Configuring the Filipino Diaspora in the United States

Diaspora 3:2 1994 Configuring the Filipino Diaspora in the United States E. San Juan, Jr. The University of Connecticut, Storrs An article by one Blanche d'Alpuget in the New York Times Book Review on Jessica Hagedorn's novel, Dogeaters, may have contributed to reviving an old impression of Filipinos as "dogeaters" inhabiting an irredeemably debauched society where greed, corruption, and chaos rule. Hagedorn is, however, an American author who has never eaten dogmeat. A mestiza with Spanish, German, and Malayan blood, she spent her years growing up in California as part of the "Filipino national identity movement" (Pajaron 20) in the sixties . Later, as a student in the American Conservatory Theater, she would get roles only as maid or hooker. Her contemporaries—the writers included in one of the first Asian-American literary anthologies , Aiiieeeeee! (Chin)—bewailed "the years of racism, identity crises, and subsequent ethnic rejection" of the postwar milieu. Exposing the fraud of the "American Dream," these young FilipinoAmerican (still hyphenated then) artists confessed how confused and dismayed they were at the "Oriental" Filipino back in the home islands ("brown faces with white minds") who adopted and imitated anything American. But how many have read their writings? According to the 1990 census, the Filipino community is now the largest segment ofAsian Americans, 21.5%, followed by the Chinese and the Vietnamese (Patel 112). By the year 2000, there will be over 2 million Filipinos in the United States. In recent surveys of Asian American literature sponsored by the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) and other professional organizations, however, there is a notable absence of any serious attention to Filipino writers , either born in the United States or self-exiled. In scholarly discourse and curricular offerings, "Asian American" usually designates Chinese (Kingston, Chin, etc.) or Japanese (Yamamoto, Okada, etc.) writers, or else Filipinos are tokenized with allusions to Carlos Bulosan or Hagedorn. At the turn of the century, William Dean Howells reviewed the novels of Jose Rizal, the national hero; Carlos Bulosan had to wait until World War II to be discovered. MLA president Houston Baker's edition of Three American Literatures privileged the Chinese and Japanese components of the category "Asian American," perhaps a form ofeditorial reverse discrimi- 118 Diaspora 3:2 1994 nation repeated by A. LaVonne Ruoff and Jerry Ward's expanded survey Redefining American Literary History. This has no doubt vitiated the honorably pluralist intent of an emergent canonizing, if revisionary, scholarship. Why were such well-known authors as Bulosan, Jose Garcia Villa, Bienvenido Santos, and others not considered on a par with Maxine Hong Kingston or Toshio Mori? Why this ethnic/multicultural marginalization or erasure? In general, public perception in the United States cannot distinguish Filipinos from other Asians, or even from Latinos (the majority of Filipinos have Spanish names). The term "Asian American" continues to inflict semiotic violence on the Filipino, even as economic statistics confirm that Filipinos as a group receive the lowest income among Asians and occupy low-status jobs incommensurable with their advanced educational attainment (Nee and Sanders 85). Is this either a cause or a result of the failure of Filipinos to project their identity, to assert their ethnic uniqueness? Apart from the usual scholarly exigencies and the endemic racism in the United States, I believe this is due to the historically unassimilable character of the Filipino cohort in the Asian American constituency. This unassimilability is a political effect. While the essentializing notion of "identity politics" has been quarantined by Asian commentators in favor of "heterogeneity, multiplicity, and nonequivalence" (Lowe 30-31), this has nevertheless generated the equally reprehensible binary opposition of"nationalism" versus "assimilation ," in which nationalism seems reduced to a species of "fanatical nativism." R. Radhakrishnan, for example, posits a binary world—"between the politics of an overarching and repressive Identity and the self-defeating strategies of'difference' that lead to more and more painful fragmentations"—from which the only escape is what he calls "a carefully nuanced historical reading ofthe predicament of ethnicity" (112). From this "post-Marxist" perspective, however , all nationalisms are alike in their complicity with the elitist state. Either nationality is just one historical form like class, gender , sexuality, or...