Filipino migrants in Germany and their diasporic (irony) chronotopes in Facebook

Abstract

This article explores Facebook's role in how Filipino migrants negotiate their diasporic chronotopes, that is, spatio-temporal constructions of their past/homeland and present/hostland. Specifically, focus group and digital ethnographic data with Filipino migrants in Germany are analysed using ethnography and discursive psychology approaches. Findings illustrate how Facebook enables Filipinos to re-enact and challenge past/homeland practices, which in turn help create a more meaningful present/hostland life. Facebook further facilitates the capture of conflicting yet socially consequential chronotopes – or irony chronotopes – that traverse and impact both offline and online dimensions of diaspora relations. Capturing such spatio-temporal interplays in migrant realities through social media provides a nuanced and dialogical view into migrants’ lifeworlds, looks beyond the communication role that social media play therein, and contributes to the digital media and temporal turns in diaspora studies.

Keywords

chronotope diaspora ethnography Facebook Filipino irony migrants social media

Diaspora studies are currently flourishing in two areas: one concerning the influence of digital media and the other involving the temporal aspects of migration. On the one hand, researchers have acknowledged the continuously increasing impact of social media on diasporic life. Digital platforms such as Facebook have been shown to facilitate migratory propensities, enhance mobility strategies and integration, encourage diaspora engagement, and support the establishment and maintenance of social ties and intimacy practices (Cabalquinto, 2018; Madianou and Miller, 2012; McGregor and Siegel, 2014). On the other hand, scholars have emphasized that migration is not just about spatial movements and processes but also about temporal norms, patterns, constraints, or disruptions (Cwerner, 2001; Griffiths et al., 2013; Wang, 2020). Some have critically adopted the idea of timespace (Mavroudi et al., 2017) or chronotope (Christiansen, 2017, 2019) to highlight the ‘interdigitation’ (Mavroudi et al., 2017: 4) or inextricable relations between space and time in diasporic meanings and experiences.

This article¹ lies at the intersection of the two above-mentioned emergent foci in diaspora studies and explores the role of social media in migrants’ navigation of timespace in diaspora. In the following sections, I first present the theoretical grounding of my study, which draws from the works of Christiansen (2017, 2019), and especially from Peeren’s (2006) adaptation of the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope to diaspora. I combine my adaptation of their ideas with a social psychological approach (i.e. social representations) to collective knowledge on migration. I then introduce the idea of irony as chronotope and how social media are chronotopic. Afterwards, I present my empirical case study, which investigates how Filipino migrants in Germany co-create and negotiate their diasporic chronotopes or spatio-temporal constructions of their past/home and present/host lands in Facebook's group platform, which in turn allows for contradictory, yet socially meaningful chronotopes of irony to emerge.

A chronotopic lens on diaspora

Chronotope literally means ‘timespace’, and the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin conceptualized it as ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 84–5). Initially applied to novels, the chronotope highlights constructions of space and time that move the narrative, events, and characters into certain changes, trajectories, and forms of thinking, speaking, and acting (Lemon, 2009). For instance, the road chronotope illustrates a representation of a person's life, choices, and experiences being tightly intertwined with their actual travel on a physical, spatial path (Dentith, 2005). Alternatively, the adventure chronotope presents a construction of an exciting, ‘hiatus’ kind of time where a character travels or is transported to a distant or foreign land and overcomes challenges that emphasize admirable qualities such as bravery, determination, or skills (Dentith, 2005).

Such timespace juxtapositions are constitutive of real life: every lived experience is anchored in and gains meaning through a specific time and place (Bakhtin, 1981). Specific timespaces also stand out as socially meaningful and aesthetic narrative motifs because they reflect and highlight the interplay among different domains of life and the richness of ‘emotions and (e)valuations’ in the human experience (Keunen, 2010: 41). Take, for instance, parlours and salons where public and intimate affairs intermingle, and where ‘webs of intrigue are spun, denouements occur and … dialogues happen, revealing the character, “ideas” and “passions” [of people]’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 246).

Hence, Peeren (2006) insists on treating the chronotope not just as a literary concept but as a ‘socio-cultural practice of timespace construction, constituted and maintained through intersubjective interaction and cultural memory’ (Peeren, 2006: 69). Chronotopes are especially tied to social and community life and its concrete relational and affective dynamics, norms, and traditions. Different communities generate diverse chronotopes, and the same spatio-temporal experience can have various meanings and affective content for different groups.

The chronotope thus renders itself especially applicable to migration, which is also a ‘social-cultural phenomenon and [social] representational practice’ (Peeren, 2006: 70; emphasis mine) anchored in time and space. I briefly adopt here Moscovici's (1988, 2001) concept of social representations, as it enriches Peeren’s (2006) elaboration of chronotope and migration as social constructions.

