![]() I recognize in Tizon’s descriptions of his mother and “Lola” a pattern I have seen in my reporting: how one exhausted, single immigrant mother turns all her fury and shame into abuse of another, weaker woman in her emotional and physical bondage. ![]() Confronting the conditions that can lead someone to choose evil is an important part of understanding and preventing exploitation. It’s much harder to tell a story of injustice that-without excusing or explaining away evil acts-nonetheless acknowledges the humanity of the perpetrator, and admits that we all have the capacity for cruelty. But it offers a certain kind of psychological safety: Even as you expose yourself to heart-wrenching injustice, you write about it as a professional observer, removed from any guilt or complicity. Reporting on systemic injustice-analyzing a broken policy and telling the stories of its victims-is crucial work. But in his essay “My Family’s Slave,” Alex Tizon went beyond exposure to self-exposure, which is why his story moved me. My own response has been to report on what’s happening and try to understand and expose it. I didn’t think about how trapped it feels to be a migrant domestic worker until I was exposed to leering men trying to exploit me because of my Asian face. citizenship, even as I feel sick for wielding my privilege as self-defense. I’ve learned to tense up every time strange men ask me if I’m Filipina, and to quickly announce my U.S. As of mid-April, 28 more women had died in 2017. Lebanese General Security, the government’s intelligence and security agency, told me that the bodies of 110 migrant women had been repatriated from Lebanon in 2016 alone. A startling number of migrant women jump off balconies, dying in either suicide or failed escape attempts. When abuse happens, they have nowhere to go. Their work contracts require that they live in their employers’ homes. In Lebanon, migrant domestic workers are specifically excluded from labor laws, which means they have no legal guarantee for basic rights like a minimum wage and maximum work hours or days off, and nowhere to appeal when they are verbally or physically abused. Most of them-about 105,000-are from Ethiopia, but Filipinas are the second-biggest group, at roughly 18,300. Lebanon had nearly 170,000 registered domestic migrants in 2016. Jordan has about 50,000 migrant domestic workers, of whom the largest subgroup are from the Philippines. I’ve been reporting on migrant domestic labor in Jordan and Lebanon since January, visiting shelters, women’s prisons, and overcrowded neighborhoods where migrant women flock together for survival, often cramming as many as a dozen people into a small apartment. I hear too many stories like this.” Several other migrant women later told me the same thing. Or else they can send you to jail, or back to your country. They say: ‘You have iqama ?’ If you don’t have, they ask you for money, or drive you somewhere to do fucking. “Sometimes they are police and sometimes they are just pretending. “They will try to make you their ‘girlfriend,’” she said. When I visited the area, a Filipina woman at the street market explained why police kept pulling me over. Many of the Filipina women who live there are “runaways,” meaning they lack regular papers and can be arrested or exploited on the streets at any time. There’s a neighborhood in Amman nicknamed “Manila Street” where many migrant workers live and congregate on their days off, setting up Filipino food markets, buying phone cards, and visiting the Western Union to send money home. Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity Ed Yong That incident repeated itself several times, always with the same progression: Men followed or pulled alongside me on the street, asking, “Philippines?” When I told them my nationality, they quickly backed off. “Welcome to Jordan!” one of them said as he rolled the window back up, his partner already driving the car away. USA.” The two officers sat up quickly, glancing at each other. I beckoned in the direction of my apartment, still perplexed until he said, “Where are you from? Filipina?” His colleague in the driver’s seat smirked. I’d left it at home, as usual, I told him. ![]() A man slouched in the passenger’s seat looked me up and down, then said, “Where is your passport?” I was walking down a street in western Amman when a police car pulled alongside me on the road, the officers inside rolling down their window and beckoning me to stop. This article is part of a series of responses to Alex Tizon’s Atlantic article “ My Family’s Slave.” The full series can be found here.ĪMMAN, Jordan-I got my first glimpse of what it’s like to be a Filipina migrant worker in Jordan on an October day in 2013, shortly after I’d moved to the region.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |