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SPEAKER_08: Hello. Hi, Lola.
SPEAKER_09: Hi, how are you?
SPEAKER_09: I'm good. How are you?
SPEAKER_06: That by the way is Gabby's grandma.
SPEAKER_09: I'm good. Okay. I just came from the church.
SPEAKER_08: A few weeks ago, I called my Lola to ask if she would be taking part in this annual tradition. Okay, so are you sending a Balik Bayan box this year?
SPEAKER_09: Do you know what Balik Bayan box is? Are you quizzing me?
SPEAKER_08: The Balik Bayan box is the box that Filipinos abroad send to their relatives back in the Philippines. That's right.
SPEAKER_09: It's Balik is returning and Bayan is home like Philippines. That's my home. A Balik Bayan box is a huge cardboard box, usually over 100 pounds, that Filipinos living
SPEAKER_08: all over the world send to family members who are still living in the Philippines. The word Balik Bayan literally means homecoming in Tagalog.
SPEAKER_09: When I was in the Philippines, it was Uncle Dennis who came here in America first. He was the one who first sent us a Balik Bayan box. To me, the Balik Bayan box, we always looking forward to it.
SPEAKER_08: Today my Lola lives in the US, which means she's usually the one sending Balik Bayan boxes. But when she was still living in the Philippines, she remembers receiving them. Do you remember like the delivery person walking up to the door? Yeah, we were so excited.
SPEAKER_09: Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_08: The Balik Bayan box is usually delivered right to your door.
SPEAKER_09: Someone knock on my door and the door is it and it said delivery. June, are you on the box from where Dennis is here?
SPEAKER_08: The family gathers around the box. So they all went down, opened the box and they were so happy, you know.
SPEAKER_08: And the box is filled with lots and lots of stuff from the US.
SPEAKER_09: They are full of chocolates, usually goods coming from Costco, the hand-me-down clothes like jackets. Sneakers, socks. Books, electronics, Game Boy, even toothpaste, shampoo.
SPEAKER_08: And the most prized object in the box. Oh, this like the spam.
SPEAKER_09: Spam is very expensive in the Philippines. And it's not just Gabby's family that does this.
SPEAKER_06: 400,000 of these Balik Bayan boxes arrive in the Philippines from around the world every month. But right now with the holidays, it's the busiest season. Mothers sending to sons, brothers, sisters, hundreds of thousands of people waiting in the Philippines for their box. Hey guys, welcome back to my channel.
SPEAKER_09: So for today's video guys, I'm going to be showing you how I pack my Balik Bayan box.
SPEAKER_06: On YouTube, there are thousands of videos of people showing how to pack their box and the joys of Balik Bayan boxing and Balik Bayan unboxing.
SPEAKER_09: I don't know how did I fit everything inside this box.
SPEAKER_05: So much work, but I'm very sure it's going to be worth it when I get there. Yay.
SPEAKER_07: I've been waiting for so long guys.
SPEAKER_11: Hello, mommy? You're sending what? Oh my God. You called and told me an echo. We sent you Balik Bayan box.
SPEAKER_10: I'm getting Balik Bayan box. Sent to me from my mama, bro. I will wait for a whole two months.
SPEAKER_08: Clearly Filipinos love the Balik Bayan box, but I didn't even realize that it was something that was unique to us until I traveled to the Philippines for the first time when I was 12. I remember going to the airport in San Francisco completely jittery for my first long haul international flight and seeing this long line only in front of Philippine airlines where people were waiting for those like high powered saran wrap machines to get their cardboard boxes wrapped in layers and layers of plastic. And I remember looking around and thinking, huh, I wonder why do so many Filipino travelers have these massive cardboard boxes?
SPEAKER_06: The reason Filipino travelers line up in the airport to wrap a hundred pound plus Balik Bayan boxes is the same reason why Filipino sons and daughters, mothers and aunts often live oceans apart from one another. More than 10 million Filipinos live abroad and over a million more leave the country every year.
SPEAKER_08: This migration of Filipinos abroad is also what gives the beloved complicated Balik Bayan box, the homecoming box, its name.
SPEAKER_07: My father left in 1982 and he went specifically to Libya at that point to work in the construction industry.
SPEAKER_08: Inagavara is an expert in Filipino migration. She's also from the Philippines and like many Filipinos grew up with a father working overseas. When Anna was around nine years old, her dad left the Philippines to work in the Middle East as a construction worker. She showed me a picture he sent her when he was in Libya. It is a picture of the desert in a very bare piece of land, kind of reddish in color.