Social representations are shared ways of thinking, doing, feeling, and relating that people form in everyday talk and interaction as members of a group. Social representations serve as a community's social psychological frame of reference or symbolic coping mechanism (Wagner et al., 1999) for dealing with ‘novel’ and ‘unfamiliar’ objects and experiences (Moscovici, 1988, 2001).

Migration is an example of such a phenomenon, that people must make sense of as they encounter it, whether as lived experience, discourse, or both. Especially as a social discourse, migration

serves as a form of ‘virtual space-time travel’ (Lempert and Perrino, 2007a: 208), a fulcrum through which the ‘beyond here’ enters into the present (Urban, 1996: 71) [and enables] the production and circulation of images of a ‘life beyond’. (Dick, 2010: 276)

Migration therefore involves not only individual psychological shifts but also transformations in people's social psyche – their shared knowledge, affective and normative values, and practices with their community of origin or group of reference (e.g. Abadia et al., 2018; de Moura and Hernandis, 2013) – as people journey across space and time.

This social representational element thus allows a deeper understanding of Peeren’s (2006) assertion that one's homeland is not only a specific place and time zone, but also a lifeworld and constellation of collective knowledge, norms, rhythms, and relations (i.e. homeland chronotope). Migrants bear their origin group's sociohistorical ‘belongings’ (Probyn, 1996, cited in Fortier, 1999: 42), including their ‘cultural identity, [which] in migration, is at once deterritorialized and reterritorialized’ (Fortier, 1999: 42). Thus, the homeland chronotope is not completely lost, as it is part of a collective subjectivity and consciousness (i.e. social representation) that migrants carry and tend to ‘re-member’ or re-create in their diasporic locations (e.g. by transforming certain host society locales as iterative and performative sites of cultural identity and traditions) (Fortier, 1999). More importantly, the homeland chronotope is not simply abandoned or forgotten because it enables migrants to adapt to a new place and time of belonging and realities (i.e. hostland chronotope). In this sense, diasporic chronotopes, especially the home chronotope, are migrants’ social representational anchors of familiar clusters of meaning and ways of being.

Chronotopes exist layered over one another and ‘will always bleed into one another in some way, requiring efforts of negotiation’ (Peeren, 2006: 71). Hence, Peeren (2006) ultimately defines diaspora as a ‘dwelling-in-dischronotopicality’ as migrants continuously navigate through various interpellations of timespace. For instance, migrants try to balance and nurture the cluster of values, norms, and relations from ‘there-and-then’ (i.e. past/homeland) with those ‘here-and-now’ (i.e. present/hostland); or migrants must negotiate the spatio-temporal norms and rhythms (e.g. punctuality behaviours and weekend practices) that they have become accustomed to in the host society as they temporarily or permanently return to the homeland. Additionally, the third space chronotope (Peeren, 2006) of the journey between the origin and destination (e.g. the liminal or in-between moments such as being at the airport or in the plane) induces a different experience.

Peeren (2006) does not discount the presence of other chronotopes in the migration experience, including intersecting yet contrasting chronotopes. I noticed this in my ethnographic work with Filipinos in Germany. In this article, I tease out how Filipino migrants’ negotiations of diasporic chronotopes give way to timespace constructions that emerge as contradictory yet socially meaningful and consequential to migrants. In the following section, I elaborate on the notion of irony as a chronotope, and how it serves to enrich our understanding of diaspora communities’ lived experiences.

Irony as a chronotope

Irony has a rich history of use and investigation, especially in literature, pragmatics, and linguistics (see Attardo, 2000). It is commonly understood in its verbal or literary form – a classical figure of speech expressing contradiction. Yet it is a multifaceted, culturally dynamic, and emotionally charged construction of paradox (Hutcheon, 1995; Simpson, 2011), whether verbal or non-verbal.

Especially in its situational form, which is greatly under-studied, irony reflects the positioning of selves in a salient situation of incoherence – ‘when our concepts and the world to which they apply are saliently out of sync’ (Shelley, 2001: 814). Take for instance how people’s expressions of discomfort about certain events or changes in their community – though they remain living in the same neighbourhood – still reflect their sense of belonging, albeit at a ‘critical distance’ (Yarker, 2019). Furthermore, irony serves both as rhetorical device and affective frame to manage competing emotions as migrants find themselves experiencing incongruities between cultural beliefs and actual community practices (Gallo, 2015).

With these understandings of the complexities of irony, I thus interpret an irony chronotope as representing the juxtaposition of at least two paradoxes, especially between what is expected (cultural or ‘encyclopaedic knowledge’, Simpson, 2011: 39) and what happens (‘situational context’, Simpson, 2011: 29). In this article, I aim to illustrate the emergence of such irony chronotopes in migrant negotiations of their diasporic chronotopes within Facebook. For this purpose, I briefly discuss next the ways in which participatory media are chronotopic.

