B. Lynne Milgram

Reconfiguring Space, Mobilizing Livelihood Street Vending, Legality, and Work in the Philippines

In the Philippines, the liberalization of the countrys economy has meant increasing rural to urban migration and dramatic growth in informal sector trade. Women, in particular, building on their historical roles as the countrys primary public and regional market traders, have made Philippine city streets their new business venue for itinerant, but viable work selling different goods: fresh produce, manufactured goods, cooked food – gendered occupations common throughout Southeast Asia. That their livelihood enterprises occur within public spaces not customarily used for commercial activities, means that such trades raise questions about who has access to and rights over such street spaces. Focusing on the growing street economy in Baguio City, the industrialized and administrative center of the northern Philippines, this article argues that female street vendors, through their livelihoods, unsettle essentialist categories such as informal/formal work, appropriate space use, and legal/illegal practice. Many of these women may appear unprepared for labor organizing, as few have the financial resources or the training they need to protect their rights. Yet, by organizing themselves into vendor associations, using letter writing campaigns and assuming innovative leadership positions, vendors successfully protested the 2007 Baguio City bylaws banning street trade in the central business district. The concessions these women won on selected laws enabled them to capture urban spaces consolidating their access to livelihood despite the constraints they face and the differences among street-based groups. Recognizing such gendered place-based politics makes nuanced analyses of Baguio Citys street vendors important to policy makers and social scientists seeking to understand how vendors’ actions may contribute to informed renegotiations of rights to integral work.

Piña cloth, identity and the project of Philippine nationalism

In the early 1990s, with increasing pressure from the economic and cultural effects of postmodern development, Philippine President Fidel Ramos orchestrated a nationalist construction under the rubric of “Filipinism” (Bankoff and Weekley, 2002, pp. 37–39). Anchored in the writings of the national hero Jose Rizal, Filipinism was a special kind of nationalism that could be used only by Filipinos; it attempted to unite people through reference to a shared past, albeit an invented one, by employing mainstream symbols of citizenship such as the flag, national anthem, and historic myths of military conquests (Bankoff and Weekley, 2002, p. 38). Within the current global framework exploring the flows of persons, places and things, new research questions the extent to which such visions of the nation remain the preeminent entity around which people shape identity. Past studies of national identity construction, often housed within political economy and history, focused on elements of so-called “high” culture (e.g., major works of art and notable religious or state monuments), or on spectacular and heroic events and ceremonies commemorating the “birth” of a nation. These are reified notions of culture and identity that, while still relevant to some degree, comprise only a small part of the mix of things that people use to situate themselves within regions. Much of the discourse on identity in the Philippines, for example, suggests that Filipinos are notably unattached to such portrayals of the imaginary nation (Pertierra, 2002). Yet, research on national identity in Southeast Asia has, until recently, provided few insights into alternative sources on which people draw to experience and manifest nationhood (see Rosaldo, 2003). An emerging new literature suggests that people increasingly craft personalised forms of identity by drawing on the “banal” material culture of everyday life – the mundane experiences of daily cultural practice (see, for example, Billig, 1995; Edensor, 2002). In this paper, I explore the varied channels through which Philippine designers use such quotidian forms of expression, namely garments made from local piña [pineapple] cloth, Asian Studies Review September 2005, Vol. 29, pp. 233–246

Reconfiguring Margins: Secondhand Clothing and Street Vending in the Philippines

Abstract Throughout the Philippines, the recent contraction of the global economy has challenged the livelihoods of the countrys urban poor. This is particularly evident in Baguio City, northern Luzons administrative center. Here, women, building on their history as the countrys foremost public market traders, have established viable street vending businesses selling different goods such as imported secondhand clothing. The meaning of secondhand clothing worldwide has shifted from its humble origin as an inexpensive functional product fulfilling the clothing needs of the poor to a useful yet fashionable commodity pursued across class and space. In this article, I use womens street-based sales of secondhand clothing to argue that vendors activate this frontier trade to challenge the states idea of normative economic pursuits thereby unsettling taken-for-granted notions of formal/informal work, appropriate space use, and the meaning of commodities. Employing customary and mainstream business practices, vendors re-craft this globally traded commodity to enable local livelihood and personalized identity constructions. I suggest that by refashioning public streets into dynamic relational sites, Baguio City vendors center previously marginalized practices to assert their place as legitimate actors in arenas of public power that have largely excluded them from the privileges of modern citizenship and rights to livelihood.

Edgy things: Negotiating borders and identity in Asian material culture – a foreword

Since the 1980s, studies on material culture have explored issues of value and meaning in objects and commodities. This literature has challenged social scientists to rethink the diverse transactions that take place between people and objects in all modes of communication and in the course of daily activities (e.g., Appadurai, 1986; Myers, 2001; Schiffer, 1999). In a critical discussion of these studies, Jonathan Friedman (1991) argues that the things themselves should not be the focus of analyses; instead, emphasis should be placed on the social context within which things are embedded. That is, “. . . things do not have social lives. Rather, social life has things” (Friedman, 1991, p. 161). From this perspective, the emotive force of objects arises less from their evocation of human or biological metaphors than from the ways in which they are used to delineate, reinforce or transform identities and positions. This is evidenced in the current research noted above. Such studies emphasise how global flows of things and the changing circumstances of their production, consumption and circulation are related to questions of modernity and tradition, nationality and ethnicity, class and identity, centre and margin. The papers in this special issue add to these discussions by showing how things used in everyday life in Asia both fashion local identities and serve projects of nation-building. In a postcolonial era in which marks of imperial rule remain in some regions and new impositions of central political power are being experienced in others, quotient things, rather than nationally-sanctioned icons, are often key cultural symbols in changing hierarchies of value, exchange and meaning. Leedom Lefferts’ and Sidney Cheung’s analyses of local “ethnic” foods in Thai-Lao and Hong Kong societies, and Lynne Milgram’s, Tom O’Neill’s and Cherubim Quizon’s research on Philippine pineapple cloth, Tibetan carpets and Philippine mixed-media constructions focus on things that have been historically outside mainstream discourses of art and cuisine. Our studies thus engage debates about authenticity, tradition and identity by distinguishing the contact zones through Asian Studies Review September 2005, Vol. 29, pp. 231–232