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VICISSITUDES OF THE FILIPINO Diaspora
by E. san juan, jR.
Farewell, sweet stranger [dulce extranjera], my friend, who brightened my way….
—Jose Rizal, “Mi Ultimo Adios”
They kept saying I was a hero…a symbol of the Philippines. To this day I keep wondering what it is I have become….
—Angelo de la Cruz, kidnapped Filipino worker in Iraq
At the cost of postcolonial blasphemy, we cross borders to the old archaic perimeter of the nation/nationality, sneaking through the Berlin Wall as fugitives, aliens, refugees. We explore the “brave new world” of post-1989 survivors. Writing before 9/11 and the Global War on Terrorism, the geographer George Demko summed up what is now a ubiqutous phenomenon, the movement of people across symbolic or political boundaries: “Since time immemorial, or at least since the Garden of Eden and the first food gatherers and hunters and the historic flight of Moses…out of Egypt and into the “land of milk and honey,” people have moved from place to place. Locally, regionally, nationally, globally. Temporarily. Permanently. By choice. At the point of a gun” (1992,144). After the breakdown of feudalism and the onset of industrialization, we witness large-scale migration of workers and exodus of refugees (Cashmore 1988,188-89). Migration is thus the pivotal Event characterizing the Global South throughout the twentieth century.
Colonization inaugurated territorial movements in the Philippines. Individuals and groups have been engaged in inter-island trade for a long time. But since 1572 Spain forced the Indios to move but only where allowed: from the rural hinterlands to the plazas where Church and military fort stood (Veneracion 1987, 35-39). Space was demarcated between the faithful (insiders) and the infidels. (outsiders). When the United States colonized the country in 1898, Filipinos were recruited as farmworkers in Hawaiian and West Coast agribusiness and cannery; whille more than 43,000 Filipinos worked in the U.S. military bases and Navy during the Cold War (Espiritu 1995; Cappozola 2020). Today, over four million Filipinos reside in the United States, not yet the “model minority” as the Japanese or Indians who have realized the American “dream of success” and become legislators, tycoons, bureaucrats, and CEOs in Silicon Valley, California (Hing 1998) .3
Roughly 6,000 Filipinos (out of 116 million total population) leave every day to all parts of the world (IBON 2008; Bisenio 2013). Over a million per year decide to cast their lot by migrating and residing somewhere else, as domestics, caregivers, or seafarers. About 3-5 coffins of OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) arrive at the Manila airport, with others suffering mysterious deaths, with hundreds languishing in foreign jails (Pineda-Ofreneo and Ofreneo 1995; Parreñas 2005). The most recent scandalous case was that of Joanna Demafelis whose brutalized body stuffed inside a freezer triggered a diplomatic quarrel between Kuwait and the Philippines (Geducos 2018).
In this era of “post-truth” and “alternative facts,” the scattering of more than 12 million Filipinos around the planet may strike one as fake news. The latest inventory lists their residence (excluding U.S.: Saudi Arabia: 1,029,000; United Arab Emirates: 477,000; Canada: 820,000; Japan: 226,000. OFW remittances, now totaling $32.2 billion in 2019 (about 10% of GDP), are more than enough to sustain the economy where a privileged minority enjoys their power and wealth over the staggering poverty of the majority (Marasigan 2022). The genie of this modern “cargo cult” sprang from this diaspora is unique; its heterogeneous multiplicity awaits nuanced cognitive mapping and historical evaluation (IBON 2022; Migrante International 2009). The orthodox doctrine that remittances of migrants offer the best policy to promote eonomic progress in those countries dependent on citizens’ working abroad has been refuted by Immanuel Ness’ powerful critique, Migration as Economic Imperialism (2023). In a previous book, Southern Insurgency (2016), Ness expounds on how “the ‘resserve army of labor’ that filters through the turnstiles as the needs of capital require is a central feature of capitalism because it enables capital to create and maintain surplus value. keeping costs down and, in the process,maintaining a powerful weapon against workers”(2016, 78). Remittances, thus, deepen and expand immiseration in the regions of departure, as the Philippine case demonstrates.
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Contextualizing Departures
In characterizing the Filipino diasporic experience, we need to frame the Philippines in its concrete historical setting. The Philippines is a neocolonial formation defined by the contradiction between the exploiting minority elite and the exploited majority. It suffers from dire underdevelopment whose chief symptom—unemployment/underemployment—stems from the lack of industrialization, failure of land reform,and corrup governance. It suffers from severe social inequality due to the historic legacies of colonialism (under Spain for three centuries, and under the U.S. since 1898), the preservation of an oligarchic system of property relations, and hence the unequal distribution of wealth and power (Constantino, Letizi 1986; Lichauco 2005; IBON. “Submission” 2022). The escape from backwardness via massive labor-export has been the path pursued by the elite since the Marcos dictatorship (1972-86). This attempt to wake up from the nightmare of tearing-apart of families and communities is an agonizing ordeal (Marasigan 2022; Yukawa 1996). It is tragic, painful, infuriating, and hopefully transformative. A prophetic sign of this metamorphosis may be discerned in the exile of dissidents, intractable “insurectos” (such as revolutionaries Mabini, Ricarte, etc.) to Guam, Marianas, Hong Kong ( for deportation as ‘terror-generating strategy,” see Kramer 2006, 137; O’Connor 2020). Homeland eluded these natives, forced to inhabit prisons or quarantines for desterrados outside their organic habitat.
By its inner logic, the capitalist market of international labor proceeds through cyclical crisis, devolving to fascist, militarized barbarism. After the disaster of 9/11 and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lybia, and elsewhere, this business of warm-body-export has become more acute because of the precarious “underdevelopment” of the country. The Philippines is dependent on an erratic global labor-market subject to unpredictable disruptions. Filipinos live in a violent over-determined formation where profound socioeconomic inequalities prevail (Miranda and Rivera 2016; IBON, “Submission” 2022). Afflicted with a serious drug problem and the pandemic, the country has recently been subjected to militaristic-authoritarian solutions such as U.S.-guided counterinsurgency measures against the communist New People’s Army and formidable Muslim guerillas. The current educational system, configured by neocolonial pressures of U.S. hegemony, has been geared to supplying other countries with trained personnel: doctors, nurses, engineers, architects, lawyers, etc. They serve to produce human labor-power for other countries in line with the unequal distribution of power and wealth among nation-states. Overall, these problems are symptoms of an unresolved historical legacy. The persisting social injustice vicitmize millions of contractual workers, poor peasants, women, indigenous groups, slum dwellers, etc. suffering from hunger, lack of housing, medical care, and affordable goods/services necessary for humane existence (Eadie 2005, 114-17; de Guzman 1984).
