of money so you know it was very much about meeting on a level playing field it is not something that I would be comfortable doing as a non-agorot researcher saying tell me how you've been humiliated and tell me about your distress that would be retrieving some of the problems that I think people surmount quite well in their networks and on their own any other questions? Yes, Candi it's really fascinating thank you for that I mean I was thinking of my own but I'm but I was not being from the quarter year I'm really interested in how your findings about Igrot sending home reflect on the wider picture yes experience of recreating home by sending boxes and it is very similar with the added nuance of Igrots have a reason to do this kind of transnational shopping you know because it's cold and they don't get good cold weather gear in the Philippines you need your Levi's steel-toed work boots and your leather jacket to be rocky and that was really you know we've got our spokesmodel over here my archetype but there's a certain there's a certain sense to that right but there are also the contingencies of being remote and kind of being having to entertain lots of people so you could do a comparative study of what's in what ballot buy-in boxes some of it's generalized to everybody some of it's specific to Igrots but Igrots definitely insert themselves in this broader diaspora culture that's why the Mikey Bustos video produced by you know Tagalog speaking migrant in Canada is so funny because they are caught up in this process as well so there are you know nuances and differences too I didn't study non-Igrot migrants in London and do box comparisons largely because my cultural capital with Tagalog is not particularly good I have a Torón Provenciano that comes out with a schwa or whatever you know and I'm Anglican I'm not Catholic so you know there are different things that happen to me which mean that I'm much more comfortable hanging out with Igrots I think my default is kind of jeans boots and a sweatshirt or a jumper and sometimes a scarf and I drink my beer out of a bottle you can see I'm fine Igrots Saturday night Sunday afternoon activities I'm fine I get into a Catholic church and I'm really not sure what I'm doing so the specificities of the practice will pull out the unique points of Igrot culture there is a lot more community level reciprocity and I've worked with Igrots elsewhere in Hong Kong on another project and we noticed that they were the only people making community level investments everybody else was investing in family businesses the Igrot migrants to Hong Kong were actually investing in cooperatives community water systems and so on and could negotiate with their families to put in money for a wider community to benefit so there are things about culture that make that durable and certainly the Igrot community here they were doing a lot of money so they weren't going to the five six money lenders they were solving problems internally and there was a lot of reciprocal exchange and a lot of work between siblings and a lot of strategies that they developed to contain problems of irregularity and avoid the border agency I mentioned slidingly in my book the rest of them I don't talk about because they're still valid they still work so this is my mission in doing this study was to show how well Igrot culture migrates and what that means about a global world you actually have a better chance of succeeding as a contract worker or regular migrant in London if you're Igrot then you do if you're not because you've got stronger kind of a stronger cultural safety net and you've got to go back to which is more regional and more secure that was my fundamental finding isn't it interesting that in a global world being an indigenous person now gives you that advantage what does it say about the global city about migration and about what everybody else is facing that's where I think was interesting because June was saying to me of course they lose their culture and I'm saying no they come up to me and they say I didn't know I needed to bring my topies to do this many cultural performances but how will I find a room an employer or meet anyone unless I go along to these cultural performances they are the big community get-togethers and what's most important and sure that's what I found you go along to these gatherings you stand there with someone and they're like she owes me money she owes me money she owes me money I'm collecting you know all sorts of things are going on there are recommendations exchanges they are very vibrant events and they are the safety net now I've got people out in the audience I can see them laughing at me I think they didn't well they were looking at my hopeless dancing and didn't realize I was noticing what they were doing is that now yeah yeah they were so for me that that was what I wanted to retrieve there were other things where I just thought you know what I do not want to re-inscribe negative stereotypes about igorots I want to celebrate the culture and the resilience that makes this possible and you know the way that they managed to land on their feet yes one of the things that you are comparing this to Hong Kong did up to mine that there is a real class difference in where you can afford to go and what you can afford to actually do as a migrant or an OFW so did you find that there were differences in the way in which the igorots in Hong Kong use networks versus the way they do in England or is there an actual difference in terms of there is some kind of a subtle class difference I suspect in who ends up there yes the people who got to the UK were generally better educated and wealthier than the people who went to Hong Kong but the other big difference is in Hong Kong everybody was on one of the domestic worker visas here in the UK my sample over time became progressively more irregular there is a lot of irregularity in the Filipino community in the UK and because of the migration regulations and the state of the job market in the urban UK and what the NHS is doing and basically just the degeneration of everything and austerity it actually