Filipinx American Studies: Reckoning, Reclamation, Transformation

By Karin Aguilar-San Juan, Angelica Allen, Gina Apostol and 34 more

This volume spotlights the unique suitability and situatedness of Filipinx American studies both as a site for reckoning with the work of historicizing U.S. empire in all of its entanglements, as well as a location for reclaiming and theorizing the interlocking histories and contemporary trajectories of global capitalism, racism, sexism, and heteronormativity. It encompasses an interrogation of the foundational status of empire in the interdiscipline; modes of labor analysis and other forms of knowledge production; meaning-making in relation to language, identities, time, and space; the critical contours of Filipinx American schooling and political activism; the indispensability of relational thinking in Filipinx American studies; and the disruptive possibilities of Filipinx American formations. A catalogue of key resources and a selected list of scholarship are also provided.

Filipinx American Studies constitutes a coming-to-terms with not only the potentials and possibilities but also the disavowals, silences, and omissions that mark Filipinx American studies. It provides a reflective and critical space for thinking through the ways Filipinx American studies is uniquely and especially suited to the interrogation of the ongoing legacies of U.S. imperialism and the urgencies of the current period.

Contributors: Karin Aguilar-San Juan, Angelica J. Allen, Gina Apostol, Nerissa S. Balce, Joi Barrios-Leblanc, Victor Bascara, Jody Blanco, Alana Bock, Sony Coráñez Bolton, Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Richard T. Chu, Gary A. Colemnar, Kim Compoc, Denise Cruz, Reuben B. Deleon, Josen Masangkay Diaz, Robert Diaz, Kale Bantigue Fajardo, Theodore S. Gonzalves, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Anna Romina Guevara, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Dina C. Maramba, Cynthia Marasigan, Edward Nadurata, JoAnna Poblete, Anthony Bayani Rodriguez, Dylan Rodríguez, Evelyn Ibatan Rodriguez, Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, J. A. Ruanto-Ramirez, Jeffrey Santa Ana, Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Michael Schulze-Oechtering, Sarita Echavez See, Roy B. Taggueg Jr.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9780823299591

Karin Aguilar-San Juan

Karin Aguilar-San Juan is a professor and chair of American studies at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her undergraduate courses include U.S. Imperialism from the Philippines to Vietnam, Critical Prison Studies, and Bruce Lee, His Life and Legacy. With Frank Joyce, she coedited The People Make the Peace: Lessons from the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (Just World Books, 2015); she also edited and introduced The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s (South End Press, 1994). She is part of the Race, Love, and Liberation Laboratory (for growing spiritual things), a planning group associated with Clouds in Water Zen Center.

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SECTION   A

Reckoning

PART   ONE

Empire as Endless War

ONE

Empire: Turns and Returns

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

Empire as a framework and an analytic is a gift of postcolonial studies, which itself was born from a global anticolonial movement that gained traction after World War II. Scholars of the Filipinx diaspora are embedded in the enduring and transnational sweep of this struggle as well as in the intellectual constellation that emerged to grapple with the workings of power under its conditions. Figures such as Franz Fanon and Aimé Césaire articulated trenchant critiques of European colonialism grounded in the militant postwar resistance from Algeria to Vietnam. Pushing back against the sedimented formations of knowledge and legal structures that underpinned territorial theft and extraction, postcolonial studies as a field was a response to and an undoing of European imperialism’s profoundly violent and racist worldview. Its particular gift was the unabashed recognition of the struggles of colonized peoples and their critical roles in the formation of the modern world. Europe was the main fixation of postcolonial studies, dominated by a focus on its colonial ambitions in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Analyses of the United States as imperial power came late to the field, deferred by dearly held understandings of its exceptionalism. Amy Kaplan’s pathbreaking work on the blind spots and omissions that exempted the United States from the early gaze of postcolonial studies looks to American exceptionalism’s denial of American empire as well as the il/legal acrobatics it used to reterritorialize its colonial holdings into something far more innocent.¹