Social media as chronotopic

Social media facilitate connections between people and ideas regardless of location or time by being a ‘space of flows’, made up of ‘nodes and networks; that is, of places connected by electronically powered communication networks’ (Castells, 2009: 34). These technologies have in recent decades become an omnipresent contemporary form of ‘social space’ (Jones, 1998), allowing massive amounts of information dissemination, communication, and social activity to occur.

By enabling the gathering of minds regardless of their spatio-temporal positions, social media have also contributed to a differentiation of people's sense of time. Time is no longer just ‘lived time’ or its actual experience and natural passing as a ‘sequencing of practices’ (Castells, 2009); it is now also social time, or a ‘form of obligation’ (Jones, 2002) or experience in relation to accomplished tasks (Castells, 2009). Social media enable the accomplishment of multiple actions, asynchronous interactions, and a digital record of individual and community stories and activities.

For migrants, social media are ‘transnational social spaces’ or ‘deterritorialized spaces’ (Christiansen, 2017, 2019). They enable migrants to nurture ties, engagement, and recognition in home and host societies (Cabalquinto, 2018; Lorenzana, 2016; Madianou and Miller, 2012) while building new networks and communities (McGregor and Siegel, 2014; Oiarzabal, 2012), shared identities, and ways of belonging (Oiarzabal and Reips, 2012; Ponzanesi, 2020).

More importantly, social media are continuously socially constructed spaces (Jones, 1998, 2002) that migrants actively employ and transform to co-create timespace. Illustratively, migrants are shown to appropriate Facebook and Twitter platform affordances to discursively co-construct chronotopes – specifically, shared experiences despite the migrants’ varying spatial/temporal locations – and thus perform and negotiate cultural practices, relations, and identities, whether among people with existing social ties (Christiansen, 2017) or none at all (Christiansen, 2019). Recently, Lam and Christiansen (2022) have shown how migrant youths’ digital media practices enable them to tap chronotopes related to ‘family, hometown, and transborder experiences’ (2022: 10) to build and sustain transnational ties and construct social positionings vis-à-vis relevant others in those three chronotopic domains.

I follow this last line of research by exploring how migrants specifically appropriate Facebook's group platform to re-enact their timespace constructions of homeland, which in turn facilitates their negotiation of their hostland chronotope and the capture and engagement of irony chronotopes.

Methodology

This study is based on my fieldwork with Filipino migrants in Germany from 2016 to 2017. I applied an ethnographic approach, which enabled me to capture Filipinos’ ‘everyday’ and their process of symbolic coping (Flick and Foster, 2008). The openness of ethnography to diverse methods allowed a rich examination of how Filipinos co-create their understanding of their home and host lands, especially in the context of their membership in and use of a Facebook group. Following the digital ethnography principles of multiplicity, non-digital-centric-ness, openness, unorthodoxy, and reflexivity (Pink et al., 2016), I conducted online and offline participant observations, selective archival search, and focus group discussions within or near six German cities (Bremen, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt, and Munich).

My main research base and partner community was a Facebook group page of Filipinos living temporarily or permanently in Germany. At the time of the study, it was the largest Facebook group focusing on Filipino everyday life in Germany, with more than 4000 members. It was also referred to by Filipinos that I encountered during pilot fieldwork and informal interviews. I made various efforts to garner support and permission from the community, including but not limited to face-to-face meetings with group administrators, posting announcements on the group page, and conducting a Facebook live video, together with an administrator, to address questions and comments from members before conducting data gathering activities.

Data analysed included my field notes, six focus group transcripts, and a data corpus comprising posts in the group's Facebook page that were saved as PDF files once a week from January to March 2017. Focus groups were conducted in April and May 2017. Names were changed to protect participants’ privacy. Excerpts were English translated from mixed Filipino, English, and German.²

Based on the focus groups³ and ethnographic fieldwork, most of the participants were female and Bachelor's degree holders. Most relocated to Germany due to their marriage to a German national. These participant demographic features are consistent with available statistics, that is, a predominantly female gender profile and a marriage migration trend among Filipino transnationals in Germany (Commission on Filipinos Overseas, 2021; Hardillo-Werning, 2007), and Filipino migrants in Europe being generally well-educated and highly skilled (Bagasao, 2007).

I analysed the collected data using ethnographic and discursive psychology approaches to examine and reflect on the scaffolding of spatio-temporal meanings in Filipino migrants’ construction and negotiation of diasporic chronotopes. First, I adapted Christiansen’s (2019) online ethnographic analysis of chronotopes in social media and identified themes pertaining to the home and host countries in the transcripts, field notes, and Facebook group posts. I also coded whether the constructions pertained to the past, present, or future and to familiar or unfamiliar objects or practices. Second, I focused on parts pertaining to the Facebook group, and searched for Filipino values, ways, and other forms of cultural engagement that reflected the themes from the first analysis. I also noted the multimodal construction of posts, that is, when images, emoticons, or links accompanied the post. Third, I further concentrated on spatio-temporal constructions that emerged as strikingly contradictory yet significant to the migrants. In this last level of analysis, I adapted a more discursive psychological stance based on the work of Cresswell and Sullivan (2020).

