Homage to Philip Vera Cruz: Revolutionary
Worker and Filipino Labor Organizer
In a time of global crisis and fierce
class war, in particular the renewed U.S. imperialist intervention in the
Philippines, the example of the life and work of progressive Filipino
worker and union leader, Philip Vera Cruz, has become more necessary and
inspiring.
By
E. SAN JUAN, Jr.
Posted by Bulatlat
On July 21, 1994,
Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard of the State Legislature delivered a
brief homage to Philip Vera Cruz (1904-1990), a founding member of the
United Farm Workers, who died on June 10 at the age of ninety. Vera Cruz
left a "legacy of commitment and dedication to social justice," Rep.
Roybal-Allard stated, which survives "in the work of grassroots
organizers" everywhere. From his arrival in this country in 1926 as a
"colonial ward," neither alien nor citizen, from beleaguered Asian
territory annexed by the U.S. after the Spanish-American War (1896-98) and
the Filipino-American War (1899-1902), to his leadership (together with
Larry Itliong) of the historic 1965 Delano Grape Strike, the course of
Vera Cruz's life followed a typical pattern—youthful initiation, crisis (peripeteia),
discovery--memorably delineated in Carlos Bulosan's classic life-history
of the Filipino migrant worker, America Is in the Heart (1948).
Philip Vera Cruz
|
|
In contrast to Carlos
Bulosan, now part of the ethnic canon in Asian American Studies, Philip is
almost unknown despite his being vice-president of the United Farm Workers
from its founding up to 1977. His 1992 memoir, edited by Craig Scharlin
and Lilia Villanueva, has not really circulated as widely, despite or
maybe because of its candid yet tempered criticism regarding the
leadership style of Cesar Chavez. Chavez's place in the pantheon of heroic
Americans like Martin Luther King appears secure. But Philip's name has
remained in limbo. Except for a handful of Filipino academics, most
Filipino Americans (now larger in numbers than the Chinese group), nor the
Latinos whom he championed, I am sure, have never heard of Philip Vera
Cruz. Nor will his compatriots spend time and energy to find out about
Philip's life and his significant contribution to the popular-democratic
struggles of the working people in this country and around the world.
Before attempting an
explanation why, I want to pose the general problem of how to make sense
of the life of any individual, how to understand its distinctive
physiognomy and meaning. Are all human lives alike? Yes and no. We all
belong to the natural species of homo sapiens/faber, sharing common needs
and aspirations. Praxis, our interaction with nature to produce and
reproduce our social existence, unites all humans. However, we are all
different because our lives are shaped by multiple contexts in history,
contexts which are often variable and unpredictably changing, so that one
needs the coordinates of the body, psyche, and society to map the
trajectory of any single individual's life-history. Writing on Luther and
Gandhi, Erik Erikson focused on the identity crisis of individuals in the
life-cycle framed by the structure of ideological world images. He noted
in particular identity problems as omnipresent in the "mental baggage of
generations of new Americans, who left their motherlands and fatherlands
behind to merge their ancestral identities in the common one of self-made
men… Migration means cruel survival in identity terms, too, for the very
cataclysms in which millions perish open up new forms of identity to the
survivors" (1975, 43). Philip was a survivor, indeed, but was he a
self-made man in the cast of the Anglo Horatio Alger models?
Instead of following
a psychohistorical approach, I want to engage the challenge of Philip's
testimonio as a constellation of personal events, events that can be read
as an allegory of the Filipino community's struggle to fashion subjects
capable of fidelity to promises and commitments, and thus invested with
self-respect and self-esteem. Winning reciprocity and recognition, Philip
held himself accountable to his family, ethnic compatriots, and co-workers
in terms of universal maxims and norms that suggest a collective project
for the "good life" envisaged within and through the contingencies and
risks of late capitalist society.