Since Corazon Aquino’s (1986-92) administration, OFW remittances have functioned as “manna” of a fabled cargo cult for the country. It has solved the perennial foreign-debt burden, allowed the wealthy few to continue to live in luxury, and the rest forced to sublimate their misery in endless consumption of mass-produced goods and the illusions (films, telenovelas, etc.) of the global culture industry (San Juan 2010, “Overseas”). The consumption of spectacles, images of technocratic advertising, function (together with State security agencies) as an efficient instrument of political control and moralizing discipline.
This schematic background of the diaspora is forever incomplete, given the uninterrupted dispersal of Filipino labor-power around the world. Filipinos are scattered in the three continents, not to mention thousands of Filipino seafarers circulating around the world’s oceans. We find them as far as the North and South Poles, nomadic, surviving— “deterritorialized” from both vertical and horizontal vectors in multiple flight formations (Deleuze 1993, 232-33), offered on the altar of profit accumulation. They help reproduce the asymmetrical social relations in various societies, as well as the geopolitical inequity in the hierarchy of nation-states. OFWs resemble the crew of Melville’s Pequod (in Moby Dick), a microcosm of racialized U.S. society where the despotic Ahab, as he hunts for the profit-wired “machine-like monster,” dooms the whole society (Takaki 1990, 288-289). The flight of OFWs belongs to this allegory of finance-capitalism epitomized by Theodore Roosevelt who compared the Filipino insurrectos to the savage Apaches during the 1899-1913 Filipino-American War (Zinn 1984, 1-24; Kramer 2006, 87-158).Today, Filipino seamen dominate the intercontinental thoroughfares of the rapacious Empire, vulnerable to grievances smoldering in the belly of cruise ships and cargo tankers.
We do not need to rehearse in detail the origin of this phenomenon, a cutting up and dispersal of the “body politic,” a diaspora conceived as “hemorrhage” and dismemberment. Is any emergency triage possible? Whence this symptom of a problem that, in its classic provenance, was ascribed to victims of the Roman legions, the Jewish diaspora? When the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, the inhabitants were driven out, drifting to other parts of the empire. In retrospect, the Marcos dictatorship started the flow of migrant workers with its labor export policy under the 1974 New Labor Code (Constantino, Letizia 1986, 66-74; Catholic Institute 1987, 22-30). From then on, the neocolonial State institutionalized this last-minute escape of people from dire straits to solve joblessness and pacify angry, desperate citizens (Beltran and Rodriguez 1996).
Meanwhile, an entrenched bureaucracy manages the traffic according to computerized Taylorizing schemes. It has been systematized, bureaucratized, technologized. We have systematic compilation and accumulation of data about them—”post-truth” verities? Or just the humdrum signs and emblems of postmodern “biopower” rolling along in streamlined, computerized fashion (Giddens 1991)? Indeed, the state-machinery (both sending and receiving states benefit from brokerage transactions) operates as a corrupt exploiter, not a representative of the masses. The oligarchic elite serves as a comprador agent of transnational corporations and Western imperial diktat, enabling the infliction not simply of feminicide but genocide. The neocolonial ideological state-apparatus in effect functions as an accomplice of the U.S. prison-industrial complex with its multinational accessories and linkages.
Within a global business platform legitimized by deregulated, privatizing market, the exchange and circulation of migrant labor/bodies have been more intensively subjected to regulatory biopower. This is chiefly in the interest of plotting market prices and currency exchanges, an attempt to rationalize an inherently anarchic market. The ongoing wars in Ukraine, Africa, and elsewhere, have triggered the frenzied call to purge the Western body politic of refugees and undocumented aliens. Demands to prohibit the entry of polluting virus and build a wall to ward off pollutants, criminals—the uncircumvened flow of bodies, goods, etc.—have exacerbated a global problem (Anderson 2000).
Transgressing Boundaries
With this millennium, OFWs have become the newest diasporic community in the whole world. They endure poorly paid employment under substandard conditions, with few or null rights, sporadically overseen by the United Nations and other humanitarian agencies. Historically, diasporic groups are defined not only by a homeland but also by a desire for eventual return and a collective identity centered on myths and memories of the homeland. This diaspora, however, diverges from the conventional typology. Since the homeland has long been domnated by Western powers and remains colonized despite nominal independence, the Filipino identification is not with a fully self-conscious nation but with regions, localities, and assemblages of languages and traditional rites.
After 9/11. the Philippines became the next target of the US global “crusade” against terrorism, part of the West’s “civilizing mission.” Where is the sovereign nation alluded to in passports, contracts, and other identification papers? It is difficult to conceive of this “Filipino” nation, given the insidious legacy of internalized disciplinary codes and the force of a normative cash-nexus ? Government handlers have praised OFWs as “mga bagong bayani” (“the new heroes”). This is not cynical alibi but anodyne for an inescapable predicament, the ironic hubris of “global servants” or model subalterns. The patronizing rubric is meant to compensate the sacrificed victims. Questions haunt these heroes:”Is it bribery or blandishment for a shameful emergency that has become a national disaster? How did we come to find ourselves scattered to the four corners of the earth and somehow forced to sell our bodies, nay, our selfhoods as commodities by the rivers of the new Babylon?”