Cresswell and Sullivan’s (2020) discursive psychology (DP) enriches this study's ethnographic endeavour as their approach also draws from Bakhtin's chronotope. Their chronotopic DP emphasizes an attentiveness to connotations – instead of just denotations – in social interaction. Paying attention to connotation fosters a sensitivity to polyphony reflective of the ‘modern psyche’ and contemporary interactions (Cresswell and Sullivan, 2020). Polyphony is the simultaneous interlayering of meanings and temporalities at a given moment and space – which can be sometimes contradictory and ‘can be experienced in terms of oneself or in terms of the chronotopes embodied by interlocutors’ (Cresswell and Sullivan, 2020: 125). Chronotopic DP thus enables the capture and analysis of a scaffolding of spatio-temporal configurations, including ‘experiential tensions at play’ (Cresswell and Sullivan, 2020: 137), such as conflicting constructions, biases about contexts, and the voices of ‘absent others’ (Cresswell and Sullivan, 2020). Consistent with the DP tradition, chronotopic DP further examines the action-orientation of overlapping timespace constructions – the purposes or practical ends for which such chronotopes are constructed within an utterance or interaction. Thus, chronotopic DP encourages taking a ‘hermeneutic attitude of “earnest irony”’ (Cresswell and Sullivan, 2020: 1) – an openness to the diverse ways that experiences interact, including the emergence of absurdity and irony in exchanges – so that the researcher ‘reveals what other[s] cannot see for themselves’ (Cresswell and Sullivan, 2020: 138).

Altogether, this combined ethnographic and DP approach provides a more nuanced and dialogical way to answer the following questions: How do Filipinos make sense of their overlapping ideas about the Philippine homeland and German hostland? How do they navigate this interplay between the home and host chronotopes in the digital context of Facebook group platform? And what other timespace constructions arise from these migrant community interactions on Facebook and to which diasporic ends?

Throughout the study, I persevered in upholding an ethics-of-care (Leurs and Prabhakar, 2018) and reflexivity (Finlay and Gough, 2003) of my positionalities – as researcher and cultural insider – and the advantages, disadvantages, rights, and responsibilities associated with these identities. I thus maintained an iterative approach, systematically and reflexively conducting alternative periods of immersion and prudent distancing from the material and writing.

The Filipino homeland chronotope

The Philippines and life there are associated with a sunny climate and relevant tropical features – what can be described as a ‘tropical island’ chronotope. Migrants become cognizant of the difference of their ‘then-and-there’ Philippine life characterized by an almost everlasting summer, warm beaches, fresh fruits and vegetables, and seafood all year round. In contrast, their ‘here-and-now’ Germany leaves them wanting in these aspects since, as some of the migrants would joke, ‘Sommer ist nur ein Tag’ (‘Summer is but a day’ in German), ‘the fish are so frozen’, and fruits are ‘not as fresh’ and ‘way [too] expensive’.

Additionally, the ‘warmth’ that the migrants associate with the Philippines also comes from their co-ethnic relations (SM1A). The Philippines is a timespace of solace and comfort, in the form of loved ones and other familiar people, ways, and customs. The Filipino migrants recognize the amicability of Filipinos in general, which is more pronounced within one's local neighbourhood or barangay, usually characterized by close communal ties. The company of family and friends, time spent together even ‘without money’ or modern-day comforts like ‘electricity’, and simple gatherings where members share food carry a lot of meaning, fun memories, and pleasant emotions, including a sense of ‘freedom’ to just be oneself.

With a homeland chronotope filled with warmth, happiness, and togetherness, it is unsurprising that many Filipino transnationals express a propensity to search for co-ethnics the moment they arrive in Germany. Additionally, they become active in re-enacting the homeland chronotope, as the later section, ‘Facebook group as re-enactment of the Filipino homeland’, will illustrate.

On the other hand, the Philippines is not a complete reflection of the ‘utopian prelapserian chronotope of the homeland’ (Naficy, 2001: 152) because of enduring practices of entrapment. The most striking of which is the ‘baluktot’ (distorted) practice of extended family culture back home. The migrants lament how many Filipinos overseas bear the burden of supporting not just their nuclear families in the Philippines but even relatives and their children. Worse is that many of these (extended) families disregard the struggles and sacrifice of their family member abroad by always asking for money or wasting it on unnecessary purchases. Such situations hold Filipino migrants in a form of ‘time loop’ of struggle and sacrifice that only ends when they are old and can no longer work abroad (SM1B).

