Filipino Writers in the United States: Toward a Contemporary Revaluation

"After 9/11, the Philippines became the second battlefront (after Afghanistan) in the U.S.-led global war of terrorism. At the cost of 1.4 million Filipino dead, the U.S. colonized the Philippines after the brutal Filipino-American War from 1899, just after the Treaty of Paris of December 1898 when Spain ceded the Philippines to the U.S., to 1913, the last year of Moro resistance. Despite almost a century of domination, the Moro Bangsa nation continues its battle for autonomy against the successive neocolonial governments, aided with U.S. Special Forces, proof that the past exerts a nightmarish stranglehold on the present. Exploited and victimized by neoliberal global capitalism, 90 million Filipinos resort to migration abroad for jobs; about 10 million Filipinos constitute the current diaspora, with three million residing in the United States alone. From this diaspora emerged four Filipino writers who, in their varied situations of exile and deracination, may be said to reflect the Filipino predicament in its historical context and cultural contingency: Carlos Bulosan, Jose Garcia Villa, Bienvenido Santos, and Jessica Hagedorn. There may be other writers with more artistic skills, but these four may be said to have exerted some ethico-aesthetic influence and political impact on their environment as to merit attention. "