Why Carlos Bulosan Now?

Filipino expatriate Carlos Bulosan was a resilient historical-materialist in his friendship with people across class, race, gender and ethnicity. He learned mainly from experience to distinguish between the privileged ruling class and the mass of American citizens.

BY E. SAN JUAN JR.
Bulatlat

Because I came to stake a claim on the world... where I lived to change the course of history...
                                                       --Carlos Bulosan, “To My Countrymen”

On and after Sept. 11, 2001, Carlos Bulosan, like thousands of Filipinos, felt the impact of that disaster. Not because he was caught in the Twin Towers or in the mountains of Aghanistan and the cities of Iraq.  Nor was he in Basilan or Zamboanga when thousands of U.S. Special Forces landed allegedly in pursuit of the Abu Sayyaf, welcomed by the sycophantic Arroyo regime. Bulosan died on Sept. 11, 1956, forty-eight years ago; he was beyond the reach of imperial terror. But even the dead are not safe from the enemy -- witness how Rizal was co-opted by the American colonizers to suppress the underground resistance after Aguinaldo’s surrender. Witness how the figure of Andres Bonifacio has been attacked by American scholars eager to debunk the prestige of the hero and prove how the leading Filipino historians have failed, like the comprador and bureaucratic elite, in measuring up to Western neoliberal standards.

Bulosan has also been coopted and taken for granted. Since the ‘60s, when Filipinos struggling for civil rights and against the Vietnam War discovered Bulosan, the author of America Is in the Heart has become  institutionalized as a harmless ethnic icon. Notwithstanding this, I have met Filipino college students today who have no idea who Bulosan is and don’t care. Obviously times have changed; indeed, circumstances, not ideas, largely determine attitudes, choices, inclinations. The current war on what Washington/Pentagon regard as foes of democracy and freedom, just like the war against Japanese militarism in World War II that compelled Filipino migrant workers to join the U.S. military, is already repeating that call for unity with the neocolonial masters, for suspending antagonisms, rendering Bulosan’s cry for equality and justice superfluous.

How do we avoid siding with, and serving, our oppressors? Almost everyone who has read Bulosan -- I am speaking chiefly of those who matured politically in the ‘70s and ‘80s , after which Bulosan suffered the fate of the “disappeared” of Argentina, Nicaragua, the Philippines -- can not help but be disturbed and uneasy over the ending of America Is in the Heart. Clearly the American dream failed. Why then does the Bulosan persona or proxy glorify “America” as the utopian symbol of happiness and liberation when the reality of everyday life -- for his compatriots and people of color in the narrative -- demonstrates precisely the opposite? Is there some hidden transcript or subtext behind the wish-fulfilling rhetoric?  Various commentators, including myself, have offered ways of reconciling the paradox, flattening out the incongruities, disentangling the ironies and discordances. The reconfigured solution may be to say that life itself is full of contradictions, which, in spite of the dialectical fix underwritten by the historical process, will not completely vanish; that these contradictions, perhaps sublimated in other forms, will continue haunting us until we face the truth of the overdetermining primal scenario. Absent this confrontation, we easily succumb to the seductive malaise of the politics of identity, in which the consumerist postcolonial subaltern constructs identity as a pastiche, a hybrid concoction, a hyper-real performance in the global marketplace.

One Filipino interviewed by Yen Le Espiritu, in her Filipino American Lives, evades the contradictions in this naive but opportunist bricolage, which Espiritu celebrates as one that is neither pluralist nor assimilationist: “...I use both the Filipino value of family interdependence and the American value of independence to the best interests of myself and my family.” Note the object of his concern: “myself and my family.” Should we look for some sense of civic responsibility or neighborly concern? Not here, for now at least. The conjunction and easily absorbs any conflict, just as those balikbayan boxes can contain all kinds of goods, legal or contraband, genuine or spurious signs of duty or status-jockeying. We take these balikbayan cargo cult as signs of success or piety to the family and homeland by Cory Aquino’s “modern heroes,” for others “modern slaves.”