SPEAKER_07: And there's just one station that you can see and that's where the workers were based.
SPEAKER_08: He would write messages to Anna and her mom on the back of the photographs telling them what he was doing, all the places he was seeing.
SPEAKER_07: It says, uh, dear mommy, husbands and wives called themselves mommy and daddy. These are some of the terraces made by our men here. I intend to plant a huge billboard proclaiming handy work of Filipino crusaders for Libyan progress and development with love. What does he mean by Filipino crusaders?
SPEAKER_07: I think they saw themselves as individuals who, you know, were building up a nation.
SPEAKER_08: Not as crusaders building up Libya, but building up the Philippines as heroes willing to pack up, leave their family behind and find work abroad to send money home.
SPEAKER_07: I think they were quite aware that their remittances were of value to the country, that they were helping the country rise up from a really dire situation at the time. Decades before the birth of the Balikbayan box, remittances, where people abroad send
SPEAKER_08: money home, were a lifeline to families in the Philippines who were living through one of the worst economic crises the country had ever experienced.
SPEAKER_07: That story starts in 1898. The Philippines was a colony of Spain.
SPEAKER_06: Spain ruled the Philippines for nearly 400 years. Then in the late 19th century, the Filipino people rose up to fight for independence, but they did not fight alone.
SPEAKER_08: The United States helped the Filipino people battle the Spanish colonizers. This was at a moment when the U.S. was in the midst of imperial expansion into former Spanish territories like Puerto Rico and Guam.
SPEAKER_06: In the end, the Spanish lost. But rather than granting Filipinos their independence, the Spanish sold the Philippines to the U.S.
SPEAKER_07: You hear then President McKinley proclaim that the U.S. is coming to the Philippines as friends, not enemies, and it is under this guise of benevolent assimilation.
SPEAKER_06: At the time, the United States claimed that benevolent assimilation was somehow magically different from Spain's colonialism. You know, the U.S. saw the Philippines as just this collection of tribes and that through
SPEAKER_07: this benevolent assimilation, America can transform this citizenry into a more disciplined, a more rule-bound population who would be, you know, fitting of the U.S., of its empire.
SPEAKER_08: In an effort to basically erase Filipino culture and replace it with American ideals, the United States set up American hospitals, American schools with American teachers.
SPEAKER_07: You know, it even went as far as teaching Filipinos how to eat, you know, proper etiquette when you're at a dinner table, how to speak, how to pronounce certain words. So it looked like a systematic erasure of the Philippines, basically.
SPEAKER_08: But President McKinley's project of benevolent assimilation had a bigger objective beyond just westernizing Filipinos. The U.S. needed farmworkers.
SPEAKER_07: It was very strategic to turn to your colonized subjects as a labor supply.
SPEAKER_08: The United States quickly saw that the Philippines' most lucrative resource was Filipinos. At the turn of the 20th century, Filipinos, mainly men, migrated en masse to the U.S. mainland and Hawaii as farmworkers. The first bricks were laid for what would become a major immigration pathway for Filipinos seeking work overseas.
SPEAKER_06: In 1935, the U.S. promised the Philippines independence at the end of a 10-year period. But before those 10 years were up, the Philippines was then occupied again by the Japanese during World War II.
SPEAKER_08: After the war, the country struggled to gain footing in a global economy. By the 1960s, nearly half of the country lived in poverty.
SPEAKER_08: And then, in 1965, Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. was elected president.
SPEAKER_08: The election of Marcos ushered in one of the darkest periods of Philippine history, one that would not only lead to the creation of the Balik Bayan box, but would also reshape the Philippines forever. At that time, the Philippines was an economic leader in the region, and Marcos ran on a campaign promise to bring even more jobs, development, and economic prosperity. But that didn't happen.
SPEAKER_07: There were a lot of embezzlement taking place.
SPEAKER_08: Instead of lifting up the entire country, the Marcos administration became a notorious kleptocracy.
SPEAKER_02: So the Marcoses were also known as being incredibly, besides like politically corrupt, like they were known for like plundering the wealth of the Philippines and saving it for themselves.
SPEAKER_08: Anthony Acampo is a sociology professor who studies the Philippine diaspora.
SPEAKER_02: Imelda Marcos, his wife, is famously known for having rooms full of shoes, like hundreds or thousands of pairs of shoes.
SPEAKER_09: As first lady, I have to flaunt love and beauty so that the 50 million Filipinos will see what is perfection.
