The Manang Generation and the Radical Origins of the Pinay Identity

Abstract

Abstract: As colonial subjects and pensionadas (students under American jurisdiction) during the American Occupation Era, Progressive-Era-Filipinas used their western education to craft a vision for the modern woman-citizen, the “New Filipina,” producing an emerging transpacific p/feminist agenda demanding both sovereignty and suffrage. Filipinas immigrating to America in the 1920s–1930s confronted similar patriarchal barriers within Filipina/o American communities while working alongside their husbands along the rural Central Coast. To secure the survival of their families, homes, and cultural heritage, pinays (Filipina Americans) employed methods of community organizing, club work, and care work, echoing the feminist politicking of the pensionada generation before. Both pensionadas and pinays interpreted Filipina labor (as cultural and maternal care work) as a means of resisting colonial and cultural patriarchies, thus helping their communities survive and thrive to this day.