The irony remains. Behind the triumphalist invocation of a mythical “America” linger the unforgettable images of violence, panicked escape, horrible mutilation, death, in Bulosan’s works. In April 1941, Bulosan wrote to a friend: “Yes, I feel like a criminal running away from a crime I did not commit. And the crime is that I am a Filipino in America.”  It is only now, thanks to the resonance of September 11, that we are beginning to grasp what is meant by these prophetic words written 63 years ago. The truth of this will, I am sure, become manifest before our program ends. Perhaps some of us are wondering if there are Ashcroft’s agents in our midst, though be assured that the librarians in this country as a group refused outright to be used as spies eavesdropping on their fellow citizens.

We have all heard of the recent deportation of the Cuevas family of Fremont, California, last July. At the same time, 89 Filipinos were deported, the Bush administration’s retaliation -- some say -- to President Arroyo’s withdrawal of 51 Filipino troops in exchange for the release of hostage Angelo de la Cruz. We might recall earlier incidents. In August 2002, 63 Filipinos were herded into an airplane in a direct flight to the Philippines, all deportees chained and manacled during the flight, monitored by FBI agents. In December 2002, a second batch of 84 Filipinos were deported under the same humiliating condition, legitimized by the Absconder Apprehension Initiative Program of the U.S. Department of Justice and Immigration and Naturalization Services (launched Jan. 13, 2001). This program has so far targetted 314,000 “undocumented” persons, including 12,000 Filipinos.  In the seven-month period from October 2001 to April 2002, 334 Filipinos were deported under authoritarian measures enforced through legislative actions, direct executive order, including of course the USA Patriot Act, under the current administration. As far as I know, Filipinos have never been deported in this manner in the past; now, with the discovery of “terrorists” in their homeland, the perception and judgment of Filipinos may approximate Bulosan’s suspicion of himself (almost like a Kafka hero) cited earlier.

Of all groups in the U.S., immigrants have always been and continue to be targeted for  severe repression. Even from the earliest period marked by the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 up to the Cold War McCarran Walter Act of 1952, they have been subject to “ideological exclusion” -- deported or banned on account of specific beliefs and ideas -- even though this violates provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  In the 1950s, for example, the Immigration and Nationality Act provided for the exclusion or deportation of any immigrant who advocated anarchism or communism.  Of late, immigrants associated with anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist Palestinian organizations branded as “terrorists” have been prohibited entry. (As everyone knows, Secretary Powell has labeled -- in a kind of pre-emptive unilateral attack -- the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army as foreign terrorist organizations, a move seconded by the Arroyo regime.) After 9/11, the USA Patriot Act not only reaffirmed such sanctions but expanded and widened the scope of the powers of the State apparatuses to suppress any criticism or dissent, even offering incentives to immigrants to spy on their compatriots.

On Aug. 5, 2004, Representative Crispin Beltran introduced a resolution to the Philippine Congress denouncing the U.S. government’s threat to expel 300,000 Filipinos in the following months. Beltran noted that during the first wave of the Iraq war, Filipinos were already targeted for deportation, and that “since 9/11, the U.S. government has indiscriminately criminalized and demonized all immigrants,” particularly those racially profiled as “terrorists” or associated with countries harboring terrorists, such as Pakistan, Syria, Iran, North Korea, and, of course, the Philippines. We have already been designated as the second front (after Afghanistan) in this endless war against Al Qaeda and the enemies of the U.S. “way of life.”

It is a matter of record that Filipinos in such numbers and in such horrendous conditions have never been officially deported from the United States ever since the islands came under U.S. rule. True, individual “trouble-makers” like union activists were deported in the ‘20s and ‘30s. But the entire community as such has never been singled out in this manner, in the way that the Chinese were stigmatized as a group before and after the 1882 Exclusion Act, and the Japanese at the outbreak of World War II. So this is a “first,” thanks to the Abu Sayyaf and the Bush-Cheney gospel of preemptive war for finance capital.

