Why Carlos Bulosan
Now?
Filipino expatriate
Carlos Bulosan was a resilient historical-materialist in his friendship
with people across class, race, gender and ethnicity. He learned mainly
from experience to distinguish between the privileged ruling class and the
mass of American citizens.
BY E. SAN JUAN JR.
Bulatlat
Because I came to stake a claim on
the world... where I lived to change the course of history...
--Carlos Bulosan, “To My Countrymen”
On and after
Sept. 11, 2001, Carlos Bulosan, like thousands of Filipinos, felt the
impact of that disaster. Not because he was caught in the Twin Towers or
in the mountains of Aghanistan and the cities of Iraq. Nor was he in
Basilan or Zamboanga when thousands of U.S. Special Forces landed
allegedly in pursuit of the Abu Sayyaf, welcomed by the sycophantic Arroyo
regime. Bulosan died on Sept. 11, 1956, forty-eight years ago; he was
beyond the reach of imperial terror. But even the dead are not safe from
the enemy -- witness how Rizal was co-opted by the American colonizers to
suppress the underground resistance after Aguinaldo’s surrender. Witness
how the figure of Andres Bonifacio has been attacked by American scholars
eager to debunk the prestige of the hero and prove how the leading
Filipino historians have failed, like the comprador and bureaucratic
elite, in measuring up to Western neoliberal standards.
Bulosan has
also been coopted and taken for granted. Since the ‘60s, when Filipinos
struggling for civil rights and against the Vietnam War discovered Bulosan,
the author of America Is in the Heart has become institutionalized
as a harmless ethnic icon. Notwithstanding this, I have met Filipino
college students today who have no idea who Bulosan is and don’t care.
Obviously times have changed; indeed, circumstances, not ideas, largely
determine attitudes, choices, inclinations. The current war on what
Washington/Pentagon regard as foes of democracy and freedom, just like the
war against Japanese militarism in World War II that compelled Filipino
migrant workers to join the U.S. military, is already repeating that call
for unity with the neocolonial masters, for suspending antagonisms,
rendering Bulosan’s cry for equality and justice superfluous.
How do we avoid
siding with, and serving, our oppressors? Almost everyone who has read
Bulosan -- I am speaking chiefly of those who matured politically in the
‘70s and ‘80s , after which Bulosan suffered the fate of the “disappeared”
of Argentina, Nicaragua, the Philippines -- can not help but be disturbed
and uneasy over the ending of America Is in the Heart. Clearly the
American dream failed. Why then does the Bulosan persona or proxy glorify
“America” as the utopian symbol of happiness and liberation when the
reality of everyday life -- for his compatriots and people of color in the
narrative -- demonstrates precisely the opposite? Is there some hidden
transcript or subtext behind the wish-fulfilling rhetoric? Various
commentators, including myself, have offered ways of reconciling the
paradox, flattening out the incongruities, disentangling the ironies and
discordances. The reconfigured solution may be to say that life itself is
full of contradictions, which, in spite of the dialectical fix
underwritten by the historical process, will not completely vanish; that
these contradictions, perhaps sublimated in other forms, will continue
haunting us until we face the truth of the overdetermining primal
scenario. Absent this confrontation, we easily succumb to the seductive
malaise of the politics of identity, in which the consumerist postcolonial
subaltern constructs identity as a pastiche, a hybrid concoction, a
hyper-real performance in the global marketplace.
One Filipino
interviewed by Yen Le Espiritu, in her Filipino American Lives, evades the
contradictions in this naive but opportunist bricolage, which Espiritu
celebrates as one that is neither pluralist nor assimilationist: “...I use
both the Filipino value of family interdependence and the American value
of independence to the best interests of myself and my family.” Note the
object of his concern: “myself and my family.” Should we look for some
sense of civic responsibility or neighborly concern? Not here, for now at
least. The conjunction and easily absorbs any conflict, just as
those balikbayan boxes can contain all kinds of goods, legal or
contraband, genuine or spurious signs of duty or status-jockeying. We take
these balikbayan cargo cult as signs of success or piety to the
family and homeland by Cory Aquino’s “modern heroes,” for others “modern
slaves.”
