Diasporic Intimacy and the Balikbayan Box

May 12

In 1985, the year after my family immigrated to the United States, the courier company LBC Express opened its first US branch in San Francisco, introducing the Balikbayan box. A Balikbayan translated from Tagalog is a person who returns home. As is the custom, a Balikbayan brings gifts for family and friends. Overseas Filipinos who cannot visit home can send a Balikbayan box packed with gifts for their loved ones. Regardless of weight, the shipment cost is per box, and this is delivered to the doorstep of the recipient. In order to cater to the resurgence of Filipinos working overseas, the Philippine Bureau of Customs as enacted by the former Filipino president Marcos, allowed a tax-free entry of personal goods in the country.

For years I have been sending my family back home Balikbayan boxes. It is a custom I adopted from my mom. She regularly sent her sister everyday bulk items such as make-up, coffee and running shoes. As an art material and substrate, the Balikbayan Cardboard box, is particular to the angst and energy of this paradoxical relationship of being a Balikbayan here in Manila. The Balikbayan box is the ubiquitous symbol of the Philippine diaspora, and as a painting material, it is unconventional and unlike a canvas, in that cardboard is a poor diy prototype material. In choosing cardboard and the process of laser technology to create paintings, I am actually courting the aesthetic of technical failure.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately of what this paradoxical relationship that a Balkibayan has with home. It is a feeling of being engaged and estranged, and all the while playing with diaspora intimacy under conditions of displacement and dislocation. I am really fascinated by this performance of intimacy by Filipino domestic workers, it’s sort of like mothering from a distance. I think so much of being a Balikbayan is concerned with the fluidity of such identities, all the while maintaining your connection to your home through technologies of translocality, such as the Balikbayan box, emails, and phone calls.