Historical Significance of the
100th Year of Filipino Arrival in Hawaii in the
Early 20th Century
What signifies this
Centennial? Could it be the rebirth of the Filipino as multicultural
citizen of a borderless world, as zealous hawkers of the nomadic,
multivocal, heterogeneous Pinoy contend? Certainly it is not the
resurrection of the “Flip” or the “little brown brother” as a refurbished
Stephen Fetchit in a non-stop minstrelsy ”Pilipino Cultural Night” of
tinikling, kiyeme and Maganda dogeaters.
BY E. SAN JUAN, JR.
Posted by Bulatlat
Farewell, my
adored Land, region of the sun caressed,
Pearl of the Orient Sea, our Eden lost….
-- Jose Rizal
On the
Asiatic coast, washed by the waves of the ocean, lie the smiling
Philippines…. There, American rifles mowed down human lives in heaps.
--
Rosa
Luxemburg
They are
even afraid of our songs of love, my brother….
--
Carlos
Bulosan
An estimated
3,000 Filipinos leave the country everyday, roughly a million every year.
In 2004, 8.08 million Filipinos out of 80 million had left the country.
Today, with a population totaling 88 million, that would run to about 9-10
million, with about 3-4 million in North America, and the rest scattered
around the world. About 3.5 cadavers of overseas Filipinos (now an entry
in the Wikipedia), or OFWs (Overseas Filipino workers), land at the Manila
International Airport — not as famous as Flor Contemplacion or Maricris
Sioson, but scandalous enough to merit attention.
Balikbayan
cadavers? This may prove that despite the borderless world of predatory
global capitalism today, as the English-speaking Pinay celebrity Patricia
Evangelista once orated, Filipinos always return to their home—or “the
idea of a home,” after thousands of Filipino nurses have served the United
Kingdom’s National Health Service, or a quarter-of-a-million Filipino
seafarers have sweated it out in foreign commercial ships. Not to worry;
many come home alive, if bruised or brutalized; never mind, the dollars
(amounting last year to $10.7 billion) of these new investors, or “bagong
bayani” (modern-day heroes) -- as Tita Cory acclaimed them -- have
saved Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s skin, sustained the glamorous lives of a
few oligarchic families, and glorified the Philippines as a proud supplier
of skilled human power to the world’s affluent citizens in the North
(Europe, North America, Japan, the Asian “Tigers), and in developing
nations (Middle East, Africa).
So we are
indeed extremely generous. We are investing more in the over-development
of Europe and petrodollar-rich Arab kingdoms than in our country where we
are witnessing, in slow motion, the irreversible collapse of the
health-care system. Who cares, anyway? Not the hustlers in Malacañang or
the Batasan. With drastic cutbacks in funding for education and other
social services, with more than one billion pesos siphoned off to fund a
counter-insurgency “all-out war” to kill dissenting Filipinos, some in the
New People’s Army (NPA), the rest as ordinary journalists, lawyers, public
servants, Bayan Muna activists, and so on. Meanwhile, the notorious Armed
Forces of the Philippines (AFP) continues its rampage of massacring
Muslims, Igorots, Lumads, left and right, aside from the over 700
civilians already killed. We are faced with the impending total breakdown
of Arroyo’s kingdom, confronted by disgruntled businessmen, Catholic
bishops, millions of workers and peasants massing in various metropolitan
centers to mount rallies before the guns of ruthless police and soldiers
and hired thugs.
Keep the
dollars flowing in to pay the debt, oligarchs pray, or the World Bank and
financial despots will come in and pronounce doom. Can a remittance
society survive in the long run? The uninterrupted flow of remittance is
contingent on an inherently unstable precarious labor market, a market
completely unpredictable, mortgaged to the essentially precarious,
crisis-ridden globalized capitalist economy. The “war on global terrorism”
threatens the smooth flow of remittance everyday, the value of currency,
computer servers, etc. The first and second Iraq Wars led to the
dislocation of thousands of contract workers. War measures against Iran,
North Korea, and other U.S.-declared “axes of evil” are bound to choke
off, if not totally cut off, this flow of dollars to keep afloat Arroyo,
her bureaucratic clique, and the comprador elite—the privileged minority
who, for a century, has colluded with the U.S. and other foreign corporate
interests in keeping the country an underdeveloped, dependent, subordinate
appendage of the Empire. With the environment ruined, the infrastructure
wasted, and most educated Filipinos abroad carrying their “damaged
culture,” as one American expert put it, there might be no viable “home”
to which Patricia’s compatriots can return to and spend their golden
retirement years.