One of the most illuminative narratives of how OFWs adapt, resist and resign themselves to their situation is Jason DeParle’s A Good Provider is One Who Leaves (2019). The title comes from the mother of the Portagana family who praises her siblings for working abroad. Survival requires travel to distant sources of subsistence and endurance of horrific adversities. DeParle traces the trajectory of two generations in which sacrifice and stoic accomodation define their ordeals in the Middle East, Singapore, Taiwan, Canada, the U.S. and cruise ships. While other accounts (for example, Montebon [2017] and Juvida [1995]) describe other schemes of survival and compromise, deParle focuses on the power of kinship networks, especially affective maternal ties, that substitute for ethnic or national ethos in keeping extended families together. However, DeParle and others either marginalize or neutralize colonial-racial-gender determinants in chronicling migrant difficulties. We are led to assume that this pattern of migration is the sure-fire formula for keeping souls and bodies together whereever OFW find themselves.
The stigma of “foreignness,” of “otherness,”applied to nomadic OFWs seems ineluctable. Alienation and racist violence prevent their resettlement in the “receiving societies” where procedural norms of acquiring citizenship are exclusivist. OFWs are thus suspended in transit, in the process of traversing the distances, unmoored, shipwrecked. Because the putative “Filipino” nation is in an occult zone, OFWs have been considered transnationals or transmigrants—a paradoxical turn since the existence of the nation is problematic or under interrogation, whereby the “trans” prefix becomes chimerical (Palumbo-Liu 1999). This diaspora has always faced the perennial hurdles of racism, ethnic exclusion, inferiorization via racial profiling, and physical attacks. Only lately are Filipinos daring to mount a collective resistance against globalized exploitation and racialized ostracism (Migrante International 2009). One is compelled to surmise how this diaspora can serve as a paradigm for critically unsettling the corporate-led international division of labor even while hegemonic neoliberalism dissolves in international conflicts.
Mapping the Contingencies
The phenomenon of Filipino dismemberment presents a theoretical quandary. Given the Philippine dwelling-place has never cohered as a genuinely sovereign nation-state (afflicted with repressive IMF-World Bank/WTO structural conditionalities), OFWs are dispersed from family or kinship webs in villages, towns, and other tributary zones. This dispersal is primarily due to economic coercion and disenfranchisement implemented by a comprador-bureaucratic oligarchy. The network of patriarchal clans/dynasties unravels when workers, peasants, indigenous groups, women and others alienate their “free labor” in the fluctuating market. While the prime commodity remains labor-power, OFWs find themselves frozen in a vulnerable status between serfhood and colonizing pettybourgeois households. Or they find themselves incarcerated as virtual slaves in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. These indentured cohorts are thus witnesses to the unimpeded dissemination of the hypothetical nation with its traumatized fragments flung to policed territories around the planet.
Dispossession of sovereignty leads to moral and ethical shipwreck, with the natives drifting rudderless, some fortuitously marooned in cities across the three continents. Via strategies of communal preservation and versatile tactics of defining the locality of the group through negotiations and shifting compromises, diasporic subjects might defer their return—unless and until there is a caring, protective nation-state that they can identify with. This will continue in places where there is no hope of permanent resettlement as citizens or bona fide residents, threatened by the danger of arrest, detention, and deportation–the disavowed terror of globalization. OFWs will not return to the site of misery and oppression—to poverty, exploitation, humiliated status and lack of a future with dignity. They would rather move their kin and parents to their place of employment, preferably in countries where family reunification is allowed, or where there is some hope of relief and eventual prosperity. Utopian longings can mislead but also reconfigure wayward travels and moments of indeterminacy. Nonetheless, OFWs find themselves forcibly returned: damaged, deported, or dead.
From a postmodern perspective, this specific spatial configuration is viewed as an event-sequence offering the interval of freedom to seek one’s fortune. Sometimes it is conceived as providing the occasion to experience the pleasure of enigmatic adventure, sojourns sweetened by fantasies of transcendence. For OFWs, this ludic notion is too extravagant. For the origin to which the OFW returns is not properly a nation-state but a barangay (neighborhood/local government unit), a quasi-primordial community, a ritual-kinship network, or even a blood-line family/clan. Poverty and injustice, to be sure, have driven most Filipinos to seek work abroad, sublimating the desire to return by regular remittances to their families. Occasional visits and other means of communication defer the eventual homecoming. If the return is postponed, are modes of adaptation and temporary domicile in non-native grounds the viable alternatives for these expatriates, quasi-refugees, reluctant sojourners?
Travails of the Wandering Malay
What are the narratives enabling a cathexis of the homeland as collective memory and project? Can one envision a catharsis from the trauma of separation? Possible narratives derive from assorted childhood reminiscences and folklore together with customary practices surrounding municipal and religious celebrations; at best, there may be signs of a residual affective tie to national heroes like Rizal, Bonifacio, and latter-day celebrities like singers, movie stars, athletes, charismatic TV personalities, and so on. Indigenous food, dances, and music can be acquired as commodities (epitomized by the “balikbayan” boxes) whose presence temporarily heals the trauma of removal. Family reunification can resolve the psychic damage of loss of status for those enduring lives of “quiet desperation.” In short, rootedness in autochthonous habitat does not exert a commanding sway; it is experienced only as a nostalgic mood. Meanwhile, language, religion, kinship, the sacramental aura of neighborhood rituals, and common experiences in school or workplace function as the organic bonds of community and civic solidarity. Such psychodynamic cluster of affects demarcates the boundaries of the migrant’s geographic imagination. It also releases energies that mutate into actions catalyzing radical emancipatory projects.
Alienation in the host country is what unites OFWs. This includes a shared history of racial subordination and marginalization. Struggles for survival—the imperative “social construct” (Bauman 1992)— are discovered through manifold forms of covert cultural resistance and subtle modes of self-determination. This may be a surrogate for the nonexistent nation/homeland of the plebeian multitude. In the 1930s, the young farmworker Carlos Bulosan once observed that “it is a crime to be a Filipino in America” (1995,173). Years of union struggle, united-front agitation and coalition mobilization have blurred if not erased that stigma, with accomplishments in the democratic struggles providing nourishment for communal pride (for racialized encounters, see Kramer 2006).
