Gemma Tulud Cruz
Beyond the Borders, Beyond the Margins:
Filipino Migration and Its Challenges to Doing Mission*
(January 2005)

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“DH” for the Hong Kong domestic helper... “Japayuki” for the Japanese entertainer ... “Katas ng Saudi” for the fruits of Filipino men’s Saudi Arabia labour. These are some of the new vocabulary that has been invented in the Philippines to describe today’s “global” Filipino. Name any service – oriented job and a Filipino migrant worker is most probably engage in it. Go to even a seemingly God-forsaken country and you will likely find a Filipino toiling the day away. From Africa to Oceania … Russia to Australia… Jordan to Saipan… America to Asia… these millions of Filipinos are actually part of a massive Filipino labor migration phenomenon.

Filipino Diaspora

Today, almost 10% of the Filipino population of more or less 80 million is outside the country and around 70% is affected by migration.ⁱ Moreover, Filipino migrant workers are in 193 out of the 224 UN-registered countries in the world. Such is the density, velocity, and multi-directionality of contemporary Filipino labor migration that it has captured the imagination of the international community and started to call the Filipino migrants’ community as a diasporic community. Today also, this Filipino labor migration is getting more and more concentrated in Asian destinations and experiencing intense feminization. From Hong Kong to Singapore…Saudi Arabia to Malaysia…Taiwan to Japan…Filipino women migrant workers are shifting from the West to the East and migrating in tens of thousands to work mainly in the service sector.

Challenging Mission

How do you talk about God in a context where isolation, alienation, and discrimination constitute the very fabric of one’s living conditions? How do you speak about the Divine in a situation where one’s faith is put to extreme test with the host country’s religious repression, e.g. Saudi Arabia, and migrant marginalization? How do you minister to a people whose faith is challenged by exposure and immersion not only to unbridleed secularization and urbanization but also religious and cultural pluralism? Lastly, how do we recognize and deal with the renew Pinoy religiosity which refuses to be stifled and is manifesting itself tenaciously in and across international borders? From the limitation of the practice of one’s religion in Islamic Middle Eastern countries… the chop-chop body of Japayuki Maricris Sioson… the execution of Flor Contemplacion… to the liturgical celebrations in the churches of Europe and the gyms as well as auditoriums of Singapore and Hong Kong… we have to admit that this phenomenon is creating a new missiological situation. If we truly listen to this complex situation that Filipinos, especially Filipino women find themselves in, I see two possible challenges to doing mission.

Liberation

First, mission has to be contextual and liberational. In a situation where poverty and alienation rips the very fabric of people’s dignity even when one is outside the country, mission needs to be done with primary consideration of the context and from the perspective of liberation. This means to say that empowerment is the ultimate goal. It should not just be pastoral in the sense that we give stop-gap solutions, e.g. counseling and legal assistance, which are not really long-term solutions in that they only take care of the effects not the causes of the problem.

At home in the Philippines, there is a need to conscienticize and strengthen not only the socio-economic and political institutions but also the people who make and break these institutions. This is very much needed among our government leaders who have become very vulnerable if not gullible and willing victims of the elitist economic globalization. This global phenomenon and the other factors which have driven millions of Filipinos to leave “home” e.g. misinformed culture of migration, must be responded to if one is to combat the roots or sources of the oppression. Outside the country, the Filipino migrant also cries out for justice and compassion. As such, preventive solutions are sought not only from the sending country and sending church but also from the receiving country or receiving church.

Social Justice

Mission, as it is in the biblical tradition, has inescapable social implications. It entails social justice. As the Synod document Justice in the World says: “Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of preaching the Gospel, that is, of the mission of the Church for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation”. So, if mission is to be rooted in the biblical tradition, especially Jesus’ mission, it must be contextually liberational.