SPEAKER_02: In their desire to make the Philippines great, they wanted to appear essentially like royalty and just looked incredibly expensive and extravagant.
SPEAKER_07: You know, Marcos spent a huge amount of the public's funds at that time, which then created inflation. It created all of these trade deficits.
SPEAKER_06: Marcos stole billions of dollars from the Philippine economy, and to offset what he stole, he borrowed more.
SPEAKER_07: And then it just became cyclical to the point that the Philippines was in huge debt. People did not have jobs, could not subsist on what was being grown, did not have enough food to eat.
SPEAKER_06: And then in 1972, Marcos declared martial law.
SPEAKER_03: I am utilizing this power for the proclamation of martial law to save the republic and reform our social, economic, and political institutions.
SPEAKER_02: He suspended democracy and basically used this power to fervently suppress any opposition that came. Their vision of the Philippines entailed them disappearing journalists who would speak out against them or activists that would speak out against them and torturing them.
SPEAKER_08: By the 1980s, unemployment was high, people were desperate, and Marcos was casting around for a solution. What he landed on was to create an entire economy centered around remittances.
SPEAKER_02: Rather than developing the Philippine economy in and of itself, the Marcos regime would encourage Filipinos to move abroad and maintain ties to the Philippines and send money back. He basically launched immigration as an economic strategy for the Philippines.
SPEAKER_08: Marcos's plan was twofold. Get Filipinos to leave the country and then make sure they'd send money home, funneling their earnings back into the Philippines economy.
SPEAKER_06: Marcos's plan came to be known, ironically, as Operation Homecoming, and it took advantage of a recent change in US immigration law.
SPEAKER_05: This bill says simply that from this day forth, those wishing to immigrate to America shall be admitted on the basis of their skills.
SPEAKER_07: The 1965 Immigration Act passed and that was the legislation that created a pathway for the so-called highly skilled migrants to come.
SPEAKER_05: Those who can contribute most to this country, to its growth, to its strength, to its spirit, will be the first that are admitted to this land.
SPEAKER_06: While Filipino migrants in the United States in the early 20th century were mainly farm and factory workers, in the latter half of the century, the US opened the gates to a different sector.
SPEAKER_08: Nursing shortages after World War II had crippled the United States healthcare system. And then in the 1960s, a second wave feminism swelled throughout the country. American women abandoned nursing to pursue other careers. Hospital recruiters needed to turn to the thousands of American trained nurses in the Philippines to fill the shortage. And the Philippine government also saw it as an opportunity.
SPEAKER_07: So it was very easy for Marcos to see that as a pathway for employment for Filipinos, but also started to see that as a way to create a remittance economy.
SPEAKER_08: But this time, it wasn't just US labor shortages pulling Filipinos abroad. Marcos went out of his way to incentivize Filipinos to fill labor needs all over the world. Hong Kong, Singapore, Madrid, and all over the Middle East.
SPEAKER_07: The Middle East was experiencing an oil boom during this time. Middle East countries were looking for workers.
SPEAKER_06: To encourage Filipinos to move abroad, Marcos passed the 1974 Labor Code. The law basically secured overseas contract work by establishing recruitment agencies that work with foreign companies to ensure a good wage and basic worker rights, but only if they went abroad with the sole purpose of sending money back to the Philippines.
SPEAKER_08: The kind of migration Marcos was encouraging wasn't the kind we think of when people try and start a better life elsewhere. This national program relied on Filipinos having one foot in the Philippines and one foot out, forever. Many of the workers going abroad couldn't bring their families, and the overseas contracts were temporary, so there wasn't a pathway to citizenship in those countries after their work was done. But many Filipinos were ready to step up and take part in Operation Homecoming because they needed to.
SPEAKER_07: I think for Filipinos, the incentive is survival. The conditions that you were living in in the Philippines at that time did not really offer any other opportunity except to leave. If you want a better life for you and your family, you have to leave.
SPEAKER_08: Marcos gave these people coming home a new name, Balik Bayans.
SPEAKER_02: It actually is a word that emerged when Marcos launched this really aggressive migration plan, economic plan to encourage Filipinos to migrate. Whenever they come back to the Philippines and they visit, what they're called is Balik Bayans, so like the Homecoming or the return of our people.
SPEAKER_07: He was elevating the status of Balik Bayans. As a Balik Bayan, you're kind of welcomed back to the country as the new aristocrats. Balik Bayans had a lot of money. The dollars that they were earning were strong, and they are the new heroes. And he said this quite a bit, you're the modern day heroes of the country because your remittances are contributing so much to the Philippines.
