Sunday, January 10, 2027: 10:00 AM
Galerie 6 (New Orleans Marriott)
By 1965, the Lyndon B. Johnson administration faced a pivotal crossroads: withdraw from
Vietnam or escalate to full-scale military intervention through a policy of Americanization.
Choosing the latter necessitated not only a precipitous increase in U.S. troop deployments but also the rapid transformation of South Vietnam’s physical infrastructure. At the time, despite years of economic aid and infrastructure development by the U.S., southern Vietnam still lacked an integrated, modern, national infrastructure as measured by suitability for military operations. Filipino construction personnel—deployed by the Republic of the Philippines and recruited by U.S. construction companies—played a central role in this infrastructure buildup. This paper investigates the privatized recruitment of Filipino personnel to construct key infrastructure in South Vietnam to carry out a globalized Vietnam War. In examining the recruitment and deployment of Filipino laborers and engineers for U.S.-funded infrastructure projects in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), this paper attempts to reframe the Vietnam War as a developmental and transnational labor project organized through military contracting and infrastructure building. It highlights how labor mobility underwrote American war-making and anti-communist state-building in Southeast Asia. By placing the Philippines, the RVN, and the United States in a trilateral framework, the paper challenges bilateral narratives of the war and foregrounds the ideological, racialized, and gendered dimensions of wartime labor. Ultimately, it demonstrates how military labor hierarchies forged during the Vietnam War institutionalized long-term patterns of labor export and regional economic dependency in Southeast Asia that persist into the present. It shows that the roots of Filipino labor export preceded the 1974 Labor Code of the Philippines issued by President Ferdinand Marcos and are instead tied to earlier U.S. efforts to align community development, Cold War geopolitics, and anti-communist statebuilding in Southeast Asia.
Vietnam or escalate to full-scale military intervention through a policy of Americanization.
Choosing the latter necessitated not only a precipitous increase in U.S. troop deployments but also the rapid transformation of South Vietnam’s physical infrastructure. At the time, despite years of economic aid and infrastructure development by the U.S., southern Vietnam still lacked an integrated, modern, national infrastructure as measured by suitability for military operations. Filipino construction personnel—deployed by the Republic of the Philippines and recruited by U.S. construction companies—played a central role in this infrastructure buildup. This paper investigates the privatized recruitment of Filipino personnel to construct key infrastructure in South Vietnam to carry out a globalized Vietnam War. In examining the recruitment and deployment of Filipino laborers and engineers for U.S.-funded infrastructure projects in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), this paper attempts to reframe the Vietnam War as a developmental and transnational labor project organized through military contracting and infrastructure building. It highlights how labor mobility underwrote American war-making and anti-communist state-building in Southeast Asia. By placing the Philippines, the RVN, and the United States in a trilateral framework, the paper challenges bilateral narratives of the war and foregrounds the ideological, racialized, and gendered dimensions of wartime labor. Ultimately, it demonstrates how military labor hierarchies forged during the Vietnam War institutionalized long-term patterns of labor export and regional economic dependency in Southeast Asia that persist into the present. It shows that the roots of Filipino labor export preceded the 1974 Labor Code of the Philippines issued by President Ferdinand Marcos and are instead tied to earlier U.S. efforts to align community development, Cold War geopolitics, and anti-communist statebuilding in Southeast Asia.
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