This undisguised terror over the Filipino community today is not new, but it is more deceptive and invasive. To be sure, the Philippines has never posed a threat to the security of the U.S.  It has in fact been victimized as a dependency of the Empire (instanced recently by the grievance of 13,000 Filipino veterans who fought in World War II but are deemed ineligible to receive full veteran benefits). Except for the American Indians, I would argue that Filipinos were the only other group that experienced the relentless ferocity of white-supremacist violence during the Filipino-American War of 1899-1903, which sacrificed 1.4 million Filipino lives. General Jack Smith earned infamy by his order to convert the countryside into a “howling wilderness”: “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn the better it will please me.” This ruthless conquest of the Philippines continued up to 1906 when 600 Moro men, women and children were killed in the battle of Mount Dajo; and up to 1913 when, in the battle of Mount Bagsak in Jolo, close to 5,000 Moro men, woman and children perished at the hands of Capt. John Pershing’s troops. This genocidal carnage inaugurating the birth of the U.S. global empire has up to now never been fully investigated to the same extent that similar atrocities in Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere are now being thoroughly researched and publicized.

It is only now that the U.S. “first Vietnam” in the Philippines has come to the foreground of the world’s conscience, along with the St. Louis Exposition of 1904. But the problem is that they are either exoticized or rendered harmless for scholastic speculation. Bulosan distills the intensity of such bloody subjugation of the Filipino revolutionary forces in key episodes in America Is in the Heart, and in stories that describe lynching and white vigilante attacks. As the bulk of Bulosan’s essays and letters emphasize, the struggles of Filipino migrant workers in the U.S. cannot be understood without its context in the fierce class war between peasants and landlords in the Philippines, between ordinary Filipinos and the Americanized oligarchy whom he satirized in The Laughter of My Father. All the personal anecdotes and incidents in Bulosan’s works need to be read as historicized allegories of the national situation in order to appreciate their full significance. Thus “Bulosan” may be read as a rubric, an emblem of that whole constellation of themes and ideas surrounding the fraught, unequal relation between the colonized formation and the imperial overlord, particularly the oppression and resistance of Filipinos in the metropole.

When Filipinos began to be active in the union organizing in Hawaii in the ‘20s and ‘30s, they encountered savage repression reminiscent of the anti-sedition campaigns against Macario Sakay and other recalcitrant “bandits.” The cold-blooded killing of 16 Filipino strikers  in the Hanapepe plantation on Kauai in 1924 is the most telling index of fascist barbarism. Filipino militants like Pablo Manlapit, Pedro Calosa and others were imprisoned and deported, with Calosa re-surfacing in Tayug, Pangasinan, as a leader of the Colorum peasant uprising. The linkage here is not the ad hoc conjunction and of the late-modern Filipino subject trying to equalize two poles of the hierarchy, the dominant and the oppressed. Imperial violence demonstrated its power in two fronts: fascist suppression of workers in the annexed land of Hawaii, neocolonial repression of worker-peasant resistance in the territorial possession of the Philippines.

There may be two time-zones and places in the lives of Filipinos, but the cartography of struggle articulates them in one narrative that, I think, is found more unambiguously dramatized in The Cry and the Dedication.  In it Bulosan resolved the dilemma that Filipino militants faced in the ‘60s during the anti-martial law movement here from 1972 to 1986, and after. It is wrong-headed to dichotomize mechanically (as the KDP  did) the struggle for civil rights and racial equality here in the U.S. and the anti-imperialist struggle in the Philippines -- both target the same enemy, the U.S. corporate elite, from varying angles. This elite is represented by the ruling oligarchy of compradors, bureaucrats, and landlords in the Philippines. Since 1898, Filipinos here and at home have borne the brunt of class, racial, and national oppression simultaneously, in variable modalities. It seems to me the Archimedean point underlying this complex is the continuing domination of the Philippines as a nation and people which, if not changed, can not transform the subordinate identity or position of the Filipino community in the U.S.  As I have asserted on various occasions, the liberation of the homeland is the decisive and pivotal item in the agenda. The struggle for national democracy follows Marx’s view that white labor cannot emancipate itself when it is oppressing those of color; and that no nation can be free if it oppresses another. Of course, the concrete conditions for carrying out the democratic struggle varies as well as the agencies and protagonists engaged. It is nonsense to valorize armed struggle in the Philippines as a “great morale booster” compared to street demonstrations and other non-violent actions here, or to belabor the generational conflicts such as those between Filipinos born here and those “fresh off the boat.” Given the priority objective mentioned above, it is then a strategic question of where the concrete struggle is waged, the collectives involved, the limits and possibilities of logistics, etc.

