by Malu Padilla
“Doing it for ourselves is the essence of the women’s movement: it
keeps us honest, keeps us real, keeps us concrete. And that is that
doing – not just being, feeling, or sweeping the floor that gets dirty
again – which brings women into history. It is new for women to be
making history – not just a few queens, empresses or exceptional
geniuses, but hundreds, thousands millions of women now entering
history, knowing we have made history – by changing our lives….”
Betty Friedman, 1921, from It Changed my Life
Our Beginnings
We did it for ourselves; it changed our lives – knowing that we have made history by founding Babaylan – the Philippine Women’s Network in Europe. September 1992 Barcelona, was a milestone in the herstory of Filipina migrants in Europe. It was an unforgettable moment for the founding mothers of Babaylan in Europe.
The Babaylan network was the first initiative of Filipina migrants to establish a pan-European network of Philippine women’s organisations committed to women empowerment and service to the community. In the true spirit of the babaylanes [2] during the colonial period of the Philippines, we named our network after these priestesses who, during the Spanish colonisation, performed not only sacred rites but also exercised leadership roles in all aspects of community life. They fought alongside with the people for a peaceful society against the imposition of a foreign system by the colonisers. Though repressed by the Spanish friars, babaylan priestesses continued to be revered and respected by the people. The original babaylanes did it for themselves and made a mark in history which until today has inspired contemporary Filipinas like us.
Babaylan Europe grew out of a need to develop an effective and empowering support system for Philippine women living and working across Europe. We are a network of Philippine women organisations in 10 European countries – Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and United Kingdom. In the past 14 years of our existence, we have reached a stage where we take Babaylan’s agenda to a level that would move Filipina migrant women beyond being on the agenda to themselves setting the agenda.
Babaylan believes that migration is brought about by a combination of socio-cultural, economic and political factors in the Philippines that push women to migrate as well as factors in Europe that pull women to immigrate. We also believe that Filipinas have common problems that confront us as migrant women in Europe – the unequal and unjust divide between rich and poor; the colonial culture ingrained by years of colonisation by the west; the Philippine government’s failure to address decisively the problem of poverty and its policies that encourage labour migration; and, the low value of women’s work in the Philippines and Europe.
Like other migrant women in Europe, we experience racism, social exclusion and sexual discrimination. Most Filipinas are employed in low paid ’reproductive work’, receive low salaries, suffer de-skilling, intellectual stagnation, unrecognized educational level, and often have language difficulties.
At Babaylan, the experience of poverty in all its forms is a thread that binds the Filipina migrant workers that form our majority membership. We began arriving in Europe in the 1960s for adventure, as wives of European nationals, as refugees, as professionals – but most of us came to escape the privations of an economy in free fall. We came to work as nurses, cooks, house cleaners, caregivers, nannies and other domestic employment. We keep enough of the euros, pounds, francs, and crones for the essentials of living, and send the rest to the Philippines. In this way, we have raised and educated our children and the children of relations who cannot otherwise afford to. We have built homes for our families, who are also fed and clothed by our efforts. Driven to leave our homeland by an economy that has been battered by recession and political instability, we struggle not just to alleviate the poverty of our own insecure social status abroad, but the poverty of our families in the Philippines.
The driving force behind this commitment to keep the babaylanes spirit alive is our belief that by pulling our skills, know-how, resources and experiences together, we can participate and integrate fully in our adopted communities and pave the way towards the empowerment of Filipina migrants. We believe that we can affect changes and improvement in our lives if we strive for it together. Our empowerment will not be served by others in a silver platter – we have to work for it, we owe it to ourselves. We see ourselves as agents of our own transformation.
Babaylan has taken a long journey in our 15 years of existence. We have learned a lot of lessons and gained new experiences along the way. We have developed our own migrant women orientation course which looks into the specificities of women conditions in the different European countries and its interconnectedness with her upbringing as a Filipino woman. At the country level, we have reached significant achievements which we can be proud of. The intention of this paper is to give the readers a good glimpse and impression of Philippine migration to Europe by a specific group of organised Filipinas. It is also from this perspective that I present the analysis and context of our work in Europe.
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