Transnational Corporations of Football Kin: Migration, Labor Flow, and the American Samoa MIRAB Economy

Abstract

In the U.S. territory of American Samoa, gridiron football has emerged as an important driver of a stock-flow relationship in which the stock of overseas-resident migrant athletic laborers sustains the flow of remittances to their extended family in their homeland. Within this article, I consider the significance of gridiron football within American Samoa’s MIRAB (Migration, Remittances, Aid and Bureaucracy) economy, a model of Pacific Island microeconomies characterized by migration, remittances, foreign aid, and public bureaucracy. Based on a series of personal interviews with high school football players between the ages of 15 and 18 years on the Eastern football team squad, as well as more than a dozen coaches, parents, educator, and directors associated with the production of American Samoan High School football (n = 60), I critically examine the social, cultural, and economic determinants involved in the collective decision-making process of footballers to emigrate to the U.S. mainland. I find that family units in the American Samoa operate as, to rephrase Bertram and Watters, transnational corporations of football kin, working collectively to develop and train skilled football laborers toward the accumulation of various forms of economic and social remittances for the benefit of the individual and extended family unit. More broadly, gridiron football in American Samoa produces a stock-flow relationship whereby a stock of Samoan gridiron footballers migrates to U.S. colleges and universities to support the flow of remittances and aid that sustains the island’s MIRAB economy.