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Pakikipagkapwa in the Basque Country: Gendered Homemaking and Postcolonial Belonging among Filipino Domestic and Care Workers

Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: This article examines how ten Filipino domestic and care workers (DCWs) in Greater Bilbao, Basque Country, employ indigenous cultural frameworks and postcolonial religious legacies as strategies of communal homemaking and integration. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and participant observation conducted in 2024, the study finds that pakikipagkapwa , the Filipino ethic of relating to others as kapwa (the shared self) theorized by Enriquez (1986), operates as a lived form of postcolonial resistance, enabling Filipino DCWs to negotiate hybrid identities and reconstruct home through communal food practices, organized sports, and the postcolonial reclamation of Spanish colonial Catholicism enacted through Filipino Masses and Filipino-led religious communities. Gender is central to this process: Filipino women disproportionately carry the burden of cultural preservation and community leadership, a positioning that is at once a triple burden and a source of hard-won public authority, and that challenges narratives reducing migrant women’s agency to labor precarity alone. Applying Boccagni and Hondagneu-Sotelo’s (2023) homemaking framework alongside Bhabha’s (1994) concepts of hybridity and mimicry, the article argues that Filipino indigenous social frameworks offer a productive non-Eurocentric corrective to prevailing integration models, which privilege individual assimilation over communal belonging. The article contributes original empirical and theoretical insights to debates on non-EU labor migration in Europe, postcolonial approaches to integration, and the gendered dimensions of diasporic homemaking in the Spanish-Basque context.
DOI: 10.21203/rs.3.rs-10502133/v1
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7172407796
Cites: 25
Cited by:
Related to: 10