SPEAKER_06: And throughout the 1980s, the Balik Bayans weren't just sending money home, they were sending stuff.
SPEAKER_02: Even though they were living elsewhere, they kind of maintained ties to the Philippines because they were sending cash, but they were also sending goods.
SPEAKER_08: Sometimes these boxes were gifts letting their loved ones know, I'm thinking about you. But mostly items inside were essentials that families needed during an economic crisis.
SPEAKER_02: And so what ended up happening is they would put them in these Balik Bayan boxes, bring them back, and so the boxes that they would send, you know, everyone loves alliteration. They were called Balik Bayan boxes.
SPEAKER_06: Unlike Marcos's migration policies designed to bring wealth to the Philippines, this form of remittance, the Balik Bayan box, happened organically. When families were separated, they want to remain connected to the families in the Philippines in other ways besides just sending a check home.
SPEAKER_07: The goodies in those boxes often contained mostly American products or things that, you know, Filipinos would imagine, you know, represented the stateside life. We would open those boxes and think, oh, wow, okay, the chocolates, the Twix, the Folgers coffee, the Colgate, the Gina Tay. I mean, these were like, my God, luxury goods, right? This is the stateside way of life. And so it kind of cultivated the sense of this is what it would mean to live overseas. Although Marcos didn't anticipate the Balik Bayan box, it ended up reinforcing his migration
SPEAKER_08: plan. First, it was utilitarian in that the Balik Bayans were supporting their families with both money and boxes of goods, but it also helped feed this fantasy of living abroad. If you become a Balik Bayan, you too can have access to all these goods. By the mid 1980s, just 10 years after Marcos signed the Labor Code into law, the number
SPEAKER_06: of Filipinos going overseas to work increased by almost 1000 percent. And as more Balik Bayans went abroad, more boxes of goods came flowing back. To promote the Balik Bayan box, the Philippine government made it cheaper to ship these boxes, making the items and the cost of shipping duty free and tax free.
SPEAKER_08: But the Balik Bayan box didn't become the multi-billion dollar industry it is today until Filipino entrepreneurs in the U.S. recognized an opportunity.
SPEAKER_02: One of the earliest Balik Bayan box companies in L.A. was actually just in a little like pop up in the Philippine grocery store.
SPEAKER_08: Anthony Ocampo, the sociology professor at Cal Poly, he actually wrote about the Balik Bayan box businesses for his Ph.D. dissertation.
SPEAKER_02: What's funny is that the sending of boxes by Filipinos is like a multi-billion dollar industry, but often these companies are just little rented spots in like a shopping, outdoor shopping plaza. Like if you can imagine like that quintessential California like outdoor plaza where you'd see like a convenience store and a laundromat, there'd also be like a Balik Bayan box company there.
SPEAKER_06: Anthony also studied the life cycle of the box, how it travels from one family member to the other all the way across the world. Today, more than 10 million Filipinos live overseas, and the more that go overseas, the more boxes get sent back.
SPEAKER_02: The box ends up in a boat that travels all the way to the Philippines from the port of Long Beach to the port of Manila. Just imagine like a warehouse that's two, three stories high, but like the whole room is filled with Balik Bayan boxes, these huge boxes from all over the world. It's bananas.
SPEAKER_08: For part of his research, Anthony actually worked for a Balik Bayan shipping company in Los Angeles. We're waking up at six in the morning, seven in the morning to go pick up Balik Bayan boxes
SPEAKER_02: in a truck with barely any air conditioning.
SPEAKER_08: Driving to people's homes to pick up Balik Bayan boxes.
SPEAKER_02: I remember this like 60 something year old woman literally got on top of her box and started jumping on it like a kid jumping on their bed to get it closed.
SPEAKER_08: And like any good sociologist, he was most interested in what the box meant to people, how they interacted with it in their lives.
SPEAKER_02: And I remember chatting with her. I was like, oh, who's the box for? And she's like, oh, it's for my son in the Philippines. You know, he's doing so well over there. He's getting married. Then I asked her, are you going to be going to the wedding? And I just saw the mood on her face get really sad. And he's like, no, I'm not going to be able to go. And I just thought, oh, wow, this is like one of those moments where you see like the box is kind of supposed to fill the void of your absence, but it never fully fills the void. And I remember taking the box away and the older Filipino woman was like just watching us from the balcony. And, you know, it was like, take care of the box, make sure it doesn't break.
SPEAKER_08: Anthony found a similar longing when he followed those Balik Bayan boxes to their recipients in the Philippines. He remembers one box in particular sent by a father in San Diego to his adult son in Manila.
