Labour,gender and ethnicities in the ‘heart of Manila’

Main themes in understanding piracy and informal economy

The flourishing piracy trade of media wares in most cities in the developing world is symptomatic of global processes which undergird other economic mechanisms protecting piratical activities despite criminalisation (Mattelart, 2009: 323). The transnational character of organised crimes and their potential to subvert existing regimes of operations, or at least manage to exist alongside them, lends piracy a resistant quality that lacks fixity. Piracy, based on the framework of creative industry leaders, is a criminal activity that causes ‘significant damage to the interests of rightsholders whose protection is the aim of intellectual property regimes’ (Panethiere, 2005: 11). This definition, however, excludes the complex relations between the creative industry’s consumer products, often representative of western sensibilities, and the socio-economic realities of people in the developing world. Cultural theorist Ravi Sundaram (2010) calls this situation ‘pirate modernity’, a useful approach to critically analyse postcolonial urban experience in relation to the illicit reproduction of creative media. ‘Pirate modernity’, being ‘globalization’s illicit and unacknowledged expression’, disrupts the monopoly of capitalism over intellectual property but – more importantly – it is the material experience that allows for many ‘urban subalterns’ to make sense of their world (Sundaram, 2010: 13–15). As in the cases of Nigeria (Larkin, 2008; Lobato, 2010),) China (Pang, 2004) and India (Sundaram, 2010), whose citizens consume international cultural products normally inaccessible due to prohibitive prices, Filipinos who otherwise would not be exposed to a global cinémathèque now have access to it (Trice, 2010). One way to interpret the phenomenon of the proliferation of new global creative media is as a kind of empowerment of those who languish ‘off the grid’ of elitist new production (Castells, 1996: 2). The creation of a new class of global mediazens – a culturally aspirational middle class outside of the developed world – however, also means that the material reality of producing pirated wares using cheap labour needs to be maintained.

The continued proliferation of pirated goods is neither a case of evil triumphing over the good – the illicit over the licit – nor a simple case of supply and demand. Rather, the proliferation of piracy is a ‘global pricing problem’ (Karaganis, 2011: 1). More than a failure of the law to effectively criminalise elements, piracy is about media goods’ prices being prohibitively high for large consumer populations, people who subsist on very low incomes, and digital technologies that enable cheap and easy reproduction of these goods (Karaganis, 2011: 1). This hints at the unevenness of resources and incomes between the North and South. Also, the material culture of people from the South – the scarcity of resources, and the talent to recycle, to salvage from scrap and share with others – is also the context within which piracy subsists. Furthermore, since ‘pirate modernity’ has the radical potential to undermine the processes of globalisation, it is able to provide a more effective avenue for product distribution, where pirates become new players in profit-making. Central to the generation of wealth for high-level operators and the swiftness by which pirated wares reach consumers is the availability of disposable informal labour in developing nations. Pirate transnationalism may have altered the rules of production and tested the limits of legality, but it has done so at the price of expanding exploitative, gendered informal work. The ‘global pricing problem’ Karaganis (2011) wrote about is heavily dependent on the susceptibility of the growing urban poor to being absorbed by informalisation. This, moreover, results in the deeper feminisation of the unpaid and flexible labour of wives, grandmothers, grandfathers and children. The persistence of piracy thus owes less to the ineffective measures of international crime busters or the existence of highly functional pirate networks, but more on the profitability of cheap labour in the South, largely feminised labour.

Informal labour – untaxed, unregistered, unregulated and unprotected work – has long been in existence, but the attention it has received recently is a result of the intensification of informal labour in the developing world and, to a lesser extent, among migrant populations in advanced economies (Bertulfo, 2011). The global recession of economies, flexibilisation of labour, the polarisation of work between high-skilled and low-skilled, and the transnationalisation of illicit networks have been cited as causes for the ever-increasing number of people in precarious states and the widening gap between the world’s wealthiest and poorest people. Informal work has been so pervasive in neoliberal age that almost half of all economic output and 75% of GDP in some countries are traceable to informal economy (Peterson, 2010: 245). There had been a ‘rethinking of informality’ in recent times, in order to quantify and qualify productivity under the category ‘informal’. This has helped push for a definition of decent work that includes those whose work falls outside the traditional parameters of formal work, which does not attract legitimacy and respect (Chant and Pedwell, 2008: 1-3). This ‘mainstreaming’ of informalisation, however, could be perceived as an acceptance of the deepening inequalities spawned by structural features of capitalist economy that threatens the hard-won battles of organised labour against exploitation. The concept of decent work is a broadening of definition that has elevated the status of many women as workers, yet this has not lessened the vulnerability of most women in the informal economy.

