Carlos
Bulosan, the Revolutionary Potential of the Filipino Peasantry, and the
Limits of American ‘Leftist’ Liberalism*
Allos’ sensibility,
with its peasant/populist ethos, mutated via a process of self-education
and disillusionment into the more focused class-consciousness of the
writer committed to the concrete program of union reforms and specific
political principles of which the rejection of imperialism, segregation
and racial apartheid, and support for the emancipation of colonies, are
obligatory demands.
BY E. SAN JUAN, JR.
Posted by Bulatlat
Thanks to the Library
of Congress and other sponsors of today’s historic event, Carlos Bulosan—let’s
call him Allos, as though we were his kasamas in Binalonan,
Pangasinan, or in Manilatown in Los Angeles—is returning for the second
time to Washington, DC. His spirit, or ghost, I mean, though it is
presumptuous, maybe even sacrilegious, to invoke it, much less assume we
can impose our wish or will on it. Individuals really exercise only very
meager control on how decisive circumstances unfold, even though we
(especially academics) pretend to have some say or “agency.” Ditto for
philanthropic “do-gooders” professing “Marxist” credentials (more later).
Proletarian Pinoy meets ilustrado
The first and
probably last time Allos was in DC was in November 18, 1943, based on his
article as contributing editor to the magazine, BATAAN (August
1944. pp.13-15) on the occasion of the death of Commonwealth President
Manuel Quezon. He said he was writing the 28th chapter of his
book In Search of America
(now America is in the Heart)
when President Quezon requested his visit to DC. He then met Vice
President Sergio Osmena, Col. Carlos Romulo, the president’s wife and
daughter, and other assistants. He writes that President Quezon was
prompted to call for him after reading his essay “Freedom From Want”
published in the Saturday Evening Post. In this elegiac tribute,
Allos evinces zealous praise for Quezon, identifying the story of Quezon
with the last 45 years of the country’s emergence into modernity. His oral
homage to the president prompted Quezon to ask him if he could write his
biography, to which he gave a coaxed gesture of assent. His admiration is,
in some ways, self-serving, a kind of fantasy projection. He writes:
…I began to ask
myself why he [Quezon] felt so close and confidential to me. I began to
contemplate what I was a year ago, a common laborer, a migratory farm
worker, who had lived in the slums of both America and the Philippines—was
it because this man, the avowed leader of his people, was also of humble
origin and went through heart-rending deprivations in his youth? It was
then that I felt kinship with him, a feeling so great that it sustained me
in my perilous trip back to Los Angeles and immediately afterwards, became
the dynamic force that moved me to interpret him to the misinformed
Filipinos in California (1944, 14).
Allos had no real
solid knowledge of Quezon’s “humble origin” or the “heart-rending
deprivations” of Quezon’s youth. But when he read the attacks on Quezon in
fascist-inspired Filipino newspapers in
California,
Allos came to the defense of the exiled Commonwealth government. It was
still “united front” politics then. Allos proceeded from DC to New York
(where he met Jose Garcia Villa) to sign his contract with Harcourt Brace
before returning to California.
President Quezon
telegrammed him afterward for a “memorandum on the Filipinos in the West
Coast.” Allos failed to fulfill his promise; instead, he “hoped that my
autobiography…would give him all the materials he would need…that in
presenting the life story of a common Filipino immigrant, who had just
attained an intellectual integrity that could not be bought, I would be
presenting the whole story of the Filipinos in the United States” (15).
Note how a radical reversal occurs here. It is Quezon now who will
compose, endorse or ratify Allos’ biography, not Allos acceding to the
ilustrado’s request. Allos, the uprooted peasant, re-invents himself as
the emblem or ethnic index to the whole uprooted community, not the
coopted ilustrado. Some kind of retributive transposition
occurs—symptom of peasant ressentiment?
At the end of this
tell-tale article, Allos bade farewell to Quezon who, conducting the “good
fight…died at a time when it seems sure that our country will be free
again, and will assume her independence in a world federation of free and
equal nations” (15).
That future of “free
and equal nations,” contrary to Allos’ sentiment, remains in the future.
