Paper short abstract:

The paper analysis the cultural products such as songs, videoclips and images created and curated by Thai migrant farmworkers around their experiences working in agriculture in Israel. These are part of the "Translocal Vernacular Migration Archive", an actor in the Thailand-Israel migration regime.

Paper long abstract:

The paper focuses on the imagined socially constructed figure of "The Migrant Hero of Isaan" created in Isaan, a long-time migration sending region in Thailand. The figure of the Migrant Hero is a self-constructed gaze of Isaan people over themselves through cultural products and vocabulary around migration (Kitiarsa 2014). The paper analyzes the figure in the context of migration from Isaan to Israel through cultural products such as songs, videoclips, and images produced around migration experiences in Israel. These are part of what I identify as the "Translocal Vernacular Migration Archive" (TVMA), a collection of cultural and material productions created and curated by migrants around the experiences of migration to Israel. Thais' movement to work in the agriculture sector in Israel intensified in the 1990s after Israel further opened its labor market to overseas non-Jewish migrants. Israel's labor market and migration policies are based on practices of othering, discrimination, and control, placing migrants as the racialized others to the Israeli "melting pot" ideology. The figure of the Hero, I argue, transmitted by the TVMA through generations, provides spaces for creativity, meaning-making, political and future oriented imaginaries, and critique over the social conditions and the experiences of Isaan migrants. The TVMA, thus, is understood as an active actor in the Thailand-Israel migration regime The paper is based on multi-scaler multimodal ethnography done with people from Ban Phak Khad, a sending migration to Israel village community in Issan, together with archival research and media and cultural productions content analysis.