Counterpointing Needs and Desires
We can explore the ethical-aesthetic implications of this historical conjuncture by foregrounding the case of Angelo dela Cruz (Gorospe 2007, 118). Dela Cruz was the truck driver kidnapped in Iraq during the US invasion, which led then president Arroyo to ban travel and work-permits. Many defied the ban, asserting that they would rather travel to war-zones and be killed instantly, rather than suffer a slow death at home. The pathos of this existential quandary is captured by dela Cruz’s response after his release in July 2004: “They kept saying I was a hero… a symbol… To this day I keep wondering what it is I have become’ (Capozzola 2020, 358). It is a poignant cry of help, a symptom of unquiet desperation, evoking the testimony of one OFW who confessed that parting from her children at the airport felt like gutting out her entrails, a disemboweling. We confront here an analogue of birth, the trauma of separation. Such is the agony of the desterrado, uprooted, unmoored, flotsam and jetsam, a dilemma more thorny than incest or tribal feuds in inherently consanguineal communities (Arellano-Carandang et al. 2007; de Guzman 1984).
We may venture drawing up a symptomatic mapping of the problems of OFWs and their ethico-political implications. We know that diaspora unsettles what is taken for granted, deemed natural or normal, customary, respectable. It purges habitual conformism, devotion to stereotypes, and fixation on group-thinking. What binds migrants, expatriates, émigrés, refugees, and exiles together is their distance from the homeland, the taken-for-granted habitat. Removal from the customary space/place of living is certainly distressful and disorienting. Going abroad resembles imprisonment, a common experience for revolutionaries such as the stigmatized “bandidos” or “insurectos” deported to Guam, Marianas, or the Caroline Islands by Spanish or American masters.
We can pursue further how this inquiry into the pragmatics of migrant discourse induces an inventory of lived experiences that define the social self. Speculation on the habitus of diaspora can precipitate that historical awareness and reflexivity required to usher us into autonomy, forsaking colonial tutelage (San Juan, “Reflections” 2013; Aguilar 2000). This is the time when we no longer need tutors and can think for ourselves, accepting responsibility for our actions. This thinking will be realized in our narratives of real or fictive homecoming. Perhaps this can solve the scattering of the symbolic body politic. Will this heal the wound of division, suture the gaps and ruptures in the physiognomy of derelict OFWs?
Doubts persist. Our present birthplace is a neocolonized one, conquered at the cost of over a million Filipinos killed, quarantined and exploited since 1899 (Schirmer 1987; San Juan, Maelstrom 2018). One wonders if there is another chronotope one can designate as homeland? We have explored the limits of these vexing questions: If the homeland is a utopian future, what is the present Philippines comparable to? Can it be prefigured or condensed in a negative trope of the “Pearl of the Orient Seas,” with its flamboyant and garish malls interpreted as the metaphors of dystopia?
We can re-affirm the thesis posed earlier: the body politic has never been really unified or homogenized; and regionalism/segmentation persists. Only Flor Contemplacion’s funeral has shaken the citiznery into nationwide mourning. Arguably, the multitude has found a mystical participation in consumerist consensus. as well as in the vicarious fulfillments offered by the viral seductions of Tiktok, Instagram, etc. But somehow a visceral urge surfaces in the diaspora. When OFWs meet in the plazas of Rome, Hong Kong, Taipei, Los Angeles, or Singapore, they incorporate the forsaken homeland in their exchanges, rituals of communal feasts, singing, playing, jokes, diverse performances. This lost horizon consists of the repertoire of bayanihan and pakikisama and utang-na-loob.(rendered in the habitus of OFWs in Fanny Garcia’s story, “Arrividerci” (Garcia 1994). Geopolitics then trumps transnational hybridity or postcolonial liminality when the production of space is articulated with habits, customs, daily routines of OFWs, as intimated by the writers we addressed (Viola 2023; Campomanes 1995). The cultural politics of diaspora provides the conjuncture where “opposing the reactionary and promoting the progressive is possible only if the spatialization on which they are rest unpacked and made explicit” (Keith and Pile 1993, 20; see also Rose 1993). This conjuncture may be what Neferti Tadiar surmised in the desire of her “personal diaspora” to create “communities informed by living, feeling relations of affinity and respect, as well as by the common struggles that give rise to them” (1999, 253-54).
In retrospect, migrants perform the communicative, reconciling mediations for diasporas that Walter Benjamin and others have conjectured as prefigurative target of consensus. For them, any moment or fissure in the continuum of time, the messiah, the salvific helpmate, may appear (Benjamin 1969, 264). As the agent of salvation tried to console his companions before his final departure, we may follow in his wake. The messiah will be there when one or two of his comrades gather wherever and whenever they find themselves—the homeland becomes incarnate or materializes in such encounters, thus reconstituting the dismembered corpus. Diaspora may trigger these acts of remembrance and ultimately deliver collective redemption once the masses actualize the retrieval and recuperation of what was stolen from them.
From this perspective, diasporic art of expression may be construed as an act of remembrance and collective gathering. Thus, resignation is premature. The deceptive regularity of dispersal that we have described conceals breaks, interruptions, openings that will only disclose themselves inadvertently; for example, the unexpected death of Vicky (in Garcia’s story) shatters the peace and undermines the pathos of indentured domesticity. Vicky’s desperate act unites fragmented selves to face the crisis of their alienation. It precipitates solidarity in the face of absolute negation: the suicide of a “family” member. Thus we find ourselves mourning our sister, the mother of all migrants and exiles in our shrunken, suddenly claustrophobic planet when computer-armed Ahabs, now in their AI-terrorizing mode, continue their rampage, destroying both core and peripheries of the ravished anthropocene world.
Retrospective Gleanings
“First Evidence of a Blunder in Drone Strike: 2 Extra Bodies”– so runs the headline of a news report in The New York Times (23 April 2015). President Obama, for the first time, apologized for the accidental killing of Warren Weinstein, an American aid worker, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian development expert, in a CIA-managed drone strike in Pakistan last January. Obama drew a lesson from the accidental sacrifice: “It is a cruel and bitter truth that in the fog of war generally, and our fight against terrorists specifically, mistakes, sometimes deadly mistakes, can occur” (Mazzetti and Schmitt 2015). But how many sacrifices by people of color and indigenes have been made for the sake of profit accumulation since Columbus and then Napoleon and Queen Victoria claimed the world for the mercantile and industrial bourgeoisie? The alternative today, almost a century now since Rosa Luxemburg posed it, is still between capitalist barbarism or revolutionary socialism via the popular-democratic liberation struggles of peoples and nations.