Allos, to be sure, not only felt almost filial kinship with Quezon and his
family, but also also a tributary, even quasi-feudal loyalty to Quezon as
a symbol of the nation’s struggle for independence. This is a traditional
peasant view of the elite. At this point, we need to interpose some
historical perspective and assay the relative importance of Quezon as a
representative of the entrenched propertied interests in the context of
the recurrent grievances and revolts of Filipino peasants, workers and
indigenous communities, throughout the Commonwealth period and the two and
half decades before 1935. One can cite here the repression of the Tayug
and Sakdal uprisings, among others, as well as Muslim dissidence, in which
the oligarchy and later Quezon himself acted as partisans of the status
quo. During the Cold War period and the McCarthyist witch-hunt, the State
was for Allos and his brothers/sisters in the union a merciless
persecutory force to resist.
The extant account of
Allos’ travels in the U.S. are sketchy, so it is difficult to determine
what other links he had to the personnel of the exiled Commonwealth
government, for example, to Romulo, J.C. Dionisio, Villa, Bienvenido
Santos,and others. We do not have any information whether he met the
members of the Philippine Writers League (either Salvador P. Lopez,
Federico Mangahas, or Arturo Rotor—major writers in English in the
thirties) who attended the Third Congress of the League of American
Writers on June 2-4, 1939 (Folsom 1994, 241). Allos was certainly
acquainted with Lopez, the most significant critic of that period,
evidenced by his letter in The New Republic “Letter to a
Filipino Woman” (San Juan 1995, 210-14) whose death he prematurely
announced (he mistook the guerilla writer Manuel Arguilla, murdered by the
Japanese, for Lopez).
One question I would
ask the future biographer is whether Allos met the poet and militant
unionist Amado V. Hernandez when Hernandez visited the U.S. after
McArthur’s “Liberation” of the colony. Allos protested Hernandez’s arrest
by the government and included an article by Hernandez, “Wall Street
Chains the Philippines,” in the August 1952 issue of the 1952 Yearbook,
Local 37, of the International Longshoremen’s & Warehousemen’s Union
in Seattle. *
Class as Network of Social Relations
Earlier I mentioned
Allos’ attitude of being “beholden” to Quezon, an attitude carried over
from the conformist ethos of a section of the peasantry. This is the
moment I would like to address the issue of “Americanism” in AIH by
way of engaging the question of social class. Herminia U. Smith recently
e-mailed Reme Grefalda, editor of the e-zine In Our Own Voice,
about this, complaining about people generalizing that “the Manongs came
from the Philippine peasantry; that they were uneducated, and that’s why
they were ‘only’ laborers.”
Allow me first to
quote first Allos’ thoughts on education and labor expressed candidly in
his letter to his nephew dated April 1, 1948:
…it is not really
important to go to the university. A college degree does not mean that you
are educated…Education comes after school, from your relations with your
fellow man, from your understanding of yourself…Education is actually the
application of this discovery: that you are a human being with a heart,
and a mind, and a soul. Intelligence is another thing, of course… [Maxim
Gorki] wrote books about the poor people in his country that showed that
we poor people in all lands are the real rulers of the world because we
work and make things. We make chairs, we plow the land, we create
children; that is what Gorki means. But those who do not work at all,
those rich bastards who kick the poor peasants around: they contribute
nothing to life because they do not work. In other words, Fred, we can
still have a nice country without money and politicians. We just need
workers. Everything we see and use came from the hands of workers….(1988,
36-37).
My first comment is
that the term “laborers,” though often derogatory or pejorative in intent,
becomes so because we live in a system distinguished by class hierarchy.
Due to the division of labor in class society, from slave to capitalist,
manual work has been degraded by being associated with the unpropertied,
unlettered groups; and thus people deprived of land, tools or animals, are
confined to sell their labor-power and do manual “labor” while those free
from laboring with their hands, supposedly educated, occupy a higher
position or status. This is not a result of being uneducated, but of being
dispossessed, racialized and colonized. Obviously, we all oppose class
differentiation and discrimination, and I hope we are all united in
rejecting such an insulting class-ridden system.
The
peasantry intervenes
I would use the term
“peasant” as a descriptive category defining a group in relation to the
means of production, in this case, land. It does not refer to status or
life-style as such. It does not imply lack of education or low
status—except from the viewpoint of the privileged idle landlord and
business elite. Historically, in Europe, the peasantry was a complex group
classified simply into the rich peasants who owned land they cultivated,
did not employ landless persons as serfs (such as the feudal landlords)
and had some power and prestige; the middle peasants who may own land or
not but who have independent means, and the poor or landless peasants
reduced to debt peonage and serfhood. You can refine this category further
by including ideology, ancestry, customs, etc.
