Heroes and Filipino Migrations

Abstract

This chapter highlights the stories of 1990s and 2000s street dancers in order to explore the impact of Filipino familial and labor migration since the early 1970s. Although scholars have usually depicted global hip-hop as an outward flow from the United States, this chapter points to an alternative trajectory—when Filipino talent is part of the 10 percent of the Filipino population to have worked outside the Philippines. This chapter analyzes two figurations—overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) and Petisyonados—that simultaneously recode state-brokered gendered migration, economic motivation, and personal rationale. The processes of migrant identity formation reveal a crucial narrative by which racial and sexual formation factor into the rooting and uprooting of Filipino people and culture. Demythologizing talent and the migrant hero trope, these Filipinos exemplify how the global mobility of people and individual motility of bodies prove to be more closely related than previously thought.