The fog of imperial war, first against recalcitrant natives of the non-Western regions of the world, and then against the subalterns in the metropolitan centers of slave traders and merchants, was invoked first with reference to the Vietnam carnage. It seems to have settled and remained stagnant since the conquest of Peru, Mexico and the Caribbean islands up to the division of the African continent in the 19th century. More extra bodies turned up in the U.S. annexation of the Philippines in the first decade of the twentieth-century, up to the present search and surveillance of “illegal” aliens within its borders. At least five bodies, cadavers, of contract workers are returned to the Philippines every day from all corners of the world.
In this brief discourse, I sketch an inventory of the U.S. imperial adventure in the Philippines as a background to the work of Carlos Bulosan, the first Filipino writer to gain canonical status, and the ordeal of Filipinos in the era of global capitalism. Today the Philippines ranks as second to Mexico in the number of contract or indentured laborers dispersed around the world, with over 12 million Filipinas functioning as symbolic and real capital of a U.S. neocolony. In this context, the now legendary figure of Jose Antonio Vargas, Filipino “undocumented” immigrant, serves as a palimpsest icon or hieroglyph for the universal predicament of all uprooted peoples, not just Filipinos, wandering for some kind of “belonging” in the era of a flat, borderless planet, as the corporate logo proclaims. Can we seriously practice this kind of hermeneutics of suspicion without us being suspect?
Where Exactly Are these Islands?
Except for horrendous natural disasters, such as the Yolanda/Haiyan storm that devastated whole provinces and killed thousands; or the other memorable eruption of Mt. Pinatubo that led to the forced abandonment of the two huge U.S. military bases in the Philippines, that island-nation scarcely merits occupying the headlines of the mass media here in North America or Europe. It’s not worth bothering about. Unless you have a Filipino friend, relative or connection, most people have difficulty locating the Philippines in the map–is it in the Caribbean or somewhere near Hawaii?
Last March 22, six thousand people marched in the white sands missile range in Alamagordo, New Mexico, commemorating the 26th anniversary of the Bataan Death March. World War II (with “Bataan” and “Corregidor” as its iconic markers) seems the live touchstone for celebrating the friendship of two peoples against the horrors of the Japanese occupation (1942-45). The welcomed “liberation” of the Philippines, for both Americans and Filipinos, wiped out the vexed origin of this relationship in the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the bloody Filipino American War in 1899. The defeat of Spain led to the annexation, or “Benevolent Assimilation” (to use Pres. McKinley’s famous phrase), of the islands. The result was not so benevolent since 1.4 million Filipinos died in the ensuing carnage which lasted up to 1913. Very few people know about this episode in American history–a blip in the rise of a gllobal empire.
In his book Lies Across America, James Loewen notes that the ship Olympia, Admiral Dewey’s flagship during the Battle of Manila Bay in May 1898, is on display in downtown Philadelphia. But not a word is mentioned about the war which became “a moral issue almost unparalleled in American policy and politics” (Wolff quoted by Loewen, [1999, 379]). From 1898 to 1946, the Philippines was the only Asian colony of the U.S. But when independence was granted, so many strings were attached that the new republic virtually remained a colony, more exactly a neocolony, up to now. Philippine sovereignty remains a myth, if not an invention of academic experts.
After 9/11, the U.S. sent several hundred U.S. Special Forces to the Philippines because of the presence of the Abu Sayyaf and the New People’s Army, both labelled terrorists. The kidnapping of the Burnham couple in 2001 and the circumstances surrounding the wife’s rescue and the death of the husband crystallized the reputation of the country as a haven of extremists. This became the pretext for the Visiting Forces Agreement and the Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement, allowing deeper US military intervention, most recently evidenced in the Mamasapano tragedy under the current regime.
What compelled the U.S. to be involved in these islands more than 8,000 miles away from the continent? We do not need to review the details of the Spanish-American War, nor the Filipino-American War. The expansion of the Republic into an Empire has been rehearsed in so many books. But the main reason is the need of the industrial economy to open up the China market by projecting its might into the Pacific (with the annexation of Hawaii and Guam) and its domination of the Pacific Basin zone of commerce from its Philippine base. So the geopolitical role of the Philippines at this stage of the growth of U.S. finance capital explains not only the violent seizure of the territory but also the political-ideological hegemony over the inhabitants. The Philippines today still plays the role of first-line defense against perceived threats from China and others (North Korea, Russia, Iran) from Asia up to the Middle East.
We are now in the era of globalized capital where borders seem to evaporate, Electronic communication has more or less leveled some barriers, but a century of scholarship and misinformation may take more time and will to rectify. We still have passports and immigration controls.
A recent popular history of the relations between the U.S. and the Philippines, Stanley Karnow’s In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (1989), tried to revive the idea of a paternalist power managing tutelage of an immature people, formerly labelled savages. The anti-imperialist Samuel Gompers then described Filipinos as “semibarbaric,” “almost privimitive,” while others used the term “yellow-bellies” and “naked Sulus,” the latter referring to the Moros or Muslims residing in the Sulu Islands. But it simply reaffirmed the premise that, however earnest the colonial attempts to civilize the Filipinos, Karnow contends that they failed to break the compadrazgo system, the “coils of mutual loyalties” (quoted in San Juan 2000, 72)–in effect, the Filipinos brought upon themselves their backwardness, poverty, and even the “miseducation” that Filipino historian Renato Constantino claims we received from the putative benefactors.