The global workforce in the informal economy is worryingly feminised, with low and unstable income and high risks of poverty, not to mention the vulnerability to harassment and violence (Bertulfo, 2011). Processes of globalisation, migration, ‘new’ war economies and clandestine networks, and the decline of formal wage employment are manifested in the pervasive informalisation of labour the world over, particularly in the ‘gender coding’ and devalorisation of women’s work (Peterson, 2010: 262–4). In 2011, there were 17 million informal workers, constituting 45% of the Philippines’ total working population, two-thirds of whom are women (National Statistics Office, 2011). Forty-four per cent of women finished secondary education compared to only 25 per cent among men (Frianeza, 2003: 181). Women’s participation in the labour force has been historically subjugated, based on their position as the ‘second sex’ wherein their labours in the home as manager and caregiver are not counted as economically productive on the grounds that this forms part of their biology, and therefore is not to be sold in the market (Guillaumin, 1995). This explains their overwhelming numbers in the lowest end of global value chains such as textiles, domestic work, light manufacturing and horticulture, which is a double-bind pushing women’s health and welfare further down the scale. I discuss this because the ubiquitous presence of women in the doubly illicit informal economy of piracy is a reinforcement of the deepening of the feminisation of poverty, especially in the case of ethnicised Muslim women in Catholic Philippines. Women and children from Mindanao are subjected to overlapping criminalisation for, first, participating in the informal economy as pirates and, second, for being ‘othered’ as ‘ethnic’ and Muslims. In this article, I argue that the gendered and ethnicised division of labour in the informal economy of piracy is a consequence of the existing economy of piracy in Quiapo that is conditioned by its social history steeped in contentious ethnic and religious politics. This economy of piracy is crucial in the formation of the two faces of Quiapo: the Muslim Hidalgo area and Catholic Carriedo, both of which are influenced by the economy of piracy but to a differing degree. The dissimilar but nonetheless related processes of feminisation that Hidalgo and Carriedo informal workers are experiencing are shaped by the influx of pirate capital in recent times and Quiapo’s past as a ‘site of social encounter and social divisions’ (Tonkiss, 2005: 1). The dynamics of feminisation in Quiapo are rooted in the spatial lay-out and ethno-religious tension which influence how labour and gender relations play out in the pirate informal economy.

Quiapo and the ethno-religious politics of piracy

Much of Quiapo’s vitality and contrast comes from the presence of two major religious landmarks: the Quiapo Basilica and the Globo de Oro mosque. They have created two foci around which piracy trade and religious practices operate. The populism of Filipino folk Catholicism displayed in the orgiastic feast of the Black Nazerene, a most celebrated occasion often involving accidents, deaths, petty crimes but also claims of miracles, is an excellent example (Nery and Finnane, 2003; Obusan, 2006). Before and long after the feast in January, on Fridays and Sundays, the crowd spills into the streets and even into Quiapo’s surrounding areas. Around the church are myriad goods: clothes, electronics, flowers, vegetables and fruits, healing potions and herbal leaves, kitsch, abortion concoctions, everything. People complete this colourful Quiapo scenario: fortune-tellers, pickpockets, prostitutes, pilgrims, hawkers, swindlers, beggars, among others, who participate in the district’s informal economy. Not far away is Globo de Oro, from where pirates run barter trading, packaging and wholesale distribution and, smaller DVD emporia for retailing. Surrounded by the streets of Hidalgo, Elizondo, Bautista and Arlegui – the densest concentration of piracy trade – the mosque ‘disappears’ amid the blur of economic activities. The fervor inspired by the religious landscape – at times one can hear the gospel from the Bible and the low murmur of praying in Arabic at the same time – and the urban jungle created by street trading, a chaotic transport system and a host of scenes, could be an assault to one’s sense of order. The traffic of the crowd and the nature of their labour are hinged on this strong culture of otherworldly frenzy.

