Filipino America Research Articles

Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America

Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America

Josen Masangkay Diaz's Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America

Josen Masangkay Diaz's Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America

Salinas: A History of Race and Resilience in an Agricultural City

Salinas: A History of Race and Resilience in an Agricultural City

Giving Back: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving

Giving Back: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving

GIVING BACK: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving by L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano

Reviewed by: GIVING BACK: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving by L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano Josen Masangkay Diaz GIVING BACK: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving. By L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano. Temple University Press. 2021. While the enduring influence of the expatriate (or balikbayan) on the Philippine nation and its economy has been a long-studied phenomenon within Filipino, Filipino American, and Philippine studies, L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano offers a new critical way to explore questions about diasporic practices as they lie within the myriad structures of the global economy. Mariano’s monograph, Giving Back: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving, theorizes the politics of giving as a mode for studying the complexities of Filipino American belonging to the homeland and outside of it, shifting U.S.-Philippine relations, and circuits of development under the regimes of globalization. Mariano centers the practice of “giving back” as a key feature of Filipino American diasporic communities through which diasporic subjects send remittances to the home-land as both obligation and responsibility. Challenging the unidirectional movement of this immigrant narrative, however, the concept “diaspora giving” reconceptualizes giving back as a set of processes that attempt to stabilize homeland and Filipinoness in the name of diaspora. For Mariano, both “diaspora” and “giving” are sites of multiplicity that hold several different practices, identities, and arrangements that underscore the transnationality of Filipino American attachment to the homeland. Diaspora giving identifies Filipino Americans as development actors often recruited to participate in the neoliberalizing economy of the Philippine development state. Moving away from discourses that highlight “love” of homeland as the foundation of the remittance economy, the book disrupts the linearity of this narrative to argue that both migration and distance are themselves transnational spaces that cultivate ideas about connection and responsibility. To this end, Mariano skillfully points to the ways that Filipinoness is never a stable entity, and the interrogation of giving practices offers insight into the ways that these acts regulate and produce alternative Filipino American diasporic formations, what Mariano calls the resubjectification of Filipino Americans’ roles for national development under globalization. Giving Back relies not upon the “policy-oriented evaluations” that measure the impact of remittances on homeland states (13). Instead, its archive follows the paths of resubjectification, using ethnography and textual analysis to trace the complexities of charity and philanthropy, which are critical operations for international and global development. Mariano historicizes charity as a colonial discourse that “brings abstract citizens together into [End Page 73] nations, constructing home or the domestic in relation to foreign spaces populated by the colonial other” (13). The four chapters of the book conceive of different forms of diaspora giving, turning not only to individual remittances but also to transnational anticolonial activism. Where the Filipino American immigrant is often configured as distinct from the Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) based on the terms of citizenship and settlement, the first chapter traces the ways that these figures are mutually constituted by a political economy structured by labor migration and state development. Mariano argues that although Filipino American diasporic subjects might not see themselves as connected to other diasporic Filipino workers, both share histories and experiences of mobility and return and have been positioned to serve as key actors for national development. Mariano’s work to disrupt the logics of Filipino American choice and OFW duty is imperative. It reveals that both choice and duty are embedded within the structure of feeling of neoliberalism. In Chapter 2, Mariano studies writer and organizer Ninotchka Rosca’s activism to provide examples of counterhegemonic giving that does not subscribe to the logics of U.S. imperialism and global capital. In doing so, Mariano theorizes homeland “disorientation” as an analytic for locating moments of disruption within the progressive pathways of state development. Disorientation interrupts the singular orientations that Filipino Americans have toward homeland. The third chapter follows Philippine Development Foundation (PhilDev), a transnational nonprofit organization, as a model of philanthropy that frames itself as the singular vehicle for addressing suffering and precarity in the Philippines, especially in its collaboration with the Philippine state. Corporate social responsibility through PhilDev and earlier Ayala foundations regulates giving by imagining itself as “doing good...

Review: Giving Back: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving, by L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano

