Filipino American Literature
"The identity of a Filipino today is of a person asking what is his
identity."
"This is then what one finds in Filipino fiction: a self
that shares in all of the contradictoriness of the national self."
The Postcolonial Meets the "Ethnic" United States
The study of Filipino American literature offers
a place for the frames of postcolonial discourse and the literary efforts
of the "hypenated" or "ethnic" American to converge--
an intersection which challenges the putative need to separate these endeavors
on the basis of the United States's seemingly shaky status as a colonial
power. (Prior to the American occupation, the Philippines spent three centuries
under Spanish rule.) American annexation of the Philippines occurred after
two separate wars: The Spanish-American War (1898) followed by The Filipino-American
War (1899-1902). U.S colonial rule of the archipelago was mitigated during
the Commonwealth Period of 1935-1946, a period after which the Philippines
gained its independence. The issues of colonization become complicated
in light of the fact that the Philippines experienced decades of enforced
"free trade" with the United States up to and even after this
independence. Such a fact helps to raise all sorts of useful questions
on the affects of neocolonialism and also the latent "colonialism"
of alienation and discrimination experienced by some immigrants.
Filipinos in the United States
Approximately 150,000 Filipinos migrated to the
United States during the period of 1906-1946, and most of these people
settled in California and Hawaii. (Hawaiian sugar plantations commissioned
many Filipino laborers.) Citizenship evaded Filipinos for many years. The
1934 Tydings-McDuffie Independence Act merely elevated the status of these
new arrivals to "nationals" from "aliens." From 1946-1964,
about 30,000 Filipinos, mostly World War II veterans and their families,
arrived in the United States. 630,000 people came in the next wave of Filipino
immigrants who arrived between 1965 and 1984. The United States's 1965
Immigration and Nationality Act and the later political and economic uncertainty
created by the Marcos regime in the Philippines are two factors which increased
Filipino immigration during this period. It is important to note
that American-born-Filipinos are referred to as "Flips." At present,
the Filipino American population is the fastest growing Asian American
group in the United States, and statistics illustrate that this community
will surpass the numbers of Japanese and Chinese Americans combined in
the next decade.
Filipinos Writing in the United States
The
key question for Filipino writers and critiques is how to retrieve (or
gain for the first time) their "lost" and "unified"
identity. The umbrella term "Asian-American" seems fallacious
to those writers (e.g. Carlos Bulosan, José García Villa,
Bienvenido Santos, and N.V.M Gonzalez) who migrated to the United States
during the first part of the century. Villa was nominated for the Pulitzer
Prize in 1943, and Carlos Bulosan's America is in the Heart (1946) continues
to hold weight in literary discussions on Filipino American identity today.
"I tell you to wait for the inevitable war/Of armies and idealogies,
and the enduring love./In our time when every man must lie for life,/Nothing
will survive but this historic truth," writes Bulosan in "Last
Will and Testament" (Evangelista 150). For these writers, the United
States is a place of
discovery and re-cultivation which are ends to a process akin to a necessary
exile Critics like Oscar Campomanes and N.V.M. Gonzalez, in an anthology
of Asian American critical essays, point to the discrepancies of models
for true Filipino American identity as they remark on the recent success
of Filipino-American writers like Jessica Hagedorn whose1990 Dogeaters
seems to search for a past and national identify not important to all Filipino
writers (Cheung 80-83). Literary critics are also prone to question Carlos
Bulosan's dominant presence in studies of Filipino American literature.
Campomanes claims, in Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling's Reading the Literatures
of Asian America, that the emphasis on Bulosan's work comes at the expense
of a lack of equal concentration on other writers "whose exilic writing
did not fit with the immigrant ethos" of the American mentality (55-56).
This claim is part of an ongoing critical discussion on the politics of
the U.S literary marketplace and hasty generalizations about minority populations.
The work of prominent writers of more recent decades (e.g. Ninotchka Rosca,
Ephifanio San Juan, Linda Ty-Casper, and Michelle Skinner) adds to the
richly complicated question of the possibility of a true Filipino American
vision. N.V.M Gonzalez is particularly conscious of the categories
and divisions of minority literature as he describes the work of Bienvenido
Santos: "In such a writing as this, the themes of racial bias, nostalgia,
and alienation find authentic expression, but the rendering must be understood
not as ethnicized American or Western ideas, Better that they be understood
as ritual responses by the Filipino in full voice . . . stifled, silenced,
and thus forced to echo itself " (Cheung 71).
A "Different" Asian American Literature
The seeming indecisiveness of agenda for Filipino-American
writers (to exile themselves from the home country or to accept the status
of a hyphenated American or to find a bridge between the two) is not exclusive
to this branch of what we term as "Asian American" literature.