Quiapo is also known as the piracy hub where middle-class film enthusiasts search for Hitchcocks, Godards, Wong Kar Wais, Kurosawas, and the masa (masses) crowd snap up the newest Hollywood films. The visibility of Muslim Filipinos in a criminalised informal economy, allegedly including drug trafficking, is traceable to their economic marginality and is a survival mechanism. Their migration had been caused by disenfranchisement due to land disputes when Filipinos from Luzon were resettled in Mindanao by the government in the 1950s. Then there were the Islamic separatist war and communist insurgency in the 1970s, followed by agro-industrial land dispossession in the 1980s (Majul, 1988). The post-9/11 Islamist resurgence also displaced thousands of Muslim Filipinos affected by the violence although this has not deeply radicalised them (Yahya, 2009). While the formation of Muslim ‘enclaves’ in Manila goes back to the early 20th century, with a handful of merchants and students living there, the high point was the 1970s, when the Islamic Center was established (Watanabe, 2007: 73). It has a mosque, a madrasah (school) and residential buildings hosting migrant families, refugees, students and business people. Mosques are a ‘symbolic instrument in the development of Muslim migrant communities’, where the centre of the economic activities they participate in, such as street trading and small-scale enterprises, are to be found, notes Watanabe (2009: 89) in her ethnography of Muslim Filipinos. The Globo de Oro mosque was built in 1976, in an integrationist move by former President Marcos, from donations by Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi who, ironically, funded the secessionist Moro National Liberation Front and gave them arms and a headquarters in Tripoli (Majul, 1988). Moreover, the complex postcolonial, economic and ethno-religious difference harks back to a ‘maritime Southeast Asian’ perspective’, where inhabitants in southwest Mindanao did not face Manila, but rather their backs were turned to it (Abinales, 2000: 47). The use of the Spanish-introduced term moro to refer to resistant, piratical non-citizens has had a deeply entrenched prejudicial effect, too (Finley, 1916: 35). Despite the more diplomatic approach of the Americans towards ‘Malay Mohammedans’, as they called Muslim Filipinos, it was the period of US colonial rule that saw the rise of elites and private armies (Majul, 1988). It was in this period that systematic economic displacement of the people began. The out-migration to the more established communities of Quiapo, Taguig and Balara resulted in a pool of low-skilled migrants engaging in informal economy. They live in barangays, the smallest political unit in the Philippines, surrounding the mosque where 110 out of 115 retail stores owned by Muslims are found (Yahya, 2009: 88). Just how male Muslims, often caricatured as pirates with long beards and wearing the taquiyah, came to be singularly associated with piracy has not been clearly historicised. While most studies on Quiapo’s piracy offer cultural analyses of piracy (Tolentino, 2009; Trice, 2010) and ethnographic analyses of structural marginalisation (Watanabe, 2007; Yahya, 2009), none has revealed why and how they got into piracy trading in the first place. One hypothesis was that in the early days of media piracy in the Philippines, the ‘Muslim connection’ smuggled the master copies into Manila either from Malaysia or Indonesia in the bellies of tuna in small fishing boats, to be reproduced and distributed (Baumgartel, 2005). Through family and trusted networks, the Muslim community in Quiapo came to occupy this niche in the informal economy. Tolentino (2009: 23–5) argues that the conflation of the image of the Muslim Filipino as pirata is a historical, economic and political consequence of othering in the name of nation-building.