The Philippines is also associated with colonial attitudes (e.g. ‘Spanish attitudes’ from the Philippines’ colonial times), especially social judgements (e.g. ‘disdainful, when they look [at people], from head to toe’) related to one's appearance and, implicitly, social class (SM1C). In contrast, the participants do not feel such ‘levels’ in German society because people seem to prioritize comfort and practicality over ‘show[ing] off’ their financial or social status. Such stories illustrate how the Philippines can represent social psychological concerns (e.g. careful maintenance of social image) anchored by persistent yet unwanted practices from a colonial culture and distant past.

Filipino migrants’ host chronotope of Germany

I arrived here during winter, in the first days [it was] nice, the snow was amusing (‘nakakaaliw’) but afterwards it was already saddening especially since [I] did not know anyone else and my spouse was at work hehe … but now it's ok especially now that I have children and I am no longer alone, hehe. (Kristel)

Like Kristel, many of the participants arrived during the winter season in Germany. Snow was a new and entertaining experience. Together with the chilly temperature and multiple layers of clothing, snow was the first palpable proof that the participants had reached foreign soil. For Filipinos who married German nationals, the wintry weather and landscape provided a romantic backdrop to their life journeys at that point in time. Reaching Germany represented the culmination of their desire and the long wait to be permanently reunited with their beloved – much like their own versions of a ‘fairytale-come-true’.

However, this initial wonderment over Germany as a place of snow and reunion eventually changed into a place of loneliness, burden, and isolation. Winter is a challenging season for Filipinos used to a tropical climate. Filipinos married to Germans narrated often being left at home to figure things out on their own and to care for their children. For other migrants, Germany became the unfamiliar experience of not having any company, especially one's family and during sickness or trying times (SM2A).

Despite the challenges and feelings of homesickness and isolation, Germany symbolizes an opportunity for newfound rootedness and transformation. For Filipino migrant-parents (like Kristel at the start of this section), Germany bears greater meaning through their children. Their children's birth gave a stronger motivation to overcome the difficulties of Germany as an unfamiliar, seasonally wintry land. The children were reason enough to persevere, to find ways to better integrate, and thus to be happier in their host country. Not only legally but especially experientially, the children became the migrants’ (separately) living and embodied temporal anchor – of permanence and newfound rootedness.

For other migrants, especially Filipino women, being left alone and doing things by themselves forced them to learn new skills, to conquer fear, and to acknowledge their own strength and resilience (SM2B). Learning to deal with technologies in German homes such as heaters, dish washers, and induction ovens also became simple but stark chronotopic artifacts of migrants’ ‘here-and-now’ German life – now also associated with ‘Do-It-Yourself’ (DIY) and ‘Can Do’ attitudes and ‘superwoman’ identity – compared to their ‘there-and-then’ less technologically advanced Philippine life. Such technologies additionally served as spatio-temporal anchors and sources of amusing experiences that enliven migrants’ discussions.

These narratives reveal certain homeland gender expectations, such as Filipino wives being confined to domesticity yet not necessarily capable of more physical housework (e.g. ‘cleaning drains, doing repairs’). Although many Filipinas with German spouses do end up being homemakers, such a domestic occupation is not frowned upon. The ability to manage household responsibilities independently and effectively is a source of accomplishment for Filipinas in Germany – which is consistent with Philippine women's ideals of a good wife even in interracial marriages (see Cabalquinto and Soriano, 2020). Moreover, Filipinas consciously adopt certain German ways, such as respecting people's privacy and (financial) discipline, that contribute to these Filipinas’ overall sense of autonomy (SM2C). In these ways, the participants contest existing representations of Filipinas married to foreigners as stereotypical ‘Filipino brides’ (Tolentino, 2001, cited in Lorenzana, 2016) or ‘spouses of “white people”’ (Lorenzana, 2016: 9), whose moral integrity and ability to be independent are in question (see also Cabalquinto and Soriano, 2020).

Lastly, German ways provided a template and inspiration for migrants to be more involved than they were in the Philippines with groups or initiatives that have tangible socio-civic contributions to make in both countries. Witnessing Germany and its embodiment of a ‘possible future’ for the Philippines encouraged migrants to hope that the homeland could also be a land of progress – with a future to which they could contribute and help realize. Hence, unlike before, transformation of both home and diasporic selves co-occurred more ‘visibly’, with their long-distance ‘presence’ and ‘persistent connection to the homeland’ (Aguila, 2015: 60).

The next section illustrates how Filipino migrants negotiate such timespace constructions in another spatio-temporal context where many contemporary diasporic interactions occur: Facebook.

Facebook group as re-enactment of the Filipino homeland

The tropical island elements that characterize the Filipino migrants’ homeland chronotope cannot be imported to Germany – but the warmth, comfort, and fun brought about by co-ethnic bonds can. Being able to re-create these communal aspects of the home chronotope in turn enables the migrants to better navigate the Germany host chronotope elements of struggle and isolation. Generally, Filipino migrants ‘re-member’ (Fortier, 1999) the homeland through re-enacting the concept and practice of the barangay – the traditional Filipino village or community. With the advent of digital technologies, however, Filipinos in Germany have taken advantage of social media, especially Facebook and its group platform, as an alternative spatio-temporal context not only for establishing such barangays and the oft-associated practice of Filipino solidarity (bayanihan) but also the Filipino community public space for entertainment and political discourse (plaza).