Giving Back is a compelling ethnography about the politics of diaspora giving, tying the personal, the family, the community, the state, and the global in a critical stroke of brilliance, empathy, and alternative visions of philanthropy and volunteerism in the lives of Filipinos in America. It presents the “simultaneities of unity and hierarchy, discourse and practice, the global and deeply personal, mobility and rootedness, home and abroad” (p. 22). Mariano elucidates the intersections of race, class, and empire in two phenotypes of Filipinos—overseas Filipino workers (OFW) and immigrants—and their expectations toward the Philippines. Giving Back examines how and why the notion of ‘giving back’ is connected to U.S. and Philippine historic ties, Philippine labor export policy, globalization, and neoliberalism.The introduction positions ‘giving back’ as a “prominent feature of Filipino American identity and communities, [that] is central to the moral economies of Filipino migration, immigration, and diasporic return” (p. 1). With “diaspora giving,” Filipinos in America are “implicated in a complex web of power relationships and conflicting identities” (p. 4). This section concerns the origin of official development programs and how the “imposition of charity was inseparable from empire as a racial project” (p. 12).Chapter 1 demonstrates the relationship between “doing good” and Filipino migration. Using critical perspectives and interviews with Filipino Americans, Mariano questions the “stakes of nationalist and identarian forms of collective identity” (p. 32) between the “ideological positioning” of the Filipino American and the OFW. “Doing good,” Mariano argues, “is channeled by the material, affective, and cultural forces that bring about its conditions” (p. 34). Philanthropy and remittances are attached to differing Filipino overseas phenotypes: the Filipino immigrant and the OFW. Mariano writes that “these forms of doing good correspond to moral valuations of giving that endow Filipino American immigrants with partnership in national economic development, but overseas Filipino labor migrants with obligatory economic duty” (pp. 44–45). The Filipino immigrant is oriented towards volunteerism and doing good to benefit those in the Philippines, while the OFW is under state control with compulsory routes of defining contributions for the good of the Philippines and the global economy.Chapter 2 examines the politics of diaspora giving, the “role of neoliberal privatization of social welfare,” and homeland orientations of Filipino Americans since the 1970s (p. 67). Dominant homeland orientations create varying immigrant subjectivities, as when Filipino Americans participate in philanthropy and social development without concern for transnational injustices. Divesting politics from homeland orientations reduces diaspora giving to a “declaration of love to the homeland” (p. 69). This chapter “counters dominant diasporic temporalities and spatialities,” including “imperial forms and forces in migration” (p. 78).Chapter 3 is a contestation of corporate social responsibility (CSR), examining one of the largest Philippine conglomerates and its influence in diaspora philanthropy. The network of foundations and associations shapes the “collective responsibility to what it means to be Filipino in diaspora” (p. 85), as well as “sites of struggle where dominant discourses of poverty and responsibility can be either secured or contested” (p. 86). Mariano critiques CSR and global capital in diaspora formation. Filipino America is the target of CSR’s “dual commitment to profit and the market” that “limits the nature of giving relationship” (p. 100) by positioning Filipino America as “making a difference in the Philippines” from a personal, apolitical stance. Mariano claims that the “marketization of Filipino America reduces diaspora giving to monetary exchange” (p. 102), noting that the “intermediary foundation that actively isolates society from history and political economy” fosters “global hierarchies that position and construct the Philippines as a premier labor exporter for the world” (p. 104).Chapter 4 shows how diaspora giving “can challenge the hierarchies of power at the intersection of neocolonialism, global capitalism, and developmentalism” (p. 114), for example, how the failed legal challenge by a transnational Filipino American organization to compel the U.S. military to clean up the environmental mess at former military bases led “to solidarity with Filipinos in the Philippines through issues that stem from the Philippine subordinate position in the global order” (pp. 114–15). Subsequent activities and programs created a “more critical Filipino American diaspora giving politics” (p. 127). Mariano argues that “transformative diasporic politics is formed through an identification as Filipino American mediated by critical associations of responsibility, accountability, and mutuality” (p. 129). This chapter provides examples of new articulations of diaspora-giving “connected to relevant issues and related struggles in other spaces” (pp. 128–29).Mariano’s critical examination of the politics of diaspora giving is a must-read for Filipinos and anyone participating in transnational philanthropy. I am and I do. Giving back is more than personal acts of charity, it is intrinsically connected to national and global politics of subject making.

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America. By Christine Bacareza Balance. Duke University Press, 2016.

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Review: Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America by Christine Bacareza Balance

Review: <i>Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America</i> by Christine Bacareza Balance

Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America

Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America

Book review : Tropical Renditions : making musical scenes in Filipino America by Christine Bacareza Balance

Book review : Tropical Renditions : making musical scenes in Filipino America by Christine Bacareza Balance

Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America, by Christine Bacareza Balance

Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America, by Christine Bacareza Balance

