Transnational Lives of Pinays on the Canadian Prairies

Filipino women or Pinays are, undeniably, the most visible mobile group of temporary foreign workers in Canada and elsewhere today. They are also the most highly socially integrated group of women from Asia due to intermarriages and a western colonial legacy. Over three hundred years of Spanish rule and fifty years of American tutelage have made the Filipinos the “little brown Americans” whose use of the English language, practice of liberal-democratic politics, and adherence to Catholicism shape their trajectories as “citizens of the world”. Filipinos have become one of the most desired group of non-white workers and immigrants for their distinct ability to integrate in western societies, to be “at home in the world”. The plight of Filipino women has indeed attracted much attention from scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. But a nuanced approach to how racialized Filipino women negotiate the limiting social structures of inclusion facilitates a broader appreciation of the meaning of migration in their lives.

This presentation explores the migration, identity, and community of Pinay in the prairie provinces of Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. While Filipino women have become the mainstay group for case studies on the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) in Canada and its consequent phenotypical constructs of the “nanny,” “caregiver” and “domestic worker”, I extend the prevailing dominant discourse of their positioning as “servants of globalization” to the grounded experiences of community participation, activism, volunteerism, and negotiating multiple identities in making meanings of their quotidian transnational lives.