Manifesting shame in a Philippine migrant village

- Emotion plays an important role in in creating new dimensions of shame in spaces of migration.
- Emotion in general, and shame in particular, flow between international and internal migrations.
- Shame simultaneously troubles measures of social positions and crystallizes social cohesion in translocal spaces.
- Emotions and social status are mutually constituted.

In this article, I examine how internal migrants in a Philippine village negotiate shame. Specifically, I analyse how shame is embodied and performed by internal migrants in “Little Italy”, a village in the Philippines populated by overseas Filipino workers (OFW), who largely work in Italy, and their families who remain resident in the village. Little Italy's internal migrants are other Philippine nationals who have moved to the village for employment opportunities within OFW households. These intersecting flows of international and internal migration render Little Italy a 'migrant village'. I interrogate internal migrants' shame in two ways: first, as underpinning the subservience that is necessary for negotiating their nominal membership of the village; and second, in contesting and reframing Filipino stereotypes in relation to local social standing and place-based meanings of paid domestic work. I argue that as much as shame has been viewed as an element of social cohesion in the Philippines, its analysis is also a critical tool for troubling current understandings of social positions in migrant spaces such as Little Italy. My findings contribute to scholarship on migration and emotion by, first, demonstrating how emotion in general, and shame in particular, flows between international and internal migrations; and second, by underscoring the role of emotion in creating new dimensions of shame in spaces of migration.