Such “miseducation” may be gleaned from the functionalist Cold War scholarship of Jean Grossholtz, Alden Cutshall, Glenn May, etc. Grossholtz’s conclusion may give a clue to the way ahistorical functionalism easily resolve social disparities and inequties: “The blend of Malay, Spanish, and American cultures has resulted in a society closely tied by primary groups and preserving the warm social ties of the barangay but over-laid with a veneer of the Spanish aritocratic style and the joy in political manipulation and achievement of American politics. Filipinos accept their formal institutions but regard them as a framework for the strong personalized leadership that is their Malay heritage” (1964, 45-46). Such categories as “Malay,” “Spanish” and “American” serve to draw clean boundaries and cement ruptures, yielding a harmonious polity suspended in a prophylactic glass-case. Invisible are the tensions, conflicts and explosions of popular-democratic struggles against almost 4 centuries of colonial violence.
Parsing the Multitude
Respected historians such as David Joel Steinberg. Theodore Friend, Alfred McCoy and others have tried to correct the idyllic picture of a smoothly operating hierarchical system. They tried to prove that Filipinos also had “agency,” but they referred mainly to the elite bloc of oligarchic families–the propertied few–with whom the colonial administrators negotiated, whom they coopted to maintain peace and order until a semblance of formal indepence could be established in July 1946.
Sure, the country is both singular and plural, depending on which perspective or evaluative paradigm one uses to triangulate the interminable conflicts of various sectors, classes, and regions in the Philippines. William Blum’s optic finds the Philippines “America’s oldest colony” right up to the last quarter of the last century when, from the Philippine bases, “the technology and art of counter-insurgency would be imparted to the troops of America’s other allies in the Pacific,” from the Korean War to the wars in China, Vietnam and Indonesia, and the Middle East (2004, 42).
Failure in apprehending the colonial subject-hood of the Philippines from 1899 to 1946 (and neocolonial status after that) invariably leads to what I consider the cardinal error in diagnosing the actualities of U.S.-Philippines relations. I am referring to the status of Filipinos in the US mainland and Hawaii from 1898 to 1946. From 1898 to 1935, Filipinos (aside from pensionados or government scholars) who were recruited by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association in 1907 were colonial subjects, or nationals, not immigrants nor aliens. This move was forced upon the planters by the 1907 Gentleman’s Agreement excluding Japanese workers; the Immigration Act of 1924 definitively barred Japanese immigration to Hawaii.
Earlier, of course, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act served as the benchmark for what Ronald Takaki would assert as the distinctively “racial and exclusionary,” not ethnic, pattern defining the history of US citizenship and suffrage. Thus while Filipinos were exempt from such exclusionary legislation, they did not enjoy citizenship rights. After the colony morphed into a “commonwealth” in 1935, only 50 Filipino bodies were allowed annual entry into the U.S,
The Brown “Indio” Menace
The sojourner Filipinos in Hawaii, however, proved recalcitrant and dangerous to capitalist agribusiness. For example, they organized a Filipino Federation of Labor in 1911 and the Filipino Unemployed Association in 1913. In January 1920, Filipino workers struck ahead of their Japanese counterparts; they were later joined by Spaniards and Puerto Ricans. When one of the Filipino labor militants, Pablo Manlapit, was arrested in September 1924, his compatriots staged protests in Hanapepe, Kauwai, where the police fired and killed 16 workers and wounded many others. This surely branded the Filipinos as trouble-makers. Manlapit was compelled to leave in 1927, but later he returned to Hawaii via California and helped revive the Filipino Federation of Labor after which he was deported to the colony (Lopez 2014).
One other Filipino worker in Hawaii, Pedro Calosa formed an association called “Beginning of Progress,” was imprisoned and deported for labor agitation in 1927. Back in Pangasinan, he organized a local group in 1929 and led the 1931 Tayug peasant insurrection. Although violently quelled, the uprising signalled a resurgence of populist, transformative energies that nourished the 1896 revolution against Spanish feudal landlordism which continues to this day (Constantino 1975). It is this action by a provincemate, a deported sojourner from Hawaii, that Carlos Bulosan (1913-1956) memorialized in Chapter 8 of his now canonical ethnic history, America is in the Heart.
Bulosan’s transformation as a canonical author epitomizes a whole history of Filipino experience in the United States in the last quarter of the 20th century. When Bulosan landed in Seattle in 1930, the global crisis of monopoly capitalism had already begun. The Depression of the thirties and forties served as the formative and catalyzing ground for his development into what Michael Denning calls a popular-front militant activist in which the impulse for national liberation of the colony intertwined with the internationalist struggle against fascism in Europe and Japanese militarism in Asia. Within this larger context, one has to situate Bulosan and his compariot’s traumatized predicament as they confronted the nativist, openly white supremacist racism of California and the West Coast in those two decades of the Depression.
Bulosan’s narrative was conceived in the middle of World War II, in the anguish over the fate of his family in occupied Philippines. It was designed to celebrate the America of his friends and ethnic kin as a bastion of democratic liberties against European and Japanese fascism. But to do that, he had to recount the hardships, pain and suffering his community endured, together with workers of other nationalities. He had to sum up what he learned, the gap between ideas and actualities.
Critics have long been puzzled by Bulosan’s authorial “double consciousness.” The contradictions found in Bulosan’s texts can be clarified as symptoms of the way the interpellated subject grappled with both the “Americanized” psyche (educated by the civilizing mission in the colony) and the politicized or pedagogical subject as part of the tremendous union mobilization that swept the workers’ organizations in which he was deeply involved. These contradictions can be indexed by the last chapter of his book which, ironically or naively, concludes a narrative of disillusionment, fear, escape from mob violence, and desperate struggle for physical survival everyday. After Corregidor fell to the Japanese, many Filipinos joined the US army. Saying goodbye to his brothers in California who had enlisted in the military, Bulosan ends America is in the Heart with a farewell to the Filipino workers in California as he caught a bus to Portland, Oregon:
Then I heard bells ringing from the hills–like the bells that had tolled in the church tower when I had left Binalonan [his birthplace in the Philippines, near Tayug, the site of the peasant uprising alluded to earlier]. I glanced out of the window again to look at the broad land I had dreamed so much about, only to discover with astonishment that the American earth was like a huge heart unfolding warmly to receive me. I felt it spreading throuogh my being, warming me with its glowing reality. It came to me that no man–no one at allo–could destroy my faith in America again. It was something that had grown out of my defeats and successes, something shaped by my struggles for a place in this vast land, digging my hands into the rich soil here and there, catching a freight to the north and to the south, seeking free meals in dingy gambling houses, reading a book that opened up worlds of heroic thoughts. It was something that grew out of the sacrifices and loneliness of my friends, of my brothers in America and my family in the Philippines–something that grew out of our desire to know America, and to become a part of her great tradition, and to contriburte something toward her final fulfillment. I knew that no man could destroy my faither in America that had sprung from all our hopes and aspirations, ever (1973, 326-327).
