Last Updated on December 8, 2021 by themigrationnews
Jason DeParle’s A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves navigates modern migration through the riveting multi-generational saga of the Portaganas, a family of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) whose decades-long journey unfolded across three continents. DeParle first met the family matriarch, Tita Portagana Comodas, in 1987 as an American reporter whose original intent was to write about global poverty and slum life. While staying at her home in Leveriza, a shanty town in Manila, he developed a friendship with the family and shifted his focus from poverty to migration. His self-described “light bulb moment” led him to a bigger realization on migrant remittances as “the world’s largest antipoverty program, a homegrown version of foreign aid” (10). DeParle also discovered the social costs of migration in the marriages of the family members, which led him to ask Peachy, one of Tita’s nieces, if these sacrifices were worth it. In response, she told him their “unofficial family creed: ‘a good provider is one who leaves’” (12).
By turns an intimate family portrait and a panoramic review of the Age of Migration, the book benefits from DeParle’s dual position as a journalist and a family friend of the Portaganas. As DeParle himself notes, this book is not about one family, rather it is about the “broader epoch of migration that is transforming much of the world” (330). Within this framework, he situates the Portaganas’ stories which he gathered from his three-decade friendship with the family, who are both product and reflection of the unfolding national and global trends of mass migration. Despite this, the family’s stories were the linchpin of the book and, even in his discussions of the larger forces behind mass migration, DeParle infuses vivid anecdotes from the family’s lives to illustrate his points.
The first few chapters narrate the stories of Tita and her husband Emet Comodas whose courtship and eventual marriage as a young couple in Leveriza was described by DeParle as a product of internal migration. In the 1960s, Tita’s father, Venancio Portagana, decided to send Tita, one of his eleven children, from the fields of Cavite to the slums of Manila. DeParle contextualizes this within the backdrop of a postwar population boom, increased migrations from rural to urban, and the allure of overseas migration. He opines that “city life, for all its hardships, promised freedom, excitement, and dreams, however slim, of making it big” (23) which also “promoted an awareness, if vague, of life beyond the Philippines” (28).
The greatest strength of DeParle’s approach is its ability to illuminate the fundamentally human aspects in what can otherwise be lost in the broader lenses used by scholars and experts on migration. For instance, when Emet takes his first overseas job in Saudi Arabia, DeParle poignantly comments: “The two main themes of Overseas Filipino Worker life are homesickness and money. Workers suffer the first to get the second.” (34-35) During Emet’s time, Filipino labor migration was a male-dominated phenomenon, which also affected the gender dynamics at home as migrants’ wives became the authority. A few decades later, when migrant labor became a feminized phenomenon, he mostly followed the story of Rosalie, Tita and Emet’s daughter, who ended up as a nurse in Galveston, Texas. Once again, migration shifted gender dynamics in the household during this period as exemplified by Rosalie’s need to make her husband Chris “feel like he’s the head” (103) and how she felt guilty when her children missed her yet felt alarmed when they didn’t. Through these details alone, the book offers a profound clarity even on phenomena that other experts may dismiss as human error. For instance, when Tita decided to use the remittances from Emet’s first job abroad to install a toilet – a luxury in the slums – DeParle saw it as both a symbol of their family’s prosperity and Tita’s newfound empowerment. Many investment-minded economists at that time would have criticized this as short-sighted consumption without truly understanding why poor remittance-receiving households tend to spend money on new comforts such as concrete walls, roofs, televisions, and stereos.
DeParle also illuminates the darker side of these arrangements with the rise of infidelity, which he exemplifies through Tita’s brother Fortz’s string of extramarital affairs and the weakened bond between the migrants and their children. He also argues that these unfolded at a time when then-president Ferdinand Marcos ushered in a period of migration fever, creating an industry of private recruitment that was “impossible to police” (42), leading aspiring emigrants to fall victim to fraudulent schemes. Despite these many costs and risks, poverty-stricken Filipinos would continue to seek employment opportunities abroad because there was no other way to be a good provider if you don’t leave – a recurring sentiment DeParle highlights throughout the book. He also explores the hidden truths and paradoxes behind otherwise celebrated aspects of modern migration such as ethnic solidarity, which he found could also be a coping mechanism for ethnic rivalries. This was exemplified by Kuya Ben who hired Chris, an engineer, to improve his reputation in Galveston since he felt disrespected by his more educated fellowmen, as he eventually confided to DeParle. In this case, DeParle uncovers these complex “stor[ies] of ethnic solidarity and rivalry in one” (219) that do not quite fit into either category.
It is important to note that the idea to write this book came at a later time in DeParle’s career while working for The New York Times. In 2006, he returned to the Philippines on an assignment to write about the culture of migration and to follow up on the Portaganas. The difference in motivation from his first visit was evident, seeing how most chapters of the book follows Rosalie’s journey in the United States. Although the three-decade time frame serves as an effective longitudinal study of one family’s multisite migrations, the book could be rather convoluted in its attempts to summarize the global and national contexts that unfolded throughout those years. Nevertheless, it was DeParle’s recollection of his formative years in the 1980s as “Leveriza’s journalist in residence” (51) that stood out mainly because of the humbled, self-aware perspective it offered. Coming from a young American reporter who initially expected to study poverty, it is refreshing to read about DeParle’s unlearning of his initial assumptions of what exactly being poor entailed when he discovered migration as the force altering the fabric of slum life for households like Tita’s.
In this sense, it is important to contextualize the publication of this book in modern American politics when heated debates on immigration dominate public discourse. Several of the chapters on Rosalie were interspersed with discussions of the Trump administration’s “campaign of fear” and spite against immigrants (241). As such, the book seeks to make larger claims about the real forces behind migration, as DeParle stated explicitly, in an attempt to counter these politicized narratives. However, even without these bigger motives to direct the narrative, this multi-generational family saga offers more than enough perspective, albeit microscopic, to stand on its own; though, the “value” of this perspective may vary from reader to reader. For instance, many of these stories may resonate with readers from traditional sending countries such as the Philippines where these emigrant narratives have been ingrained in the local culture for decades. Whereas, American readers, especially those who are keen to denounce anti-immigration policies, may perceive these as novel groundbreaking insights, though one may wonder if it is preaching to the choir. Regardless of the limitations, DeParle provides a much-needed and hard-earned perspective to a phenomenon that has always been a primarily human-centered one in spite of all the propaganda that threatens to dehumanize it.
Review by Patricia Miraflores
Patricia Miraflores is a graduate student pursuing a joint Master’s degree in M.A. Euroculture at the University of Groningen and Uppsala University. She is a recipient of the 2020 Erasmus Mundus scholarship award from the European Commission.