This paper analyses the social, economic, and political trajectory of a relatively prosperous fishing and marketing town in the Western Visayan region of the Philippines from the mid 1960s to the present. It describes the local responses to a series of key domestic events (the imposition of Martial Law, and the advent of electrification, TV, and private English language schooling), and two major external influences (the 1965 changes in US Immigration Law and the OPEC price increases in the early 1970s). It suggests how, in combination, these events led to a flood of international migration from the town, a collapse in local investment and job creation, the simultaneous development and withdrawal of a small middle class, and continuing poverty in a setting of potential wealth.

Globalization is clearly the buzz-word of the day. The term is being used in dozens of way in business, government, and media, popular usage, and the academic community. Most often, it refers to seemingly new and certainly accelerated flows of capital, labor, technology, information, organizational or mobilizing skills, images, and ideas flooding across national boundaries, creating new links among localities and centers all across the world. In the process, globalization usually suggests (or promises), major transformations in social life, economic productivity, political structures, etc. Its also often portrayed as a kind of unstoppable steamroller, flattening out and homogenizing cultures, economiC options, and political alternatives all around the world. And many, though not all, use it as a celebratory term, with the idea that people everywhere will ultimately benefit from the increased productivity, improved quality, and the market discipline, brought about, if not imposed, by globalization.

Whatever truth there may be to these positive claims for globalization, it also has down-sides and limitations. Perhaps most striking is the grossly uneven distribution of its benefits and costs - which both challenges arguments for its homogenizing powers, and perhaps most importantly, underscores how very little is truly "global." Indeed, while much of what is popularly viewed as "global" may reach widely around the world (though not everywhere), on inspection it becomes clear that it emanates from, and accrues most of its benefits to, very particular places; whether Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Brussels, Tokyo, London, or Washington DC. Likewise, global forces frequently have destructive effects on social institutions, families, and communities. This may support globalization's characterization as "transformative," but it also contradicts claims of being a positive influence. And most fundamntally, there are also crucial limits to the powers of globalization. In fact, the global and the local are mutually constituative: many of the most significant changes in contemporary world are resulting from the interaction of global or external influences and very particular and local actors, structures, processes.

In this paper, I will begin to sketch out the interaction of some selected global forces and the social and economic conditions, structures, and processes in a very concrete locale, Estancia, Iloilo, a large marketing, fishing, and port town in Western Visayan region of the Philippines. By focusing on a particular locale, I hope to specify some of the contradictions, conundrums, and limits of "globalization," and in the process to clarify what it has meant in the Philippines, where it might be leading, and its specific role in social transformation.

Clearly, the Philippines and Estancia, Iloilo, have been deeply subject to global forces. But they have also contributed to them, shaping and re-shaping them, as well. To my great good fortune, I have been able to study these processes in Estancia beginning in 1966-68 when I lived there for 18 months doing dissertation research on rural entrepreneurship. Still more fortunately, I have been able to visit the town 14 times over the last 30 years, and thus witness its evolution over this tumultuous period.

I should note that I originally chose Estancia as a research site in 1966 because it stood out as a highly productive and relatively prosperous town in a region of endemic poverty. I was interested in understanding, in a relatively rural setting, how firms developed, and the processes by which new wealth, capital, skills, and employment opportunities were generated, in the hope that whatever I learned might be applicable or adaptable to other communities in the Philippines, or elsewhere. Although I did not realize it then, the town has also provided an arena in which to study the interaction of local and global processes as they have subsequently transformed the town and the lives of its residents.

Estancia in 1966-68

In the 1960s, nearly all Estanciahanons (as local residents are called) from ordinary fisherman to the wealthiest fishing outfit operators and the Mayor, saw their lives as rooted in the town; it was the major arena for their lives. Every year some people left Estancia for schooling and employment elsewhere in the Philippines. But for the vast majority, the relatively prosperous town was the setting in which they expected to live out their fortunes and the bulk of their lives. It was not a closed community; hundreds of fishermen and their families came from surrounding communities to sell their fish and buy supplies every week, and scores of wholesale and retail fish merchants came to purchase fish for resale elsewhere on Panay. The town was also the terminus for a major provincial bus line, and 2-3 inter-island steamers stopped weekly at the pier enroute to and from Manila. Estancia was a bustling community well connected with other parts of the Philippines.

