The exploitation of Filipino labor in the United States is part of a larger historical narrative of the development of U.S. industrial capitalism and the U.S. nation-state as a racial polity: the exploitation of Filipino labor and the U.S. colonization of the Philippines cannot be separated from the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of African Americans, the exploitation of Chicanos/Latinos, Asian workers, etc. Today, the dispersal of 9-10 million Filipino Overseas Contract Workers (OCWs) around the globe is continuation of this historical narrative, specifically of U.S.-Philippine relations within our “new times” of corporate globalization/U.S. Empire. Seventy percent of OCWs are women hired for domestic work. Their labor is exploited around the globe in order to sustain the Philippines as a semi-feudal remittance society.

A population of 89.5 million is attempting to survive within a Philippine society in shambles due to U.S. neocolonial economic control, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and various Structural Adjustment Programs (San Juan, 6; Aguilar, 2007). Each day about three OCWs, whom President Arroyo would like to market to the world as “supermaids,” return in coffins to an increasingly militarized Philippines that has witnessed, over several years, the return of U.S. troops under the Visiting Forces Agreement and the global “war on terrorism” (San Juan, 6; Aguilar, 2007). The militarization of the Philippines is connected to other forms of violence, especially against women. This is evident with the recent Subic Rape case. In 2005, a young Filipina (Nicole) in her early twenties “was gang-raped by four U.S. military servicemen; one of the soldiers was found guilty in a trial last December, only to be whisked away from a local prison by the U.S. Embassy in the middle of the night” (Aguilar, 2007; Lacsamana, 2007). Massive abuses (from imprisonment to death) of progressive human rights activists from various sectors of Philippine society (youth and students, teachers, lawyers, clergy, indigenous communities, workers and peasants) occur daily under the Bush supported Arroyo administration, especially during the presidential elections this past spring. Since 2001, over 850 lives have been claimed by extrajudicial violence in the Philippines (People’s IOM, 2007).

Returning to the other side of the Diaspora, we find that Filipino Americans live a contradictory existence as the largest Asian Pacific American group; yet, their history, culture, and identities are rendered almost invisible. Oftentimes, young Filipino Americans (as was my experience) yearn for the slightest representation of Filipinos in U.S. media and culture. Lest we become obsessed over the possibility of celebrities such as Enrique Iglesias, Prince, Foxy Brown, Jessica Alba, or Jay Z as being half, part, or even a fraction Filipino, we must sustain a critical awareness beyond the reification of identity, beyond the limitations of the insipid, mind-numbing morass of a corporatized media that obfuscates, for Filipino Americans, the connection between the creation of identity and the creation of a genuinely independent Philippines (the complex process of becoming). For example, very little media attention has been given to the fact that approximately 30,000 Filipinos have been targeted for deportation at this moment of intensified racial profiling under the USA Patriot Act (San Juan, 12). Multiculti celebrations of difference located within the realm of consumption can only leave us with indigestion, bloated with heartburn, precisely because this “politics of difference” is not able to help us come to grips with (to develop a systemic analysis of) our condition of exile within the United States.

Fortunately, as San Juan notes, over the past two decades a new generation of Filipino-American intellectuals and cultural workers have created an incisive critical sensibility that connects grassroots struggles of Filipinos residing in the United States and in the Philippines (23-24). Here I think of the Critical Filipina and Filipino Studies Collectives and young intellectuals such as Anne Lacsamana (Women’s Studies, Hamilton College) and Michael Viola (Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, UCLA). Today, the anti-globalization and anti-war movements are sites where Filipino American youth are addressing issues of exile, identity, and home. Underground hip hop groups such as the Native Guns (California) and the Blue Scholars (Seattle, Washington) have rearticulated the originary emancipatory vision of hip hop to critique the U.S. occupation of Iraq and to shed light on the implications of U.S. Empire for people of color and the working class, especially the Filipino American community and Filipino Diaspora (Viola, 2006). Filipino American youth, students, feminist, and queer activists continue to provide their enthusiasm and vision to campaigns to support family reunification rights as well as the rights of health care workers (such as the Sentosa 27 national campaign in New York City organized by the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns to expose the abuse and exploitation of Filipino nurses and other health care professionals).

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