The irony
remains. Behind the triumphalist invocation of a mythical “America” linger
the unforgettable images of violence, panicked escape, horrible
mutilation, death, in Bulosan’s works. In April 1941, Bulosan wrote to a
friend: “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.” It is only
now, thanks to the resonance of September 11, that we are beginning to
grasp what is meant by these prophetic words written 63 years ago. The
truth of this will, I am sure, become manifest before our program ends.
Perhaps some of us are wondering if there are Ashcroft’s agents in our
midst, though be assured that the librarians in this country as a group
refused outright to be used as spies eavesdropping on their fellow
citizens.
We have all
heard of the recent deportation of the Cuevas family of Fremont,
California, last July. At the same time, 89 Filipinos were deported, the
Bush administration’s retaliation -- some say -- to President Arroyo’s
withdrawal of 51 Filipino troops in exchange for the release of hostage
Angelo de la Cruz. We might recall earlier incidents. In August 2002, 63
Filipinos were herded into an airplane in a direct flight to the
Philippines, all deportees chained and manacled during the flight,
monitored by FBI agents. In December 2002, a second batch of 84 Filipinos
were deported under the same humiliating condition, legitimized by the
Absconder Apprehension Initiative Program of the U.S. Department of
Justice and Immigration and Naturalization Services (launched Jan. 13,
2001). This program has so far targetted 314,000 “undocumented” persons,
including 12,000 Filipinos. In the seven-month period from October 2001
to April 2002, 334 Filipinos were deported under authoritarian measures
enforced through legislative actions, direct executive order, including of
course the USA Patriot Act, under the current administration. As far as I
know, Filipinos have never been deported in this manner in the past; now,
with the discovery of “terrorists” in their homeland, the perception and
judgment of Filipinos may approximate Bulosan’s suspicion of himself
(almost like a Kafka hero) cited earlier.
Of all groups
in the U.S., immigrants have always been and continue to be targeted for
severe repression. Even from the earliest period marked by the Alien and
Sedition Acts of 1798 up to the Cold War McCarran Walter Act of 1952, they
have been subject to “ideological exclusion” -- deported or banned on
account of specific beliefs and ideas -- even though this violates
provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the 1950s,
for example, the Immigration and Nationality Act provided for the
exclusion or deportation of any immigrant who advocated anarchism or
communism. Of late, immigrants associated with anti-Zionist and
anti-imperialist Palestinian organizations branded as “terrorists” have
been prohibited entry. (As everyone knows, Secretary Powell has labeled --
in a kind of pre-emptive unilateral attack -- the Communist Party of the
Philippines and the New People’s Army as foreign terrorist organizations,
a move seconded by the Arroyo regime.) After 9/11, the USA Patriot Act not
only reaffirmed such sanctions but expanded and widened the scope of the
powers of the State apparatuses to suppress any criticism or dissent, even
offering incentives to immigrants to spy on their compatriots.
On Aug. 5,
2004, Representative Crispin Beltran introduced a resolution to the
Philippine Congress denouncing the U.S. government’s threat to expel
300,000 Filipinos in the following months. Beltran noted that during the
first wave of the Iraq war, Filipinos were already targeted for
deportation, and that “since 9/11, the U.S. government has
indiscriminately criminalized and demonized all immigrants,” particularly
those racially profiled as “terrorists” or associated with countries
harboring terrorists, such as Pakistan, Syria, Iran, North Korea, and, of
course, the Philippines. We have already been designated as the second
front (after Afghanistan) in this endless war against Al Qaeda and the
enemies of the U.S. “way of life.”
It is a matter
of record that Filipinos in such numbers and in such horrendous conditions
have never been officially deported from the United States ever since the
islands came under U.S. rule. True, individual “trouble-makers” like union
activists were deported in the ‘20s and ‘30s. But the entire community as
such has never been singled out in this manner, in the way that the
Chinese were stigmatized as a group before and after the 1882 Exclusion
Act, and the Japanese at the outbreak of World War II. So this is a
“first,” thanks to the Abu Sayyaf and the Bush-Cheney gospel of preemptive
war for finance capital.
