Manila

In 1975 we moved to Manila. In one of those chance events, Manila seemed to become a gravitational point in the landscape of global nomads, at least those involved in the development and aid community. That is, in Manila we suddenly began running into people we had known in other countries over the previous decade and a half. Everyone was ending up in Manila.

Manila has continued to have a strong gravitational pull. We left in 1979 and I have not had the pleasure of returning. But reminders of the Philippines crop up at the most unexpected times and places. This chain of thought came to mind because my sister just forwarded me links to some old videos someone had uploaded to YouTube: Philippine TV commercials from the 1970s. These are things I had not seen in decades, and yet could sing along to as if they were yesterday (White Castle Whiskey, or the San Miguel Beer song). But they become a kind of touchstone for a time and place.

A few years ago I was flying back from a conference and struck up a conversation with a fellow scholar in the row in front of me. I had attended her panel. Somehow in the course of the conversation it came up that we had both attended the same school in Manila and may have even overlapped a year. She knew folks in my sister’s year and older kids as well. We then bonded instantly by annoying people in the seats around us by singing…old Filipino TV jingles.

In another coincidence, I was teaching a class in cultural globalization and during discussion a student mentioned being at school in Manila in the 1980s. Turns out we went to the same school, though I was there in the late 1970s. The next week she turns up with an old yearbook of hers, thinking that though I wouldn’t know the students, I might recognize the teachers and just get a kick out of seeing the place in the 1980s. As I looked over the yearbook in my office later I suddenly realized that the student and I were the same age, which means that we were the same class. The students I had known as 11-year olds were her peers for her high school years. And there I was seeing all my friends, now grown. It was a fantastic present. Of course, I was seeing their graduation pictures fifteen years after they graduated, so I wasn’t seeing them now, though it felt like it.

The cultural anthropologist Arjun Appadurai once argued that the best way of understanding the chaotic nature of globalization today is to see it as a series of landscapes: the landscape of people, the landscape of finance, the landscape of technology, the landscape of media, and the landscape of ideologies. On each landscape, things move in their own particular circuits. I realize that there’s a landscape of global nomads, perhaps competing landscapes since migrants, refugees, military personnel, business folk, missionaries, and tourists move across the world in quite different ways. But there certainly seems to be a landscape of international school students, not just from Manila, but from across the IS system. It was an IS alumni who pointed out to fellow alums those old commercials on YouTube. This is not just to make the point that it’s a small world, but that to understand globalization we need to understand these competing landscapes and how they shape our movements. This means not only understanding these global interpersonal networks but also the global media network that puts old Filipino commercials on the Internet.

One last story. A good friend of mine from Manila also moved to Phoenix. He worked as an actor and landed a role in a TV commercial for beer. So there he was, playing a cowboy out in the Arizona desert, pretending it was Christmas out on the range. During a break someone asked the director when the ad would air, if they would see it the next holiday. The director said no, it wouldn’t air in the US. It was being made exclusively for broadcast in Manila.

J