In his personal letters (from 1937 to 1941), Bulosan confessed that “the terrible truth in America shatters the Filipinos’ dream of fraternity” induced by over thirty years of colonial indoctrination. On the eve of Pearl Harbor and the Japanese conquest of the Philippines, he wrote to an American woman friend: “Love would only make it the harder for little guys like us to bear the unbearable terrors of life. Yes, I feel like a criminal running away from a crime I did not commit. And the crime is that I am a Filipino in America” (Bulosan 1995, 173). Cultural-studies cholar Michael Denning argues that the rhetorical excess “is a sign of the narrator’s desperate attempt to transcend a United States of violence, ‘a world of brutaity and despair’ “(1997, 274) which also infected his family and working comrades. Such rhetoric was an attempt to heal or erase the evidence of history and class politics on violated, uprooted and transplanted bodies.
Hemeneutics of Stigmata
One incident that summed up the emergency plight of Filipinos in the thirties is the Watsonville race riot, a culmination of vigilante attacks on Filipinos beginning in Yakima Valley in 1928, throughout the West Coast and up to Florida in 1932. During four nights of rioting in January 1930, about 250 men attacked 46 terror-stricken Filipinos, killing one of them, Fermin Tobera. One historian summarized the incidents thus:
At the inquest over the body of Fermin Tobera, it was decided that the person who had fired the short was unknown…When the body of Fermin Tobera…arrived in Manila, ‘thousands of Filipinos took part in orderly demonstrations.’ Tober’s body lay in state for two days. Tober was declared a national hero and for a time at least occupied a pedestal along with Jose Rizal, the national hero of the Philippines. A member of the Philippine legislature was quoted as having said at the burial services that the bullet which killed Tober ‘was not aimed at him particularly, its principal target was the heart of our race… (Bogardus 1976, 56-57).
Pablo Manlapit, the veteran labor leader, organized a march of thoousands in Los Angeles protesting the murder. Concerning the Manila Luneta “necrological service” for Tobera, dubbed as “National Humiliation Day,” historian Paul Kramer remarked that it “vividly illustrated the mutual constitution of U.S.. colonialism and Filipino nationalism across transpacific space” (2006, 428). By “mutual constitution,” Kramer means that the nativist pogrom disproved the viability of “inclusionary racism,” finally giving independence to the U.S. from its colony. Kramer believes that “economic protectionism [by corporate power] and racist nativism” allowed “American racial insularity” the means of granting formal independence to Filipinos.
And so, contrary to the old-fashioned history books, Filipinos did participate in shaping their destiny. This is now the fashionable postmodernist theory which purports to grant agency to the poor colonized subalterns, even though the effective players in this drama remain the corporate political functionaries/officials and nativist white-racial supremacists. We are supposed to enjoy the illusion that the dispersed masses of Filipino peasants and workers exercised equal power and resources as the hegemonic bloc of wealthy landlords, businessmen and bureaucrats. In that ideal world, everyone is a free and equal moral person just like everyone else. Manlapit, Pedro Calosa, Philip Vera Cruz, and others recuperated their bodies by mourning and prefiguration, recalling Bulosan’s advice to his relatives: “Never forget your people, your country, wherever you go. Your greatness lies in them…Do not misuse your gift, apply it toward safeguarding our greatest heritage, the grandeur of ou history…sacrificing itself for the good of the whole community, [like] Rizal who sacrificed his llife and happiness for the people” (Bulosan 1995, 180).
Charting Escape Routes
The irony of this tendentious revisionism and the ascription of agency to individual performative bodies of the colonized subalterns seem to be the latest twist in revising Cold War reductionisms. The intention is certainly commendable. One reviewer of the current scholarship insists that the colonized possessed individual agency equal to the colonizers by performing one’s own body, which allows “individuals the space to oppose, or perpetuate, the imperial imaginary” (Allen 2014, 221). Pursuing this methodological individualism, in contrast to the allegedly simplistic formulas of an economistic Marxism or the traditional structural-functionalist analysis dealing with anti-imperialist ideologues, the new postmodernizing scholars are devoted to exploring “the liberatory possibilities involved in the performance of one’s own body,” or of one’s own gender or race. Following this logic, Tobera and Contemplacion could have done more with their bodies beyond the confines of the police record or the autopsy report. They need a conceptualist artist like Kenneth Goldsmith, perhaps, to release the performative libidinal impulses hibernating in the bodies of “little brown brothers” and sisters working in the asparagus fields of California and pineapple plantations of Hawaii in Bulosan’s time.
In light of the recent controversy over Goldsmith’s recital of “The Body of Michael Brown,” one wonders if anyone attempted such a feat of artistic transfiguration. Of course, conceptual poetics/aesthetics was unheard of in the thirties. But a clearly analogous situation is that of the national trauma/crisis at the execution in Singapore of Flor Contemplacion, one of the ten-million OFWs/domestic workers sent abroad as a national policy of labor export implemented by the Marcos dictatorship to relieve unemployment and earn foreign currency. After being detained, tortured and tried for four years, Contemplacion was hanged and her body brought for burial in her hometown. An unprecedented spectacle of national mourning, with thousands of Filipinos lining the streeds, awed a worldwide audience. Thousands attended her funeral procession, outraged by both the Singaporean government’s straightjacket system and the Philippine politicians’ neglect of the brutal treatment of numerous OFWs for years–this time, the anger and grief released transpired in a setting more unsettled than the colonial milieu of Tobera’s time.