Dialogue

I also believe that Filipino mission today has to be dialogical and translocal. Moreover, it must be inter-culturally and inter-religiously dialogical on a translocal level. The Filipino diaspora has put one out of every five Filipino in a more multi-ethnic and multi-religious milieu. As such, it is imperative that migrant Filipinos who come from a predominantly Catholic Christian country and are usually rural in origin are equipped with the dispositions and skills needed in living in societies marked by cultural and religious pluralism. It is also important that the sending Church (the Philippine Church) works with the receiving Church qualitatively and continuously. The Philippine Church, for instance, tries to minister to migrant domestic helpers or DHs by giving a pre-departure orientation seminar or PDOS. In Hong Kong where most of the DHs go to, the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong has created the Diocesan Pastoral Center for Filipinos in recognition of the tremendous need for apostolate for the Filipina DHs. But I believe that these are not enough. There not only has to be continuous and critical international collaboration between churches regardless of religion and denomination. The churches should also actively seek and fight for the transformation of the very structures that contribute to the oppression and migration of migrant Filipinos.

For a Church of no strangers

The Church’s or the Community of the People of God’s compassionate and healing presence is also urgent in uprooted people and diasporic communities of Filipino migrants. Thus is needed not only in helping them deal with their experiences of injustice but also in how to cope with the oppressive situation and witness to their faith amidst different cultures and religions. For one, Filipino migrants experience not only cultural alienation but also religious alienation even within their own religious communities. The Hong Kong Catholic Church, for example, says that as they appreciate the contribution of the Filipinas to the Church of Hong Kong, there are difficulties in establishing a Church that is both Filipino and Chinese. They identify what is at the heart of the problem when they say: “We are aware that we still need to inculcate among our Chinese people that the Church is universal and that two cultures can proclaim the same faith in the same Church, in different ways and languages…and [that] the Diocese of Hong Kong would like to see the Chinese and the Filipinos join one another at Mass and gatherings, as equals and as friends.”ⁱⁱ

A New Mission

Migration, whether forced or voluntary and exacerbated by globalization, I believe, is the new context and future of mission. In as much as migration ultimately has negative repercussions, it may be considered as an inevitable phenomenon. Increased poverty and mobility brought by globalization makes this all the more inescapable. The challenge then is for us to creatively draw from this situation since Filipino migrants are also missionaries themselves. In most of the 193 countries where they are present, the church is the principal site of celebration of Pinoy identity and community making migrancy a very potent source of missionary activity by the Filipinos today.

Missionary People

Filipino migrants are perceived by a number of their receiving communities to be creating some kind of ecclesiogenesis. They, especially Filipino women migrants, have been known not only to be breathing new life into their host countries’ faith communities but also forging a new way of being church. In Europe or countries of the North, they bring a new dynamism to churches ravaged by secularism. In Hong Kong and Singapore, temporal gyms and auditoriums are transformed once a week into homes of prayer for the Filipina pilgrim workers. And this hunger for and witness to the faith is not only about going to Mass either. For example, aside from the regular prayer meeting with their numerous faith groups, the Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong even attend Theology classes and do outreach work during their one and only off-day which they usually arrange to be on a Sunday. This new way of being church and as such a new way of doing mission finds its testament in the very statement of the Hong Kong Church:

Our churches are very alive on Sundays because of their presence. The Filipinos have brought their religiosity and faith to the Church of Hong Kong – they enhance the faith of our local people with their presence, witnessing hospitality, joy, and love for music. The diocese is truly blessed in many ways because of the Filipinos, and their dynamism will keep alive the faith in the territory.… In short, the Filipinos are to be called missionaries first before they are labeled as domestic helpers (emphasis mine). ⁱⁱⁱ

No Place Like Home

At the heart of the biblical tradition and Jesus’ missionary vision is the gift of a “home” – a place and space where justice is done and love and respect unites everyone. Today, poverty worsened by economic globalization and migration are redefining all our notions of “home” and challenging our very understanding and approach to mission. The call therefore, especially in the context of Filipino migration, is to engage in a mission that brings about contextual borderless liberation – one that is in dialogue with other cultures and religions. Mission in the face of globalization should be a mission beyond inculturation but a mission of interculturation – one that respects or embraces differences, especially in cultures and religions, and enables people to live in harmony with diversity. It is only when mission is both contextually liberational and dialogically translocal that mission can truly respond to the cry of the Filipino in general and the Filipina in particular.

The cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have also seen how the Egyptians are oppressing them; so come now, let me send you to Pharaoh, that you may bring my people, the Israelites out of Egypt (Ex 3:9-10).

 

Notes