The Wily Filipino

Obsessive Thoughts.

Joel Tesoro has written an excellent, thought-provoking response to my previous post, where, as he writes, "The real issue is how the Fil-Am obsession with that victimization plays on both sides of the Pacific."

I should probably qualify something: this "obsession" is really only limited to a small handful of academics, activists, artists and students; the real Fil-Am obsession (and I'm not being entirely flippant here) is paying their car loans and mortgage payments on time. That is, not all Filipino Americans have the luxury of ruminating about postcolonialism; that's something for people (like academics) who are paid to do it. =) (And yes, I'm being defensive, as he pointed out, simply because I've written about the American colonial period as well.)

He writes:

Many Asian-Americans have, for reasons I'd be curious to know more about, taken a leaf from the minority playbook and decided that emphasizing marginality, suffering and victimization ought to work for them as well in raising their political and social status. Hence the frequent emphasis -- especially among Asian-American groups on campus -- on cases of anti-Asian violence or anti-Asian racism and discrimination, both past and present.

I think it would be naïve to think that "victimhood" doesn't get you brownie points. I don't particularly like using the term because it's often employed as a slur by right-wing critics of liberal and minority politics, but there's truth to what you write. (I quote myself from my comments here.) But such is the double bind of identity politics in general, I think; one has to constantly walk the narrow middle ground between victimhood and self-affirmation or else leave oneself open to criticism. There is, in any case, the necessity to consistently address acts of racism and violence, and the "frequent emphasis" upon them only reflects the sad realities of life as a minority in the U.S.

But let me paint an utterly cynical, hypothetical scenario (and gentle readers, please do not quote me out of context, since I'm playing devil's advocate here): in comparison with, say, African Americans and Native Americans, Asian Americans were relatively better off. (Alas, I've seen the Suffering One-Upmanship Game played all too often in reality.) Blacks were enslaved, Native Americans were slaughtered, and Asian Americans -- well, the Japanese Americans were interned, and Chinese Americans did time on Angel Island, and Filipinos… hey, it sucked being a migrant worker back then. At least the Filipino-American War seems a lot more… catastrophic. [Devil's advocate mode off.]

But there's another reason for this obsessiveness, as you've pointed out: Filipino Americans locating themselves in the American narrative, and another factor that I'll discuss towards the end.

But to a Filipino academic, the focus on how marginal Filipinos are in America serves more to advance the agenda of Fil-Ams rather than Filipinos.

But of course (but see below).

In fact (a Filipino academic might say) how the hell do Fil-ams know what the U.S. colonial period was like: At the time, many of their ancestors were taking the opportunity to emigrate to the States!

While I don't want to raise the specter of the know-it-all Filipino abroad, this goes back to the point I made previously regarding commemoration. At least someone is doing the remembering. Besides, there are already few Filipinos alive today who were, say, teenagers during the Commonwealth period, so the same question could be asked of Filipinos in the Philippines. When I was growing up in the Philippines there was little mention in my history textbooks of the Filipino American War, and I can't imagine that it was simply due to people having "moved on," so to speak; it meant, at least to me, that there was still some digging up necessary.

So in a sense, aren't Fil-Ams, in their quest to advance themselves in their adopted homeland, just manipulating the Philippines and the Philippine experience -- essentially becoming another set of Americans colonizing Filipinos, except in this case they share the same skin color.

What exactly do you mean by "manipulating?" If by "manipulating" you mean shifting the historical lens onto the war -- perhaps even to the point of "obsession" -- then that still doesn't seem much like "manipulation" to me.

I can see your point about "colonizing" and "appropriating," but historically it's been shown many times that the fates of people in the U.S., particularly those of immigrants, are often inextricably linked with the U.S. government's policies towards their respective "homelands." That is, if the American empire -- not including the whole swath of westward expansion -- has its beginnings in the Filipino American War, then surely it "belongs" to Filipino Americans as well, if only a little more than it belongs to all "generic Americans" as well. (One can argue that the extraction of labor from Filipino migrant farmworkers mirrors the same neocolonial capitalist system in place now.)

Yet their colleagues on the other side of the Pacific continue to devote their energies to the production and research into victimization and suffering -- because it's both appropriate for them and also timely, as more and more young Fil-Ams enter academe and start to learn themselves about their "home culture." But that divergence only underlies the chasm between Filipinos and Filipino-Americans which has always existed.

Again, it's not exactly just about "victimization and suffering" -- see below. (I've been writing about this "chasm" as well, so I'm glad you mentioned it.)

This brings me to Vergara's final point: that remembering events like the Philippine-American war helps correct the Eurocentrism of American schoolchildren.

Not entirely my point, but more of an attempt to destabilize the glorious American narrative (which too many people still believe), and, at the very least, to shake up people's complacent notions about the United States.

Portraying themselves as victims, if rather remote, is certainly part of it. But I think the larger project here is to point out the historical connections between the American empire then and the supposedly new "Pax Americana" being established -- particularly in terms of its supposed benevolence, its arrogance, its notions of the dark-skinned "other," its unquestioning belief in military solutions. Bush's "war on terror," which has been extended to Philippine shores, surely has its echoes (and arguably, roots) in the American military occupation of Mindanao in the first decade-and-a-half of the colonial period. Such "obsessiveness" over the war -- while it may be unhealthy -- can only illuminate the political and cultural dynamics of empire. If it stirs people, both in the Philippines and the United States, to think more about the consequences of America's actions past and present, or to question political and historical orthodoxy, then so much the better.

Posted by the wily filipino at July 31, 2003 08:50 AM