It is more than likely that Contemplacion’s case will be repeated–as it has been with many executions in the Middle East, and one pending in Indonesia today, Over 10 million OFWs are scattered around the planet–5,000-8,000 contractual workers leave everyday, remitting $26 to $28 billion a year, enough to pay the country’s foreign debt and keep the economy floating. Right now, there are about 7,000 Filipinos in prisons around the world, 80 in death row. Nine OFWs have been executed so far under Aquino’s tenure, the biggest number so far within less than six years. The bodies of Tobera and Contemplacion seem harbingers of what’s to come, turning in their graves with the internment of a double or postcolonial mimicry, over a hundred years since Mark Twain penned his savage satire on the “Business of Extending the Blessings of Civilization to Our Brother Who Sits in Darkness.”
Vargas as Cosmopolitan Trope
Which brings me finally to the body of Jose Antonio Vargas, the 2008 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and self-declared undocumented immigrant. Vargas is still very much alive, but his figure serves as an exemplary symbolic icon in the long genealogy of Bulosan’s characters traversing the American heartland throughout the turbulent twentieth century. He embodies the inscription of “America” in the heart that Bulosan dreamed about, a belief enshrined in the Statue of Liberty and defended by the Editorial Board of The New York Times opposing the current nativist, xenophobic trend: “Immigrants are America’s rocket fuel, powering our nation’s unsurpassed economic and cultural achievements” (2025, 7).
Brought to the US illegally when he was 12 years old, Vargas was “sitting in darkness,” as it were, until at age 16 he tried to apply for a driver’s permit and was told that his documents were fake. In a 2012 TIME issue and before that, in a June 2011 essay in The New York Times Magazine, Vargas and other undocumented folks came out of the shadows, in order to promote dialogue about the system and advocate for the DREAM Act, which would provide children in similar circumstances with a path to citizenship. In that same year, Obama halted deportation of undocumented immigrants age 30 and under eligible for the DREAM Act; but Vargas, who just turned 31, did not quallify and remained in limbo.
Vargas claims that the immigration system is broken, preventing many deserving candidates (who identity themselves as American) from residing in the country legally. Vargas’ campaign “Define American” is intended to document the lives of an estimated 11.5 million people without a legal claim to exist in the country (Constantini 2012). Vargas declared: “I define ‘American’ as someone who works really hard, someone who is proud to be in this country and wants to contribute to it. I’m independent. I pay taxes. I’m self-sufficient. I’m an American. I just don’t have the right papers. I take full responsibility for my actions and I’m sorry for the laws that I have broken’ (Wikipedia 2010).
Vargas counts among the three million “Dreamers” or DACA ((Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) now subject to mass deportation by Trump’s masked/hooded ICE agents. Since 2011, Vargas has been no longer just a Filipino but an anchored, (not floating) signifier for all undocumented (he rejects the label “illegal”) immigrants, as his 2013 autobiographical film Documented attests. On July 15, 2014, Vargas was arrested by immigration authorities while trying to leave the border town of McAllen, Texas, where he attended a vigil organized by “United We Dream” at a center for recently released Central American immigrants.
Counter-intuitively, Vargas’ arrest was due to an oversight, or felicitous negligence. In order to leave the Rio Grande Valley, Vargas had to cross through a U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoint. He went through airport security with his Philippine passport and a copy of the US Constitutition–a trope for the double consciousness, the ambivalence of Du Bois’ body torn between the two domains of citizenship and alienation. He was cleared by the Transportation Security Administration, but a border agent took his passport, reviewed his documents, asked him some questions, placed him in handcuffs, and escorted him to the McAllen Border Patrol station for further questioning. We learn that he was released later that day due to the fact that he had no history of criminal activity. Lo and behold, being an undocumented alien is no longer a crime (concerning the diverse routes taken by asylum seekers, see Kiterseff et al. 2023).
In a recent update on his status, Vargas recalled how he was able to go through the hurdle of getting a D-3 waiver that permitted undocumented immigrants with a U.S college degree and an employment visa to re-enter the country: And so he left the U.S. for the first time in 1993, went through the consular interview in Tijuana, Mexico, to be finally documented: “I am 43 year old. I have spent 31 years living in America’s gray zone. This was my only shot–a complicated, unlikely shot–at living in the only country I have ever really known, with legal status….It took months and enormous resources, strategizing and support, for me to get a work visa. I am just one man, and this is just one story. Consider now the estimated 11 million other undocumented people in America, how many hurdles they face and how llittle we support them” (2025, 7). Vargas is one voice rising from the vast immigrants right movement that William Robinson considers the “leading edge of popular struggles in the United States” in challenging “the oppressive and exploitative class relations that are at the very core of global capitalism” (Robinson (2007). Against the ongoing criminizalization of immigrants, the Spring 2006 nationwide mobilization of millions was a powerful riposte soon to be replicated with mass protests against the Gaza genocide and the onset of fascist barbarism.
One can then surmise in hindsight: Was Bulosan, a fierce advocate of immigrant rights, wrong about being a criminal in America? Vargas is one of the 3.4 million Filipinos in the U.S. (as per 2010 census), the second largest Asian group, but actually the largest from one single homeland. But Vargas is no longer the one-dimensional Filipino; he has become multiple, a differential or bifurcated signifier of the heterogeneous wanderer. He is no longer just an expatriate, exile, possessing an in-between planetary identity. Vargas’ agency, his performative body, is now going to be awarded the 2014 Freedom to Write Award from PEN Center USA–an award perhaps exceeding the much touted Maria Ressa’s Nobel Prize in challenging imperial hubris. Vargas is a responsible individual with prophetic agency, avatar of the transpacific Filipino, mutually constituting his existential predicament in the geopolitical fantasy of all persons displaced by the cataclysmic changes at the end of the 20th cenury and the beginning of this new portentous millennium. With fear and trembling, like Kierkegaard’s double, we wait anxiously for the denouement of Vargas’ adventure.
THE PHILIPPINES MATRIX PROJECT 
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