ABSTRACT
This chapter explores agency in the context of border-crossing among some typical sectors of those with Philippine origins or ethnicity, who live and work in cosmopolitan sites, as well as their families. It opens with a description of cosmopolitanism’s understanding of agency followed by a critical discussion on agency as it plays out in the context of Filipinx border-crossing. The chapter concludes by pointing out what cosmopolitan and migration perspectives contribute to each other. Due to decades-long sustained and systemic physical and digital mobility and connectivity, increasing numbers of Filipinx move to and from cosmopolitan sites in order to live, work or be with kin. The lives of Filipinx who cross physical borders and social boundaries have been often portrayed as paradise-like or hellish, as success or failure according to different normative standards, and their agency as unrestricted or non-existent.