Today, given the
debate on multiculturalism, the nature of identity is almost equivalent to
cultural belonging, to genealogy and affiliation. In the culture wars in
which everyone is engaged, whether one likes it or not, the politics of
identity seems to have repudiated any universal standard or "metanarrative,"
so that one's life can only be situated within the frame of limited
localities, specific zones of contact, particularities of time and place.
I do not subscribe to the postmodernist doctrine of nominalist
relativism—that only atomistic sense-data, not general concepts, can
provide experimental knowledge. As Charles Sanders Peirce argued,
consensual belief can be fixated at the end of any inquiry provided we
agree that the reasons for any belief are fallible and open to
modification. Whatever the position one takes in the dialectic of global
and local, the singular and the universal, it is difficult to avoid the
question of how to adjudicate the relative power of social/cultural and
individual/psychic factors in the shaping of subaltern lives. Nietzsche
and Derrida cannot so easily reject the Enlightenment legacy of doubt and
critique without pulling the rug from under their feet; such legacy, on
the other hand, has been put on trial by its victims—by feminists and by
thinkers like Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Mariategui, C.L.R. James, Edward Said,
and others.
I submit that 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 colonial possessions like Puerto Rico),
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. This occurred in
varying degrees, with nuanced complexities, depending on their
ethnic/racial, gender, class, and national positions at particular
historical conjunctures. In the case of the Filipino subject—the
"nationals" in the first three decades of the last century—the crucial
context for understanding the ethos or subject-position of this group is
none other than the violent suppression of the revolutionary struggle of
Filipinos against colonial domination, first by Spain and then by the U.S.
This coincided then with the beginning of segregation enforced by lynching
mobs, the confinement of Native Americans to reservations, and mass war
hysteria against the "Black Legend" (leyenda Negra) during the
Spanish-American War. In this charged climate, nationality, racialized
physiognomy, and social class marked all Filipinos, and continues to mark
them, as stigmata difficult even for assimilationists to erase.
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.
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.
The practice of belonging implies accountability. We have seen Philip
prove his faithfulness to his father and to his family by sharing his
hard-won wages, denying himself the opportunity for an education or even
for a relatively comfortable life. He has in effect been fulfilling an
unspoken promise to maintain his organic linkage with the community. This
is itself a mark of character as well as a sign of self-hood, although the
practice of helping the family back home is shared by the majority of
Filipino workers in one degree or another. Another sub-cultural
characteristic of Philip's generation is what he calls pride, the refusal
or failure to convey the forbidding reality of their lives to their
parents and relatives back home. Everyone in the colony believed in
America as the "land of promise," a place where hard work would reward you
with success, status in terms of money and material possessions.
Conditioned by this ideological expectation, Philip and the "Manongs"
lived a life of suspended utopian longing, if not stubborn self-deception.
Philip did not want to disappoint his brother so he persuaded him not to
follow and join him: "I was trying to be truthful but at the same time I
didn't want to tell him the details of how hard life was here." Philip
confessed the nature of the collective predicament:
”I couldn't tell them
some of the truths about my life here because I wanted to make them
believe that America was good as I believed before I left. I had to
struggle to make it good, at least for myself. Most of my Filipino
compatriots felt this way too, and that's why very few of us wrote
truthfully about our lives here to our families back home. Many of us were
guilty of fooling our families in the
Philippines
into believing we were something here that we really were not" (2000, 29).
For the most part,
Philip never dwelt at length or in depth on the illusions most colonials
cherished about the United States. To be sure, the schooling and
ideological apparatuses of the state conditioned every native to believe
in the equivalence of prosperity and everyday life in the metropolis. So
efficient was this mass indoctrination that it had to take the daily
ordeals of survival for these young Filipinos to get rid of years of what
Filipino historian Renato Constantino calls "mis-education." An emblematic
symptom of this may be found in Philip's discovery of his ignorance when
he disembarked from the ship that took him to Vancouver: he saw that the
wealthy class enjoyed themselves above the deck while hundreds of his
companions suffered in the steerage. This "shock of recognition"
precipitated a turn or reversal that reinforced the latent streak of
independence already manifested in his childhood.
