Mediatization and the migration imaginary of left-behind children in the Philippines

The mobility brought about by labor migration in the past decades has fundamentally changed family life and resulted in the rearrangement and renegotiations of familial responsibilities in which children are particularly affected as they are often left behind. Using the mediatization framework and the concept of migration imaginary, I conducted interviews with 20 migrant parents in Hong Kong and 25 of their children left behind in the Philippines to unpack the embeddedness of media and communications in the transformations of transnational families. In this article, I argue that family, popular, and state mediatization have aligned and deepened the normalization of labor migration and intergenerational transmission of this imaginary for the left-behind children and their families. Media representations applaud the sacrifices of the migrant parents and young social mobility through labor migration, while communication technologies have significantly improved communication and the migration infrastructures for transnational families in the past decades. What is obfuscated in this process is that the state takes advantage of this migration imaginary to maintain the status quo of the Philippines’ participation in the neoliberalist global labor enterprise, where left-behind children are ultimately groomed as a target market to provide the future work force in human labor exportation

Ethnography · Narrative · Politics · The Imaginary · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Philippine History and Culture

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