There are, however, some ways in which the Filipino American experience
veers away from the "normal" Asian American lifestyle, and these
differences contribute to these writers' literary intentions. Ephifanio
San Juan Jr. claims, in "Filipino Writing in the United States,"
that Filipino Americans "remain an exploited and disadvantaged, not
a 'model' minority" (142). Oscar Campomanes, in his arguments that
all types of Filipino American writing are "exilic" in some way,
counters Bharati Mukherjee's strict dichotomy of immigration and expatriatism
( Lim and Ling 57). The uniqueness of Filipino American writing comes,
for critics like Campomanes, from its inability to fit neatly into divisive
labels. What makes Filipino American literary efforts different, even from
South Asian American writers, is the combination of the length of the total
colonial experience, the involvement of the United States, and the varying
degrees of willingness to assimilate into the American cultural landscape.
Further complicating the matter is the Filipino appraisal of its own "national"
language (Pilipino, stemming from Tagalog) which, according to an entry
in the 1995 Encyclopedia Americana written by Leonard Casper, is known
as "Filipino English." The pluralism of national consciousness
within the Philippines (eight vernacular languages and three distinct geographical
divisions) also precludes an immediate and unified "home" or
"national" identify.
Major Themes
Critics tend to agree upon the importance of the
re-configuring and re-creating functions of the imagination for Filipino-American
writers. This imaginary attempts to ease the shock of alienation and isolation
resulting from immigration and apparently helps to bridge the homeland
to the United States for the Filipino American. Rocio G. Davis describes
the import of this quality along with the elements of irony and "double
perspective" in an anthology of essays on Asian American immigrant
literature (Kain 118-119). In her explication of the work of Hagedorn and
Rosca, she states, "the interaction of historical facts and memory
are the tools that construct the immigrant's elusive story as the need
to see beyond superficial accounts and tell their own versions, albeit
fictionally constructed-- to create, ultimately, a mythos rendered official
in the telling," (125). The theme of invisibility is also one that
is often explicated in critical works. San Juan attempts to differentiate
between the themes of those writers like Bulosan who write of a "radical
project of solidarity of people of color against capital" and writers
like Santos and Ty-Casper who write with "conciliatory or integrationist
tendencies " (151).
Commonly Cited Works of Fiction and Poetry
Many Voices (poetry), José García Villa (1939)
America is in the Heart (autobiographical), Carlos Bulosan (1946)
The Bamboo Dancers, N.V.M. Gonzalez (1959)
The Peninsulars (deals with influences of Spanish colonization),
Linda Ty- Casper (1964)
"Scent of Apples" (short story), Bienvenido Santos (1979)
State of War (novel), Ninotchka Rosca (1988)
Dogeaters (novel, nominated for National Book Award), Jessica Hagedorn
(1990)
A Selection of Authors and Titles for More Research
Bacho, Peter. Dark Blue Suit and Other Stories, 1997
Bruchac, Joseph. Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Asian American Poets,
1983
Cordova, Fred. Filipinos: Forgotten Asian Americans, 1983
Francia, Luis H. and Gamalinda, Eric, eds. Flippin':Filipinos on America,
1996
Kaplan, Amy and Pease, Donald E., eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism,
1993
Kim, Elaine H. and Lowe, Lisa, eds. New Formations, New Questions: Asian
American Studies, 1997
Kowalewski, Michael, ed. Reading the West, 1996
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics,
1996
Peñaranda, Oscar et al. "An Introduction to Filipino-American
Literature," in Aiiieeeee!, 1975
Rafael, Vincente L. Discrepant Histories : Translocal Essays on Filipino
Cultures, 1995
Ruoff, LaVonne Brown and Ward, Jerry W. Jr., ed. Redefining American
Literary History, 1990
San Juan, Ephifanio, Jr. Beyond Postcolonial Theory, 1998
Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity, 1986
Sumida, Stephen H. And the View From the Shore: Literary traditions
of Hawaii, 1991
Works Cited
Cheung, King-Kok, ed. An Interethnic Companion to Asian American
Literature. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Evangelista, Susan. Carlos Bulosan and His Poetry: a Biography and
Anthology. Seattle, London: University of Washington Press, 1985.
Kain, Geoffrey, ed. Ideas of Home: Literature of Asian Migration. East
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997.
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin and Ling, Amy, eds. Reading the Literatures
of Asian America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.
San Juan, Ephifanio, Jr. "Filipino Writing in the United States."
Philippine Studies 41.2 (1993).
Links to Related Sites
What One Filipino American Community is Reading
http://nick.sfpl.lib.ca.us/www_root/000000/html/INTCENTER/index.htm
Interview With Jessica Hagedorn
http://www.bookradio.com/interviews/hagedorn/
Some Experts in the Field
http://www.rochester.ican.net/~fjzwick/cb/sanjuan_tpt.html
Author: Reshmi Hebbar, Spring, '98.
Links
within this site
Postcolonial Studies at Emory
(Image of an "Homme Carrefour" from Donald J.
Cosentino's Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou [Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler
Museum of Cultural History, 1995].)