We can speculate then
that Philip's narrative of his life is an attempt to explain his
character, the habitus of the self shared with his ethnic group. But what
distinguishes Philip from the others, and in what way is this selfhood
(ipse), a departure from the typical paradigm of the immigrant fable of
success in America? What kind of moral or ethical subject is exemplified
in Philip's decision to reveal his judgment of Chavez as a consequence of
his being faithful to the demand of the larger Filipino community that was
prior to his obligation to the bureaucratic constraints or rules of being
an official of the union?
Philip's critique of
Chavez's authoritarian style is nothing new, as Frank Bardache (1993),
Rodolfo Acuna (1988), and others have elaborated on this on various
occasions. Qualified by profuse praise of Chavez's charismatic stature and
his self-sacrificing devotion to the welfare of the farm workers, Philip's
objection to Chavez's top-down management was long suppressed for the sake
of the public image of UFW unity. However, the struggle for popular
democracy in the Philippines and in the U.S. pre-empted Philip's devotion
to UFW bureaucracy. It was only when Chavez embraced the brutal Marcos
dictatorship in the Philippines, and invited the fascist labor minister
Blas Ople to speak to the UFW rank and file in the August 1977 Convention,
while muzzling his own vice-president Philip, that Philip could no longer
restrain himself.
This crisis is
significant for configuring Philip's narrative because it ushered the
rupture, the ethical choice, that defined his character from idem-sameness
to ipse-selfhood: his opposition to the authoritarian rule of Ferdinand
Marcos in the Philippines coincided with a national upsurge of radicalism
among Filipino-Americans, in particular the second or third-generation
youth, who were mobilized in the late sixties and seventies by the
civil-rights and anti-war campaigns. This is the youth that he appeals to
at the end, his audience, his hope for a new future. No such turning-point
can be found in the early stages of Philip's life that equals this episode
in intensity and resonance. Patient and forgiving, self-effacing to the
point of seeming to be fatalistic or indifferent, Philip finally disrupted
postcolonial inertia and connected his present with other moments in his
life when he rebelled, contradicted abusive authority, and tried to help
sustain a community of honest, dignified, morally capable citizens of
equal status.
In the section of his
autobiography, "The movement must go beyond its leaders," Philip opposed
the irrational cult of a leader and the suppression of criticism which
deprived union members of "their right to reason for themselves."
Capability for moral choice needs to be actualized by democratic public
institutions such as unions, etc. Notwithstanding the praise of Chavez by
Peter Mathiessen, the biographers Richard Griswold del Castillo, Jacques
Levy, Joan London, John Gregory Dunne, and others, Philip's reservation
may be explained by his identification with the plight of his compatriot
Larry Itliong who initiated the Delano grape strike and had never really
been credited for his part in this historic event. Philip regretted not
having been closer to Larry whose self-contradictions, tied to the apathy
and suspicion of his ethnic group, limited his efficacy. Responding to
those who wanted to preserve the mythical aura of Chavez and the movement,
Philip writes: "For me, we need the truth more than we need heroes" (2000,
91). He has broken from the circumscribed locus of family and ethnic
kinship; defamiliarized, he joins a larger family of citizens united by
the solidarity of civic cooperation and the humanizing telos
of transformative political praxis.
Truth, in Philip's
eyes, concerned principles, not personalities. Although he resigned from
the union after he publicly distanced himself from Chavez's support of the
Marcos dictatorship, Philip remained supportive of the UFW and the entire
unionizing movement. Although he bewailed the fact that he sacrificed too
much in his struggle to survive (a duty to support his family in the
Philippines) and maintain his dignity as a Filipino assisting his
community and fighting for workers' rights, Philip was never bitter or
cynical. He affirmed an internationalism that transcended the narrow
parochial claims of ethnicity, racial affiliation, and nationality: "…I
respect the differences between people through their cultures, and I think
all efforts, energies, and money should be concentrated to serving the
people instead of making profits for a select group or country here and
there."