Hidalgo vs Carriedo: gendered labour and spatial divisions

The ethnicising effect of the presence of Muslim Filipinos in piracy trading in Quiapo has also altered the social relations of those whose lives revolve around it in more complex ways. The participation in the material production of ‘pirate modernity’ by a historically marginalised group of people brings closer scrutiny to the relations between gender, ethnicity and informal labour. In this section, I point out how piracy-related labour demands are conditioned by the concentration of capital in Muslim areas, the gendered division of labour resulting from the unevenness of capital, and the flow of pedestrians and pilgrims relative to Quiapo’s spatial geography. Second, I argue that the traffic of people thronging the streets near the two places of worship is the result of a careful negotiation of tension between Christians and Muslims on how to optimise the benefits of piracy.

Because both piracy and the informal economy are two productive regimes that are transnational, extraordinarily complex and subversive, the new social relations forged in the streets of Hidalgo and Carriedo manifest them strongly. The spatial divide between them divided Christian and Muslim traders into recognisable spheres of material culture practices centred on commerce but with the marked gendered divisions unique to each sphere. Quiapo is neither a neighbourhood of heritage houses nor the working-class hub it was in the heyday of Philippine manufacturing in the 1960s. It is no longer the trading and shopping destination of the 1940s yet what remains fascinating about it are the ways Filipinos recognise established mores that respect the boundaries of religion and territory. The Hidalgo-Carriedo binary, however, has challenged these views by absorbing changes emanating from forces such as pirate capitalism, law enforcement and people’s resistance.

The Basilica and the Golden Mosque are physically separated by Quezon Boulevard but connected by an underground pass for pedestrians constructed in the 1950s. Walking from San Sebastian Basilica via calle Hidalgo, the centre of media piracy is surrounded by old houses with little trace of their former glory now occupied by the underclass, its sidewalks lined by the homeless. Barangays 383 and 384 in Hidalgo, are mostly made up of barter centres in newly built emporia where exchanges of pirated DVDs in bulk are done. Each emporium is divided into many smaller stalls, packing and retailing almost the same titles of local and international films. On the afternoon of 16 November 2010, in three adjacent emporia on Hidalgo, there were 196 women and 52 children, while there are only 64 adult males. What is significant to note is the ethnicising and gendering effect of the ubiquitous visibility of hijab-wearing women in one section but not in others. Their labour contributes to economic production in two ways: as traders by minding the store and as reproductive labourers. Children playing in the stalls or sleeping in their mothers’ arms are familiar scenarios of women’s labour in the pirate economy. Elderly Muslim women contribute by looking after the wares during non-peak hours, while children as young as three years are little machines with their tiny hands packaging DVDs into plastic or boxes or folding DVD covers. They are highly effective because of their nimble reflexes while older children who can do the maths are performing ‘customer relations’. The men, on the other hand, do ‘men’s work’: carrying boxes, dealing with wholesalers, fending off the police, among others. In a multi-storey ‘DVD mall’ in Elizondo Street, newly built from the demolished bahay na bato, I spoke with Farida, a young Tausug wife who oversees her two daughters and asked why she and her daughters are not home. She said, ‘This is home. We come here early, we eat here, sleep here. This is our life’ (‘Parang bahay na rin. Nandito kami mula umaga, pati pagkain at pagtulog. Eto ang buhay namin’) (interview, 16 November 2010). Farida, equating bahay (home) as buhay (life), both of which are tied to piracy and the religious and ethnic ‘ghetto’, is not bothered by the situation at all. Her family has a specialised division of labour where individual tasks are coordinated to contribute to income generation. Redefining the domestic where chores ascribed as private are performed in public spaces is one of the ways the economy of piracy has reoriented the social world of Quiapo.