Empire as a critical descriptor of the United States emerged in full force with the imperial turn in the field of American studies, which marked the centennial of the 1898 overseas military and political interventions of the United States as the originary moment of American imperialism. Of course, empire—where one state desires and exerts control over territories and peoples that are not its own—was not introduced to the Philippines by the United States, nor was 1898 the United States’ first imperial foray. Spain had colonized the Philippines for well over three centuries, and scholars of the Philippines had readily understood the archipelago through the framework of Spanish empire.² For Filipinxs who subsequently resisted American encroachments on their sovereignty, empire was a concept that encapsulated the contradictions of a young republic flexing its military muscle around the world. As in its own hemisphere, where Latin America felt the imperial sting of US interventions, the United States’ pivot to Asia and the Pacific in the late nineteenth century made manifest its vision of global supremacy. Despite its profound pattern of imperial behavior— military assistance in the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom; a violent pacification campaign in the Philippines that laid the foundation for decades of colonial rule; the conversion of Cuba into a protectorate and Puerto Rico into a commonwealth, to name a few—the United States maintained a sense of innocence about its place in the world. Few things would genuinely trouble the image that Americans had of themselves—the Vietnam War later on in the twentieth century was one of them. The social, political, and intellectual paradigm shifts stemming from a global decolonial movement that reached its apex in the 1960s and 1970s recognized the United States as among the world’s modern imperial powers.

Yet it was not until the 1990s, with the hundredth anniversary of the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War, that the United States as empire came into focus for postcolonial studies and American studies scholars alike.³ The imperial turn in American studies as a field recast the US-Philippines special relationship through a history of imperial power, rather than the innocent myth of benevolent assimilation.⁴ This approach spawned an interdisciplinary subfield with empire as an analytic and the Philippines, along with Guåhan (Guam), Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, and Cuba as the units of analysis. Aside from examining the military and political forms of occupation that had come to define empire, the imperial turn in large part focused on the myriad cultural forms that undergirded the machinery of war, the diplomatic maneuvers, and the international posturing of global powers.⁵

Scholars coming out of the US context’s imperial turn looked to the Philippines to understand the norms, beliefs, and practices of uplifting our little brown brothers. The archipelago served as a case study for how the United States’ racial politics served and shaped its imperial project, and how empire-building, in turn, affected US national racial imaginaries and policy.⁶ The wars in the Philippines were also an international political theater where ideas about nation and gender were defined.⁷ And as colonial rule was established, it became clear that the mission of empire was not only about public administration, but also the imposition of American civilization in domestic spaces.⁸ Scholars of the imperial turn looking to the Philippines demonstrated how notions of progress and civilization were sedimented through institutions like law, education, and public health, stretching both the meaning and periodization of empire beyond warfare or formal political rule.⁹

Turning to empire’s cultures animated studies of its racialized, gendered, and sexualized logics, particularly when the focus of inquiry shifted to Filipinx life under empire rather than American colonial institutions. These logics informed and reinforced military violence and occupation and the theft of sovereignty from people deemed unfit for self-governance—as evidenced by Nerissa Balce’s account of the visual archive of Filipinx racial abjection during the Philippine-American War and Sarita Echavez See’s study of imperial ways of knowing—rationalized the acquisition of land and labor.¹⁰ Much of the critical heft of this work was steeped in the ethnic studies movement, an intellectual project grounded in anti-imperialist, antiracist praxis, which might be seen both as a response to an American studies oriented toward exceptionalism and myth, and as a homegrown offshoot of postcolonial studies. Wielded from this intellectual genealogy, empire helped to explain how we are here because you were there, moving narratives of Asian (and Filipinx) migration beyond and deeper than theories of push and pull and more squarely within the racial gendered matrix of settler desire and violence.