According to Ms Joey, the creator and lead administrator of this study's partner community, Facebook was an obvious choice for establishing an online community of Germany-based Filipinos. As the most popular social media platform and social networking site, Facebook provides ‘the most practical’ virtual social context to create a ‘modern Treffpunkt [meeting point in German] of Filipinos’. Many Filipinos use Facebook, and it is easily accessible for everyone. Membership is also open, regardless of spatio-temporal location – wherever people may be in Germany or whether they are residents at present, in the past, or in the near future. The important thing is that they are, have been, or will be ‘genuinely in Germany’ and are ‘willing to be a part of a supportive community’.

Like traditional barangay leaders, Ms Joey and her co-administrators are considered the Facebook group's leaders – sustaining the rules and norms, managing or initiating activities, and mediating or pacifying tensions among members. The administrators utilize Facebook's closed group feature and control who is accepted or removed from the community. Additionally, they maximize the pinned post feature that allows a post to remain on top of all member posts. Alex, a co-administrator at the time of the study, regularly uses pinned posts to remind members about the community's purpose: ‘pagtutulungan (communal support and cooperation), especially towards our fellowmen who are newcomers here in Germany’ (SM3).

Such regular posts are examples of the group's incessant endeavours to tap into the Filipino spirit of bayanihan (‘togetherness in common effort’) – a characteristic feature not just of the traditional Filipino community life but of Filipino social relations, especially in times of need and displacement (Enriquez, 1977: 5). The word and practice of bayanihan originates from an actual Filipino context of spatio-temporal movement realized through the values of community, altruism, and collaboration: village members literally carrying a relocating member's physical home (e.g. in the provinces and in the olden days, a native Filipino hut made from organic materials such as bamboo, cogon grass, and nipa leaves) from one place to another.

Such community practice is transposed both into the spatio-temporal context of Filipino interactions in Germany and on Facebook – not only by sharing tips, information, and experiences, but also by providing a timespace to interact in familiar Filipino ways. For instance, the Facebook group enables members to speak in a mixture of Filipino, German, and other Philippine vernaculars; to observe discursive practices of Filipino courtesy and respect (e.g. use of po, opo, ate [sister], kuya [brother]); to encourage each other through Filipino Catholic ways like sending prayers or wishing someone divine blessing (e.g. ‘God bless’, ‘God is with you’, ‘May God take care of it’); or to simply share migrants love for and recreation of Filipino cuisine in Germany.

These Facebook bayanihan practices naturally extend back to offline co-ethnic interactions. For example, members help those who want something brought back from the Philippines, or from Germany to the homeland. In some instances, the community assists co-ethnics in dire need, even when they are neither German residents nor part of the group. Such offline extensions of the online migrants’ bayanihan reiterate the purpose and sincerity of the group as a barangay.

Finally, the migrants’ ‘lighter’ appropriation of Facebook group as the community's social gathering site is akin to the Philippine plaza (Alarcon, 2001) – a public space that is a ‘basic ingredient in Filipino culture and everyday life’ (Alarcon, 2001: 103) where members can find comfort outside the home and engage in community interactions. Members thus peruse their Facebook group wall for ‘everyday entertainment’ – open exchanges of jokes, anecdotes, or amusing internet content. Akin to Lam and Christiansen’s (2022) participants who use photos and videos in constructing their hometown chronotope and to Aguila’s (2015) informants who use ‘tagging’ to ‘send feelers (parinig)’ to relevant others (Aguila, 2015: 80), the present study's participants made full use of Facebook's affordances to (hash)tag and post quotes, images, videos, or memes to get the attention of group members and trigger ‘inside jokes’ or nostalgic memories from the homeland (SM4).

Like the political function of the Philippine plaza (Alarcon, 2001), the Facebook group's wall also serves as the migrants’ public sphere. Although the administrators prohibit talk about politics, members get to discuss everyday concerns, especially to contest voices of absent but embodied others (Cresswell and Sullivan, 2020). For instance, members challenged some co-ethnics’ and host society members’ representation of Filipinas as only being able to migrate as either a nurse or wife of a German national. Some female members clarified their chronotope of Germany: that even when Filipinas get married to German nationals, this does not mean that Filipinas have an easy life (SM5A, Excerpt 1). This is also related to migrants’ sentiments regarding the misuse or abuse of Filipino (extended) family culture and existing chronotopes of life abroad by family members in the Philippines, i.e. that life is easy abroad (SM5A, Excerpt 2).