This
undisguised terror over the Filipino community today is not new, but it is
more deceptive and invasive. To be sure, the Philippines has never posed a
threat to the security of the U.S. It has in fact been victimized as a
dependency of the Empire (instanced recently by the grievance of 13,000
Filipino veterans who fought in World War II but are deemed ineligible to
receive full veteran benefits). Except for the American Indians, I would
argue that Filipinos were the only other group that experienced the
relentless ferocity of white-supremacist violence during the
Filipino-American War of 1899-1903, which sacrificed 1.4 million Filipino
lives. General Jack Smith earned infamy by his order to convert the
countryside into a “howling wilderness”: “I want no prisoners. I wish you
to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn the better it will please
me.” This ruthless conquest of the Philippines continued up to 1906 when
600 Moro men, women and children were killed in the battle of Mount Dajo;
and up to 1913 when, in the battle of Mount Bagsak in Jolo, close to 5,000
Moro men, woman and children perished at the hands of Capt. John
Pershing’s troops. This genocidal carnage inaugurating the birth of the
U.S. global empire has up to now never been fully investigated to the same
extent that similar atrocities in Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere are now
being thoroughly researched and publicized.
It is only now
that the U.S. “first Vietnam” in the Philippines has come to the
foreground of the world’s conscience, along with the St. Louis Exposition
of 1904. But the problem is that they are either exoticized or rendered
harmless for scholastic speculation. Bulosan distills the intensity of
such bloody subjugation of the Filipino revolutionary forces in key
episodes in America Is in the Heart, and in stories that describe
lynching and white vigilante attacks. As the bulk of Bulosan’s essays and
letters emphasize, the struggles of Filipino migrant workers in the U.S.
cannot be understood without its context in the fierce class war between
peasants and landlords in the Philippines, between ordinary Filipinos and
the Americanized oligarchy whom he satirized in The Laughter of My Father.
All the personal anecdotes and incidents in Bulosan’s works need to be
read as historicized allegories of the national situation in order to
appreciate their full significance. Thus “Bulosan” may be read as a
rubric, an emblem of that whole constellation of themes and ideas
surrounding the fraught, unequal relation between the colonized formation
and the imperial overlord, particularly the oppression and resistance of
Filipinos in the metropole.
When Filipinos
began to be active in the union organizing in Hawaii in the ‘20s and ‘30s,
they encountered savage repression reminiscent of the anti-sedition
campaigns against Macario Sakay and other recalcitrant “bandits.” The
cold-blooded killing of 16 Filipino strikers in the Hanapepe plantation
on Kauai in 1924 is the most telling index of fascist barbarism. Filipino
militants like Pablo Manlapit, Pedro Calosa and others were imprisoned and
deported, with Calosa re-surfacing in Tayug, Pangasinan, as a leader of
the Colorum peasant uprising. The linkage here is not the ad hoc
conjunction and of the late-modern Filipino subject trying to
equalize two poles of the hierarchy, the dominant and the oppressed.
Imperial violence demonstrated its power in two fronts: fascist
suppression of workers in the annexed land of Hawaii, neocolonial
repression of worker-peasant resistance in the territorial possession of
the Philippines.
There may be
two time-zones and places in the lives of Filipinos, but the cartography
of struggle articulates them in one narrative that, I think, is found more
unambiguously dramatized in The Cry and the Dedication. In it
Bulosan resolved the dilemma that Filipino militants faced in the ‘60s
during the anti-martial law movement here from 1972 to 1986, and after. It
is wrong-headed to dichotomize mechanically (as the KDP did) the struggle
for civil rights and racial equality here in the U.S. and the
anti-imperialist struggle in the Philippines -- both target the same
enemy, the U.S. corporate elite, from varying angles. This elite is
represented by the ruling oligarchy of compradors, bureaucrats, and
landlords in the Philippines. Since 1898, Filipinos here and at home have
borne the brunt of class, racial, and national oppression simultaneously,
in variable modalities. It seems to me the Archimedean point underlying
this complex is the continuing domination of the Philippines as a nation
and people which, if not changed, can not transform the subordinate
identity or position of the Filipino community in the U.S. As I have
asserted on various occasions, the liberation of the homeland is the
decisive and pivotal item in the agenda. The struggle for national
democracy follows Marx’s view that white labor cannot emancipate itself
when it is oppressing those of color; and that no nation can be free if it
oppresses another. Of course, the concrete conditions for carrying out the
democratic struggle varies as well as the agencies and protagonists
engaged. It is nonsense to valorize armed struggle in the Philippines as a
“great morale booster” compared to street demonstrations and other
non-violent actions here, or to belabor the generational conflicts such as
those between Filipinos born here and those “fresh off the boat.” Given
the priority objective mentioned above, it is then a strategic question of
where the concrete struggle is waged, the collectives involved, the limits
and possibilities of logistics, etc.
