Transnational Real Estate: Selling the American Dream in the Philippines
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Published:May 2017
This chapter focuses on the emergence of the transnational circulation of real estate development capital. It captures the various ways real estate agents working between the United States and the Philippines are attempting to lure Filipinos in the United States back to the Philippines. Interweaving this discussion is Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s notion of an “economy of appearances,” particularly with regard to how the aspirations of Filipinos living abroad have created a source of both fictional and material capital to subsidize property developments in the Philippines. It explains how the performance of this speculative capital produces the context in which many Filipino families are now confronting the possibility of traveling back to the Philippines and staying there permanently.
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