Abstract
U.S. imperialism in the Philippines has led to the multiple generations of diasporic conditions of colonial amnesia and systematic forgetting of history. Its impact on the Filipinx community has left unrecorded memories and voices of immigrants silenced, and considered lost to history. This study examines the relationship between U.S. colonialism and imperialism in the Philippines and the experiences of Filipinx immigration to the U.S. through a critical Indigenous feminist lens of visual imagery and storytelling. Given that many of the experiences within the Filipinx diaspora in relation to the American Empire have been systematically forgotten and erased, this study utilizes family photographs in framing the challenges and reinscribes harmful hegemonic U.S. colonial and imperial narratives. With a combination of semi-structured interviews and photo analysis as a form of visual storytelling, the family photographs within the Filipinx diaspora may reframe, challenge, and resist hegemonic U.S. colonial and imperial narratives by holding memories of migration, loss, family belonging, and community across spatial and generational boundaries that attempt to erase by the U.S. nation-state. Results shed light on resistance and survivance through bayanihan (community care) spirit.
Highlights
IntroductionThe politics of forgetting and memory within the Filipinx community is a special interest of ours, as first-generation Filipinas in the U.S One of us is an undergraduate student and the other is a tenured professor at a predominantly White university, and we utilize this study to elevate the voices of our Filipinx communities
Background andResearchers’ Stances: A Dance of Two Generations of ScholarsThe politics of forgetting and memory within the Filipinx1 community is a special interest of ours, as first-generation Filipinas in the U.S One of us is an undergraduate student and the other is a tenured professor at a predominantly White university, and we utilize this study to elevate the voices of our Filipinx communities
This study explores the ways in which family photographs can challenge and resist U.S imperial narratives
Summary
The politics of forgetting and memory within the Filipinx community is a special interest of ours, as first-generation Filipinas in the U.S One of us is an undergraduate student and the other is a tenured professor at a predominantly White university, and we utilize this study to elevate the voices of our Filipinx communities. We knew very little about the history of our Filipino culture, our communities across the diaspora, including our own families who immigrated here from the Philippines. Our lack of knowledge impacted our sense of belonging in our own cultures and peoples. This includes how we navigate being inadvertently labeled as “authentic” Filipina or not. In the process of learning about our herstories, or the lack thereof, we learned about the affective power family photographs hold in building cultural memory, tracing transnational histories of migration within diasporas, bridging
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