Meanwhile,
the fabled ascendancy of this overseas “middle” class – a freakish
diaspora of sorts mimicking the Indian and Chinese migration in modern
times – has led to stagnation and near collapse. As Richard Paddock
recently noted in a Los Angeles Times (April 20, 2006) report on
this phenomenon, the much touted “booming economy” of Arroyo & her
generals “can’t create even the 1.5 million jobs a year needed to keep up
with population growth.” No wonder, the Philippine health care system is
in ruins, the public schools a wreck, families disintegrated, and the
system corrupted thoroughly by the profits gained by bureaucrats,
politicians, recruiting agencies, etc. from the misery of millions of OFWs.
Who cares, anyway?
Let us turn
to the erstwhile land of promise, the “home of the free and the brave.”
While there are now close to three million Filipinos in the United States
(not counting the “TNTs” (tago nang tago, literally illegal immigrants)
either as citizens or permanent residents, the majority by habit or
prudent decision still consider the Philippines their real and only
homeland. This unless they have opted to become Anglos by sheer
self-denial, shame, or suicide by self-delusion. Even if they modify their
ethnic identity as “Filipino-American,” they are perceived as “Filipino”
by the majoritarian optic in this racial polity governed by the ethos of
white supremacy. Their country of origin, their nationality, is reproduced
by the logic of cultural pluralism that underlies U.S. immigration and
naturalization ideology and policy. This logic is demonstrated everyday in
the immigration debate, by the proponents of a liberal “guest worker”
program or by the neo-conservative scheme of a heavily militarized border.
To be sure, the immigration problem masks the fundamental reality of
fierce class war waged everyday by the corporate elite, now led by Bush
and his neo-conservative clique, against the majority of citizens, in
particular against people of color. Did Patricia say a “borderless” world
where love for one’s neighbour is dutifully observed?
But
Filipinos will go on, according to the cliché, “come hell or high water….”
Recall how many Filipinos said, when the government prohibited travel to
Iraq because of Angelo de la Cruz’s kidnapping, that they would rather go
to Iraq to work and be killed instantly rather than die a slow death in
their “beloved Philippines.” Lives of quiet desperation? Survival of the
fittest by adaptation to a fixed environment, or to the pressure of
changing historical circumstances? Thoreau! Darwin! Hegel! Wisdom of the
sages is needed, but the Hobbesian Leo Strauss and Rortyan pragmatism seem
to trump everything in our born-again computerized Disneyland.
History,
however unpredictable, can be ultimately understood. Until the nature of
the U.S. racial polity (founded on white supremacy/Herrenvolk
Exceptionalism) is changed, the “Filipino” will survive despite
assimilation or self-denial. What this “Filipino” might be, remains to be
seen. And despite globalization, the system of nation-states and the
hierarchy of international power politics will persist until genuine
equality among nations and peoples becomes, via a revolutionary
transformation, a reality.
Despite the
unrecognized majority status of Filipinos in the Asian American category,
Filipinos remain marginalized and racialized due to physical markers,
accent, association by name, and other knowable reasons. One key reason is
historical: the first Philippine Republic, victorious over Spanish rule,
was destroyed by invading U.S. forces in the Filipino-American War of 1899
up to 1913. Over one million Filipinos died fighting for national
self-determination. We became colonial subjects, subalterns of the U.S.
Empire. Throughout the twentieth century, Filipinos rebelled – via
strikes, seditious theater, peasant insurrections, clandestine newspapers,
etc. – and fought for justice and independence. We wanted boundaries to
mark and delineate the territory of the Filipino nation as well as the
sovereignty of the nation-state called the Philippines.
