It was not until Philip settled in Delano in 1943 and began working in the grape vineyards that he would be exposed to the overt racial segregation, hostility, and institutional harassment that Filipinos experienced every day. I think it was Philip’s knowledge of diverse settings, modalities of survival and adjustment, as well as his uninterrupted devotion to supporting his brother and sister by regular remittances, that enabled Philip to maintain some distance from the plight of the Filipino community even while being categorized as belonging to that politically and economically subordinated group. His civic consciousness was dormant, his capabilities as a citizen untapped by any mediating political or social institution that could turn them into actual powers.
It is also revealing that Philip did not display the more reflexive astuteness that Bulosan showed in his dealings with compatriots, perhaps due to the latter’s health problems and physical inability to really earn a living. Philip was able to manage and still save money to send home to his mother, a fulfillment of his vow to his father. Despite accommodation to city life, Philip expressed an appreciation not for the pastoral innocence of the countryside but for the independence of the farmer cultivating productive land, for the self-disciplined industriousness of “simple folk,” which contrasted sharply with the deceit and betrayal rampant in urban life. After leaving his birthplace, Saoang, Ilocos Sur, and “crossing the Pacific in search of a better life, wandering around the U.S. for many years,” Philip finally returned to a rural place resembling his natal village, though he also was painfully cognizant of the disparity: “Saoang was green, lush, tropical….and there was always the sight of the blue ocean that contrasted so beautifully with the rolling green foothills that came down almost to the water, whereas Delano is flat, hot but dry, with almost no green vegetation except what’s planted on the farms, and no bodies of water” (2000, 7).
Philip celebrated the “Saong tradition of migrant work” in the 1940s when the New Deal was being tested in factories and fields. Despite his direct acquaintance with racism, Philip never showed any tendency to chauvinist exclusivism; he acknowledged the influence of his Anglo friend Bill Berg from New York—Philip would talk to Filipinos about how “white people had also fought for freedom and are also revolutionaries, that the minority in this country cannot fully succeed without the help of all freedom fighters, whatever the color of their skin” (2000, 23). After the victory over fascist Germany and militarist Japan, the U.S. entered the era of the Cold War. Times changed and labor-capital antagonisms, muted by white supremacy and Western chauvinism, simmered under the surface (for a good historical background to the farmworker’s movement, see Kushner 1975).
One of the major events that produced a decisive swerve in Philip’s life, even if not consciously recognized in words, took place in his witnessing the 1948 Stockton strike led by the veteran labor organizers Chris Mensalvas and Ernesto Mangaong, close friends of Carlos Bulosan. Both organizers were officers of the Cannery Workers Union, ILWU Local 37, in Seattle where Filipinos predominated. Of great significance to Philip was Mensalvas and Mangaong’s successful effort to thwart the government’s attempt to deport them under the anticommunist McCarran Act. Earlier in his life, as field help or restaurant worker, Philip never experienced any sustained involvement in strikes or worker protests. Philip is silent about his views regarding the witch-hunt of left activists, nor does he make any mention of the Huk uprising in the Philippines, nor Mao’s triumph in liberating China, nor of the Korean War. Instead he comments on why Filipinos who entered the U.S. before 1936 (like himself) could not be deported because they were nationals, not aliens. In any case, he emphasizes the importance of the Stockton strike as “the first major agricultural workers strike” before the 1965 Delano strike.
Philip’s education materialized in the school of arduous labor in households, restaurants, factory and field, and in his solidarity meditations. Personal witnessing of farmworker organizing, as well as the testimony of actual participants in the struggle for humane treatment, helped shape Philip’s trust in the competence and sustainable strength of the organized masses to influence the course of their lives, even to the point of converting their passive resignation into active self-determination. Before touching on Philip’s decision to resign from the UFW as a critique of Chavez’s top-down style, I want to introduce the two aspects of identity, the idem and ipse identity, theorized by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, as pivotal elements in the construction of an ethnic autobiography.
So far, what I have reviewed are the events of Philip’s development as reflexive protagonist of his adventure in the U.S. This is a narrative of the development of character, what Ricoeur calls the “self” (idem/sameness) as a permanent structure of qualities or dispositions by which a person is recognized. This structure consists not just of acquired habits but also learned identification with values, norms, ideals, models, heroes, in which the person or the community recognizes itself. This continuity of character should be distinguished from the self as ipse (selfhood) embodied in the phenomenon of promise, “that of keeping one’s word in faithfulness to the word that has been given. Keeping one’s word expresses a self-constancy that, far from implying temporal changelessness, meets the challenge of variation in beliefs and feelings…The continuity of character is one thing, the constancy of friendship quite another” (1983, 106). The question “What am I?” differs from “Who am I?,” the former is sameness without selfhood and the latter selfhood without sameness.
