Queering Land and Labour: The Filipinx Diaspora in the Settler Colonial Racial Geographies of the North

Keywords: labour, Filipinx, queer
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 74

Abstract

"Land is Life," remains a popular refrain in the Philippines long-standing anti-colonial, anti-feudal, and liberation struggle. The colonial legacies and chronic problem of landlessness is understood to be one of the root causes for the labour migration of millions of Filipino/as. By holding the dispossession of land and the labour migration of Filipinx together, the Philippine diasporic subject is often imagined as suspended in time while labouring outside of the Philippines. One such place where Filipinos currently labour is in the settler colonial and capitalist resource extractive landscapes of northern British Columbia (BC). In the context of northern BC, the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous lands and peoples undergirds how and where Filipinos live and labour.

In this paper, I trace the racial geographies contoured by the overlapping configurations of land and labour that condition both the Filipinx diaspora and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in northern BC. I follow calls in Indigenous, Black, and critical race scholarship that push back against relying on the common land-labour dialect that tends to lock geographic imaginings squarely in the rubrics of white supremacy and settler colonial projects. I propose that there might be queer ways of disentangling land and labour configurations by paying attention to the everyday negotiations of Filipinxs who are working and making lives in northern BC in relation to Indigenous resistance and resurgence.