A Manual on How to Pack and Send a Balikbayan Box

I cannot recall my first encounter with the balikbayan box or its name. It seemed to circle the air of our gatherings in the most nonchalant manner. For those who have never packed or sent a box, a steady supply of Christmas commercials lock the Filipino imagination into binaries of love and sacrifice centering the Overseas Filipino Worker. The balikbayan sends oft-unrestricted weights of these tax-incentivized balikbayan boxes filled with commercial or secondhand goods to their families from wherever they are.

The word balikbayan combines balik (to return) and bayan (country) to mean “returning home”. This word conveys a longing that is personal and political, with the balikbayan box no longer a mere object. However, while the balikbayan box is celebrated as an expression of love, it also carries contradictions of state dependence on migrant labor and the emotional toll of separation. It carries within it an entire system of care and diasporic displacement. From Marcos era labor export policies to the ongoing “care economies” that sustain the Global North, the act of sending a box is entangled with histories of export oriented development that pushed marginalized populations into migration. The return it promises is rarely realized.

These structural inequalities intersect with global economic pressures and U.S. policy influence, whose economy relies on immigrant care workers. I write this while living in U.S. cities like New York, where thousands of OFWs face exploitation: 24 hour work days, inadequate rest, wage theft, and vulnerability tied to immigration status. The weight of 400,000 balikbayan boxes sent globally every month carries a heavy burden. Has this practice of care been co-opted by the state or has the state co-opted care? Perhaps both.

For many female OFWs, the politics and labor of care converge: they care for families abroad while sustaining their own families across great distance. NYC based groups like Ain’t I a Woman? have documented the exploitative conditions under which many migrants, including OFWs, work. Juxtapose this with the

Philippines’ incentivization of sending goods and remittances, where one can send tax free boxes of unlimited weight up to three times a year. The celebration of the balikbayan as a modern hero while obscuring the structural inequities that make this heroism “necessary” poses many tensions.

My work begins here. Last year, I interacted with and shifted the ways those familiar and unfamiliar with it view the corrugated container. Feeling its weight physically and emotionally, I have transformed it, modified it, documented it, conversed about it and performed it to understand how it embodies the uneven proximities of care. In this way, I assert that relationships of support are never neutral.

Dialectics and Layers

Early last year, I spoke with Tita Louise, an OFW who migrated to Los Angeles in 2010. The dialectic in Tita’s stories showed multiple truths. It is true that there is joy in giving. However, there are also other truths, layers that consist of familial expectations, anxieties over what to send, costs to manage, gratitude over support, among many others.

In my friend Teresa Naval’s 2019 thesis Corrugated Cartographies, she argues that the balikbayan tradition helps enact Filipino identity in the diaspora. She traces how the term balikbayan was coined to reimagine overseas Filipino workers as returning heroes whose national duty is to send home money and goods.

I was struck by her work in shifting focus from the box’s symbolic role to the labor and emotion embedded in its making. As the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter in a Filipino household, I’ve personally witnessed the dualities of social reproductive labor. This too creates a proximity to the box despite the fact that I have never packed or sent one. I cite this to underscore how personal and political my inquiry is. And, as this is a platform on Strategies, I would like to distance my work from the impression of strategy as calculating and efficient. This work is intentionally slow and welcomes complexity. The binary of sacrifice and heroism embedded in “strategic work” does not fit the multi dimensional experiences offered by the balikbayan box.

There is an impulse to anchor insights on “objective”, quantitative research. However, I struggle with the inherent bias. For instance, the Philippine government’s data on balikbayan boxes focuses on volume and frequency, not on who sends them, what they include, from where, how often, or why. Philippine Statistics Authority records estimate roughly 60% of OFWs are women, yet the labor of care embedded in each shipment remains statistically invisible. While quantitative invisibility persists, qualitative accounts often center the story of a female OFW.

Miller, in his piece on Alienable Gifts and Inalienable Commodities, explores how gift giving involves negotiations in which women are expected to prioritize others’ needs above their own. Balikbayan boxes mirror this dual nature. These commodities embody presence and, more aptly, absence. The ‘box as a gift’ is analogous to the ‘box as an avatar’ of the migrant. This proxy body returns home in place of the migrant.