During the height of the Cold War and the McCarthy witch-hunt in the ‘50s, oppositional Filipinos bore the brunt of official anticommunist terror. Filipino trade unionists (such as Ernie Mangaong, Chris Mensalvas, and others active in the International Longshoreman and Warehouse’s Union in Seattle) were brought to trial, harassed, and threatened with deportation. After his transient fame in the late ‘40s, Bulosan suffered ostracism and censorship up to his death in 1956. Evangelista and Campomanes charge Bulosan of yielding to “alcoholism, illness, obscurity, neurosis, and despair” in a time of fascist terror and emergency. These are cynical judgments based on trivializing speculation.

 It is uncanny to find Bulosan writing in the 1952 Yearbook of the ILWU Local how “Terrorism Rides the Philippines.” That is the title of his article on the persecution of Amado V. Hernandez and other progressive nationalists by the Roxas puppet government. It suggests Bulosan’s unbroken service in the anti-imperialist front despite his physical distance from Manila. His novel The Cry and the Dedication, inspired by Luis Taruc’s autobiographical account, Born of the People, is an eloquent testimony to Bulosan’s wrestling with the forces of racism as well as class and national oppression without idealizing the supposed political maturity of Filipino revolutionaries over against flabby American reformists. This latter claim echoes the opinion that Filipinos who speak “Filipino” are more genuinely Filipino than those Filipinos, born here, whose parents have prevented them from learning their language. Being Filipino is not a transhistorical essence but a political project of realizing collective emancipation. It is a question of becoming Filipino on what grounds, for what reasons and principles -- what is ultimately at stake?

Bulosan himself bewailed the reproduction of colonial self-hatred and impotence in his compatriots here. It is not suprising that relatively successful Filipinos, especially professionals who came after the liberalization of immigration in 1965, dismiss Bulosan as obsolete or irrelevant. Bulosan is alleged to be useful only in finding out about the experience of the first generation of Manongs during the Depression. Now that Filipinos have, or are beginning to make it -- witness Loida Nicolas Lewis, General Taguba, and other model-minority figures touted by Filipinas magazine or Philippine News -- we don’t need Bulosan. We don’t need the lessons gained from past experience, the struggles of the Manongs like Manlapat, Calosa, Philip Vera Cruz, Larry Itliong, and others (without whom, it may be said here, the United Farm Workers of America would not have emerged in a radical fashion) -- except to measure how far we have advanced in the social ladder, in the pecking order of the class/racial hierarchy. Bulosan, of course, also wrote a substantial number of essays and stories about Filipinos back home some of which I collected in the anthology, The Philippines Is in the Heart (published in 1978 by New Day Publishers, Quezon City). Besides, leftist radicalism is out of fashion in the age of cyber globalization and transnational cyborgs morphing from one ethnoscape to another -- even though the pasyon and its postmodern variants are still used as the monolithic standard of interpretation and evaluation for social movements today.

One may add here that, strictly speaking, there was no diaspora of Filipinos before the Marcos dictatorship institutionalized the “warm body export” at a time when the circumstances warranted the exchange. The circulation of commodified labor, mainly domestics, now reaching nine million, is the principal mode in which globalization impinges on Filipino consciousness. It is not the success of Lea Salonga, General Taguba, and other celebrities. Films, songs, stories of Flor Contemplacion, Sarah Balabagan, and nameless other victims of the global “care chain,” have now arrived at the cultural arena. In time, no doubt, we will have many male and female Bulosans to chronicle the travails and struggles of this “migrante” population exploring real and imagined worlds.