Reclaiming Filipino America through Performance and Film

Filipino Americans are the fourth largest migrant group in America and the second largest Asian population in the United States. Migration from the Philippines is constant and has increased dramatically in the last sixty years. Filipino Americans participate as the ‘Asian American’ identity/race but the specificity of Philippine-U.S. relations and migration pathways make this inclusion a misfit. As a former territory and with complex shifting migration policies, Filipinos have been considered by the U.S. government an ambiguous population, falling just out of reach of national visibility. As the population has continued to grow, Filipino Americans have shared narratives and begun conversation to address the constant cultural negotiation and struggles within the social and racial structures of America. Since the 1980s, a Filipino American cultural and artistic movement or ‘moment’, has emerged with artists, dancers, performers, and filmmakers. These artists make critical interventions that disavow the American empire. The works make comment upon the ramifications of being an unrecognized Asian colony and the systemic challenges of immigration assimilation. An example of a work from this cultural moment is Jose Antonio Vargas’ autobiographical documentary Documented (2013). The film, intended as an up close and personal account of an undocumented migrant in the United States, also serves as an example of current Filipino American cultural productivity and visibilization. By studying this artistic movement, one can approach deeper understandings of citizenship and national belonging(s) in the current transnational climate and the border crossings that circumscribe the Filipino American diaspora.

Reclaiming Filipino America through Performance and Film

Filipino Americans are the fourth largest migrant group in America and the second largest Asian population in the United States. Migration from the Philippines is constant and has increased dramatically in the last sixty years. Filipino Americans participate as the ‘Asian American’ identity/race but the specificity of Philippine-U.S. relations and migration pathways make this inclusion a misfit. As a former territory and with complex shifting migration policies, Filipinos have been considered by the US government an ambiguous population, falling just out of reach of national visibility. As the population has continued to grow, Filipino Americans have shared narratives and begun conversation to address the constant cultural negotiation and struggles within the social and racial structures of America. Since the 1980s, a Filipino American cultural and artistic movement or ‘moment’, has emerged with artists, dancers, performers, and filmmakers. These artists make critical interventions that disavow the American empire. The works make comment upon the ramifications of being an unrecognized Asian colony and the systemic challenges of immigration assimilation. The works make comment upon the ramifications of being an unrecognized Asian colony and the systemic challenges of immigration assimilation. An example of a work from this cultural moment is Jose Antonio Vargas autobiographical documentary Documented (2013). The film, intended as an up close and personal account of an undocumented migrant in the United States, also serves as an example of current Filipino American cultural productivity and visibilization. By studying this artistic movement, one can approach deeper understandings of citizenship and national belonging(s) in the current transnational climate and the border crossings that circumscribe the Filipino American diaspora.

The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946 by Rick Baldoz

The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946 by Rick Baldoz

Book Review: The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946

Book Review: The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946

Interventions of Memory and Visibility: Recovering and Reclaiming Filipino American History

Interventions of Memory and Visibility:Recovering and Reclaiming Filipino American History Linda Pierce Allen (bio) Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire. By Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 208 pages. $70.00 (cloth). $22.00 (paper). The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946. By Rick Baldoz. New York: New York University Press, 2011. 336 pages. $79.00 (cloth). $25.00 (paper). Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina. By Denise Cruz. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. 312 pages. $89.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). Over the past twenty years, the field of Filipino American studies has exploded, from just a handful of scholarly books on the subject to more than three dozen titles and countless essays. The field’s notable progress is not surprising given the growing population of Filipinos in the United States: estimated at 3.4 million by the 2010 US Census Bureau, the Filipino American population grew by nearly half within the last decade alone, to become the second largest Asian group in the United States. Yet despite this demographic support, the emergence of Fil-Am studies has been no easy task. In addition to the epistemological challenges involved in conceiving a field from such a heterogeneity of disciplines, combined with the practical challenges involved in institutionalizing a field that remains largely underrepresented in academe, Fil-Am studies scholars have also had to write themselves into existence—writing against decades of imperial amnesia that have maneuvered to erase the historical record that exposes the United States’ forfeitures of democracy in favor of empire building. The ways in which Filipinos have become forgotten and made invisible despite their long-standing presence in the United States have been well documented by early scholars in the field, such as Fred Cordova and Oscar Campomanes. [End Page 211] More recent scholarship has since worked to the counter the cultural aphasia surrounding Fil-Am studies, recovering historical memory and reclaiming visibility for Filipinos in the United States. Rick Baldoz’s Third Asiatic Invasion (2011), Denise Cruz’s Transpacific Femininities (2012), and Lucy Burns’s Puro Arte (2013) each add new dimensions to Fil-Am studies. Baldoz’s strength lies in the details: his meticulously researched work provides the most exhaustive account of early twentieth-century Filipino immigration, labor, and contested citizenship to date. Providing an abundance of documentation, he recovers a valuable historical record that complicates the US perspective on Philippine independence. Cruz’s narrative is essential for the ways in which it contests the early twentieth-century figure of the male migrant laborer as the sole representative of Filipinos during this period; her study of the “transpacific” Filipina brings new attention to the representations of women in the Philippine Question. Finally, Burns’s narrative analyzes deeply the historical representations of Filipino men and women, theorizing the Filipino/a performing body at sites such as the St. Louis World’s Fair exhibition and taxi dance halls (both also thoroughly documented by Baldoz), as often overlooked sites of resistance. Together, these three complementary texts recover and illuminate—even as they complicate Filipino American history, literature, and politics. Baldoz’s Third Asiatic Invasion provides a nuanced reading of US political history surrounding the Philippine Question. Minimizing the efficacy of anti-imperialist ideologues in the fight for Philippine independence, Baldoz redirects attention to struggles between increasingly violent nativist groups, American agribusiness and plantation interests, US diplomatic officials, and Filipino nationalist leaders over questions of citizenship and sovereignty. In his comprehensive study of the domestic ramifications of the US occupation of the Philippines, Baldoz exposes how US racial formation is both informed by and works to inform the path of empire. His detailed, lucid portrait of the mutually constitutive practices of empire, immigration, and race establishes clear links between Filipinos’ status as American colonial subjects and the organization of racial boundaries in American society. Moving beyond the now widely accepted sociological premise that race is a social construction, Baldoz asks, “who is doing the assigning, and to what end?” (8). He begins by situating the uniqueness of Filipino immigration amid the waves of Asian immigration to the United States since the...