During the
height of the Cold War and the McCarthy witch-hunt in the ‘50s,
oppositional Filipinos bore the brunt of official anticommunist terror.
Filipino trade unionists (such as Ernie Mangaong, Chris Mensalvas, and
others active in the International Longshoreman and Warehouse’s Union in
Seattle) were brought to trial, harassed, and threatened with deportation.
After his transient fame in the late ‘40s, Bulosan suffered ostracism and
censorship up to his death in 1956. Evangelista and Campomanes charge
Bulosan of yielding to “alcoholism, illness, obscurity, neurosis, and
despair” in a time of fascist terror and emergency. These are cynical
judgments based on trivializing speculation.
It is uncanny
to find Bulosan writing in the 1952 Yearbook of the ILWU Local how
“Terrorism Rides the Philippines.” That is the title of his article on the
persecution of Amado V. Hernandez and other progressive nationalists by
the Roxas puppet government. It suggests Bulosan’s unbroken service in the
anti-imperialist front despite his physical distance from Manila. His
novel The Cry and the Dedication, inspired by Luis Taruc’s
autobiographical account, Born of the People, is an eloquent
testimony to Bulosan’s wrestling with the forces of racism as well as
class and national oppression without idealizing the supposed political
maturity of Filipino revolutionaries over against flabby American
reformists. This latter claim echoes the opinion that Filipinos who speak
“Filipino” are more genuinely Filipino than those Filipinos, born here,
whose parents have prevented them from learning their language. Being
Filipino is not a transhistorical essence but a political project of
realizing collective emancipation. It is a question of becoming Filipino
on what grounds, for what reasons and principles -- what is ultimately at
stake?
Bulosan himself
bewailed the reproduction of colonial self-hatred and impotence in his
compatriots here. It is not suprising that relatively successful
Filipinos, especially professionals who came after the liberalization of
immigration in 1965, dismiss Bulosan as obsolete or irrelevant. Bulosan is
alleged to be useful only in finding out about the experience of the first
generation of Manongs during the Depression. Now that Filipinos have, or
are beginning to make it -- witness Loida Nicolas Lewis, General Taguba,
and other model-minority figures touted by Filipinas magazine or
Philippine News -- we don’t need Bulosan. We don’t need the lessons
gained from past experience, the struggles of the Manongs like Manlapat,
Calosa, Philip Vera Cruz, Larry Itliong, and others (without whom, it may
be said here, the United Farm Workers of America would not have emerged in
a radical fashion) -- except to measure how far we have advanced in the
social ladder, in the pecking order of the class/racial hierarchy. Bulosan,
of course, also wrote a substantial number of essays and stories about
Filipinos back home some of which I collected in the anthology, The
Philippines Is in the Heart (published in 1978 by New Day Publishers,
Quezon City). Besides, leftist radicalism is out of fashion in the age of
cyber globalization and transnational cyborgs morphing from one ethnoscape
to another -- even though the pasyon and its postmodern variants
are still used as the monolithic standard of interpretation and evaluation
for social movements today.
One may add
here that, strictly speaking, there was no diaspora of Filipinos before
the Marcos dictatorship institutionalized the “warm body export” at a time
when the circumstances warranted the exchange. The circulation of
commodified labor, mainly domestics, now reaching nine million, is the
principal mode in which globalization impinges on Filipino consciousness.
It is not the success of Lea Salonga, General Taguba, and other
celebrities. Films, songs, stories of Flor Contemplacion, Sarah Balabagan,
and nameless other victims of the global “care chain,” have now arrived at
the cultural arena. In time, no doubt, we will have many male and female
Bulosans to chronicle the travails and struggles of this “migrante”
population exploring real and imagined worlds.
