Flippin': Filipinos on America

Abstract

Flippin': Filipinos on America. Edited by Luis H. Francia and Eric Gamalinda. New York: Asian American Writers' Workshop. 1996. 377 pages. $14.95 paper. In Culturally We Are All Mestizos (Budhi, II, 1998) Fernando N. Zialcita argues that Filipino identity is neither schizophrenic nor bastardized, as it is sometimes carelessly described, but simply crossculturally complex. As second largest archipelago in world, Philippines already was habitat for linguistically discrete tribes never nationally unified until Spanish, then American, colonization. Furthermore, even though both colonial powers were Western, influences they had on islanders were not only varied but occasionally diametrically opposite. The resultant confused/enriched efforts at coexistence (including not just Hispanization or Americanization of Philippine society but Filipinization of invaders/intruders as well) justify Zialicita's description of Philippines' culture, in Southeast Asia, as similar to development of Mexico's mestizaje. When to all of these mixed origins one adds complicated overseas attempts to define what is Filipino-American (or American-Filipino), one is prepared to recognize rich contents of Flippin' whose apparently flippant title really means to suggest two-sidedness of currency that connects American-born Filipinos, those F.O.B. (fresh off boat), those with kindred and therefore welcoming homes in both worlds, as well as those of different generations and classifications: those writers established and those emergent. Each side of coin is itself many-sided; and this collection of stories and poems, happily, is only one of a slowly increasing number offering partial representation and definition of the Filipino-American. (One may recall, for example, Luis Francia's larger anthology, Brown River, White Ocean--Rutgers, 1993--which he continues to misrepresent as seminal, despite major precedents in this country as long ago as sixties, from which a number of entries in Francia were borrowed--without acknowledgement.) Among most venerable authors presented are N.V.M. Gonzalez (declared National Artist in 1998, after spending decades on faculty of California State University-Hayward), Sionil Jose (whose epic series on Ilocanos of Rosales is gradually appearing under Random House imprint), Linda Ty-Casper, and poets Carlos Bulosan and Carlos Angeles. The arrivistes include Ninotchka Rosca, Jessica Hagedorn, Eric Gamalinda, and Alfred Yuson; emergents, Marianne Villanueva, Eileen Tabios, Nick Carbo, and Fatima Lim-Wilson. …