Money, Maturity, and Migrant Aspirations

Since the state institutionalization of migrant labour began in the Philippines, countless children have been ‘left behind’ bereft of one, or even both, parents. Consequently, the moral evaluation of familial and financial responsibility has intensified. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in the various institutions involved in the quotidian lives of young people, this chapter uses Cheryl Mattingly’s (2013) notion of the ‘moral laboratory’ at home and in school to explore lived engagements with money, morality, and mobility. In the reimagining and pursuit of future possibilities beyond a life of poverty and unemployment, this chapter contends that young people’s experimentation with money as a form of mobile or migrant aspiration reflects their strategic moral values and maturation.