The independent cross-border migration and trade-related mobility of Sambas women may not be as long-standing as that of men, but it has decisively increased over the past twenty years as Sambas Malay women have found work abroad. Similar to and for many of the same reasons as other Indonesian women, a significant proportion of Sambas women are now incorporated into transnational service and manufacturing labour circuits. Others are active as cross-border traders. The cross-border mobility of Sambas Malay women is fundamentally (but not exclusively) an economic strategy, a pragmatic response to economic hardship through the pursuit of higher wages, trade advantages, and non-agricultural work opportunities in nearby Sarawak and Brunei. Sarawak is a particularly popular destination, given its proximity and the fact that its per capita income is almost six times higher than that of West Kalimantan (Bariyah, Lau, and Abu Manor, 2012). The prevalence of cross-border mobility is manifest in the range of formal and informal cross-border migration and trade pathways and institutions. Many of these build on the earlier patterns of trade and migration noted in Chapter Two, such as Sambas Malays’ association with the timber industry. Essentially, rural working-class Sambas Malays now inhabit a cross-border social field or ‘transnational habitus’ (Guarnizo, 1997) that spans Sambas, Sarawak, and Brunei—one that channels them into well-established licit and illicit cross-border economic pathways.

This chapter describes a socioeconomic borderscope that situates women as both independent labour migrants and traders, and wives, sisters, and/ or mothers of cross-border migrants. Thompson (2007, p. 4) argues that migration is ‘a particular kind of movement’ that ‘entails a work of imagination in the point of origin’ as well as ‘knowledge and desire’ about the destination. Discerning the nature of the territorial borderscope of Sambas Malay women is thus an exercise in understanding how prior information and current aspirations shape women's cross-border migration. Moreover, their territorial borderscopes provide a basis for an analysis of the effects of cross-border mobility on the construction of Sambas Malayness and its associations with rurality. Central to this analysis are the elements of Sambas Malay culture and adat that facilitate and underwrite a territorial borderscope. Such cultural components are subject to reinstatement and/ or modification as result of rural Sambas Malays’ cross-border mobility.