What is the reality today? Possibly the largest of what is denominated the Asian group in the US, Filipinos number close to 3-4 million of which 106,000 to 700,000 are undocumented due to overstayed visas. Of this total, 70-75% are immigrants, while 25-30% are Filipino-Americans born in the U.S., ethnically defined Filipino. Although lumped together with Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Indians in the category of “Asian Americans” (now 11 million, due to triple to 33 million by 2050), Filipinos so far have  failed to reach the status of the  “model minority” in terms of income, prestige positions, and other indicators, for reasons that inhere in the colonial and neocolonial subjugation of the Philippines and in the class-divided structure and social metabolic process of racialized reproduction of the U.S. polity.

It is not historically correct to insert Filipinos into the homogenizing immigrant narrative of success (as the historian Ronald Takaki and others are wont to do), for the workers recruited by the Hawaii sugar planters were not, properly speaking, immigrants. Nor was Bulosan an immigrant when he landed in Seattle in 1930. Like thousands of Filipinos in the Alaskan canneries and the farms of Hawaii and the West Coast, Bulosan was a “colonial ward.” In various ways, we are still neocolonial dependents of the U.S. Empire. Neither China nor Japan, Korea nor India, were completely colonized and annexed by the U.S.  Those formations, needless to say, possess unquestioned cultural integrity and millennia of elaborate cultural development not found in the Philippines. The Philippines has perhaps the unenviable distinction of being the US only direct colony in Southeast Asia from 1898 to 1946, and a strictly regulated neocolony thereafter.  Owing to the fierce, implacable resistance of Filipino revolutionaries to U.S. colonial aggression, the U.S. invading military (mostly veterans of the brutal campaign against the  American Indians) inflicted the most barbaric forms of torture, punishment, hamletting, and other disciplinary measures. The U.S. produced the “first Vietnam” in this systematic genocidal campaign of pacification made ideologically genteel by President McKinley’s policy of “benevolent assimilation.”  It was a “civilizing mission” intended to “Christianize” the natives, an unprecedented “killing field” where, for Henry Adams, “we must slaughter a million or two of foolish Malays [called “niggers,” “gugus,” and “black devils” by the soldiers] in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric trailways.”

As Colleen Lye and others have argued, the Filipino experience as colonized/neocolonized subjects is singular and cannot be dissolved into the archetypal immigrant syndrome. It cannot be altered so as to lump Filipinos with the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian communities with their own historical specificities. Although the pan-ethnic category of “Asian American” was invented in the ‘60s to articulate points of unity in the social, political, and economic struggles for recognition of the diverse groups, it is important to note that the American colonial bureaucrats and military perceived and handled Filipinos as if they were American Indians or African slaves in the South. We can see unadorned vestiges of this among American experts claiming epistemological authority over their native informants. Again, we need to stress the ideological paradigm, the frame of intelligibility, in which American administrators, social scientists, intellectuals, etc. (including the notorious Stanley Karnow, author of the best-selling In Our Image) made sense of Filipinos: either we were (like the American Indians) savages, half-childish primitives, or innocuous animals that can be civilized with rigorous tutelage, or else slaughtered. They found that some could be trained like the African slaves or Mexican stoop laborers. No one mistook the Filipinos for the persevering if wily Chinese, the inscrutable Japanese, or the mystical Indian. We were mistaken for unruly Africans, Mexicans, or American Indians who needed to be tamed and domesticated. This, plus the reputation of Filipinos as militant union organizers and/or highly sexed dandies, explain the putative nasty “invisibility,” irksome if indeterminate “otherness,” our fabled interstitial difference, which, however, does not protect us from the surveillance of the Department of Homeland Security or the racist violence that murdered postal worker Joseph Ileto and many others.

