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A trowel (/ˈtraʊ.əl/), in the hands of an archaeologist, is like a trusty sidekick – a tiny, yet mighty, instrument that uncovers ancient secrets, one well-placed scoop at a time. It’s the Sherlock Holmes of the excavation site, revealing clues about the past with every delicate swipe.
When I was growing up in Tinambac, Camarines Sur, balikbayan boxes were a common sight. Sometimes they would pass by our place on their way to Cagliliog, loaded in tricycles or jeeps, heavy with things sent from the other side of the world. The sight of those boxes sparked a kind of quiet excitement. You’d see a name handwritten in permanent marker, usually in all caps, and someone would always ask, “Ano’ng laman n’yan? (What’s inside?)”
My own excitement was more personal. Every now and then, Tata Raul, who was working in the United States, would send a box to us. I would wait eagerly, imagining what might be inside for me. There was always something: a shirt that smelled different, foreign candy, sometimes even a toy that none of my neighbors had. It was like receiving a message in a bottle from a place I couldn’t yet imagine. Those boxes arrived with a sense of ceremony, opened with care, and their contents often became woven into our daily lives.
These childhood memories may seem small, but they are part of a much larger story. Today, as we observe Philippine Heritage Month, it is worth asking: what do we consider part of our heritage? Is it only the churches, the gold, the old rituals, and languages? Or could the story of overseas Filipino workers — their sacrifices, their labor, their longing — also be seen as heritage, etched not in stone, but in corrugated cardboard, sachets of lotion, and recorded voices tucked into cassette tapes?
Across generations, millions of Filipinos have left home in search of opportunity. From sugar workers in Hawaii to nurses in the United Kingdom, our diaspora spans the globe. And each departure leaves a mark, not just on the individuals who go, but on the families and communities they leave behind. These marks are often material. The balikbayan box is a container of memory, filled with the textures and scents of another world.
Anthropologist Clement Camposano writes about how Filipino migrants actively shape their identity across borders. They are not only economic contributors but cultural transmitters, sending not just money but pieces of their lives. These arrive in the form of branded chocolates, packs of dried fruit, used jackets, or imported shampoos. These objects take on meanings far beyond their commercial value. A bottle of lotion, for example, becomes a stand-in for a mother’s care. A pair of sneakers becomes a reward for doing well in school. The act of receiving becomes a ritual, and the box itself becomes a reminder of presence despite physical absence.
In our house, one box from Tata Raul included something we didn’t quite expect: a cassette tape. It contained a recorded message, his and Auntie Glo’s voices greeting each of us one by one. I remember the sound of the cassette player clicking into place, the tape whirring softly before his voice came through. There was something both strange and comforting about hearing him that way, like he was in the room but just out of reach. Long before Viber and video calls, these tapes allowed our relatives to send not just their voices, but their personalities, their jokes, even the pauses in their speech. That cassette became part of our household for a time. We would replay it, sometimes just to hear him again, to remind ourselves that he was still thinking of us.
These experiences are not unique. Across the country, there are thousands of homes with similar stories. A house in Pampanga might have an extra floor built from remittance savings. A kitchen in Iloilo might hold a spice rack full of condiments from three continents. A teenager in Quezon City might wear hand-me-downs from an aunt in Canada. These are not anomalies. They are part of our everyday material culture, shaped by migration and infused with emotion.
From an archaeological perspective, these items matter. They are artifacts of a globalized life. Future archaeologists might one day dig through a landfill and find a collection of empty corned beef and spam cans, shampoo sachets labeled in Tagalog, and wrappers from overseas snacks. They might find traces of hybrid food practices, evidence of transnational parenting, or repurposed packaging used for storage. These items will tell a story of how one of the most mobile populations in the world made sense of dislocation through objects.
The emotions surrounding these materials are harder to preserve, but they linger. They live in the smell of used clothes fresh from the box, in the crinkle of plastic wrapping, in the awkward Taglish recorded on cassette tapes. Even in the digital age, when messages arrive instantly, the weight of the balikbayan box still carries something different. It takes weeks to arrive. It carries anticipation. It represents effort, thought, and care.
There are so many children (some of them I grew up with, others I’ve met through the years) who grew up without knowing what it felt like to be held by their mother after a bad dream, or to be fetched by their father after school. Their parents were away, working in foreign homes, hospitals, oil rigs. They learned to adjust. They learned not to ask too many questions. And when their parents finally came home, it was not always the joyful reunion they had imagined. Sometimes, the return came with oxygen tanks or quiet hospital visits. Years of heavy lifting, night shifts, and emotional labor left their mark. Others came back to houses that had changed, to children who had learned to live without them. I have seen the silences at dinner tables, the small awkwardness of trying to belong again. I have seen how the very love that drove them to leave could also be what slowly broke them apart.
As it often does, the food at the table reflects the journeys traveled and offers an easy, silent way to bridge the distances between family. At birthdays and reunions, the table might feature a menu influenced by migration – sweet spaghetti made with canned sauce, macaroni salad with ingredients that traveled through customs, or American-style fried chicken cooked in a local kitchen. These recipes have become part of our culinary heritage, passed down not just through families, but through flight itineraries and cargo ships.
Letters, once written by hand and now mostly replaced by digital messages, offer another layer. When preserved, they speak of hardship, homesickness, and the will to persevere. Some are folded into eighths, smudged with fingerprints, stored in biscuit tins under beds. They are personal documents, but they also record the broader migration story: salaries delayed, apartments shared, new languages learned, birthdays missed.
And in homes across the Philippines, old luggage sits in corners, their wheels broken from years of use. These suitcases are rarely thrown away. They are too valuable, too symbolic. They carried dreams one way, and memories the other.
So, as we celebrate the Philippine Heritage Month, let us expand our understanding of heritage. It is not only found in ancient tools or colonial churches. It also lives in the recorded voices on cassette tapes, in the smell of lotion sent from abroad, in the joy of a child unboxing a chocolate bar from a distant land. Each of these items carries the weight of love, the imprint of sacrifice, and the quiet persistence of care stretched across oceans.
Because one day, long after the boxes have crumbled and the bank accounts closed, what remains may be a child’s memory of a box that smelled like the sea and California. A letter folded into eighths. A pair of rubber shoes worn only on Sundays. And perhaps, in those fragments, we will still find home. – Rappler.com
Stephen B. Acabado is professor of anthropology at the University of California-Los Angeles. He directs the Ifugao and Bicol Archaeological Projects, research programs that engage community stakeholders. He grew up in Tinambac, Camarines Sur. Follow him on bluesky @stephenacabado.bsky.social .
