The Philippine Refugee Processing Center: The Relational Displacements of Vietnamese Refugees and the Indigenous Aetas

Abstract

Essays 118 YẾn Lê Espiritu and J. A. Ruanto-­ Ramirez The Philippine Refugee Processing Center: The Relational Displacements of Vietnamese Refugees and the Indigenous Aetas Established in 1980, the Philippines Refugee Processing Center (PRPC) on the Bataan Peninsula served as the most prominent transit center for almost all of the Southeast Asian refugees making their way to permanent resettlement in America. By the time the PRPC closed in 1995, approximately four hundred thousand Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong refugees had transited through it before resettling in the United States (Barr 2011). The story of the PRPC is often told as one of international cooperation to ease the acute “Boat People” crisis: the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) administered the center; the United States provided most of the funds for establishing and maintaining the center;1 and the Philippines donated the land on which the center was built. While other works have critically examined the humanitarian claims touted by the UNHCR and the United States,2 this article assesses the role of the Philippines as land donor in the PRPC international partnership. Specifically, it focuses on a largely hidden fact of the Marcos government’s “donation” of land for the construction of the PRPC: the eviction and relocation of the Aetas,3 members of the Magbuk ún tribe of Negritos believed to be the first inhabitants of Morong, Bataan (Tebtebba Foundation 2008, 17–­ 18; Cruz and Romero 2012, 5). By focusing on the PRPC and the relational displacements of Vietnamese refugees and the Indigenous Aetas, this article merges and extends the fields of critical refugee studies and settler colonialism studies. Using the lens of critical refugee studies, it shows how the Marcos government’s motivation to host Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s derives from its need The Philippine Refugee Processing Center 119 to project itself as a liberal democracy to divert attention away from its much-­maligned martial law policies. But this is an incomplete story. Drawing on settler colonialism studies, the article points out that the Marcos regime’s ability to recast itself as a humanitarian state required not only the refugee figure but also Indigenous land. This productive convergence of critiques—­critical refugee studies and settler colonialism studies—­is enabled by the article’s focus on a non–­Global North postcolonial nation. By underlining the mythologies of rescue and benevolence deployed by the Philippines, a Global South nation, the article disrupts the focus on Global North resettlement countries that typifies much of the work in refugee studies. And by highlighting the ongoing displacement of the Aetas in the postcolonial Philippines, it exposes the settler disavowal that collapses histories of genocidal violence and dispossession of Indigenous peoples into a story of “postcolonial ‘survival’” (Day 2019, 7). Methodologically, the article relies on Yến Lê Espiritu’s analytical technique of critical juxtaposing : “the bringing together of seemingly different and disconnected events, communities, histories, and spaces in order to illuminate what would otherwise not be visible” (Espiritu 2014, 21). In critically juxtaposing displaced Vietnamese refugees and the dispossessed Aetas, this article makes visible both the geopolitical violence that accompanies refugee aid and the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous land and peoples in postcolonial nations. In short, the relational displacements of refugees and Indigenous peoples, when refracted against one another, expose the ongoing and linked effects of global militarism and settler colonialism. 6 Critical Refugee Studies: Martial Law, Humanitarian Claims, and the PRPC The interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies reveals how imperial and militaristic projects often masquerade as refugee aid (Espiritu 2014; Nguyen 2012). In Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es), Espiritu (2014) argues that the figure of the Vietnamese refugee, the purported grateful beneficiary of the U.S. “gift of freedom” (Nguyen 2012), has been key to the (re)cuperation of American identities and the shoring up of U.S. militarism in the post–­ Vietnam War era. Indeed, the image of thousands of Vietnamese risking death to escape “communism” and resettle in the United States appears to affirm the United States’ uncontested status as a nation of refuge (Espiritu 2014). However, in reality, the granting of refugee status to displaced Vietnamese was a highly contested and...