What is the
reality today? Possibly the largest of what is denominated the Asian group
in the US, Filipinos number close to 3-4 million of which 106,000 to
700,000 are undocumented due to overstayed visas. Of this total, 70-75%
are immigrants, while 25-30% are Filipino-Americans born in the U.S.,
ethnically defined Filipino. Although lumped together with Chinese,
Japanese, Koreans, and Indians in the category of “Asian Americans” (now
11 million, due to triple to 33 million by 2050), Filipinos so far have
failed to reach the status of the “model minority” in terms of income,
prestige positions, and other indicators, for reasons that inhere in the
colonial and neocolonial subjugation of the Philippines and in the
class-divided structure and social metabolic process of racialized
reproduction of the U.S. polity.
It is not
historically correct to insert Filipinos into the homogenizing immigrant
narrative of success (as the historian Ronald Takaki and others are wont
to do), for the workers recruited by the Hawaii sugar planters were not,
properly speaking, immigrants. Nor was Bulosan an immigrant when he landed
in Seattle in 1930. Like thousands of Filipinos in the Alaskan canneries
and the farms of Hawaii and the West Coast, Bulosan was a “colonial ward.”
In various ways, we are still neocolonial dependents of the U.S. Empire.
Neither China nor Japan, Korea nor India, were completely colonized and
annexed by the U.S. Those formations, needless to say, possess
unquestioned cultural integrity and millennia of elaborate cultural
development not found in the Philippines. The Philippines has perhaps the
unenviable distinction of being the US only direct colony in Southeast
Asia from 1898 to 1946, and a strictly regulated neocolony thereafter.
Owing to the fierce, implacable resistance of Filipino revolutionaries to
U.S. colonial aggression, the U.S. invading military (mostly veterans of
the brutal campaign against the American Indians) inflicted the most
barbaric forms of torture, punishment, hamletting, and other disciplinary
measures. The U.S. produced the “first Vietnam” in this systematic
genocidal campaign of pacification made ideologically genteel by President
McKinley’s policy of “benevolent assimilation.” It was a “civilizing
mission” intended to “Christianize” the natives, an unprecedented “killing
field” where, for Henry Adams, “we must slaughter a million or two of
foolish Malays [called “niggers,” “gugus,” and “black devils” by the
soldiers] in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and
electric trailways.”
As Colleen Lye
and others have argued, the Filipino experience as colonized/neocolonized
subjects is singular and cannot be dissolved into the archetypal immigrant
syndrome. It cannot be altered so as to lump Filipinos with the Chinese,
Japanese, Korean and Indian communities with their own historical
specificities. Although the pan-ethnic category of “Asian American” was
invented in the ‘60s to articulate points of unity in the social,
political, and economic struggles for recognition of the diverse groups,
it is important to note that the American colonial bureaucrats and
military perceived and handled Filipinos as if they were American Indians
or African slaves in the South. We can see unadorned vestiges of this
among American experts claiming epistemological authority over their
native informants. Again, we need to stress the ideological paradigm, the
frame of intelligibility, in which American administrators, social
scientists, intellectuals, etc. (including the notorious Stanley Karnow,
author of the best-selling In Our Image) made sense of Filipinos:
either we were (like the American Indians) savages, half-childish
primitives, or innocuous animals that can be civilized with rigorous
tutelage, or else slaughtered. They found that some could be trained like
the African slaves or Mexican stoop laborers. No one mistook the Filipinos
for the persevering if wily Chinese, the inscrutable Japanese, or the
mystical Indian. We were mistaken for unruly Africans, Mexicans, or
American Indians who needed to be tamed and domesticated. This, plus the
reputation of Filipinos as militant union organizers and/or highly sexed
dandies, explain the putative nasty “invisibility,” irksome if
indeterminate “otherness,” our fabled interstitial difference, which,
however, does not protect us from the surveillance of the Department of
Homeland Security or the racist violence that murdered postal worker
Joseph Ileto and many others.