makes more sense to follow the regular strategy here you're better off as an irregular migrant I've done the mouse I would do it myself it makes sense so irregular irregular without papers without leave to remain or work un-documented well un-documented I mean your documents they just don't let you do what it is that you're doing and your documents may be in some sense of processing or appeal or with somebody those documents may be there but your actual activities and what's on the documents don't match I use irregularity I would never use illegal and it's very easy to fall into irregularity I accidentally worked for an Australia without a visa when it got cancelled by an airline and nobody told me so I went in to apply for citizenship and they pressed the red button under the desk and some people thundered into the room and I said oh the airline did that because I had two passport that's really interesting and why did no one tell me you shouldn't have been worrying okay so you want to put me in migration detention I might find that really intriguing and that's the last thing they want to hear is I'm a researcher I might really enjoy being in migration detention that's when they push the other red button and go no we can't take this person they're going to write something so that kind of works against them so seriously the actual norm for migration seems to be upheaval and irregularity for almost everybody but there are people who look at what's happening in the labour market and think actually informality, working cash in hand overstaying when the UK took down exit controls it created a space and there's a lot of economic space in London which if you're paying taxes and national insurance you can't actually live in but if you're just taking cash in hand and you have really good networks and you can live in tiny houses and you can make it liveable so that's the difference from Hong Kong and people kind of sort out those spaces and what they can do to make them work and of course you've got ignorant professionals who are English as a second language English as a language of education degree holders very well organized etc they find their way into that labour market and do extremely well particularly because of the Anglican church affiliations they are you know really able to negotiate quite well they do the same thing in Hong Kong but here it's an informal kind of economy and the book outlines some of the strategies that people were following to make London work they've become more and more extreme people have had to get ready to move more and more frequently and you get to the point where people won't actually share a house with other Igarots because if there is any kind of contact with the border agency they want to be atomized and isolated so they don't sort of if they get taken in there isn't kind of contagion that goes right through the community but they've coped with that very very well I remember when they brought in the checks for rental agreements where landlords had to look at people's passports and make sure that they actually had a visa and I contacted one of my respondents and said how are you going to be affected by this and she said what makes you think I've got a tenancy agreement they're in the informal rental economy and I went yeah okay you get back to worrying about the elections in the Philippines and I'll just get real here you know what are the workarounds I don't write so much about that in the book because it's not like hand the book to the home office and they've got a but you know it's out there people share information Hong Kong you can't do this so one of the arguments I make in the book is about James Stott's Shatter Zone is we've got a new Shatter Zone in the urban area where it's like the wild west and strangely enough people with clan and tribal ethnic ties they know how to live in that kind of environment I once told my husband when he was on this story about how my friends had they purchased a truck and they had to have the truck repainted because it had belonged to a false recruiter the false recruiter was going bankrupt and being arrested and they'd sold it on and they had it detailed and then they had to bribe the land transportation office to change the registration fine and then my husband was looking at me in horror because he thought they'd done it in the UK so I went back in the Philippines don't worry he was like yeah but I could believe they would be able to do that in London I've met these people they could make that happen even here in London I'm like yeah you're right but they didn't they did it back in the Philippines and how to sort that so there's this way in which you get this incredible networking and knowing what people do and what to ask for I mean another great story of mine one of my respondents was working as a part-time housekeeper for a family with a banker and she went through the one of the major Philippine banks she was remitting into an emergency situation she put in 1500 pounds the bank sat on it for three days they didn't send it forward so she told her employer oh it's still sitting with the bank and he rang up and threatened them with a legal investigation under the banking act because he was in compliance with one of the major international banks here in London and she just she knew say oh they're doing this and I don't think they should be and he's like right it says here I'll just bring them and tell them you know we're going to report you unless I'm like yeah because you know she's listening being strategic it happens anyway it's now 11 I think we should move on but you're welcome to ask me questions over the break and there is a sign up sheet I ordered in 16 pieces of this book to sell at a Tawa Deep Discount and managed to lose them in SOAS so if you put your name down we will find them in SOAS and we can post you a copy and if you're going back to the Philippines I'm going to be sending some to Mt. Cloud in Baguio and we can probably also arrange door to door yeah sorry about that but yeah you can sign up and we'll post if we find it we'll post it from here to help you thank you ok thank you