These chronotopic ways and social practices of the Filipino migrants in their Facebook community help flesh out a chronotopic and collective outlook of what Aguila (2014) describes as ‘online pakikipagkapwa’, or Filipino transnationals’ creative adoption of Facebook's affordances to re-negotiate their Filipino identities and relations. Filipino migrants in Germany have appropriated the Facebook group into their own digital and diasporic ‘terrain of belonging’ reflecting the Philippine ‘historical and cultural possessions’ (Fortier, 1999: 42) and practices beneficial to their successful navigation of the host chronotope.

In the next section, I focus on timespace configurations within the community's Facebook interactions that emerged as strikingly ironic and on the possible action-orientations implied by such interconnected yet contradictory chronotopes.

Irony chronotopes in Filipino relations as captured in Facebook interactions

Amidst the Filipino migrant community's re-enactment of the Filipino homeland, I noticed recurring discussions about members’ encounters with co-ethnics offline (SM6). Upon arriving in Germany, the Filipino migrants anticipated chance meetings with co-ethnics. Such ‘surprise moments’ were expected to be joyful and comforting, yet some unfortunately ended up as disappointments as the participants were snubbed or treated as ‘material for gossip’. Similarly, gatherings meant to facilitate and strengthen co-ethnic relations sometimes turned out to be timespaces of pabonggahan (flamboyance), social judgement, and conflict, and so hindered or broke relationships instead. In turn, these ironic chronotopes of disconcerting offline co-ethnic meetings, whether circumstantial or organized, led to a secondary level of irony in Facebook discussions: migrants discouraging fellow Filipinos from engaging with and trusting co-ethnics.

These incongruent timespace constructions of Filipino co-ethnic encounters and trust relations can be better understood in the context of the concept ‘kapwa’ (also mentioned by participants [SM6]). Kapwa means ‘shared identity’ (Enriquez, 1977, 1978) or oneness of self-and-other (Aguila, 2015). It is considered the core value of Filipino identity and psychology (Enriquez, 1977, 1978; Yacat, 2013). Filipino as kapwa, a relational self, goes hand in hand with moral-social obligations, especially treating others with respect and dignity, as humans and equals (i.e. pakikipagkapwa or the practice of kapwa; Enriquez, 1977, 1978). To be treated otherwise triggers a constellation of perplexing thoughts and emotions, especially ‘shock or disbelief’ (Enriquez, 1978: 30) and a deep sense of sadness (SM6).

The findings are consistent with previous works that exhibit conflicting relations among Filipino migrants (Aguila, 2014, 2015; Manalansan, 2003). Yet more than contentious Filipino diasporic relations, the ethnographic data illustrate a third chronotopic layer of irony through laughter (Cresswell and Sullivan, 2020). The mere chance to observe co-ethnic interactions in the Facebook community, including misunderstandings or disputes, becomes a ‘form of entertainment’ or ‘comic relief’ (SM7). Through the Facebook group and its affordances, Filipino migrants (and me, as the researcher-observer) are able to capture and participate in a ‘carnivalesque mesalliance of ideas, people, and situations’ (Cresswell and Sullivan, 2020: 137) characterizing the (online) Filipino public life. Much like the unbridled interweaving of public and intimate affairs and the communal amusement effect found in the chronotope of salons (Bakhtin, 1981) and in the Philippine plaza (Alarcon, 2001), the Facebook group enables a third person's experience and reaction to the community members’ own recognition, feelings of laughter, and eventual acceptance of both the normality and absurdity of contradictory Filipino relational dynamics amidst a thriving online migrant community (SM6, SM7).

These interweaving irony chronotopes can be interpreted further as having the following discursive ends. First, they are collective ‘warnings against the betrayal of kapwa’ (Aguila, 2014: 84) and what could be the Filipino diasporic community's social sanctions to co-ethnics who fail to ‘re-member’ (Fortier, 1999) homeland values or continue to uphold a colonial or judgemental mentality (SM1C). For instance, new Filipino migrants who fail to exemplify the kapwa ideal are labelled as ‘feeling like a frog. You would think they have been here in Germany for 100 years’ (SM6, line 3). Such chronotopic utterance not only conveys strong disapproval and dislike but also serves as both insult and condemnation. The first part of the utterance is a colloquial insult to someone's beauty, that is, to feel or be like a frog is to be ugly. Yet within the context of the whole utterance, the phrase also serves to admonish the co-ethnic's lack of beauty-of-will (or the Filipino social-personal value of kagandahang-loob; Enriquez, 1977; Reyes, 2015) and right to superiority, that is, no valid claim to seniority or authority since they have not stayed in Germany for a long time.

Second, these ironic timespace constructions appear to be the Filipino migrants’ version of preventing ‘context collapse’ (Marwick and Boyd, 2011). These chronotopes remind migrants that the Philippine ‘there-and-then’ life and kapwa expectations cannot be expected to be re-enacted in full, whether in their present life abroad or online. Selective co-ethnic relations thus become a pragmatic way to spare each other disappointment, perhaps even a sense of loss.

