04 ISSUE XI
MAY 2026
MAY 2026
How to pack and send a balikbayan box
Exploring how the iconic balikbayan boxes illuminate the structures, inequalities, and cultural meanings of Filipino migrant culture and economy.
By Kaye Yuvallos
Every month, over 400,000 balikbayan boxes travel from around the world to the Philippines. Filipino culture celebrates these corrugated containers as tokens of love and devotion. And while this is true, it often obscures its dialectics. Labor export policies, gendered care economies, state incentives, and the affective toll of migration are among the contexts that reveal the balikbayan box as not merely a container for commercial or secondhand goods.
Images from Kaye Yuvallos.
The word balikbayan combines balik (return) and bayan (country) to mean "returning home." I suppose the irony here is that it is usually the box that returns, not the person. Since the 1970s, the Philippine government has institutionalized migration as a strategy for economic survival. The term balikbayan itself was coined during the Marcos administration, in part an ideological project to transform migrants into national heroes. Today, roughly 10% of the Philippines' population lives abroad, with 1.83 million Filipinos working overseas as domestic caregivers and healthcare providers. Their remittances constitute nearly 10% of the nation's GDP.
It is important to contextualize this deeply embedded tradition historically. Marcos-era labor export programs pushed marginalized populations, especially rural farmers dispossessed of land, into migration as a livelihood strategy. These structural inequalities at origin intersect with U.S. policy influence and global economic pressures. The United States, whose economy relies heavily on immigrant care workers, benefits directly from this system. In cities like New York, thousands of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) face exploitation: 24-hour workdays, inadequate rest, wage theft, and vulnerability tied to immigration status.
For many female OFWs, the politics of care converge in a paradox. They care for families abroad while sustaining their own families across great distances. The balikbayan box becomes an archive of this care work performed across borders. Yet this care is simultaneously entangled in structures that Kehinde Andrews calls “the new age of empire,” in which contemporary imperialism operates through privatized extraction rather than territorial conquest.
Global demand for Filipino caregivers sustains an economy that exports care itself as a national resource. Filipino women remain overrepresented in care labor abroad, their work read through a racialized lens of characteristics: warm, generous, resilient. While these descriptions do not translate directly as “wrong” or “bad”, this lens narrows what their labor is allowed to mean.
Allow me to juxtapose this with the work of the Philippine state. Today, the government incentivizes this system. Balikbayans can send tax-free boxes of oft-unlimited weight up to three times a year. The celebration of overseas workers as modern heroes obscures the structural inequities that make this heroism "necessary" in the first place. Has the state co-opted this practice of care, or has the state co-opted care? Perhaps both.
I have spent the past year creating “A Manual on How to Pack and Send a Balikbayan Box.” Through conversations with balikbayans, I documented more than 120 steps in the packing and sending process, resulting in an instructional document more than 100 feet long. Pages vary in color and direction to visualize how people diverge in their processes. Balikbayans I befriended through community meetings, and groups annotated the draft with red-pen edits and reflections. We cut strips, taped edges, and scored pages together. I will also exhibit the manual publicly in conjunction with public programming for and by migrants later this year.
Through this work, I have encountered labor embedded in the system in different ways.
Objects are not passive. They participate in the imperial formations that shape their circulation. As I unpack the balikbayan box in my practice, I continuously enter a dense assemblage of postcolonial relations that expose the coloniality of Filipino labor and the transnational infrastructure of contemporary empire.
I cannot recall my first encounter with the balikbayan box or its name. It seems to circle the air of our gatherings in the most nonchalant manner. For those who have never packed or sent a box, a steady stream of Christmas commercials from fast-food chains and large retail brands locks the Filipino imagination into binaries of love and sacrifice, centering the Overseas Filipino Worker. Several artists and designers have worked since then and now to provide counter-narratives.
I am grateful to have learned from members of the Filipino diaspora, including family friends and relatives I have reconnected with, as well as friends I met through community building here in New York City. Our exchanges continue to illuminate the box as a container for complex situations. The balikbayan box and the balikbayan exist within such an assemblage, connecting senders and receivers, the Philippines and its diaspora, all of us caught up in global conditions.
kaye yuvallos is a researcher and designer based in New York and the Philippines, and a graduate student in Transdisciplinary Design at Parsons School of Design AT THE NEW SCHOOL.