In the Philippines,
however, the Spanish colonial system narrowed the classification into two
main ones: the Spanish landlords who owned fiefdoms and operated through
caciques and hired overseers, and the majority of dispossessed
natives. Even Rizal’s family had to lease their farms from the Dominican
friars. Objectively, Rizal came from the rich peasantry; but their access
to education and lineage aligned them with the ilustrado fraction
who, while not owning land, accumulated some wealth through farming,
trade, etc., that enabled their separation from the landless poor
colonized subjects. Because Filipino peasants became proletarianized when
they moved to the towns and cities while maintaining the peasant ethos of
the traditional village, their sensibilities and behavior reflected the
vacillations typical of the youthful Allos and his social class. Thus we
observe Allos’ strong spirit of solidarity and egalitarianism mixed with
his desire to move beyond the traditional regime of submission to
authority, to the power of the inheritors of prestige and privilege
founded on property.
When the United
States colonized the Philippines, the legal idea of land ownership with
Torrens title became part of the
legal and political system. Ordinary peasants acquiring the means were
able to buy land. Some feudal estates (esp. those owned by the friars)
were broken up, but not all; in fact, as William Pomeroy documents in
American Neocolonialism (1970), tenancy increased during forty years
of direct U.S. colonial rule. The
landlord system, though weakened, was in fact renewed and strengthened
with the U.S. cooptation of the oligarchy in managing the State apparatus,
bureaucracy, schools, etc. In Allos’ case, the family owned some land (Allos
mentions this land as a gift from his father’s friend) which they had to
mortgage or sell to pay for both Aurelio and Allos’ passage. The farm was
foreclosed. Allos writes in a sketch published in Poetry magazine:
My father was a small
farmer, but when I was five or six years old his small plot of land was
taken by usury; and usury was the greatest racket of the illustrado,
and it still is although it is now the foreigners who are fattening on it.
My father had a big family to support, so he became a sharecropper, which
is no different from the sharecroppers in the Southern States. Years
after, because of this sharecropping existence, my father fell into debts
with his landlord, who was always absent, who had never seen his
tenants—and this was absentee landlordism, even more oppressive than
feudalism. Then my father really became a slave—and they tell me
there is no slavery in the Philippine Islands! [circa 1943]
So when historians
trace the genealogy of the “Manongs” to the peasantry, it is not meant to
debase them as “uneducated” or “only” laborers. Studies of the peasantry
(in itself, a rigorous scientific discipline) by Eric Hobsbawm, Eric Wolf,
James Scott, Theodor Shanin and others have demonstrated the sagacity,
intelligence, shrewdness, and wisdom of the peasantry. Their adaptive
skills have not been surpassed by the modern urban entrepreneur. Needless
to say, formal education is not a measure of intelligence or wisdom. The
best illustration of this is Allos’ The Laughter of My Father, as
well as other stories collected in The Philippines Is in the Heart.
As for the
degradation of workers and laborers, this is part of the history of the
rise of capitalism. The Depression was a crisis of this system, worsening
the plight not only of unemployed and starving millions of citizens but,
more severely, of people of color like the “Manongs.” They were not,
strictly speaking, immigrants (not until the Commonwealth would there be
an immigrant quota for Filipinos) but colonial subjects barred from access
to citizenship. In addition, they were also a proletarianized and
racialized minority. Productive labor, of course, is the source of social
wealth, though from the viewpoint of a market-centered economics, labor is
downgraded from the view point of capital and ownership of land and
productive means. This is the effect of judging everything in terms of
exchange value, not use-value, the result of translating all values into
money, possessions, or commodity-fetishes.
“Little Brown Brother’s” burden
This is the moment to
confront the problem of white-supremacist “Americanism” posing as
minority-model “Marxism.” Practically all readers of AIH, with some
exceptions, read it only as an immigrant story, or at best, a “Popular
Front” collective biography, as Michael Denning and others have done.