Bulosan was one
of the first organic intellectuals of the Filipino community to have
understood this singularity precisely in his depiction of the Filipinos as
subjects occupying a unique position: participating in the class struggles
of citizens in the U.S. for justice and equality, not just for competition
for a “place in the sun,” while at the same time demanding freedom and
genuine sovereignty for the Philippines as a necessary condition for their
being recognized fully as human beings. This is a far cry from the
stereotype lauded by Manila newspaper columnists. One of them mused
recently what “A Day Without Filipinos” would be, following the lead of
the film “A Day Without Mexicans.” Are we really indispensable, not
expendable? Filipino caregivers are much in demand in the global “care
chain” because “they have that special touch, that extra patience and
willingness to stay an hour more when needed.” Whether we like it or not,
this is the ubiquitous image of the Filipino projected onto the
mass/public consciousness by Internet, rumor, printed media, television,
and so on. It is displacing the memory of Imelda Marcos and her fabulous
shoe collection, despite the recent film apologizing for her charming
kookiness.
Indeed, there
is a struggle of and for representation, superimposed on the fundamental
narrative of class war. Writing before his death, Bulosan affirmed a
desire for critical representation that is today frowned upon by
postmodernist deconstructors. It is said that no one can represent anyone
faithfully, accurately; language always fails. But everyday practice
proves the opposite; the corporate media are more powerful in representing
us for profitable exploitation. Bulosan expressed his creed: “What
impelled me to write? The answer is: my grand dream of equality among
men and freedom for all. To give a literate voice to the voiceless one
hundred thousand Filipinos in the United States, Hawaii, and Alaska. Above
all and ultimately, to translate the desires and aspirations of the whole
Filipino people in the Philippines and abroad in terms relevant to
contemporary history.” Whether he succeeded or failed, that is for us and
future readers to decide under varying circumstances. Unfortunately, for
various reasons, most Filipinos do not read. We may have to translate
Bulosan and other writers into computer/Internet language, the discourse
of films, television, rap music, dance, and other non-print media.
Finally, I want
to point out that Bulosan -- so often this is forgotten even among the
ranks of progressives -- was a resilient historical-materialist in his
friendship with people across class, race, gender and ethnicity. He
learned mainly from experience to distinguish between the privileged
ruling class and the mass of American citizens not all of whom are on the
side of the class enemy. In fact, this enemy can only maintain its
hegemony (that is, governing by consent with the help of jails, police,
army), by overt or subtle ideological manipulation. And after September
11, by fear, by stigmatizing people of color as sinister aliens,
criminals, terrorists. We need to make this necessary distinction so that
we do not isolate ourselves and then indulge in sectarian
self-righteousness, compensating for our elitism by boasting about the
superior revolutionary discipline or intelligence of Filipino insurgents.
If Bulosan did that, he would never have survived in the crisis of the
Depression and McCarthyism. More crucially, he would never have gotten the
uncompromising support of many white American women who became his
intimate companions and helped him write and publish. (I frankly believe
that most of his works are products of combined efforts by him and his
numerous women helpers. A novel purported to be by Bulosan, All the
Conspirators, is, judging from its style and content, the work of a
woman-friend who was also a writer.) Nor would he have deigned to read the
works of Richard Wright, Melville, Whitman, Theodore Dreiser, William
Saroyan, and, of course, his close friend Sanora Babb. Bulosan’s lesson is
this: We need to unite with as many people here and across the planet on
the basis of principled struggle for the broadest democratic rights and
social justice. We need to build on the accomplishments of past
generations of workers, artists, etc. Certainly, another world is possible
provided we struggle as partisans for universal ideals of human rights,
freedom, equality, and compassion for all life in the endangered
ecosystem.
I think it is
in this spirit of the united front against fascism and imperialism that
the Carlos Bulosan Heritage Center is being inaugurated today. In
solidarity with the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, Palestine,
Nepal, and others in the frontline of the war against imperial globalizing
terror, we are launching the Bulosan Heritage Center in a period of
crisis, which is both a moment of danger and opportunity, chiefly the
opportunity of educating, raising consciousness, by mobilizing those
classic qualities of patience, fortitude, humor, cunning, intelligence and
generosity in Filipinos that Carlos Bulosan immortalized in his life and
work. Bulatlat
(Remarks delivered at the inauguration of the Carlos
Bulosan Heritage
Center of the Philippines Forum, New
York City, Oct. 30 2004. The author is co-director of the Philippine
Forum.)
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