SPEAKER_02: He said, you know, what's interesting is my dad, whenever he sends a box, he sends me pictures of cranes, like construction cranes. And you know, that's what I was really into when I was eight years old. And my dad, even like 12, 15 years later, he still thinks I'm into cranes and I don't have the heart to tell him that that's not who I am anymore.
SPEAKER_08: What does it look like for a country to be built on remittances? Like how does that shape an identity of a country? I think if a country's economic development plan is based on immigration, what that means
SPEAKER_02: is that there's a whole lot of its citizens that are going to be just like cognitively oriented toward building a life outside of the country they were born in. Filipinos, we have such tight knit families, we have strong families, but it's a country where people are encouraged to separate from their families for decades. And you know, no matter how beautiful this Balik Bayan box is or whatever nice things are in it, it doesn't fill the gap that happens when a loved one is just not under the same roof as you anymore.
SPEAKER_08: My Lola, who received Balik Bayan boxes from my uncle Dennis when she lived in the Philippines.
SPEAKER_09: The Balik Bayan box, it came from who Dennis, it came from his heart.
SPEAKER_08: She moved to the United States decades later. But while coming here allowed her to connect with some of her kids in the United States, she had to leave her youngest son, Ariel, who was still in school. And then she became the one sending Balik Bayan boxes.
SPEAKER_09: Whenever I ate something like the chocolate, oh, I remember Ariel loves this chocolate. So I go to Costco. And it's like when you're homesick, huh, and you miss your son, I buy something for them and then put it in a box. That makes me happy that my homesick will be cured because of that.
SPEAKER_08: Thinking about my own family's history, I don't really know how to hold that happiness with the reality of why we send the Balik Bayan box in the first place. On the one hand, I feel sad when I think about my Lola always being oceans away from her children for these big historical and economic reasons far beyond our control. But on the other hand, there's something beautiful about her tasting a chocolate, knowing that her son in the Philippines would like it, and then going out of her way to buy boxes and boxes of that chocolate to send to him. Why do you say your homesick will be cured?
SPEAKER_09: Because whenever I think of them and I give them something that I have here and not in the Philippines, that makes me happy.
SPEAKER_06: When we come back after the break, Gabby tells us about the salty, delicious, artery-clogging item that you can find in almost every Balik Bayan box after this.
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SPEAKER_08: So this item that I made an entire three-part series about is the salty, delicious, and surprisingly profound Spam.
SPEAKER_06: So why did you decide to make an entire series about Spam? Okay, so the main reason was that my Filipino family and Pacific Islanders in general love
SPEAKER_08: Spam.
SPEAKER_06: I find this really fascinating. So I grew up never thinking of Spam as anything other than not very good meat, like super processed, you know, it's kind of fits into the hyper processed American food that is not appealing. And I don't know if I even had it for most of my life. And then I met Joy, my partner, and she's Filipino. And now I have Spam way more than I ever thought I would. And I like it a lot and her family loves Spam. And it's just one of the things that's part of my life now.
SPEAKER_08: Okay, yeah. And it feels like a very common story to just like, yeah, once you're part of the Filipino community, Spam is just like going to be part of your life from now on. It'll be a family member. And I wanted to try and understand why that is for Filipinos. And like what I found was that has a lot to do with the American quest to spread democracy abroad. So what I mean is during World War Two, Spam was one of the key food sources and what was called the K rations for American GIs. Spam has a lot of calories, it stores well, so it's perfect for soldiers. And when the Philippines became a central battleground for the United States to fight the Japanese, American soldiers land in Manila, and with them, so did the Spam and their food rations. And just to put this into context, in total, 150 million pounds of Spam were produced for the war effort during World War Two. So you can only imagine how much of that is ending up in the Philippines during that time. And the irony of American soldiers eating Spam morning, noon and night is that they got so completely sick of it. They would trade their Spam with locals for literally anything else that wasn't this nondescript slab of pink salty meat.
SPEAKER_06: A delicious nondescript slab of pink salty meat. But I can imagine not wanting to eat it every day. And so they traded it far and wide, and a lot of it ended up in the hands of local Filipinos who began to love it, right?
SPEAKER_08: Exactly. And that's definitely part of the story. But also Spam really holds this very sentimental value for Filipinos who went through Japanese occupation. My grandpa, my Lolo, was around eight or nine years old when American GIs started to come to the Philippines in droves. And he remembers hiding in the mountains from the Japanese army and like spending months feeling hungry and scared with his family. So when American GIs came and like started rolling through the dusty mountain roads and their trucks, this was a big deal for them. And the American GIs would throw stuff to Filipinos lining the road. So cookies, cigarettes, chocolate. Probably had some downsides with cigarettes, for sure.
