Pinoy Capital
The Filipino Nation in Daly City
Benito M. Vergara, Jr.

Home to 33,000 Filipino American residents, Daly City, California, located just outside of San Francisco, has been dubbed “the Pinoy Capital of the United States.” In this fascinating ethnographic study of the lives of Daly City residents, Benito Vergara shows how Daly City has become a magnet for the growing Filipino American community.

Vergara challenges rooted notions of colonialism here, addressing the immigrants’ identities, connections and loyalties. Using the lens of transnationalism, he looks at the “double lives” of both recent and established Filipino Americans. Vergara explores how first-generation Pinoys experience homesickness precisely because Daly City is filled with reminders of their homeland’s culture, like newspapers, shops and festivals. Vergara probes into the complicated, ambivalent feelings these immigrants have—toward the Philippines and the United States—and the conflicting obligations they have presented by belonging to a thriving community and yet possessing nostalgia for the homeland and people they left behind.

Reviews

“Pinoy Capital is a colorful and nuanced ethnographic foray into the social institutions and quotidian lives of Filipino Americans living in Daly City. Vergara is a gifted writer and his work delves closely on the affective and reciprocal relationships and practices of Filipino Americans as immigrants. This is a welcome and important study, and Vergara puts forward important and innovative assertions and arguments that will have repercussions on debates about Filipinos in the United States.”
—Martin Manalansan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and editor of Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America

“Pinoy Capital is a landmark text—an exciting, refreshing, and critical ethnography that continues, but revitalizes, ongoing conversations regarding Filipino immigrant/transnational life in the United States. There have been very few ethnographies of this group, and I think this one not only offers a much-needed and provocative study, it complicates arguments and discussions about the specificities of Filipino immigration to the U.S. Vergara provides solid and rigorous engagement with his objects of study, and he is especially attuned to the clarities and complexities of everyday life in a particular site that is touted as a quintessential one for Filipino American settlement.”
—Rick Bonus, Associate Professor, Department of American Ethnic Studies, University of Washington

About the Author

Benito M. Vergara, Jr. is the author of Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th-Century Philippines. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

232 pp
6×9
3 tables 2 map(s)

paper: $25.95, Jan 09
EAN: 978-1-59213-665-0
ISBN: 1-59213-665-6

cloth: $74.50, Jan 09
EAN: 978-1-59213-664-3
ISBN: 1-59213-664-8

Popularity: 4% [?]

A lesson learned: Never, ever deliver a conference paper when you’ve only had four hours of sleep in the last 48 hours. I was supposed to deliver the paper below:

In this paper, I explore performance and improvisation among Filipino overseas musicians. In 2003, over 58,000 Filipinos were scattered worldwide in nightclubs and hotel lounges; however, the majority of people who migrate as Overseas Performing Artists (OPAs) travel to work in Japan. OPA is, in this instance, a euphemistic, bureaucratic category that denotes the sex trade, and comprises the crucial distinction between Filipinos working in Japan and those elsewhere working as more professional musicians.

Despite such differences, I argue that the practices of performance and improvisation, both as musical activities and as metaphors for everyday migrant life, link both kinds of OPAs. In my interviews, OPA returnees constantly spoke of a spontaneous and naturally Filipino ability to imitate. This imitative performance, however, did not allow for musical improvisation; they were limited to learning and mimicking particular idioms from a globally shared musical repertoire.

Such practices, I argue, parallel the relationship between state and individual. One can see performance and improvisation as strategies utilized to compete with restrictive migration policies, to evade state surveillance, or, more ordinarily, to resist drunken customers. As an economic strategy, migration also exemplifies a kind of adaptability, also directly related to improvisation or imitation.

My paper is also a critique of government policies that enable, if not facilitate, the exploitation of migrant labor. Simultaneously, through emphasis of migrant practices, I treat OPAs as rational and creative actors, incessantly performing and improvising, even if constrained by the regulations of the state and the demands of capital.

Et cetera, et cetera, until I realized that it had ballooned into an unmanageable 30 pages when it was still only really halfway done and I had to boil it down to about 7 pages for the presentation. So I painfully hacked off the entire “improvisation” section, threw out all the lovely ethnographic detail and whatnot, including a “thick description” of a performance of Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head,” and came up with 6 pages. All of this surgery done the night before I was to teach three classes and hop on a redeye from SF. Not good. (Thankfully a MARTA ride from the airport to Buckhead was only $1.75.)

So I gave my talk — my fellow panelists’ papers on Filipino Americans in post-war Filipino cinema, the Black-Eyed Peas’ “The Apl Song” video, and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle (plus a big helping of Baudrillard) were far more interesting than mine — and had to run off with Izzy to the Children’s Museum of Atlanta, which was only really okay. (It was too late to get tickets to the aquarium.) Izzy really liked the Rube Goldberg-like contraption which, among other things, made it possible for you to drop wet balls onto unsuspecting people’s noggins. Nothing like wet balls. (Okay — the first person to tell me which John Irving novel that comes from wins… well, nothing.) I missed everything else on Saturday, since I spent most of the day zonked with Izzy, but that was fine.

None of the pictures you see here were posted with anyone’s permission, but I’ll be happy to take them offline.