Obviously it is far from being an exemplary narrative of immigrant
success. There is arguably more allegory, gothic melodrama, and utopian
fabulation in AIH than in Laughter. As I have stressed in my
paper, the inability to understand the substantive function of the first
part of AIH, from chapter 1 to 12, is a symptom of the larger
failure to understand the political and cultural actuality, significance,
and consequence of the colonial subjugation of the Philippines from the
time of the Filipino-American War of 1899 up to 1946, and its neocolonial
dependency thereafter. It is a crippling failure which leads to all kinds
of vacuous, ill-informed pronouncements (which I will illustrate in a
moment).
This is the reason
why I propose that we decenter the Bulosan canon and begin with The Cry
and the Dedication, Laughter, his essays, poetry, and his other
writings in approaching the totality of his achievement. The other works
avoid the celebration of “America” as the totemic paradigm of freedom and
democracy. We hope to correct the formalist framework of intelligibility
that would exclude the historical context of the profound colonial
subjugation which Allos and the Filipino people as a whole experienced
from 1899 up to the present. It would result, first, in espousing 200%
Americanism; second, confusion in making sense of the contradictory
messages of the narrative; and third, a cynical acceptance of immigrant
success leading to a dismissal of the work as tedious, naïve, a
multiculturalist factoid. (See Jessica Hagedorn’s visceral repudiation of
Bulosan in The Gangster of Love.) I will not go into the reasons
why AIH turned out to be such an ideological pastiche well before
the vogue of postmodernism—I have supplied some reasons in my paper.
Take the case of
Kenneth Mostern’s essay, “Why is America in the Heart?” published in the
UC Berkeley journal, Critical Mass (1995). Mostern, a
self-proclaimed Marxist, faults AIH for its “Americanism” and its
unquafied endorsement of “American democratic institutions, even at their
worst” as “the vanguard of world politics.” Was Allos really guilty of
this? I think Mostern imputes to AIH a spurious teleology which
springs from his assumption that the Philippines as a classic colony was
really being shaped by U.S. policies to be a fully democratic,
industrialized society, an organic part of the metropolis. Not only is
Mostern not aware of the series of U.S. legislation and policies (from the
Jones Act to the Bell Trade Act and their sequels) that defined Philippine
subalternity for the last century and the next. His analysis also exhibits
a remarkable insensitivity to the experience of racialized subjugation, a
flaw rather astonishing for those boasting of being schooled not only in
Marx and Lenin but also in W.E.B. DuBois, Fanon, Said, Freire, and a whole
battery of thinkers who have exposed the limits of Eurocentric teleology
which Mostern claims to reject. Consider the following:
….I am not claiming
that Bulosan’s desire to bring technological development to the
Philippines—seeing its economy as needing…”development”—is what is wrong
here. While the Philippines is poor and oppressed the attempt to bring
some of what the U.S. has to it is obviously appropriate and deserves the
support of all U.S. leftists, whether or not we are Filipino….Just as the
wealth of the United States, earned in part through imperial presence in
Asia, allowed Bulosan the space to become a writer, such a continuing
disparity of wealth, where it occurs, and the colonial legacy, even where
it doesn’t, may ensure the continuation of this pattern [of allowing the
Philippines to develop into a full-blown industrial capitalist power]
(1995, 49).
Mostern’s argument is
now considered rather embarrassingly inept, to say the least. It is based
on the crude mechanical view that social development goes through the
evolutionary stage from slavery and feudalism to capitalism, and the
latest is of course superior to what came before it. When Marx heard that
his followers were attributing this linear teleology to him, he famously
remarked: “If that is marxism, then I am not a Marxist.” A clear sign of
Mostern’s chosen stance of ignoring the impact of U.S. colonial
domination, and what it signifies for Filipinos who sacrificed 1.4 million
lives to defend the gains of the revolution against Spanish despotism, is
this remark:
Bulosan opens the
book with a moment of disjunction, an explicit contrast between a young
peasant boy, Carlos himself, working the land with his family and the
intersection of this apparently primeval scene with the outside world,
most specifically the world of a war in Europe, where Carlos’s brother
Leon is fighting. No reason is given why a Filipino boy would be fighting
on another continent; instead, the fact of the global situatedness of the
peasant economy is the theoretical premise of the book, what which the
intelligent reader must already know (1995, 46).
What Mostern forgot
was precisely his self-professed duty to apply materialist dialectics to
this “global situatedness,” one which is mediated by U.S. colonial rule.