I observed that majority of vendors in the Muslim area are women and children at any given time. Although it would be impossible to find any statistics that pin down labour participation in the pirate informal economy because of the very nature of the business, this is consistent with studies that show the overwhelming presence of women in informal economy, where 70% of labour participation in Southeast Asia is by adult women, and as much as 97.5% in all of Asia (Charmes, 2012: 116). Child labour in the Philippines is also prevalent, with almost 5.5 million children aged 5 to 17 working as paid labourers (National Statistics Office, 2011). While the presence of women and children in the informal economy is unsurprising, their pronounced visibility in Hidalgo is made possible by the improved built environment – air-conditioned stalls in relatively safer, permanent structures have been erected to accommodate expanding trade activities. Women I interviewed agreed that to be sheltered in these mall-type commercial estates allowed them to simulate a homelike situation, ‘parang nasa bahay ka na rin’ (Salud, interview, 17 November 2010). In the comfort of their stalls, women like Farida and Salud are able to perform their duties as both mother and labourer while the children enjoy the comforts of a well-lit space and a cool temperature. I see Farida’s older daughter watching one of the pirated films she sells; she tells me how watching films with subtitles could help her daughter improve her English, thus, aid her learning at school. Her younger daughter, on the other hand, is fast asleep in a makeshift hammock. These scenes are repeated not only in Farida’s emporium but also in the entire bloc of Hidalgo and adjacent streets surrounding the mosque. There are no official figures that would confirm any marked increase in women and children labour participation before and after the boom in piracy. Statistical studies on piracy, especially those published by think-tanks commissioned by copyright lobbyists, lack rigour, claims Karaganis (2011). There is ethnographic evidence in the case of Quiapo, however, that women and children’s labour participation in piracy is related to the improvements in infrastructure that house workers in a less hazardous environment. The boom in piracy in the last 20 years has inflated real estate in Hidalgo, altering city spaces and architecture as decrepit heritage houses from the turn of the 19th century to the early 1930s have given way to concrete mid-rise condominiums. A male participant, 29, who did not wish to be named, claimed that during his 11 years in the business he had been very content and had seen improvements in his personal life, as an impoverished young man who left Basilan in 2000. His family of three children work together in a small stall he rents, where they spend most days and evenings to eke out a living (interview, 18 November 2010).

Crossing the underpass from Hidalgo, locals and pilgrims alike find the Quiapo Basilica, one of the most revered churches in the Philippines today. Carriedo street, to the right side of the basilica, is the artery that brings pilgrims from the light railway station (LRT) to the basilica. The street leads to Plaza Miranda – the ‘open’ space where devotees and traders meet. Traversing the ‘pirate ghetto’ towards the church, indices of ethnicity and Islam disappear. Instead, one hears the voice of the priest on loudspeakers in the open space. Here, there are no emporia managed by women in hijabs, instead one sees improvised structures of light materials lined up in the street. Young, muscular and agile male vendors are quick to disassemble these fixtures when raiding teams enter this ‘unprotected’ business zone. The workers have no roof over their heads or a reasonably comfortable chair; mostly they stand for long periods of time. Levin, age 22, who pocketed 150 pesos (roughly US$3) per day for about 12 hours of work, pointed out the dangers of being ‘unprotected’. The Optical Media Board enforcers, authorities from the mayor’s office and policemen all threaten to disrupt trading at any given time. These attempts to put a stop to piracy in Quiapo paid off when the Philippines dropped from the ‘priority watch list’ to the ‘watch list’ of the International Intellectual Property Alliance (Cuartero, 2012). Although Levin confirmed that his former boss, Elena, as well as others in Carriedo, pay lagay (bribe or protection money), they do not enjoy the stability of Muslim retailers, ensconced in air-conditioned buildings whose illicit operations are negotiated at a higher cost. Because they are walang puesto (literally ‘without a place’), these DVD retailers hire young male workers who are physically able to handle harassment and imprisonment.