For the field of Filipinx American studies, the reframing of US-Philippine political and cultural history through the lens of empire was profoundly formative. It positioned the field as a critical intervention in Asian American studies, which had been defined by an immigrant paradigm and a largely economic explanation for why migrants of Asian ancestry came to the United States. Empire better described the terms of the Filipinx people’s relationship with the United States. Recruited as part of a racialized labor force, Filipinx laborers bypassed Asian exclusion laws due to their ambiguous legal status and operated as a reserve and flexible labor force precisely through this ambiguity. Within Asian American studies, reframing Filipinxs as subjects of US empire helped explain the unrecognizability and unassimilability of the Filipinx experience within both the US nation-state and the field of Asian American studies, as pointed out by Oscar V. Campomanes.¹¹ As wards of the new American tropics, the liminal status of Filipinxs highlighted the racial legal contradictions at the heart of alien exclusion and white citizenship.¹² In other words, Filipinx mobilities to (and from) the metropole, their patterns of community formation, their sociocultural experiences, and their legal identities were shaped by the evolving relations of US empire in the Philippines.¹³

For the Philippines and Filipinx in the diaspora today, empire continues to explain the material realities and conditions of life in the archipelago and beyond. As postcolonial scholars have argued, postcoloniality is a condition, not a periodization (or to extend Patrick Wolfe, it is a structure, and not an event¹⁴). Empire also illuminates how this structure was and is held together through race and sex, violence and benevolence. Historically, US empire’s outright brutality worked hand in velvet glove with the promises and coercions of intimacy and belonging as part of the overall management of the islands. This particular mix of carrot and stick methods was overlaid with the United States’ special brand of exceptionalism, which saw its overseas territories as laboratories for the white man’s burden. Yet despite claims to moral and racial superiority, it was apparent that white colonial men, in particular, had few qualms when it came to sexual arrangements with the people over whom they ruled.¹⁵ This was a great cause for colonial anxiety.¹⁶ White American tolerance for interracial relations in the colonies, however, did not extend so easily to Filipinxs who migrated to the metropole. Filipinx migrant laborers on the continent, in particular, were framed as hypersexual predators of white women, stoking anti-Filipinx sentiments and violence down the West Coast.

What empire as an analytic allows in these instances is a broader transnational framework through which Filipinx migrant labor and Philippine life can be apprehended. As Neferti Xina M. Tadiar puts it, the sexual economies of empire march on in the sociocultural and political forms of the global world order of late capitalism championed by the Washington consensus. Under this neo-imperial formation, the libidinal relations of empire trade in the currency of Filipinas.¹⁷ The exportation of certain kinds of labor for the world economy—particularly different kinds of gendered carework— is built on the foundation of US-Philippine colonial history.¹⁸ These interventions illuminate how empire is useful for thinking through how power is operationalized in similar or different ways in sites of historical or presentday occupation and control, and what shapes empire might take beyond that of brute military domination.¹⁹

With the Filipinx diaspora stretching beyond the United States, the concept of empire has allowed for mappings beyond a US-centric cartography, and for articulations with other colonized spaces and other colonized subjects. This affiliative remapping pulls together sites like Puerto Rico and Hawai‘i through an intercolonial lens to parse out the routes and experiences of migrant laborers in imperial spaces.²⁰ It also opens up questions about how colonized peoples might themselves be mobilized to be part of imperial maneuvers elsewhere, even as they also remain some of its most vulnerable subjects. The clearest articulation of this critique has come from the framework of Asian settler colonialism, which provocatively points out how diasporic Asians—including Filipinx, whose geographic and sociocultural mobilities are enabled particularly in and through imperial circuits—may also be agents of empire in places where they settle.²¹ In Hawai‘i, for instance, where Native Hawaiians are outnumbered by Asian and Filipinx settlers, the economic and political success of ethnic settler groups needs to be examined with an eye to how it might contribute to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.²² In this critique, informed by Indigenous studies and theorizations of anti-Blackness, the citizenship ideal of Filipinx Americanness is revealed to be a manifestation and apparatus of empire.

