Baby’s indiscretion, her refusal to be bound by a role, results in her ouster from the country, but not before she permanently upsets the community, the members of which had so carefully cultivated a satellite Philippines in a desert country. Baby, who dyes her hair and wears high heels, refuses to speak Tagalog, eat Filipino food, or sing karaoke. The helpers know their roles until Baby comes along. In a foreign worker compound in Bahrain, the educated class from the cities welcome the helper class from the provinces to their homes once a week to eat and sing with them. Similarly, in “Shadow Families, the difference between the professional and worker classes in the community of Filipino workers overseas is an imaginary line, easily crossed. After her discovery of an even more treacherous little mutiny, Sally grasps where the real power lies, sees that she is after all but a guest worker in a foreign country. In her deception, she believes she is making up not only her friend Minnie’s long hours of domestic labor in the Mansour household, but also for her guilt at her own more elevated position as a professional. Mansour’s gifts while abandoning any pretext of teaching the hopeless child in an attempt to even the scales of power. Sally accepts the job of schooling the disabled daughter of a wealthy Bahrain family, receiving Mrs. In two stories of Filipinos abroad as foreign workers, Alvar explores the power plays that are, in Sally’s words, meant “to offset some imbalance in the world.” They’re a repudiation of a role Alvar’s characters are relegated to or have passively assumed. Sally Rivas in “The Miracle Worker” calls them little mutinies. In Alvar’s stories, these migrant workers and expats plot their own personal revolts. These events and issues form the backdrop of Mia Alvar’s story collection In the Country in which economic inequities and political repressions drive a diaspora of workers and asylum-seekers. When the people forced Marcos from the palace and the country in 1986, little changed under the new democratic leadership for the country’s ruined economy or its practice of sending its workers abroad. It was during the Marcos regime that the Philippine government began shunting off its unemployed from a stagnant economy, most often to the oil-producing countries of the Middle East.

It was a remarkable non-violent revolt in response to the decades of corruption and decadence of a regime that suppressed speech, took over businesses, and embezzled government funds. That year, from February 22-25, two million Filipino citizens, joined by political, military, and religious groups, occupied Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, a main thoroughfare in Metro Manila.

This February marks the thirtieth anniversary of the People Power Revolution that ended the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 1986.

In the country mia alvar analysis