I witnessed the logic behind this when enforcers came while I was at a ‘stall’ speaking to Elena. As the vans came to run over goods and vendors, the young men expertly mobilised to save their merchandise. They have devised a system for hauling hundreds of discs, a television, recorders, stools, tables, in one go, to a ‘safe house’ in an alley nearby. Levin rushed to help but I was left in the sidewalk gaping at the confusion happening around me. Elena told me how ‘the farce is taking its toll on the business. It’s all a joke! They do this, we come back, they return, we run again; waste of time’ (‘Pangit sa negosyo itong kalokohang ‘to. Joke talaga. Darating sila, babalik din kami, babalik sila, tatakbo na naman; sayang sa oras’) (interview, 16 November 2010). Added to this ‘farce’ is the exposure to natural elements, such as Manila’s humid weather and the monsoon rains, the overcrowding and the poor air quality that makes street trading a difficult, dirty and dangerous job. In the 2000s there were about 17 million workers in the Philippines involved in street trading with no social security, no health benefits, and no right to claim for damages (Pastrana, 2009). I asked four young men under Elena why they would rather work in less comfortable Carriedo than in off-street Hidalgo. They all emphatically agreed that they would rather work for Elena, their 45-year-old retailer, in Carriedo rather than in ‘protected’ Hidalgo. ‘It’s difficult to work with Muslims … they do not trust non-Muslims. Of course, they also want to give jobs to their compatriots’ [‘Mahirap kausap ang mga Muslim … walang tiwala sa hindi Muslim. Siempre mas gusto nilang bigyan ng trabaho ang kababayan nila’] says Paolo, 23, with a young wife and one child to support. It is no coincidence that Paolo, Levin and two others are all Catholics.

By a comparative observation between Hidalgo’s Muslim side and Carriedo’s Catholic side, there is an actually existing gendered and ethnic division of labour in Quiapo’s piracy trading. What makes the phenomenon interesting is how the division has introduced a new pattern of labour demand to prop up ‘pirate’ economic activities in Quiapo. The informal economy is almost always gendered; women are over-represented as their participation allows them to care for the family even as they earn secondary income. But the singularity by which the gendered division of labour in Quiapo occurs is precipitated by localised conditions. The influx of pirate capitalism, the presence of a migrant ethnic minority as surplus labour, and the particularities of Quiapo’s social make-up are factors also affected by a religious divide. First, I argue that what is demanded of labour in Carriedo is a result of its spatial identity as ‘Catholic’. Carriedo remains decidedly ‘Catholic’ judging from the mixture of wares sold, such as rosaries, ‘indulgence’ candles, charms, amulets and crosses. The decision of Muslim Filipinos to remain in Hidalgo is a result of a deeply rooted religious divide. While I have little doubt that ‘Muslim’ pirate capital is found in Carriedo – pirated wares ultimately come from the other side – there is a tacit agreement that Muslim pirates should remain outside the Catholic sphere. The religious identities of each have remained visibly segregated but nonetheless penetrable by pirate capital. For while Catholic Quiapo is the dominant face of the locale, Muslim Quiapo dictates the traffic of goods, the composition of labour, and the extent of the market. The tension is also a way to maintain equilibrium. Muslim Filipinos are socially marginalised yet are the drivers of capital and commerce in a predominantly Catholic but poorer area. This implies that piracy capital exerts an influence on labour and gender relations in Quiapo, while the socio-political history of the area conditions the boundaries of Quiapo’s social reality.

The built environment conditioned by the amount of illicit capital in Hidalgo also rearranges the conduct of private family life of Muslim Filipinos. Street trading in the Muslim area is literally off-street, ensconced in permanent infrastructure that facilitates the absorption of women’s and children’s surplus labour into the economy of piracy. On the other hand, Carriedo is exemplified by the dearth of ‘pirate capital’, either in infrastructure, reproduction capacity or volume of retail merchandise, which demands and privileges masculine labour. This type of set-up requires young bodies, which in due course become ‘misshapen’ by the difficult labour the body performs. In other words, the unevenness of pirate capital in Quiapo is embodied in those who labour there. However, what is particularly compelling about the subtlety of this division is the feminising effect on the young men in Carriedo of pirate capital’s concentration in Hidalgo. The violence and harassment against them on an everyday basis by local power-holders adds to their already marginal status. Because these young men are arawan (no work-no pay daily arrangement) and working in the most precarious of conditions, it can be argued that pirate capital being ethnically identified with the Muslim feminises them further. The lack of physical infrastructure to protect their bodies against assault, either intentional harm or simply the weariness of everyday labour, downgrades Carriedo’s pirates in the hierarchy of Quiapo’s informal economy. The young men, when questioned, suggest that their physique has changed over a period of time. Ironically, despite the feminisation they experience, their upper bodies are muscular due to the demands of street piracy. The paradox is visible in the way these young men, themselves embodying physical power and masculinity, are chased, publicly chastised and at times violently manhandled by authorities.