In tandem and in tension with the ways in which Filipinx should understand how they might be laying claim to settler innocence, the analytic of empire also sheds light on how power is unsettled precisely through the connectivities and networks that empire’s far-flung geographies activate. Empire plants the seeds of its own undoing: It generates unruly, ungovernable subjects who work within and against its aims. The demilitarization movement that continues to thrive in the Pacific, for instance, maps its connections and actions across the sites that the United States has militarized over the last century, connecting the Philippines to Okinawa, Guåhan, Hawai‘i, and other places in the region whose peoples and lands have felt the impact of American security.²³ Understanding how empire’s logics work to position Filipinx in the Philippines and in the diaspora links the experience of vulnerable overseas contract workers around the world to people whose livelihoods and in/securities rely on militarized economies and their often-violent collateral consequences.

In some ways, these movements, organized around political issues as opposed to Filipinx identity, operate as critiques with regard to the field of Filipinx American studies. They decenter American as an identifier and as a project, which signals several interrelated reframings. Moving away from American is a refusal to uphold ideas of American exceptionalism through inclusion. As the still-implied end point of Filipinx settlerhood in the United States, attachments to American bind us to the imaginative poverty of statist political definitions of citizenship rather than more capacious and revolutionary models of sovereignty. It also binds us to an imaginative and theoretical cartography that centers the United States, and the limited ways in which empire allows us to dream and see beyond its contours.

The field defined by Filipinx people and diaspora might do well to discard these investments as part of the work that needs to happen alongside and after empire. With whom do we ally ourselves as a field and group of scholars? What paths do our political and intellectual loyalties take? We have models to follow: The critical interventions of Indigenous feminisms, the continuing work of transnational demilitarization and decolonization movements, and the field of Asian settler colonial studies grapple with and move beyond empire and its national obsessions. This is not to say empire has outlived its utility, only that its critique might be turned toward the Philippines and Filipinx at home and elsewhere, and especially to how Indigenous lands, rights, and peoples might be better accounted for as the enabling presences in its analyses.

NOTES

1. Amy Kaplan, ‘Left Alone with America’: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture, in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), 3–21. See also Allan Punzalan Isaac on the insular cases that legally transformed categories of sovereignty according to the needs of US empire in the American tropics: Articulating Filipino America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

2. Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992); John D. Blanco, Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth Century Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Augusto F. Espiritu, American Empire, Hispanicism, and the Nationalist Visions of Albizu, Recto, and Grau, in Formations of United States Colonialism, ed. Alyosha Goldstein (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 157–79.

3. Others periodize the US imperial moment earlier, looking to Latin America as the first imperial territory upon which the US exerted both military and political intervention.

4. Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

5. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, Cultures of U.S. Imperialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994).

6. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Michael Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage and Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).

7. Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

8. Amy Kaplan, Manifest Domesticity, in The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).

9. Julian Go, Chains of Empire, Projects of State: Political Education and U.S. Colonial Rule in Puerto Rico and the Philippines, Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, no. 2 (2000): 333–62; Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006).

10. Nerissa S. Balce, Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016); Sarita Echavez See, The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum (New York: New York University Press, 2017).

11. Oscar Campomanes, The New Empire’s Forgetful and Forgotten Citizens: Unrepresentability and Unassimilability in Filipino-American Postcolonialities, Critical Mass 2, no. 2 (1995).

12. Allan Punzalan Isaac, American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Rick Baldoz, The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898–1946 (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

13. Rick Bonus, Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000); Denise Cruz, Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012); Rudy Guevarra, Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/o Community in Stockton, California (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013).

14. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.

15. Tessa Marie Winkelmann, Dangerous Intercourse: Race, Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946 (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2014).

16. Victor Román Mendoza. Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, RacialSexual Governance, and the Philippines in US Imperialism, 1899–1913 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016).

17. Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004).

18. See Choy, Empire of Care; also, Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

19. Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013); Camilla Fojas, Islands of Empire: Pop Culture and U.S. Power (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014).

20. Joanna Poblete-Cross, Islanders in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai‘i (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014). See also Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008); Faye Caronan, Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

21. Candace Fujikane, "Introduction: Asian Settler Colonialism in the

U.S. Colony of Hawai‘i," in Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai‘i, ed. Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008): 1–42.

22. Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Colonial Amnesia: Rethinking Filipino ‘American’ Settler Empowerment in the U.S. Colony of Hawai‘i, in Positively No Filipinos Allowed: Building Communities and Discourse, ed. Antonio T. Tiongson Jr., Ricardo Gutierrez, and Edgardo Gutierrez (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 124–41.

23. Christine Taitano DeLisle, Destination Chamorro Culture: Notes on Realignment, Rebranding, and Post 9/11 Militourism in Guam, American Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2016): 563–72; Kim Compoc, Emergent Allies: Decolonizing Hawai‘i from a Filipinx Perspective (PhD diss., University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 2017); Kim Compoc, Joy Lehuanani Enomoto, and Kasha Ho, From Hawai‘i to Okinawa: Confronting Militarization, Healing Trauma, Strengthening Solidarity, in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (forthcoming).

TWO

Empire as the Rule of War and Fascism

Nerissa S. Balce

Empire is a critical concept that describes the realities of people from the Global South, in this case Filipinos in the Philippines, Filipino immigrants, and their descendants in North America. Empire is the originary trauma of Filipinos and Filipino immigrant life. If seeing or witnessing the violence of slavery is the original generative act in the creation of Black subjectivity and identity (Hartman 1997), then seeing and witnessing the violence of empire—through literary, visual, or artistic forms—is the moment of the creation of the Filipinx subject.¹ Empire is a historical experience that binds us to Latinx communities given our shared histories forged by American wars of conquest (Campomanes 1992, 1999, 2008; San Juan 2008), the destruction of Indigenous land and cultures (Rodríguez 2010; Gonzalez 2013), the violent suppression of Independence movements (Ileto 2017), the modern US-sponsored wars against communist insurgencies in our homelands (Tadiar 2016), our common experience of farmwork and labor organizing (Baldoz 2011; Mabalon 2013), surviving the violence of anti-miscegenation laws (Volpp 2000), and the reality of our shared status as undocumented immigrants (Francisco and Rodriguez 2014; Guevarra 2016).²

As an academic construct, it refers to the conquest and occupation of a territory by a foreign power, often through military violence and war. It is also a shorthand for the historical legacies, traumas, and the cultural forms of people affected by an imperial culture. In Filipino diasporic studies or Filipinx studies, empire often refers to the US empire or the violent American colonization of the Philippines after the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), a historical moment that, according to cultural studies critic Dylan Rodríguez, was a reflection of a genocidal white nationalist-imperialist common sense and a reflection of white civilization-making and native social liquidation across the Pacific.³ The Philippine-American War of 1899 ushered the dawn of the American empire into the Asia-Pacific and was a historical moment of white supremacist statecraft defined by genocide as an American nation-building project.⁴ The Filipino condition, as Rodríguez refers to Filipino American or Filipinx immigrant life in the US, must be understood as a social existence entangled with the generative legacy of genocidal contact with the United States that began with a war of conquest that remains unrecognized and forgotten.⁵ While the Philippines was also colonized by Spain (1521–1898) and by the Japanese imperial army during World War II (1942–46), the status of the Philippines as the first and only formal colony of the United States highlights the significance of empire as the foundational historical narrative of Filipinx America. Just as war and militarization are the experience of Korean Americans, Vietnamese Americans, Cambodian Americans, Laotians, Hmong, and Okinawans, empire refers to different approaches in the study of Filipinx immigrant