Filipinos

Abstract

“Filipino” refers to those who claim ethnonational ties to the Philippines. At the same time that the term assumes such an affiliation, its invocation problematizes this connection. The term itself cannot be said to be autochthonous to the archipelago, as it is the namesake of Prince Felipe II of Asturias of the 16th century. While certainly not exceptional to many accounts of places and nations that share a colonial past, scholars in Latino studies might think, along with scholars in Filipino studies, what it might mean to articulate an Asian identity, culture, and history via a name inherited from colonial Spanish. Indeed, the Filipino alphabet does not even have an “F”—“Filipino” may hail as much into existence as it displaces from colonial memory. Contemporary and historical migration patterns of Filipinos similarly speak to such displacements. By some accounts, more than ten million Filipino citizens live outside of the national and geographic boundaries of the Philippines; hence its diaspora is not singular but multifarious and expansive. As some of these texts certainly attest, human labor is the country’s most profitable export. The study of Filipinos and the Philippines, moreover, finds its place in studies of Asia, the Pacific, the Middle East, and Latin America. In other words, even as “Filipinos” presumes a certain geographical fixity, it also generates a host of queries that incisively call into question this assumption and the politics it holds. In particular, how does one articulate an ever-shifting diaspora? Under what conditions was the “Filipino” made possible, and what did its invocation foreclose and provoke? Who did it include then, and what might it exclude now? The literature included here focuses on the study of Filipinos not in any attempt to produce objective knowledge about a single group of people, but rather treats Filipinos as an entry point for interrogating the terms by which Filipinos are known and understood. For instance, literature on migration calls into question not only the telos of immigration to point to the necessary multidirectionality of Filipino movement, but also points to the state itself as developing into an entity that must manage a citizenry that lives elsewhere. Filipino literature in Spanish, moreover, necessitates a study of the transpacific that attends to competing and overlapping empires. This bibliography also aims to enumerate to works of cultural and literary production (beyond just secondary academic sources) that we feel would be most relevant to scholars in Latinx/a/o studies and Latin Americanists who are interested in looking at Spain’s lone colony in Asia. Nevertheless, the list of literary and cultural sources here is by no means meant to be exhaustive, but is rather a point of departure. For instance, listing works in Spanish by Filipino authors, while historically relevant, is certainly not completely (or at all) representative of “Filipino literature,” particularly because Spanish is not widely spoken in the Philippines today.