This development in labour market relations of piracy in Quiapo builds on the widely accepted notion of women’s overwhelming participation in the informal economy. The case study presented poses a challenge to the concept of ‘pirate’ labour being dependent on traditional gender roles. Quiapo’s economy of piracy has influenced labour placement in two zones historically segregated by religion and ethnic composition. On the one hand, a masculine workforce in one area is formed by the general lack of investment; on the other hand, a female-dominated area is supported by the influx of money and improvements in infrastructure allowing them to continue their reproductive roles in more acceptable conditions. In short, Quiapo presents a case of different scales of labour utility between men and women based on the specificities of ‘pirate’ market and the social history of a city. Just how transnational piracy and the informal economy intersect in Quiapo demonstrates that not all sectors (and sexes) of ‘pirate’ labour experience the impact of piracy uniformly. The unevenness in capital and, subsequently, its effect on labour, is traceable to the ‘first-mover’ effect of Muslims’ primacy, which gave them comparative advantage in the market. While the analysis of the ‘first-mover’ effect on the gendered division of labour is observable in Quiapo, it remains to be asked in further studies on the topic how deeply specificities of gendered labour in Quiapo benefit piracy trading, which has gripped the ‘heart of Manila’ at its very core.

Conclusion

The hypotheses I advance in this article on the gendered and ethnicised divide in Quiapo elaborate on how transnational piracy of media products is slowly changing Quiapo’s social dynamics, on the one hand. On the other hand, the specificities of Quiapo, its people, spatial and social history influence in deep ways how exchanges in piracy trading are conducted. The district’s rich cultural and religious history, central in the national imagination of the Philippines, intersects with piracy, which has introduced subtle changes in the social relations of its inhabitants. In particular, the article shows how piracy in ‘the heart of Manila’ contributes to urbanisation through the influx of capital in the construction of new infrastructure, and more tacitly by enlivening the visual, aural and oral pulse of the people as they participate in the global production of ‘pirate modernity’. More broadly, I hinted at the flexibility of pirate capital in the deepening of globalisation through cultural products, reflected in the way pirated creative industry media are produced, distributed and consumed by Manileños. Finally, the peopling of Quiapo, the openness with which it welcomed the Philippine ‘other’ from the south, and the manner in which the state ‘colonised’ the city of Manila to ‘Islamise’ it for purposes of national integration, have been instrumental in the making of a gendered and ethnicised division of labour in piracy trade in Quiapo today.

Presenting the case of the uneven pirate commerce in Hidalgo and Carriedo, this article traced how an evidently feminised labour force in one street and a masculine one in an adjacent area are a result of the gender divide that is specifically shaped by the visible segregation rooted in religion and ethnicity. Piracy that submits to global processes engages the inhabitants of Quiapo in the informal sector to reinforce a gendered division of labour in Hidalgo and Carriedo. While the informal economy is universally feminised and women’s work devalorised, the concentration of Muslim Filipino women in one section in Quiapo heightens the ‘othered’ position of these women in relation to male Muslims but also in the politics of national identification, where Islam and minority mean inferiority. The attitude towards Muslims of Catholic Tagalogs, as expressed by the workers in Carriedo, points to a long history of tension that must be included in the definition of what is ‘Filipino’. Quiapo’s case is especially poignant because the so-called ‘pirates’ are historically the underclass of Philippine colonial and postcolonial political economy, which lends this division a more complex and painful dimension. This hierarchisation lends validity, rather obliquely, to the prejudice towards Filipino Muslims as pirates, whereas ‘ordinary’ Filipinos are small players who join the trade to survive. While the ‘heart of Manila’ today is diagnosed as obsolescent in image, representation and infrastructure, and is generally considered to be a dangerous public space (Venida, 2002: 50), Quiapo nevertheless continues to reveal insightful lessons and outcomes of social processes which it harbours within the liminal spaces that make up this intense, ever-exciting district.