He forgets what almost everyone knows: Filipinos, just like today, are
enlisted to fight U.S. corporate wars; that the serflike or slavish
existence of landless peasants like Allos’ father and millions like him
have been legitimized by the preservation of the power of the oligarchical
landlord class as a political strategy of neocolonial rule; and that the
fight for independence against U.S. colonial oppression is what motivated
the popular-front struggle here and in the Philippines against fascism
(part of the oligarchy supported Franco in Spain) and Japanese militarism
(part of that oligarchy believed it was a useful foil to U.S.
imperialism).
Reading AIH as
a glorification of “Americanism” or American Exceptionalism may in part be
due to the editorial cleansing of the text itself. It is, as some have
duly suspected, a very sanitized text in its silence over the destructive
effects of U.S. colonial rule, especially the years from 1914 to 1948.
Given the Filipino rejection of Spanish autocratic rule and religious
authoritarianism, American proclamation of its “civilizing mission,”
complete with Thomasite teachers, public education, etc. was attractive.
There was no other choice under the flag of “Manifest Destiny.” Except for
the allusion to the January 1931 Tayug peasant insurrection, there is no
mention in AIH of the Tangulan movement (1930-31) nor the Sakdal
uprising of May 2-3,1935 and its
aftermath.
Nonetheless, it is
absurd to erase or wholly obscure the scenes and chapters that expose the
savage truth of “Americanism” in action, represented in white-supremacist
violence on behalf of agribusiness and monopolies. Nor is it correct to
assume that the presumed proletarian politics of the later part of the
narrative has replaced “the peasant society” portrayed in the first
section. In a revealing gesture, Mostern calls the Filipino workers
“expatriates” whose “backwardness,” however, he deplores repeatedly in
favor of an enlightened “leftist” United States Studies which turns out to
be a vapid token of pettybourgeois wish-fulfillment.
Mostern’s
self-righteous act of patronage is typical of postmodernizing scholars
guilty of the excesses of what Pierre Bourdieu (2000) calls “scholastic
reason.” Presuming to be bearers of an omnipresent panoptic mind, they
pass judgment on the world without any awareness of their own accessory
location, their ineluctable inscription in the social-historical text of
which they claim to be free. This stance of presumptuous objectivity may
be simply dismissed as innocent, a self-indulgent reproduction of
trivialities, or dangerous in being complicit with forces producing misery
and horror for millions of human beings. Thanks to Mostern’s nominalist
syndrome, we are now alerted to the dangers of imposing formulaic
solutions to neocolonial “backwardness” masquerading as latter-day
“benevolent assimilation,” the Anglo’s “civilizing mission” in ultra-left
disguise.
One symptom of
peasant subaltern ambivalence I mentioned earlier may be found in its
affinity for millennial or messianic movements which reflect the reality
of their isolated, fragmented lives. As Hosbawm notes, the unit of
organized action for subaltern groups is “either the parish pump or the
universe. There is no in between” (1984, 20). This may explain the
inflated rhetoric of an “America” inhabited by an indiscriminate “common
people” or “toiling poor, a utopian space beyond class and state, as well
as its fragmentary segmented nature, a fact registered in the episodic,
repetitious or segmentary flow of the narrative. These stylistic and
formal qualities linked to the peasant world-view contrasts with the more
cohesively class-conscious part of the narrative which reflects the basic
social reality of proletarian existence—that is, of migrant contract
workers who are colonized/racialized subjects—in being concentrated in
groups of mutual if forced cooperation in farmwork and in organized union
activities.
What illuminates the
contradictions in AIH is thus not a contrived formulaic schema such
as the one imposed by Mostern, based on his limited world of leftist
sectarianism, but our grasp of the historical and social reality of the
Filipino peasantry in the colonial“lost” homeland, and of the Manongs,
bachelors in barracks, moving from place to place, ostracized from normal
life by massive laws, by customary prohibitions of everyday life, etc.—a
violently distorted, grotesque, and terror-filled landscape beyond the
comprehension of sheltered academics, a milieu perhaps approximating what
our ethnic communities may be experiencing after 9/11 in the “homeland
security state.”
