Configuring the Filipino Diaspora in the United States

Abstract

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 Filipino-American (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?