Yet for the great bulk of the townspeople, and with only slight variations up and down the social ladder, Estancia was the defining center of their lives; it was the locus of their families, their work, and their larger social and political involvements, expectations, and ambitions. In part because of its relative prosperity, Estancia was a magnet, attracting and holding people. Much of its social, economic and political life was organized around nearly classic and quite stable patron-client relations. Residents spoke and acted as though Estancia was where they would live their lives, seek their allies, fight their battles, make their fortunes, and suffer their defeats. Some of their children might go elsewhere, but for most Estanciahanons the town was home; physically, socially, economically, psychologically.

By the mid-1980s Estancia had changed dramatically. Over the two decades, many of the boundaries between Estancia and the larger world had thinned and fallen away. Variously, but effectively, for everyone in the town, nearly all the world was now in some sense "available," and much of it was personally known. There had been a redefinition of one's own place and Estancia's place in the world, and a redefinition of the operative world itself. By the 1980s, for its residents, the town was still a significant place, but patron-client relations had thinned considerably, and the town was now simply one among many significant places and possibilities in their lives. The imaginable, desirable, and accessible world was not just Estancia and its immediate extensions, but something closer to the world as a whole.

This 20-year transformation in local understandings of who and where one was in the world, and how one could operate in it had many sources and numerous implications for individuals, families, as well as social, political, and economic relations and modes of organization within the town. In one way or another, nearly everyone was touched by this expansion and elaboration of the available world.

The remainder of this paper will be devoted to sketching out the nature and dynamics of some of the key elements of this transformation; their sources, character, and meaning in the lives of individuals, social relations, and institutions within the town. As I hope will become evident, these changes fundamentally result from the interaction and synergy of specific external or "global" forces or processes, and equally specific events and actions internal to the Philippines. In the real world of the town they are mutally constituative; they cannot be meaningfully separated.

The changes in Estancia have come and gone in two directions; the outside world has entered the town as never before, and Estanciahanons are now outside, exploring the world, as never before. Three major shocks from outside the town during the 1970s -- the imposition of martial law, the OPEC-induced quadrupling of fuel prices, and electrification -- triggered a series of major changes and responses within Estancia. In the process, they demonstrated to the townspeople both the extent to which external forces shaped their lives, as well as the town's permeability, its vulnerability to forces beyond its control. Simultaneously, three other external events -- the 1965 changes in United States immigration law, the OPEC-generated demand for skilled labor in the Gulf States, and the destruction of the Philippine economy by President Marcos and his cronies -- created opportunities and incentives for people to move out of Estancia into the wider world. People discovered they were more subject to, more deeply engaged with, but also had greater access to the outside world than they had previously imagined possible. Many discovered that they could also operate creatively and take advantage of those external changes with some degree of success.

All six of these major changes took place more or less in parallel over a twenty-year period, and while three -- Martial Law, the economic depredations of Marcos and his cronies, and electrification -- were largely (though not entirely) national or local, their more enduring effects in the town derived from their interaction with the more "global" forces emanating from outside the Philippines.

Martial Law

On September 21, 1972 President Marcos declared Martial Law in the Philippines, abolishing Congress and concentrating power in his own hands. Largely a matter of internal national politics, it was nevertheless immediately legitimated with strong and continuing support from the American administration, the US military, the American Chamber of Commerce, and the international business community. In Estancia, Martial Law had a number of almost immediate consequences. At least for the first several years, almost everyone in town would assert that the "peace and order" situation had improved (though in fact this had never been a major problem in Estancia). A nearby Philippine Constabulary (national police) garrison, ostensibly concerned with preventing "subversive activities," clamped down on the sale of small explosives charges used in the fishing industry. But by far the most most immediate effect of Martial Law was the virtual destruction of local politics