The
Manongs’ red-white-and-blue blues
One other approach to
understanding the charge of Americanism is to consider how the “America”
utopianized rhetorically in AIH resembles Clarabelle in Allos’ “The
Romance of Magno Rubio.” The story of course is not a realistic but a
satiric portrayal of a contrived situation, with strong allegorical and
didactic elements. Like the vignettes in Laughter, both story and
play mobilize the tendentious potential of caricature, incongruities, and
ribald exaggeration found in the genre. They ingeniously expose the fakery
of the invented and fantasized object inhabiting Magno’s imagination, a
fantasy-contagion that infects all the “little brown brothers” from the
Asian colony. Here, of course, the Americanism or American Dream whose
quasi-floating signifier is the figure of Clarabelle—the fixation on
money, consumer goods, white-skin privilege, etc.—which is humorously
exploded as a mirage, a hallucination. The recurring refrain, attributed
to Claro, the astute letter-writer, already foregrounds the hyperbolic
discrepancies to which the honest Magno Rubio seems wrongheadedly blind:
Magno Rubio. Filipino boy. Four-foot
six inches tall. Dark as a coconut. Head small on a body like a turtle.
Magno Rubio. Picking tomatoes on a
California hillside for twenty-five cents
an hour. Filipino boy. In love with a girl one hundred ninety-five pounds
of flesh and bones on bare feet. A girl twice his size sideward and
upward, Claro said… (1996, 118)
But are Claro and
Nick, the knowing smart guys, always to be trusted? Magno’s “love” turns
out to be a collective trauma, a group fixation, to which systematic
education (or miseducation, as Renato Constantino would put it) and
ideological manipulation in the colony, among other forces, had made these
lonely bachelors highly susceptible. The “romance” in the title, caused
partly by anti-miscenegation laws but mainly by their colonized/racialized
position, refers to this collective psychic illness whose origin and cure
seems to inhere in the unsettled, unfixed but also regimented condition of
contracted/recruited workers from the colony. Unlike the Chinese, Japanese
and Koreans, Filipinos bear the singularity of being considered “savages”
or “barbaric” for their fierce resistance to American “pacifying” troops
circa 1899-1902 (as witness the “water cure,” retrenchment of entire
villages, anti-sedition laws, and other ethnocidal measures) and their
obssession with independence. Disillusionment for Magno begets a sense of
pathos, but comic distance supervenes, and life returns to routine work in
the end.
This theme of sharing
a perceived good or value, whether it is an object, person, information,
or a dream, finds a memorable embodiment in the story “The End of the
War.” I should point out that the publication of this story in the New
Yorker in September 1944 occasioned a charge of plagiarism against
Allos, which the magazine settled out of court. For this, Allos was
vilified in the Philippines
by journalists like I.P. Soliongco and others who disliked his radical
politics. The charge is not serious, I think, because Allos’ story is not
an exact copy of “The Dream of Angelo Zara” by Guido D’Agostino. There is
an obvious similarity of plot, in the same way that Shakespeare’s plays
borrowed plots from Italian, Greek, Roman and other sources. While for
D’Agostino’s Italian characters, the dream of seeing Mussolini dead is
shared and passed on from one character to another, none privatizing the
original, in Allos’ story, one person’s dream of the occupying Japanese
soldiers surrendering to the Filipino infantry testifies to Allos’ desire
for the empowerment of the entire community, not just for individual
self-gratification. This is a key difference that makes “The End of the
War” quite exceptional in refracting the anomie-ridden, violently
disintegrated life of the “Manongs.”
On the whole, the
characterization, setting, imagery, and style all exhibit Allos’ singular
trademark, with an uncanny resemblance to the collective sharing of an
illusion in “The Romance of Magno Rubio.” There is the same exchange of a
value without the mediation of money or some reifying fetish. In
Laughter, Allos reworked many traditional fables and anecdotes
whose provenance in Arabic and Indian folklore is well-known and whose
plots, motifs, and character-types continue to be reproduced by authors in
many languages and cultures. It is the folk, the people, who function as
the original authors; Allos’ task was to mediate between this world of
subaltern folk and the world of industrialized capitalist modernity.
