On The Presence of Filipinos in the United States and Other Essays by E. San Juan, Jr. (Salinas, California: SRMNK Publishers, 2007. 114 pp., $12.50)

BY JEFFREY ARELLANO CABUSAO*
Contributed to Bulatlat
Vol. VII, No. 24, July 22-28, 2007

Toward the end of their 2005 dialogue homegrown: engaged cultural criticism, African-American feminist bell hooks and Chicana artist Amalia Mesa-Bains argue that the reality of post 9/11 forms of racism within the United States (specifically, the role of white racism in the national debate around immigration) and its connection with the U.S. occupation of Iraq “call into question all of our academic theories about postcoloniality” (132). Mesa-Bains states, “… we’re not ‘over’ colonialism. Just think about the undocumented workers who died on 9/11; their names were never added to any lists, and their families were never given any reparation” (132). If these undocumented workers could be added to a list, it would be one that speaks to a long genocidal history of racist violence committed against peoples of color in the United States and well as in the Global South. The invisibility of undocumented workers, which has recently been challenged by hundreds of thousands of immigrants who rallied across the nation in April 2006, is a condition of racial “otherness” that is shared with other communities of color within and without the U.S. nation-state.

E. San Juan, Jr., an internationally renowned Filipino cultural critic and literary scholar located in the United States, offers a thorough rethinking of the very methodological approaches and ideological assumptions that undergird the idea that we’re “over” colonialism in his new book On the Presence of Filipinos in the United States (2007). Today, Filipinos in the United States constitute the largest Asian Pacific American group; they “number nearly three million, with over 70,000 coming every year” (San Juan, 22). Given these numbers, how do we account for the complete ignorance in contemporary U.S. society with regard to the formation of Filipino American communities? How do we account for the indeterminate otherness of the Filipino in the United States?

San Juan encourages us to understand the historical development of the Filipino-American community as inextricably interconnected with the unfolding of Philippine society, the Filipino Diaspora, and the history of U.S. Empire. With the brutal and bloody U.S. suppression of Filipino national sovereignty in which one million Filipinos were slaughtered (Filipino-American War, 1898-1902), the Philippines became a possession of the United States. Filipinos, in turn, became “colonial subjects, subalterns of the U.S. Empire” (San Juan, 10). From 1907-1949, Filipino migrant workers, many of whom originated from the Philippine peasantry, were exploited within the United States: “Over one hundred thousand ‘Pinoys/Pinays’ and ‘Manongs’ (affectionate terms of address) helped to build the infrastructure of U.S. industrial capitalism as the major labor force in agribusiness in Hawaii and the West Coast” (San Juan, 20).

The post-1965 immigration patterns (the movement of professionals from the Global South to the North) did not do much to change the material conditions of Filipinos in the United States. San Juan explains why the “model minority” category cannot be applied to the (now) largest segment of Asian Pacific America:

“The post-1965 contingent of Filipinos decisively altered the character of the Filipino community: 85 percent were high school graduates, most were professionals and highly skilled personnel who fitted the demands of the U.S. economy. But because of race- biased licensing and hiring practices, they found themselves underemployed or marginalized… Although highly educated, with professional, military or technical backgrounds, fluent in English and nestled in large relatively stable families (average households include 5.4 persons of which two at least are employed), Filipinos in general earn less than whites and all other Asian groups, except the Vietnamese. With women workers in the majority, Filipinos are invisible or absent in the prestigious managerial positions… Labor market segmentation, cultural assimilation under U.S. neocolonial hegemony, and persistent institutional racism explain the inferior status of Filipinos.” (22-23).

Racism is ingrained and embedded not only within the social and cultural life of the United States, but also within its very economic structures and its asymmetrical global relations of power.

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