Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes

The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers

By Anna Romina Guevarra

Rutgers University Press

In a globalized economy that is heavily sustained by the labor of immigrants, why are certain nations defined as "ideal" labor resources and why do certain groups dominate a particular labor force? The Philippines has emerged as a lucrative source of labor for countries around the world. In Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes Anna Romina Guevarra focuses on the Philippines—which views itself as the "home of the great Filipino worker"—and the multilevel brokering process that manages and sends workers worldwide. She unravels the transnational production of Filipinos as ideal migrant workers by the state and explores how race, color, class, and gender operate.

The experience of Filipino nurses and domestic workers—two of the country's prized exports—is at the core of the research, which utilizes interviews with employees at labor brokering agencies, state officials from governmental organizations in the Philippines, and nurses working in the United States. Guevarra's multisited ethnography reveals the disciplinary power that state and employment agencies exercise over care workers—managing migration and garnering wages—to govern social conduct, and brings this isolated yet widespread social problem to life.

A splendid and hard-hitting book that exposes the campaigns by some governments to urge their citizens to work overseas, a key and virtually unnoticed aspect of economic globalization. Karen Brodkin, author of How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America

Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes brings the intricate workings of the Philippine state in brokering transnational migration into sharp critical relief. Anna Romina Guevarra offers an exemplary piece of scholarship that cuts across various scales of complexities and levels of analyses which will define the contours of future debates and research agendas on migration. Martin F. Manalansan IV, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Guevarra's carefully researched, richly textured ethnographic study provides a compelling analysis of the employment agencies that recruit, mold, and market Filipina nurses and domestic workers for export as 'model workers' to the United States and around the globe. Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes offers a valuable contribution to the literature on migration as well as that on carework. Ruth Milkman, author of L.A. Story

An accessible and clearly written book that contains important empirical findings and lucid observations about the social discourses and practices of labor brokerage. Anna Guevarra contributes to a better understanding of key actors in transnational migration and the cultural and ideological underpinnings of a major part of the Filipino export-oriented care service economy. American Journal of Sociology

Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes offers a comprehensive account of the Philippine state's role as a labor broker. This book strives to envision new ways we might address global inequalities by tapping into the shadow side of global migration—the collective power offered by Filipino migrants' repressed feelings, frustrated dreams, and personal discontents. Signs

Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes is a highly original and well-researched book that makes major significant contributions to the scholarly literature on contemporary international labor migration. Contemporary Sociology

Guevarra's take on the messy and often contradictory ways that all actors - the state, labor agencies, and workers - internalize and function with ideologies of labor brokerage takes us deep into the micro-processes of migration ... A calculated and forceful critique against the systems of capitalism that broker labor and commodify people. Critical Sociology