We are not sure all
of Allos’ characters in “The Romance” derive from the peasantry. All
display in varying degrees the naivete, cunning, intelligence, resiliency
and solidarity of peasants whose labor, while alienating, also preserves a
certain humanity in them. Magno and his worker-friends were definitely not
“guests of the State,” nor immigrants; they were, as many have noticed,
colonial wards subject to all the disciplinary regime of
anti-miscegenation laws, prohibitions and exclusions of all kinds. But the
whole lesson of AIH is the transformation of the Filipino subaltern
consciousness, fragmented but at the same time cosmic and global, into a
critical and cohesively class conscious intelligence, through the process
of affiliating with the organized political movement of a multiracial
working class. This act of self-liberation through class liberation,
however, is incomplete unless it is dialectically mediated through the
emancipation of the colonized homeland, through national liberation. I
think this is the ultimate lesson that cannot be gained without reading
The Cry and the Dedication, the 1952 Yearbook, and the social
contexts informing them.
Vogue of transnationalisque chic
There is a fashion
nowadays of claiming to be cosmopolitan or transnational as a safeguard
against neoconservative fundamentalism, a latter-day version of
multicultural Americanism, or pragmatic American Exceptionalism (see Ponce
2005; San Juan 2004). Transnationalism, however, apologizes for the
hegemonic pluralism that legitimates imperial conquests and justifies the
predatory market consumerism that passes for globalization. There is no
escape from distinguishing between imperial nationalism and
national-liberation struggles of oppressed peoples. What Hobsbawm once
said remains true despite the vogue of neoliberal globalization: “The
scale of modern class consciousness is wider than in the past, but it is
essentially’national’ and not global… The decisive aspects of economic
reality may be global, but the palpable, the experienced economic reality,
the things which directly and obviously affect the lives and livelihoods
of people, are those of Britain, the United States, France, etc.” (1984,
22). Allos’ sensibility, with its peasant/populist ethos, mutated via a
process of self-education and disillusionment into the more focused
class-consciousness of the writer committed to the concrete program of
union reforms and specific political principles of which the rejection of
imperialism, segregation and racial apartheid, and support for the
emancipation of colonies, are obligatory demands.
One of Allos’ last
public act of commitment to his vocation is the campaign to defend Chris
Mensalvas and Ernesto Mangaong, militant leaders and officers of Local 37,
ILWU, who were facing deportation, accused of being communists. The
leaflet accompanying this campaign against Cold War McCarthyism condemns
“the drive to deport foreign labor leaders” as “part of the hysteria that
is terrifying the nation today. It is the vicious method of Big Business
Race Haters to cripple organized labor and its gains, destroy civil rights
and liberties, and abrogate the American Constitution.” Allos wrote a
poem, “I Want the Wide American Earth” (echoing the earlier poem, “If You
Want to Know What We Are”) to benefit the Defense Fund. In it he affirms
that we, the multitude of productive men and women “have the truth/ On our
side, we have the future with us” and “we are the creators of a flowering
race.” (1979, 15). It is a Whitmanesque ode charged with universalist and
utopian impulses, invoking a cosmic protagonist, an heroic egalitarian
multitude. That millenarian or chiliastic tendency persists, though in a
muted subterranean form, in The Cry, whose bold counterpoint is the
recovery, simultaneously hypothetical and imperative, of a free and
prosperous homeland.
Ultimo Adios
Always mindful
(unlike his critics) of the need for anyone passing judgment on the world
to factor in his/her position in self-reflexive critique, Allos gives
advice to his nephew at the end of World War II that witnessed decisive
and irreversible transformations in his life, and the beginning of the
Cold War, a new era of social cataclysms. I conclude here with an excerpt
from Allos’ letter to his nephew dated April 1, 1948:
And when you are old
enough to go away, Arthur, do not hesitate to go out and face life. And
whatever the future has in store for you, I request you to challenge it
first before giving up. But never forget your family, your town, your
people, your country, wherever you go. Your greatness lies in them…If
someday you will discover that you are a genius, do not misuse your gift;
apply it toward the safeguarding of our great heritage, the grandeur of
our history, the realization of our great men’s dream for a free and good
Philippines. That is real genius; it is not selfish; it sacrifices itself
for the good of the whole community. We Filipinos must be proud that we
had the greatest genius in Jose Rizal, who sacrificed his life and
happiness for the people (1988, 36). (Facsimile of letter reproduced in
Campomanes and Gernes 1988, 31-37)
* One of the
points I raised in my paper—accessible to all, courtesy of IN OUR OWN
VOICE—is the need for scholars to do the necessary detective work and
document Allos’ fabled “mobility” which has puzzled or confused numerous
Asian American pundits. In short, we need more critical research into
Allos’ life in the
Philippines and here from his birth to his death on Sept. 11, 1956.
