Up from Benevolent Assimilation: At Home with the Manongs of Bienvenido Santos

Abstract

It should not be possible to read literature without understanding that Filipino American is a concept at intersection of immigrant and colonized, and at overlap of waning of territorial and waxing of neocolonialism. This article specifically examines stories by Bienvenido Santos (1911-1996) as critical expressions of transition from older practice of colonization to an emergent neocolonialism. Broadly speaking, neocolonialism arose as informal empire (McCormick), a new formation designed to take world order (Hardt and Negri) from the age of empire (Hobsbawn) into long twentieth century (Arrighi) of globalization and its discontents (Sassen). (1) literature tracks this transition through animating ambivalent desires that travel across this historical shift. After a generation of historical revisionism, famously (Campomanes, New Empire's 159-60) can now be remembered. literature provides not only satisfactions of inclusion a multicultural melting pot, but also a reminder of how United States modernity was fundamentally built upon both dynamics of capitalist development and gendered racialization and failed project of colonialism Pacific. A newly self-critical literature came to Santos for multiculturalism and stayed for insights into meaning and history of its today. Accidental Immigrant Acts 1945, as war Pacific finally came to an end with a pair of thermonuclear detonations, a man and a white woman Washington DC end their relationship Bienvenido Santos's short story, Quicker With Arrows. More precisely, man, Valentin Rustia, finally musters courage to propose to his girlfriend, Fay Price. And she promptly turns him down: Thank you for all fine times, Val, thank you for this gesture, but sorry, I'm not buying. Good night (167). Rejected and dejected, Val returns to impromptu celebrations still going on at his apartment. In hall, party still waited for final word from White House about surrender (167). So ends penultimate story Santos's collection, Scent of Apples. The story closes by paralleling different endings: World War II, Japanese wartime occupation of Philippines, United States colonial occupation of Philippines, an exilic community of United States, and an interracial romance. With these parallels, Quicker With Arrows uses a companionate relationship between individuals as both a realist depiction and as an allegory. Realism is mode of representation usually associated with Santos, a writer who was openly committed to chronicling lives of forgotten Filipinos: manongs (first a term of respect for an elder male, here, it refers to early wave of laborers who came to United States), pensionados (brief wave of immigrants to United States who came to study at universities with intention--often not realized--of returning to Philippines to occupy civil service positions colonial administration), exiles: accidental immigrants, as he has called them. Despite being a professional writer and teacher, Santos characteristically remarked that in a special sense I, too, am an old timer (qtd. Campomanes, Filipinos 169) Santos feels a kinship with these pre-1965 sojourners from Philippines who never manage to get back home. (1) But Quicker With Arrows is a different kind of Santos story. At its center is a figure who is not as sympathetic as beleaguered manongs. Val is a first-world-loving, upperclass dandy who was handed a sinecure for duration of war. To call Val a member of burgis (a term of satirical ridicule for sanctimonious and self-interested middle class), would probably be an insult, as he is clearly of indigenous elite who presumably collaborated with colonizers. …