Yet, third, such contradictory Filipino diasporic chronotopes are also a reminder that ‘that's life’ – regardless of nationality, some people are trustworthy, while others are not (SM6), and that the awareness and management of tensions and contradictions may actually be a form of comfort and belonging (Yarker, 2019). As some members also catch themselves doing, Filipinos re-enact the ‘old same days[,] old same ways’ despite being abroad – whether it be ‘gossiping so early in the morning’ (SM6), nurturing a sense of community and solidarity, or sustaining the Filipino ‘disposition toward lighthearted bantering and joking relationships’ (Enriquez, 1977: 8), which are all part of Filipino everyday life, wherever Filipinos may be.

Conclusion

Diaspora changes the meaning of space and time for migrants, especially in relation to the home and host lands. As in the case of Filipino transnationals in Germany, even trivial matters such as the weather and household technologies can become stark spatio-temporal artifacts not just of their old and new homes but of the transformation of their diasporic selves. Being away from home intensifies the Filipino migrants’ desire to keep home ‘close’ and assist in overcoming the struggle and isolation that the host chronotope entails. Therefore, despite some states of (cultural and colonial) entrapment represented by the homeland, the migrants still find ways to re-enact the homeland sense of community (barangay), solidarity (bayanihan), and public sphere (plaza) through the Facebook group platform.

The chronotopes of Filipinos in Germany exemplify the intertwining and transformation of the migrants’ inner and social lifeworlds. Yet more than constituting negotiations of identity and social relations (comparable to Lam and Christiansen, 2022), the participants’ chronotopes elucidate the significance of engagement in a (Filipino) public life. Even when such communal involvement is purely online, it provides an everyday timespace of (ironic) comfort and belonging (Yarker, 2019) that can be vital for stay-at-home and widely dispersed members of a migrant group. Furthermore, the Filipino chronotopes illustrate the profound embeddedness and contemporary relevance of certain sociocultural practices, as they are re-enacted, contested, and redefined by members in diasporic, digital interactions. With Filipino migrants in Germany, their diasporic chronotopes illustrate that the Filipino kapwa (and Filipino social psychology in general) is not tantamount to smooth, tension-free relationships. Instead, the faithful practice of being one-with-others is both a deep ‘conviction’ and an active praxis of ‘accepting and dealing with the other person as an equal’ (Enriquez, 1977: 7) and a fellow human being with both merits and flaws.

Alternatively, the predominantly female and married profile of the Filipino participants may have played a part to the kind of chronotopes identified in the analysis. Many of the posts on the Facebook group are related to the concerns of Filipinas (to be) married to Germans or as stay-at-home wives. Nevertheless, both the disposition and desire to nurture supportive relationships and a microcosm of Philippine public life are shared by Filipinos in Germany regardless of gender, education, or social status. Yet a more gender-focused analysis remains a promising endeavour to tease out further the role of (Filipino) gender stereotypes or expectations vis-à-vis chronotopic digital interactions.

In facilitating Filipino migrants’ re-enactment of their homeland, Facebook also enables the capture of irony chronotopes that illustrate intersecting layers of complexity in migrants’ lived experiences. Facebook facilitates multiple perspectives of taken-for-granted yet socially meaningful events and relations among Filipinos in Germany – whether in digital real-time or archived form – together with the intermingling of ‘emotions and (e)valuations’ (Keunen, 2010: 41), such as ironic awareness and laughter, that add to the ‘palpability’ (Keunen, 2010: 41) of Filipino experiential tensions in diaspora.

Furthermore, identifying irony chronotopes through social media invites a more dialogical and dynamic view of how diasporic relations prosper or fail, and in what directions diasporic identities evolve online. It also invites researchers to further tap into emotions and ethnocultural meanings related to ironic situations and self–other relations, as such affective and cultural aspects contribute to what can be defined as ironic (Hutcheon, 1992, 1995; Simpson, 2011).

Finally, this article's adaptation of Peeren’s (2006) conceptualization of diaspora as dischronotopicality – through examining migrants’ navigation of multiple diasporic chronotopes within Facebook – contributes to growing research on time as a significant dimension of sociocultural experiences, including the current pandemic. Giving more attention to intersecting spatio-temporal dynamics in the migration experience also serves to enrich our understanding of the continuously evolving relation of technologies and mobile lives.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Maria Niña Angela Salita for her assistance during two focus group discussions; Christopher Cohrs, Margrit Schreier, Koen Leurs, and Niccolo Tiangco for their thoughts on the earliest drafts of the manuscript; and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback that helped me further refine my analysis and discussion.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – GSC263, 49619654.

ORCID iD

Audris Umel

Notes

Author Biography

Audris Umel is a PhD candidate at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS), a joint doctoral program of University Bremen and Jacobs University Bremen in Germany. Her current interests include socio-political discourses within (digital) media and public spheres, qualitative and mixed methods, (big) data analytics, and new media approaches.

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