We need younger
unprejudiced scholars to shift through the papers in the Bulosan archive
at the U of Washington Library, and elsewhere, and classify everything in
a systematic way. Because of the neglect of this necessary work, texts
like All the Conspirators have appeared which cannot be authenticated
properly. The late Dolores Feria and others suspect that many
writer-friends who helped Allos throughout the years, in various
capacities, had a hand in many of his texts, some even responsible (in my
view) of composing them. Too bad that Josephine Patrick and Sanora Babb
can no longer answer our questions; but their papers, in particular those
of the Babb sisters, may provide clues. Numerous letters to a wide variety
of correspondents here and in the Philippines need to be added to the
pioneering collection that Feria edited in 1960, Sound of Falling Light.
In a letter of
Sept 30, 1976, PC Morantte disputes the birthdate of Nov. 24, 1914 which
Allos put down in his autobiographical sketch for Stanley Kunitz’s
Twentieth Century Authors (1955)—Morante believes it was Nov. 14, 1914. In
the sketch for Poetry magazine, Allos put down Nov. 24, 1913 and his
arrival in Seattle on July 22, 1930, compared to 1931 in the earlier
account.Morrante also contends that, based on information from Allos’
brother Aurelio, Allos finished third year high school (not three
semesters) in 1929, serving as editor of his high school newspaper.
*Remarks
delivered at the Bulosan Symposium, Library of Congress, Washington DC,
April 28, 2006
REFERENCES:
Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000. Pascalian Meditations.
Stanford: Stanford University P.
Bulosan, Carlos. 1944. “Manuel L. Quezon—THE GOOD FIGHT!”
Bataan
(August): 13-15.
-----. 1978. The Philippines Is
in the Heart. Quezon City: New Day Press.
-----. 1979. “I Want the Wide American Earth,” Unity
(July 13), 15.
-----. 1988. “Two letters.” In “Two Letters from America:
Carlos Bulosan and the Act of Writing” by Oscar Campomanes and Todd Gernes.
MELUS 15.3 (Fall): 31-46.
----. 1996. “The Romance of Magno Rubio.” In Asian
American Literature, edited by Shawn Wong. New York: Addison-Wesley
Educational Publishers, Inc.
Campomanes, Oscar and Todd Gernes. 1988. “Two Letters
from America: Carlos Bulosan and the Act of Writing.” MELUS 15.3
(Fall): 15-46.
D’Agostino, Guido. 1943. The Best American Short
Stories 1943, edited by Martha Foley. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.
Folsom, Franklin. 1994. Days of Anger, Days of Hope.
Boulder, CO:
University of Colorado Press.
Morantte, P.C. Personal letter to me, dated Sept. 30,
1976.
Mostern, Kenneth. 1995. “Why is America in the Heart?”
Critical Mass, 2.2 (Spring): 35-64.
Pomeroy, William. 1970. American Neo-Colonialism.
New York: International Publishers.
Ponce, Martin Joseph. 2005. “On Becoming Socially
Articulate.” Journal of Asian American Studies 8.1 (February):
49-80.
San Juan, E., ed. 1995. On
Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of
Carlos Bulosan.
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
----. 1996. “Searching for the Heart of America?” In
Teaching American Ethnic Literatures, edited by John Maitino and David
Peck. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 259-72.
-----. 2004. Working Through the Contradictions: From
Cultural Theory to Critical Practice. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell
University Press.
Smith, Herminia U. 2006. E-mail to Reme Grefalda, dated
March
24, 2006.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
E. SAN JUAN, Jr. directs the
Philippines Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut, USA. He will be
Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Center, Italy, this Fall
2006. His recent books are Sapagkat Iniibig Kita and the reissued Toward a
People’s Literature both published by the University of the Philippines
Press; also Racism and Cultural Studies (Duke U Press), Working Through
the Contradictions (Bucknell U Press) and the forthcoming In the Wake of
Terror: Class, Race and Nation in the Field of Global Capital (Lexington
Books).
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