What follows
are propositions that can be examined and discussed, depending on one’s
perspective. Some are banalities, some hypothetical assertions. In any
case, here they are:
We Filipinos
are proud to have a long and durable revolutionary tradition that
identifies our collective belonging. The first Filipinos recruited by the
Hawaiian plantations – and, later on, by the Alaskan canneries and
California agribusiness-- distinguished themselves not only by diligent
work but by militant resistance to exploitation. We use this occasion to
pay homage to Pablo Manlapit, Pedro Calosa, Chris Mensalvas, Ernesto
Mangaong, Carlos Bulosan, Philip Vera Cruz, and nameless others (in the
International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union; United Farm
Workers, and so on) who sacrificed their lives to uphold Filipino
self-respect and autonomy. At the least, they fought for human dignity.
They not only fought for principles of class, gender and racial equality,
but also for respect for their nationality and ethnic integrity. Personal
honor, class identity, and nationality constituted one dialectical
constellation of values and norms.
Reality is
always contradictory, and changes are never uniform and reducible to easy
generalizations. Since the end of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986, more
than nine million Filipinos, now known as Overseas Filipino workers, have
been scattered around the planet. Because the homeland remains a
neocolonized dependency, economic backwardness accounts for severe
unemployment. In the fifties, Ramon Magsaysay promised and delivered some
token homesteads to Huk surenderees, at the expense of the Moros. But that
propaganda frontier, that illusory “safety valve,” is gone. After all, it
was simply a Cold War “promise” designed to defeat the impatient Huk
Politburo.
Today, the
Philippines has been integrated into the neo-liberal global market, thanks
to Aquino, Ramos, Estrada and Arroyo. This is Patricia’s borderless dream
world of buy-and-sell, of the certain freedom of starving if no one buys
your labor-power. Filipinos have to “sell” themselves in the predatory
globalized market. Can we envision Filipinos as part of a world
proletariat arming themselves for a general mass strike, as Rosa Luxemburg
prophesied for twentieth-century Europe? Will Filipinos participate in
storming the barricades of Wall Street and other centers of corporate
power? One recalls the mass demonstrations organized by Migrante and other
groups in Hong Kong, North America, Italy, and other countries, against
Arroyo’s Proclamation No. 1017 and the continuing brutalization of
opponents by torture, extra-judicial killings, “disappearances,” and so
on.
Once upon a
time, according to Fred Cordova’s version of history in Filipinos:
Forgotten Asian-Americans, Filipinos died for Americanism; Filipinos
wanted to be 200 percent Americans as they fought side by side with their
colonizers in Bataan and Corregidor. Recently, Itty Abraham of the
East-West Center in Hawaii, noted how “the imperial wheel had turned full
circle” when, in 1945, Filipino veterans were finally awarded full U.S.
citizenship for their military service to the country.” Unfortunately, the
U.S. Congress rescinded in 1946 the rights of these same veterans. Of the
original 141,000, only 29,000 survive; 8,000 reside in the U.S., the rest
in the Philippines. Even if the Filipino Veterans Bill is approved,
benefits will not be extended to those veterans living in the Philippines.
“Americanism,” anyone?
Meanwhile,
immediately after 9/11, over 465 Filipinos, some already U.S. citizens,
were deported as criminals, manacled during the 22-hour chartered flight
to the homeland. Under the white-supremacist USA Patriot Act, according to
Jay Mendoza of FOCUS, the entire Filipino community—not just individuals
like the Cuevas family of Fremont, California-- is under attack. An
estimated 300,000 Filipino immigrants will be deported from the U.S.,
according to a Department of Foreign Affairs official in the Philippines.
Whither Americanism a century hence?
