OFWs are fragile humans too

By Ted Aldwin Ong

“We live in a time when every day brings ample evidence of the disposability of human life,” writes Neferti X.M. Tadiar in her book Remaindered Life.

Tadiar’s reflections resonated deeply with abstract artist Les Amacio and me as we both exchanged messages following the untimely death of 41-year-old Overseas Filipino Worker, Wilma Auza, who suffered a fatal cardiac arrest while traveling by bus from Cebu to Dumaguete.

Her story echoed the themes central to Amacio’s poignant sculptural installation, “Human(s) Are Fragile Too,” featured in the recently concluded exhibition Cultural Workers, Not Creative? at the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art.

In his work, Amacio pays tribute to the unyielding spirit of the OFWs while underscoring the fragility of their lives. He transforms personal and collective narratives into powerful visual statements using white balikbayan boxes—objects imbued with cultural and emotional significance to many Filipino families. As an OFW cultural worker himself, Amacio intimately understands what these boxes represent: sacrifice, longing, and connection.

His work immediately captured my attention and sparked a deeper interest in studying how art can frame and reflect the conditions of workers abroad. I, too, come from a middle-class family with members who began migrating as early as the 1970s to work in the United States. Others found work in the Middle East or encountered different cultures through scholarships in Europe. This background shaped my interest and understanding of displacement, diaspora, and the complex realities of labor culture and migration.

This reflection also led me to revisit readings on nature and labor during my years as an activist, ranging from Karl Marx to Jason W. Moore, as well as Silvia Federici’s feminist-Marxist perspectives, drawing connections to Tadiar’s works, Remaindered Life and Life-Times of Becoming Human.

These frameworks illuminate Amacio’s depiction of the OFW’s “anatomy of sacrifice,” articulated through three recurring forces: Pagod (exhaustion), Padala (the burden of sending remittances and goods), and Pagluha (grief or silent suffering). This portrayal evokes Jason W. Moore’s assertion in Capitalism in the Web of Life (2015) that labor, especially that performed by racialized, gendered, and colonized bodies, is not separate from nature but is deeply embedded within the ecological logic of capitalism.

Moore argues that within this system, labor is not only disciplined and devalued but also systematically depleted—reducing both human labor and the natural world to “cheap natures” ripe for exploitation. Time, energy, and emotional labor are extracted in the same way as natural resources, treated as disposable, yet endlessly demanded.

Tragically, these forces are not merely philosophical or artistic concepts, they reflect real-life consequences as embodied in the fate of Auza, who was found unresponsive aboard a Ceres bus. Her story brings to life the very essence of Amacio’s themes, showing that sacrifice, while often romanticized, can also be a source of silent suffering.

Through this lens, Amacio’s work becomes more than an artistic expression; it transforms into a memorial on the cost of labor migration and the quiet heroism of those who endure it. Hence, “Human(s) Are Fragile Too” emerges not only as a personal commentary but also a protest on the planetary condition in which the lives of migrant workers are exhausted akin to the exploitation of our natural resources, resulting in depletion and ecological collapse.

In his work handling the shipment of artworks at Hasenkamp Nationale in Abu Dhabi, Amacio became a heartbreaking witness to the reality that, for some overseas Filipinos, the journey home ends not in reunion, but in a plywood box.

The passing of Wilma Auza lays bare the often-overlooked burdens carried by migrant workers. Even during a break from her labor in Kuwait, she endured a grueling 16-to-20-hour journey, flying through Japan and Manila to Cebu, followed by a long bus ride via roll-on/roll-off ferry, just to make it home. She had hoped to reunite with her family; instead, her homecoming ended in tragedy.

The lived narrative of Wilma Auza and the sculptural installation of Les Amacio intersect in a powerful truth expressed in “Human(s) Are Fragile Too” : the fragility of OFWs is not incidental, but systemic. Their labor is relentlessly extracted, their well-being perpetually deferred, and their humanity often obscured by the very infrastructures that claim to support them. These intertwined narratives offer not only the tragic portrait of one woman’s final journey, but also a broader anatomy of a labor system that consumes, discards, and ultimately forgets—even in death.