Imagining Futures: Youth Identities in Transnationally-Linked Villages in the Northern Philippines

Abstract

Each year a sizeable proportion of mothers leave their villages in the Philippines to work abroad. While they leave behind their families and onlookers who remain, attend schools, and work in the villages, the mother’s connection and sense of belonging persists, reinforced through sending home gift boxes, remittances, and ideas. These women’s left behind children and their peers are connected too – directly or vicariously – to the rest of the world because of the flow of these material and cultural goods into the villages. These create a complicated relationship between home and away that transforms the villages, making them into a new and different kind of place. The disciplines that have ..