Bulosan was one of the first organic intellectuals of the Filipino community to have understood this singularity precisely in his depiction of the Filipinos as subjects occupying a unique position: participating in the class struggles of citizens in the U.S. for justice and equality, not just for competition for a “place in the sun,” while at the same time demanding freedom and genuine sovereignty for the Philippines as a necessary condition for their being recognized fully as human beings.  This is a far cry from the stereotype lauded by Manila newspaper columnists. One of them mused recently what “A Day Without Filipinos” would be, following the lead of the film “A Day Without Mexicans.” Are we really indispensable, not expendable? Filipino caregivers are much in demand in the global “care chain” because “they have that special touch, that extra patience and willingness to stay an hour more when needed.” Whether we like it or not, this is the ubiquitous image of the Filipino projected onto the mass/public consciousness by Internet, rumor, printed media, television, and so on. It is displacing the memory of Imelda Marcos and her fabulous shoe collection, despite the recent film apologizing for her charming kookiness.

Indeed, there is a struggle of and for representation, superimposed on the fundamental narrative of class war. Writing before his death, Bulosan affirmed a desire for critical representation that is today frowned upon by postmodernist deconstructors. It is said that no one can represent anyone faithfully, accurately; language always fails. But everyday practice proves the opposite; the corporate media are more powerful in representing us for profitable exploitation. Bulosan expressed his creed:  “What impelled me to write?   The answer is: my grand dream of equality among men and freedom for all. To give a literate voice to the voiceless one hundred thousand Filipinos in the United States, Hawaii, and Alaska. Above all and ultimately, to translate the desires and aspirations of the whole Filipino people in the Philippines and abroad in terms relevant to contemporary history.” Whether he succeeded or failed, that is for us and future readers to decide under varying circumstances. Unfortunately, for various reasons, most Filipinos do not read. We may have to translate Bulosan and other writers into computer/Internet language, the discourse of films, television, rap music, dance, and other non-print media.

Finally, I want to point out that Bulosan -- so often this is forgotten even among the ranks of progressives -- was a resilient historical-materialist in his friendship with people across class, race, gender and ethnicity. He learned mainly from experience to distinguish between the privileged ruling class and the mass of American citizens not all of whom are on the side of the class enemy. In fact, this enemy can only maintain its hegemony  (that is, governing by consent with the help of jails, police, army), by overt or subtle ideological manipulation. And after September 11, by fear, by stigmatizing people of color as sinister aliens, criminals, terrorists. We need to make this necessary distinction so that we do not isolate ourselves and then indulge in sectarian self-righteousness, compensating for our elitism by boasting about the superior revolutionary discipline or intelligence of Filipino insurgents. If Bulosan did that, he would never have survived in the crisis of the Depression and McCarthyism. More crucially, he would never have gotten the uncompromising support of many white American women who became his intimate companions and helped him write and publish. (I frankly believe that most of his works are products of combined efforts by him and his numerous women helpers. A novel purported to be by Bulosan, All the Conspirators, is, judging from its style and content, the work of a woman-friend who was also a writer.) Nor would he have deigned to read the works of Richard Wright, Melville, Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, William Saroyan, and, of course, his close friend Sanora Babb. Bulosan’s lesson is this: We need to unite with as many people here and across the planet on the basis of principled struggle for the broadest democratic rights and social justice. We need to build on the accomplishments of past generations of workers, artists, etc. Certainly, another world is possible provided we struggle as partisans for universal ideals of human rights, freedom, equality, and compassion for all life in the endangered ecosystem.

I think it is in this spirit of the united front against fascism and imperialism that the Carlos Bulosan Heritage Center is being inaugurated today. In solidarity with the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, Palestine, Nepal, and others in the frontline of the war against imperial globalizing terror, we are launching the Bulosan Heritage Center in a period of crisis, which is both a moment of danger and opportunity, chiefly the opportunity of educating, raising consciousness, by mobilizing those classic qualities of patience, fortitude, humor, cunning, intelligence and generosity in Filipinos that Carlos Bulosan immortalized in his life and work. Bulatlat 

(Remarks delivered at the inauguration of the Carlos Bulosan Heritage Center of the Philippines Forum, New York City, Oct. 30 2004. The author is co-director of the Philippine Forum.) 

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