Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique

Abstract

“Immigrant goes to America, / Many hellos in America;/Nobody knows in America / Puerto Rico's in America!” This chorus from the original 1957 stage version of West Side Story, sung—and brilliantly danced to—by Anita (Chita Rivera) and the Shark Girls on a New York city rooftop, offers a cogent critique of U.S. empire, particularly its exceptionalism and concomitant amnesia. This critique is not limited to Puerto Rico. Locations from Guam to the Panama Canal Zone to the Philippines and elsewhere have also, at various points and in various ways, been “in America,” with few in America knowing about it, despite intraimperial migrations of persons from those places. This shared sensibility is the focus of Faye Caronan's Legitimizing Empire, an ambitious and focused study of resonances between Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural critique. To address this resonance, Caronan provides a series of perceptive interpretations of contemporary cultural productions, from novels to documentaries to spoken-word performances, emerging from Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican artists. In her discussion of documentaries, Caronan uses the generative phrase “creative reenactment” to describe the strategies for making visible that which has been not only nearly lost to history but also even systematically forgotten. These reenactments, and the memories of the colonized that they give expression to, go beyond just the documentary genre. Caronan's concept of “creative reenactment [as a] method of recuperating their subaltern perspectives” usefully describes anything that makes critique possible and meaningful for those who share a history of U.S. empire, such as those with connections to the Philippines and Puerto Rico (p. 78).