SPEAKER_08: And of course, cans of Spam. So my grandfather tells the story of, you know, chasing after the trucks and catching cans of Spam as the trucks were kind of rolling by. And he's not alive anymore, so I can't ask him this, but I always wondered if, you know, that was the first time he had ever seen an American. Like if his introduction to like America were American GIs tossing cans of Spam at him during World War II. That's a strong sentimental linkage to like this army that is helping free people and
SPEAKER_06: then giving them food. People are hungry. That's really intense. Right.
SPEAKER_08: And so when I saw him, it was like Spam represented freedom. And this was a very common experience in the Philippines for people in my Lolo's generation. Spam symbolized like luxury, abundance and American freedom. And after that, Spam became this prized delicacy in the Philippines. And that's why it's still a quintessential item today in Balik Bayan boxes.
SPEAKER_06: So I understand that for someone like your Lolo's generation that Spam represents all good things about American culture. But I'm curious if that love of Spam extends to someone like you. Like how do you feel about Spam?
SPEAKER_08: So obviously I have a really sentimental attachment to it because of my grandpa and how much he loved it. And also when I would come home as a kid with like good grades or something from, you know, from school, my mom would make me a special Spam breakfast. Oh yes. Yes. Rice, fried egg, fried Spam, fried garlic. Oh lovely. But I also have this love-hate relationship with it. Love because it's always been this distinctly Filipino thing to me. And when my Lolo was alive, he loved Spam. And when he came to America where Spam was freely available and it wasn't a luxury item, he would still eat it all the time, like every day for breakfast. That was until he got diagnosed with diabetes. And when he was diagnosed, his doctor was like, the Spam needs to be the first thing to go. So there's this negative connotation for it with me. You know, American imperialism and American canned goods imported to the Philippines have done a lot of harm in terms of public health. Like my Lolo, for example, died of complications from diabetes a few years ago. Diabetes is in like all, like all of my family members have diabetes. And I'm not saying that it's because of Spam, but the widespread export of like unhealthy processed American foods and like the reverence for it, processed foods like Spam, for me is part of like the real public health issue in the Philippines. And diabetes and heart disease are some of the leading causes of death in the Philippines.
SPEAKER_06: And this is pretty widespread, like everything that we export that's processed and high in fat and high in salt and high in sugar, you know, this is something not unique to the Philippines.
SPEAKER_08: Right. And it's widespread, especially throughout the Pacific islands. Wherever American GIs went during World War II, they left a trail of fatty, salty American processed foods in their wake. And Spam has become really integrated into local cuisines and places like Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, and all of those places have like staggeringly high rates of diabetes and heart disease. So the story I thought I was telling through the Spam series was, you know, that Spam was delicious and a relic of imperialism, the end. When I started researching Spam, and especially when I went to visit Spam's headquarters in Austin, Minnesota, that's when I really opened Pandora's can, so to speak. I found out that the factory that makes Spam actually played a huge role in the American labor movement in the 1980s. And that story led us into a larger story about immigration, the history of meat packing, the evolution of labor. And it ended up being that the story of Spam crisscrosses like decades and continents, and it touches some modern pressing questions about food, family, and how we want to work to put food on the table.
SPEAKER_06: Well, it is all really fascinating stuff. So if people want to hear more, and I really recommend they do, they should check out WNYC and the Atlantic's The Experiment podcast from last spring. There's a three-part series on Spam, how the American dream got canned. Thank you so much, Gabby. I really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_06: Thank you. Ninety-nine Percent Invisible was produced this week by Gabrielle Burbay and edited by Kelly Prime with additional help from Christopher Johnson, Jacob Maldonado Medina, Swan Rial, and Vivian Lay. Mix by Martine Gonzalez. Music by our director of sound, Swan Rial. Delaney Hall is the senior editor. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team is Chris Burube, Laushen Madon, Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Joe Rosenberg, Sofia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Robin Rodriguez. Gabrielle hopes to produce more perfect, a show about the Supreme Court for WNYC Studios, which will be releasing its new season in the spring. I am very excited about this. Ninety-nine Percent Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI.org. While it lasts, we're on Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI. You're listening to a Stitcher podcast from Sirius XM. Thank you for sticking with us in 2022. I'll see you next year.
