Despite the defeat of the anti-imperialist insurgency, Filipinos who grew up in the first three decades of the last century absorbed the ideals and passion for independence which saturated the milieu and resonated up to the outbreak of World War II. Philip’s will to autonomy is displayed in his realistic attitude to religion—for him, “churches are only as good as what they do, not what they say” (2000, 80)—a practicable stance easily harmonized with his emphasis on what he calls traditional Filipino values of helpfulness, understanding, and loyalty.
The racialized subjugation of the natives, the arguably genocidal extermination of over one million Filipinos resisting U.S. aggression, continued through a dual policy of coercion and “Benevolent Assimilation.” Eventually the U.S. coopted the elite and used the patron-client system to pacify the seditious peasantry. The Americanization of the Filipino through selective education and the liberal habitus of a “free-market” order, side by side with feudal or tributary institutions, produced the subaltern mentality which one will find in most Filipinos then (and up to now, in the professional stratum and the petty bourgeoisie in general), particularly those recruited for work in the Hawaiian plantations, the student pensionados sent by the colonial government, or those who, like Philip and Bulosan, chose on their own to pursue the adventure of making their fortune in the U.S. in the years of the Great Depression.
Unlike in Iraq and Afghanistan today, U.S. colonizing strategy in early twentieth-century drew from the experience of the brutal taming of the American Indians and the juridical/ideological policing of blacks, Tejanos, Chinese, etc. Class and ethnic stratification via mass public education regulated the rigor of industrialization while the few exceptional cases of successful careers gave an illusion of mobility and possibilities of change. The gradual but inexorable movement from the impoverished rural village to the modern city and then to the North American continent replaced the lure of revolutionary ideals. The impact of the defeat of the armed nationalist movement registered in different ways for every Filipino migrant—one needs to qualify here that Filipinos were not technically immigrants until the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935 when entry of Filipinos was limited to 50 every year. One can say that the primal scenario of defeat bred suspicion, not trust; however, every Filipino of peasant or working-class origin had to settle account with that “curse” by sly, cunning accommodation or by hidden forms of civil disobedience if she or he wants to show fidelity to the promise of being responsible to family and community.
For Bulosan, the personal experience of peasant revolts brutally put down by the U.S. in the twenties allowed him to see in collective suffering a promise and hope of liberation. He interpreted every episode in his life as part of this narrative of transformation. Thus early union organizing by the CIO in the West Coast and the popular front of intellectuals—especially the international front against fascism in Spain and Europe–made it possible for him to withstand the cruelties of the McCarthy repression in the fifties and the equally brutal suppression of the Communist-led peasant uprising in the Philippines in the late forties and fifties. The symbolic action of the native’s laughter at his fate produced a catharsis that helped him recover from disillusionment. Hence the pattern of life for the Bulosan protagonist in his fiction is that of the young peasant who gets his education from community/worker struggles, pan-ethnic solidarity with all the oppressed (including women), and from his conviction that underneath the ruin of his dreams, the temporary deprivations and exclusions, survives the image of “America” as the embodiment of equality, dignity and material prosperity for all, a condition that will be brought about by mass struggles and personal sacrifices. It was a narrative of maturation, learning from collective experience, and a celebration of universal togetherness, a belonging to a redemptive fraternity. Bulosan arrived in Seattle in the thirties without any possessions and died in Seattle in the fifties penniless, but supported and acclaimed by a large vibrant community of workers and colleagues of various ethnic and racial backgrounds throughout the country.
With Philip Vera Cruz, this typical narrative acquired some telling if commonplace deviations. It was a narrative of emancipation, no doubt, but also a story of disenchantment and a caustic tale of reserved affirmation of the human comedy.
In broad outline, Philip’s life conforms to Bulosan’s in that both were colonized subjects from the Philippines, and both participated in the anti-capitalist reform-minded struggle of multiethnic farmworkers, but they were also two unique individuals. As Sartre once said in wrestling with the problem of how one can define the individuality of members of the same group: “Valery is a petty bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about that. But not every petty bourgeois intellectual is Valery.” Philip shared the same subject-position as millions of his countrymen: “Because of our colonial education we looked up to anything American as good” (2000, 11); but he diverged in overturning the dominant hierarchy of values, valorizing integrity and faithfulness to one’s words, solidarity, as the universal measure.
Key to the difference lies in Philip’s more independent temperament that was manifest early; for example, he defied his parents in going to school despite their refusal or indifference. Philip was able to pay for his passage from the sale of the last piece of family property. His family did not go through the more arduous ordeals of Bulosan’s clan in strife-torn Pangasinan province. Philip accepted the beneficent claims of U.S. education, not questioning its ideological function; so he finished high school in Washington in between hoeing beets in North Dakota, earning income as a busboy in a country club in Spokane, Washington, and doing various chores in Chicago. In Chicago, however, Philip engaged in intellectual pursuits, he was active in various community organizations; he also studied for a while at Gonzaga University in Spokane before being drafted into the army in 1942. What is unusual is that even though Philip learned the art of survival in the cities where Filipinos were discriminated and ostracized, he did not experience the violent racist attacks that Bulosan and other Filipinos suffered in California and Washington in the thirties and forties. Philip quietly accepted subaltern status so long as he could send money to his family back home.
