Ballroom Dance as an Indicator of Immigrant Identity in the Filipino Community

Abstract

Filipinos now constitute largest Asian ethnic group in California and like many immigrant groups, they face problem living hybrid identity within dominant culture (Bonus 1). This essay offers brief report on significance ballroom dance to Filipino community, provides evidence distinct Filipino social conduct on ballroom dance floor, and will then focus on incorporation what are considered traditional movements from indigenous dances into ballroom-based line dances as examples Filipinos' efforts to negotiate their identity in world. Thomas Turino offers compelling reason for ballroom dance's popularity within this particular immigrant group. His research into cosmopolitanism and popular music in Zimbabwe examines ballroom dance in Zimbabwe's Salisbury townships where ballroom dancing has been practiced since 1930's. Considering it dance middle class whites, Africans began taking up dance because it was prestige activity a better class people. Photos in African Parade competitions during 1970's show large crowds participants and spectators suggesting that mentality remained largely intact even during height nationalist movements (Turino 147-48). Given 400 years colonization, mentality Filipinos has also been explained by varying theories colonial influence. Nilda Rimonte notes that, Filipinos were victimized on several fronts: by assumptions and presumptions colonial ideology, by very act cultural invasion itself, by coercive cultural transformations and by complicit collaboration leaders and elders who perpetuated violence historical distortions.... Denial this past has been source crippling confusion about Filipino identity and obligations to West. (41) I believe Filipino Ballroom dancers practice ballroom dance because they also consider it prestige activity of better class people, but also as an imagined American activity. Just as West has its imaginations East, Philippines has its imagination United States. Indeed U.S. colonialism in Philippines was rhetorically driven by what President McKinley had referred to as assimilation, whereby earnest and paramount aim colonizer was that win[ning] confidence, respect and affection colonized. Colonization as assimilation was deemed moral imperative, as wayward native children cut off from their Spanish fathers and desired by other European powers would now be adopted and protected by compassionate embrace United States. As father is bound to guide his son, United States was charged with development native others. Neither exploitative nor enslaving, colonization entailed cultivation the felicity and perfection Philippine people through uninterrupted devotion to those noble ideals which constitute higher civilization mankind. Because colonization is about civilizing love and love civilization, it must be absolutely distinct from disruptive criminality conquest. The allegory benevolent assimilation effaces violence conquest by construing colonial rule as most precious gift that the most civilized people can render to those still caught in state barbarous disorder. (Rafael 21) I see Filipino Ballroom Dance as product United States' benevolent colonization Philippines but at same time see signs Filipino American immigrants' desire to maintain link to their homeland and attempts to gather and identify themselves as separate from mainstream. I begin with popularity ballroom dance within Filipino diaspora. Filipino ballroom clubs, schools and studios can be found all over world. Within these spaces, Filipinos find safety from outside forces and room for sub-communities to develop inside dominant culture. …