What
signifies this Centennial? Could it be the rebirth of the Filipino as
multicultural citizen of a borderless world, as zealous hawkers of the
nomadic, multivocal, heterogeneous Pinoy contend? Certainly it is not the
resurrection of the “Flip” or the “little brown brother” as a refurbished
Stephen Fetchit in a non-stop minstrelsy ”Pilipino Cultural Night” of
tinikling, kiyeme and Maganda dogeaters. In any case,
it is timely to celebrate the Centennial by noting that Filipinos in the
U.S. form a decisive contingent of this evolving diaspora because of its
location, not yet their collective praxis, in the metropole of the global
hegemon. The ideology of “Americanism” retooled to fit the
neoconservative “civilizing mission” of the “New American Century” still
prevails, despite the Foucauldean negotiations of assimilated “model
minority” cheerleaders of the community.
Of course,
location is not enough; but being dis-located is a strategic disadvantage
since you need orientation to find one’s direction and accomplish
collective goals. Otherwise, you are at the mercy of sharks, sirens, and
destructive currents. The pathos of the OFW’s predicament is captured
powerfully by Angelo de la Cruz’s response after his release by his
kidnappers in Iraq in July 2004: “They kept saying I was a hero…a symbol
of the Philippines. To this day I keep wondering what it is I have
become.” What have I become? So what have we become as displaced and
transported Filipinos outside our homeland, the imagined but realizable
and knowable community of our fears, loves, and longings? “By the waters
of Babylon, there we sat down, yea…” yearning for our lost Eden, singing
forbidden songs under constant surveillance by the FBI, CIA. Border
patrols, Minutemen, and so on.
We are not
transmigrants or transnationals, to be sure, despite the lucubrations of
academic pundits and exoticizing media. To speak plainly, we are Filipinos
uprooted and dispersed from hearth and communal habitat. We will find our
true home if there is a radical systemic change in the metropole and, more
crucially, a popular-democratic transformation in the Philippines. Short
of a world without classes and nation-states, without the bourgeoisie
“screwing” (to quote the idiom of some famous rappers) the masses, in the
meantime, we need to “cultivate our garden,” as a French philosophe
once said. What else bears repeating? Only a free, prosperous, genuinely
sovereign Philippines can give Filipinos here and Pinays/Pinays everywhere
their authentic identity and empower them as creative, resourceful humans
in a world of free, equal associated producers. Mabuhay tayong lahat!
Bulatlat
[This is a
longer version of a brief message sent originally to the Migrant Heritage
Commission for their Program Honoring the Filipino Migrants, June 10,
2006, at the Hyatt Regency Crystal Hotel, Arlington, Virginia. For an
elaboration of the themes and theses of this message see the author’s
books:
Racial
Formations/Critical Transformations (Humanities Press, 1992) ;
The Philippine Temptation (Temple U Press, 1996); From Exile to
Diaspora (Westview, 1998); After Postcolonialism (Rowman &
Littlefield, 2000); Working Through the Contradictions (Bucknell U
Press, 2004); and online articles: <http://www.boondocksnet.com/centennial/sctexts/esj_returning_diaspora.html
>
<http://www.palhbooks.com/juan.htm> <http://www.oovrag.com/essay2006a-1.shtml>]
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
E. San Juan, Jr. , director of the Philippines
Cultural Studies Center (Connecticut), received his degrees from the
University of the Philippines and Harvard University. He will be a
Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at the Bellagio Center, Italy, this Fall. He
was recently Fulbright professor of American Studies at the Katholieke
Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and visiting professor of literature at
National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. Among his recent books are Beyond
Postcolonial Theory (Palgrave), Racism and Cultural Studies (Duke U
Press), Toward a People’s Literature (reissued by the University of the
Philippines Press), Working through the Contradictions (Bucknell U Press),
and Himagsik (De La Salle U Press). In press are Balikbayang Sinta: An E.
San Juan Reader (Ateneo de Manila U Press) and From Globalization to
National Liberation (U.P. Press).
BACK TO
TOP ■
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION ■
COMMENT
© 2006 Bulatlat
■
Alipato Media Center
Permission is granted to reprint or redistribute this article, provided
its author/s and Bulatlat are properly credited and notified.