As a little girl, Xyza Cruz Bacani learned about her mother's life through photos her mother would send back home to the Philippines. She was angered by a photo of her mother opening a Christmas present in Singapore, and, later, angered by others she received from Hong Kong, where her mother has worked as a domestic laborer since 1999. Bacani grew up an unmothered child and followed her mother's path, becoming a migrant domestic worker for the same wealthy woman her mother works for, the one who considers her mother like "family, like a little sister." In Hong Kong, Bacani struggled to mend this childhood-long rupture; receiving a mother's care felt foreign. However, she also came to appreciate her mother's sacrifices: saving to build a house back home, her mother never splurged on herself, and never took a day's leave to explore Hong Kong.
Bacani writes that she picked up a camera to show her mother the city outside their door. "I became her eye. I became a photographer because of my mother. She is the reason for who I was, who I am now and who I will be." The work of a photographer whose lens acts as her mother's eye, recalls what poet and filmmaker Cathy Linh Che has called a "restorative archive." Bacani broke the cycle of migration after being published on The New York Times photography blog in 2014; and she has been narrating the lives of migrant workers and their families ever since.
This curation, drawn from the NYU Abu Dhabi Akkasah Photography Archive, emphasizes Bacani's images of mothers (and fathers) mothering while working in the United Arab Emirates — including at NYU Abu Dhabi during the campus’s construction — and at home in the Philippines. When she made the series Komunidad: Filipinos in the UAE in 2015 and 2016, there were approximately 400,000 Filipino migrants living abroad in the country. A decade later, there are over 700,000 Filipino migrants living and working in the UAE — lives, perhaps, less likely to come to mind when reading the day's headlines of war.
Curated by
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Montana Ray, Clinical Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies, NYU
In conversation with
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Jonathan Burr, Digital Collections Management Archivist, Akkasah, NYU Abu Dhabi
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Janet Bunde, University Archivist, NYU University Archives