The narrative
climaxes with an invocation to his successors, the youthful workers whose
representatives here may be the editors, Scharlin and Villanueva. Philip's
message to the young generation in whom rests the future of any country
clearly serves as the leitmotif of his chronicle: "The success of any
positive changes in this country depends on the strength of the workers
and the organizations that hold the workers together are the unions….
Nothing will really change in this country without the total support of
the working class" (2000, 154). He was seventy three when he chose the
popular, democratic resistance against the right-wing Marcos dictatorship
over Chavez's open support for it, a stand that also confirmed his
internationalist, progressive spirit of opposing capitalism as a system
whose destructive exploitative logic was the lesson and truth that Philip
wanted to impart by recording his life.
In retrospect,
Philip's life is in search of a narrative scheme that would contradict if
not interrupt the commodified story of immigrant success, a narrative that
would capture what Sartre calls (with reference to Kierkegaard) "the
singular universal" (1974, 141). It would be a narrative that would assume
the world-historical objectivity of human character but also recognize the
active subject who fills the "holes of history" and opens up the space for
global transformation. Such is the lesson I find from studying the
autobiography of Philip Vera Cruz, a revolutionary Filipino worker, who
replied to the perennial question we often hear addressed to us, ourselves
as others: "Why don't you go back where you came from?" He couldn't—until
he could account for why he stayed and fought.
References:
Acuna, Rodolfo. 1988. Occupied America: A
History of Chicanos. New York: Harper and Row.
Bardache, Frank. 1993. "Cesar's Ghost: Decline and Fall of the U.F.W." Nation
(26 July/2 August): 130-35.
Dunne, John Gregory. 1971. Delano. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Erikson, Erik. 1975. Life History and the Historical Moment. New York:
W.W. Norton.
Etulain, Richard, ed. 2002. Cesar Chavez: A Brief Biography with
Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins.
Griswold del Castillo, Richard and Richard A. Garcia. 1995. Cesar
Chavez: A Triumph of Spirit. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Kushner, Sam. 1975. Long Road to
Delano. New York: International Publishers.
Levy, Jacques. 1975. Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa. New York:
W.W. Norton.
London, Joan and Henry Anderson. 1970. So Shall Ye Reap. New York:
Thomas W. Crowell.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1983. "Self as Ipse." In Freedom and Interpretation, ed.
Barbara Johnson. New York: Basic Books.
San Juan, E. 1998. From Exile to Diaspora: Versions of the Filipino
Experience in the United States. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1974. Between Existentialism and Marxism. New York:
William Morrow and Co.
Valledor, Sid Amores, ed. 2004. The Original Writings of Philip Vera
Cruz. Unpublished manuscript.
Vera Cruz, Philip (with Craig Scharlin and Lilia Villanueva. 2000. Philip
Vera Cruz: A Personal History of Filipino Immigrants and the Farmworkers
Movement. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
==============================
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
E. SAN JUAN is
co-director of the Board of Philippine Forum, New York City, and heads the
Philippine Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut, USA He was recently
visiting professor of literature at the National Tsing Hua University,
Taiwan, and professor of American Studies at Katholieke Universiteit
Leuven in Belgium. Among his recent books are BEYOND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY (Palgrave),
RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (Duke University Press), and WORKING THROUGH
THE CONTRADICTIONS (Bucknell University Press). Three of his books in
Filipino recently appeared: TINIK SA KALULUWA (Anvil Publishing), HIMAGSIK
(De La Salle University Press) and SAPAGKAT INIIBIG KITA (University of
the Philippines Press).
BACK TO
TOP ■
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION ■
COMMENT
© 2004 Bulatlat
■
Alipato Publications
Permission is granted to reprint or redistribute this article, provided
its author/s and Bulatlat are properly credited and notified.