Strategies and Methodologies

Methods can make visible what statistics obscure. I navigate its complexities by creating a manual that contributes to the documentation of the breadth and diversity of packing and sending balikbayan boxes. It aims to locate their dignity and agency by presenting instructional accounts based on different experiences, which has otherwise been taught orally or performatively in private or informal digital spaces.

As a method, it draws from the exhibition of Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where guides illustrate steps in creating tools of resistance and Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit, a publication which demonstrates how prompts alter perception. These manuals encode technique and labor but also poetics, and a pedagogy.

I am grateful to have learned from aunties like Tita Louise; friends I have met through community building; and creators of “how to pack a balikbayan box” videos. Our exchanges continue to illuminate the box as a container for complex situations. The balikbayan box and the balikbayan exist within such an assemblage, connecting senders and receivers, the Philippines and its diaspora, all of us caught up in global conditions.

This has also naturally made the manual a site for collaboration. In its annotation process, I approached balikbayans as collaborators rather than subjects. I built relationships prior to collaboration through active participation in community organizations that center Filipino migrants and care labor. I understand many designers devote themselves to refusing extractionist tendencies, I do this personally by working through invitations rather than solicitations, and maintaining transparency.

Last year, I invited people who packed and sent boxes to annotate the 70-foot manual draft with red pen edits, written reflections, and notes on their own processes. We also worked on realizing the draft together by cutting strips, taping edges, and scoring pages. I realize these strategies and methodologies may seem thoroughly planned and even determined in advance. I concur that it is the nature of the work that is most integral. Honesty, the centering of collective desires, and, specific to this inquiry, the intentional articulation of the processes, costs, and labor associated with assembling and sending a box creates a rhythm that strengthens the foregoing research and design.

Materiality is also my primary mode of inquiry, inspired by Bruno Munari’s Orange, which analyzes the fruit to reveal systematic relationships in design and function. To handle, fold, tape, and fill the box is to participate in its meaning making. Tactility here is a method of knowing.

The manual itself now coincidentally mirrors the form of an unfolded, albeit very long, balikbayan box. The next iteration I am working on is at least 100 feet long and contains panels that unfold in different directions. The horizontal orientation allows one to read left to right, and when folded, it compresses like a traditional book. Some pages are colored differently to identify where people diverge in their process. Some pages are longer or shorter to visualize the variable lengths of time different steps require. This is another strategy that has naturally unfolded through intentional and meaningful engagement.

It brimmers in its potential for reflexive storytelling as well. The resulting “absurd” length creates a metaphor of distance and labor. In its production, I am working with a member of Radix Cooperative, who is a part of migrant care networks. I also list contributors (in my view, shared authors) in different stages of the work with pseudonyms for privacy and safety, given the precarity accompanying migrant labor. I wrestle with anonymity but the more important contract here is relational. Going “at the speed of trust”, contributors are given the ongoing choice to continue or withdraw.

From late April to mid May 2026, the manual will be exhibited publicly, a reflexive and temporal space for public programming co-created with balikbayans and migrant advocacy leaders. In alignment with Eve Tuck’s call to move away from damage centered research, this project at least intends to live within a dignified, desire centered framework that foregrounds agency. It is not merely a thing to look at though I am alive to the questions that constantly arise in this work. There are dichotomies and contradictions of desires that will surely remain unresolved, whether class or mobility or anonymity.

About Kaye Yuvallos

Kaye thinks with things, who labors for them, and what they carry. She is a researcher and designer based in New York and the Philippines tracing the materialities of care, labor, and belonging within the diaspora and their networks. Through transdisciplinary research and design, she creates within socially engaged projects ways to navigate and respond to complex and layered systems. Her latest work, A Manual on How to Pack and Send a Balikbayan Box, won the 2026 Student Research Award at The New School.

Kaye is currently one of three inaugural fellows at the Cell for Advanced Strategies (CAS) and is one of the founding Research Fellows for The Gowanus Yearbook, a community-centered design project platformed by Van Alen Institute in Brooklyn. Prior to moving to New York in 2024, Kaye designed and spearheaded campaigns in both public and global health advocacy spheres. She is informed by a decade of professional experience, consulting for multinational corporations and political networks around the world.