In the chapter titled, “Philip Vera Cruz: Narrating a Filipino Life in the Imperial Heartland,” San Juan argues that much like the widely known Bulosan, the life of Vera Cruz can serve as a valuable allegory in the ongoing projects to transcend class exploitation and the virility of racial domination. Through a careful examination of Vera Cruz’s engagement in the Civil Rights movement of the sixties and seventies, San Juan demonstrates that a historical understanding of lived experience can serve as a critical point of analysis. This is only applicable when the analysis of the individual is widened beyond the personal to examine and problematize conditions that entire groups of people are situated. San Juan maintains:
“The life-pattern of an individual like Philip Vera Cruz is unique and at the same time typical for a colonized subaltern in the U.S. Empire. But it is not idiosyncratic since he, like thousands of his compatriots from the Philippines (or other subjugated territories) was exposed to the same political, economic and ideological forces that shaped the lives of the majority of migrant workers in the U.S. in the last century.” (68).
While San Juan provides an important embarkation, much more research and scholarship needs to be undertaken examining the transformative praxis of not only Vera Cruz but also other radical labor organizers of color who linked political strategy to a historical understanding of lived experience and international class struggle.
Always present in San Juan’s writing is the devotion to facts, the need to face the harshness of history, and the insistence of examining social relations in its totality. As a result, San Juan engages history in the present tense. This is especially evident in the chapter, titled “Returning from the Diaspora Rediscovering the Homeland.” San Juan provides a theoretical lens to better understand the judgments made by the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT), an international opinion tribunal that is independent from any State authority. In March 2007, the PPT found the presidential administrations of the Philippines and the United States guilty for military repression (i.e. extra-judicial killings, abduction, torture, etc.) and the “gross and systematic violations” of human rights towards the Filipino people. Since 2001, more than 850 workers, activists, educators, peasants, and religious leaders have “disappeared” or been murdered. [2]
In this concluding chapter, San Juan writes with a burning sense of urgency offering recommendations for both scholars and activists motivated by their sincere desires to intervene. He calls for not only resistance but also the formation of alternative models that are united in the objective of maximizing human potential. Ultimately, this requires the transcendence of the present global economic order and the hegemony of the transnational ruling class. San Juan notes the importance of critically engaging Marxism in order to specify the process of social transformation that can potentially lead to emancipation. He maintains:
“We need to acquire a Marxist orientation. This means that if you want to help liberate the Philippines from U.S. neocolonial stranglehold, or express your solidarity with the mass struggles going on, you will want to fight the class enemy right here, in Washington and in the corporate headquarters” (98).
The knowledge that San Juan imparts to assist in our understanding of the capitalist mode of production as a totality is important not only for awareness but also so that we can ultimately transform the complex, historic, and unjust conditions that confront Filipinos in the United States and throughout the world.(Bulatlat.com)
*Mike Viola is with the Graduate School of Educations and Communications, University of California, Los Angeles.