The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946

The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946

The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946

The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946

The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946 (review)

Reviewed by: The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946 Estella Habal The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946. By Rick Baldoz. New York: New York University Press, 2011. 336 pp. $79.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). In The Third Asiatic Invasion, Rick Baldoz examines “the entanglement of immigration, empire, and citizenship” (p. 9) embodied in the unique history of Filipinos in the United States. Filipinos made up the “third invasion” of Asian immigrants to America, after the Chinese and Japanese immigrants before them; and, like them, Filipinos during the period covered by the book were required for labor but were also assumed to be incapable of assimilation and were racially excluded. What made Filipinos different from the previous two “invasions,” Baldoz explains, is the status of the Philippines as an American colony. As a consequence, Filipinos were given the “anomalous political designation” as U.S. nationals that “placed them in a political twilight zone between citizenship and alienage” (p. 9). Because of their unique status they were afforded certain rights, such as the freedom to travel across the U.S. border and within the country, while they were not citizens; they were not regarded as aliens, not subject to U.S. immigration laws, and could never become citizens. Baldoz analyzes “the sociolegal architecture of American empire” (p. 10) by explicating little-known legal cases and by relating the history of the formation of Filipino communities in the United States, revealing how “American practices of racial exclusion repeatedly collided with the imperatives of U.S. overseas expansion” (p. 10) and labor-market demands. Baldoz introduces the book with the 1934 case of the interracial marriage of Rafael Lopez de Onate, “a light-skinned mestizo” (p. 1) who was a white-looking movie star, and Eleanor Wilson McAdoo, the daughter of a U.S. senator. Racial proscriptions barred Filipinos from marrying whites, but Lopez de Onate claimed Spanish blood as proof of his “whiteness” to marry. Onate, however, stated that he was born in the Philippines; if he had claimed to be Spanish he could have been legally “white” and been able to marry. The case was “a major scandal at the time” (p. 7), and Onate was denied because he did not qualify as racially pure; he remained a Filipino to the court even though he rejected that designation. This case illustrates “the contentious politics” revolving around Filipino migration to the United States and the ways in which the arrival of Filipinos “confounded authorities charged with enforcing racial and national boundaries” (p. 7). Baldoz’s history of Filipino community formation and law cases demonstrates that, despite their racial subjection to white supremacy, Filipinos challenged the racial status quo. He argues that their unique [End Page 734] status and the ambiguity of immigration laws emboldened them to challenge the racial hierarchy. He brings together case studies from American colonization in 1898 until Philippine independence in 1946 that have not been synthesized elsewhere. The Third Asiatic Invasion demonstrates Filipino agency during a period in which these “nationals” were often literally invisible (since they were not even counted as immigrants). Other studies have traced the formation of early Filipino immigrant communities in the United States, but few have examined this history in the context of the intersection of empire, race, and citizenship with such thoroughness and legal acumen. Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony in American Workers, Colonial Power: Philippine Seattle and the Trans-Pacific West, 1919–1941 (2003) and Catherine Ceniza Choy in Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (2003) have taken on these interrelationships, but not as broadly in terms of legal and political dynamics. Baldoz makes a major contribution that will shape Filipino American history, as well as American history more broadly. The Third Asiatic Invasion covers new ground, fills in neglected aspects of the Filipino American experience, and shines a new light on how dynamics of the early twentieth century affect the debates on race and immigration today. In the course of the book, Baldoz discusses the incorporation of the Philippines into the American empire, including the political and legal workings to distinguish annexing the Philippines as a...