The 40-plus folks who ended up congregating in front of the hotel were then organized and split by Rick, who we see conducting the orchestra here:

The heat lamps reminded him of the tropics — or, in a reference to Allan’s forthcoming book, American Tropics. (We heard the phrase “American tropics” used a lot throughout the conference, just like the phrase “basketball court” — but youngsters may be reading this, so I won’t explain it.)

About half of the crowd. Martin’s in a silly mood:

Half went to a Hawaiian fusion food restaurant, which was the wise choice. “I didn’t go all the way to Atlanta to eat Hawaiian food,” said Theo, who ended up going with us to the jaw-droppingly expensive Brazilian restaurant where you could eat (as Theo said later), “the entire cast of The Lion King on skewers.”

Meat:

I can’t find my photo of Gladys’ neater plate (she was sitting next to me).

I can’t remember the exact context for this picture, but here it is, preserved for posterity:

Later, at the hotel lobby, the sated Filipinos, fueled by beer, vodka tonics and Brazilian cremes de menthe, regrouped — Kiko, Lucy, Rick, Liz, Theo, Robyn, Linda floating in and out (her book just came out), and I can’t remember who else right now — where discussion ensued: somewhat lurid talk with Tony (his co-edited book just came out too), the Manila music scene, rather tame AAS gossip, and Rex Navarrete. (Someone explained their discomfort at his humor, saying that he was essentially making fun of the working-class generation of her immigrant parents. This is not an incorrect observation, and his more recent enthusiastic reception in Manila by the well-heeled suggests, I think, a decidedly classist tinge to all the laughter at the declassed middle class and lower-middle class Filipinos who followed the doctors and engineers to American shores.)

Anyhow, the next day we had our Filipino caucus, where we discussed our Plans to Take Over The World. But outside the meeting room, I figured we had a bit of a way to go:

Popularity: 1% [?]

Ran into the old grad school crowd in DC: Peter (with whom I was on a panel), Leif, Sara, Josh and Michelle. There seems to be much less of the Ithaca diaspora here this time; I wonder whether it’s something of a backlash from the debacle of last year’s conference (see the posts of 10/21, 10/22 and 10/23). But as I walk through the sterile gleam of the Marriott, with its hotel rooms costing well over a hundred dollars each, and $160 conference fees, I am always struck by how we anthropologists insist on meeting at places like this that graduate students, or most important, our informants — we almost all “study down” anyhow — wouldn’t be able to afford. (I barely could, myself; Bulletproof Vest happened to be fortuitously house-sitting in Vienna, VA, at the end of the Orange Metro line, and so I got to cancel my still-expensive reservations at the hotel a few blocks down the street.)

Of course, conference attending does not at all preclude any meaningful engagement with the people with which we study and work. But such an annual ritual regularly throws into relief the distance between the hotel’s deep carpets, and the staff people of color refilling the water glasses and changing the sheets and (depending on the anthropologist) the relatively benighted people we study. Or maybe this distance is an artifact of a kind of anthropological arrogance; heard many times during last year’s debate was the refrain “And we’re anthropologists, of all people!” — as if we were somehow, by the sheer nature of our work, naturally capable of a deeper social commitment than any other scholar. Or, as if anthropologists couldn’t be as selfish and backbiting as the rest of the academy.

This is somewhat reminiscent of the mini-crisis, in the last decade or so, within Asian American Studies as well: that many younger scholars, armed with techniques and vocabularies of French origin, were increasingly estranging themselves from “the community” through which the discipline was given birth (and, even more criminally, abandoning the ideals of social justice and empowerment). The crusty, grizzled activists, on the other hand, were sitting on wilted laurels, presenting (if at all anymore) papers that were largely descriptive and devoid of analysis, their undisciplined quality transformed into the exemplary virtue of Sticking It To The Man. All of this, of course, are inaccurate generalizations.

But I do remember, for instance, a conference in Seattle when a graduate student presented a paper on the generation of Filipino immigrants who arrived in the ’20s and ’30s, with a gently critical view of their ideas of patriotism and belonging. One of the many grayish-haired people in the audience stood up immediately at the beginning of the Q&A session and uttered these three fateful words: “You weren’t there.” The dialogue, if one could call it that, immediately shut down. But it is symptomatic of how the field, in its extended period of adolescent pains, is both deeply rooted in counterhegemonic ’60s principles and commitment to “the community” [cheap shot here: it's all just lip service] and at the same time still struggling for legitimacy in a minimally, politely “multicultural” academe [cheap shot here: to be accepted in the eye of the (white) beholder].

All this intellectual handwringing (and for some, damaging to their careers) has been arguably unproductive, but at least the issue is repeatedly brought to the surface. Anthropology, perhaps in contrast, has traipsed along its own merry way, only a few decades removed from sleeping with the colonial enemy (and the repeated cries of penance that followed it). But in the end, the perhaps inherent, queasy disjuncture in any hotel conference may be attributable to the very real gulf, in any discipline, between university and “the community.” I am not necessarily someone who would claim the student body as the community which I serve (particularly the students who I know take an Asian American studies class because they think it’s an easy A!). For me, it must be more — a wider and deeper involvement with “one’s people” outside of the manicured quads of the campus — though my time and energy always seem to be lacking in this aspect. Of course, the main justification for these large hotels seems to be the logistics of accommodating a few hundred panels anyhow, with which no university would dare burden itself.

Popularity: 1% [?]