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Some comments from Filipino immigrants circulating online are so condescending to the poor like, "Instead of waiting for dole-outs, they should plant seeds so they have food to harvest." Mamser naman, urgent po ang pagkagutom. Hintayin pa pong tumubo ang malunggay?" Kalurks.
By saying such lines, Filipino immigrants echo racist stereotypes of the "lazy native," the 'Juan Tamad," the "indolent indio." Filipinos saying these sadly repeat the words of colonizers that harmed us historically.
From Jose Rizal's "The Indolence of the Filipinos." Copy's available at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6885/pg6885.html
"Without education and liberty, that soil and that sun of mankind, no reform is possible, no measure can give the result desired...What we wish is that obstacles be not put in his way, that the many his climate and the situation of the islands afford be not augmented..."
"that instruction be not begrudged him for fear that when he becomes intelligent he may separate from the colonizing nation or ask for the rights of which he makes himself worthy..." -Rizal, The Indolence of Filipinos
Woke up to this going viral. Pls note that this tweet isn't meant to divide. We are operating a community pantry in our hometown & most donations come from generous folks in the Filipino diaspora as you can see in the report below that I typed up. Salamat, mga kababayan!
It's sad that some kababayans overseas echo our colonizers' words but diasporic giving can be life-saving. I am privileged as an OFW professor, but many kababayans work in precarious positions. I always hear: if conditions at home were better, we wouldn't be away.
Many comments on this thread note that the urban poor cannot farm because they have no land. I am anthropologist of my rural howetown & the case is the same. Poor rural folk are surrounded by vast farmlands that aren't theirs, or that used to be theirs, which they can't farm.
In my research, land dispossession lies @ the very heart of the problems of the poorest folks. Landlessness has become ordinary. The poor aren't lazy; they're without capital as landless farmers. The shift to cash economy & aspirations for modernity have pushed them to sell land.
Rizal said above that the Filipino needs education to be truly free. What is sad is that the poor do invest in education, but the only investment they can gamble is land. For their next generation's upward mobility through education & professionalization, land must be sold off.
Many have worked as tenant farmers all their lives. When they do farm, they face the worst conditions of precarity. Let me share this part of my ethnography about the horrible wage labor situation that farmers in my hometown face:
I guess I just want to make the quick point that urban poverty must be linked with the historical, generational, and ongoing dispossession of people in the originating communities of migrants -- these are rural places such as my hometown in Bicol.
The Philippine govt, in collusion with wealthy nations needing cheap labor, overlooks the need to invest in local infrastructure in the rural hometowns & to return land to the dispossessed. It was in 1987 when land reforms were passed but the rich still hold on to haciendas.
So, my hometown is located in 1 of the areas with the highest land distribution backlog. Focus in the Global South & the Save Agrarian Reform Alliance reported that those with high backlog “figure prominently in the list of provinces where the poorest families have been found.”
What is interesting is that my hometown is also proudly called by its residents the "town of dollars" as local men were recruited to work in the US Navy, beginning the cycle of US-bound mobilities. But only a handful get to earn capital & and afford land. There is no true reform.
I have to go as I need to work on a presentation 
, but let me copy here an excerpt from my book in progress how dollars, migration, & govt-supported migration trajectories, in the rural Town of Dollars, for the poor, contribute to the erosion of the local moral economy:
, but let me copy here an excerpt from my book in progress how dollars, migration, & govt-supported migration trajectories, in the rural Town of Dollars, for the poor, contribute to the erosion of the local moral economy:
And if you would like to donate to our community pantry (I am one of the organizers and your donations are safe, I promise), please check info below:
