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A Locational Feminist Reading of Filipina American Fiction by Ma. Elena L. Paulima

January 9, 2023 by admin Leave a Comment

Many thanks to Dr. Erlin­da Alburo for call­ing my atten­tion to this aca­d­e­m­ic paper about Fil­ipino Amer­i­can fic­tion pub­lished in KINAADMAN Vol, XL, 2018 (A Joun­ral of South­ern Philip­pines, pub­lished by Xavier Uni­ver­si­ty).  The study includes dis­cus­sions of sto­ries from books I edit­ed, includ­ing Fic­tion by Fil­ipinos in Amer­i­ca, and Grow­ing Up Fil­ipino 2.

Dr. Ma. Ele­na L. Paul­ma looks at the short sto­ries of Amelia Bueno, Lesliann Hobayan, Rashaan Mene­ses, Julia Palar­ca, Veron­i­ca Montes, Eveli­na Galang, and oth­er Fil­ipino Amer­i­can authors.

Thanks to Dr. Ma. Ele­na L. Paul­ma and Kinaad­man for this study.

Source: Kinaad­man Vol XL, 2018,  All rights reserved

ARTICLES

A Loca­tion­al Fem­i­nist Read­ing of

Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can Fic­tion: A Non-Fiction

Ma Ele­na L Paulma

Abstract

This paper tack­les the con­cept of epis­temic vio­lence described by Michel Focault and Gay­a­tri Spi­vak as the era­sure of cul­tures, lan­guages and iden­ti­ties. Tak­ing into con­sid­er­a­tion sev­er­al voic­es, to wit: those of fem­i­nist lit­er­ary the­o­rists, char­ac­ters from select­ed Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can fic­tion, voic­es of Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­cans whom the writer has had con­ver­sa­tions with in Amer­i­ca, the cre­ative non-fic­tion voice of the writer and the writer’s own voice in weav­ing togeth­er this col­lec­tive expe­ri­ence, this paper elu­ci­dates that the search for “home” is the con­text for the inter­na­tion­al dias­po­ra of Fil­ipinos. Inter­lac­ing crit­i­cal analy­sis with cre­ative non-fic­tion, the paper out­lines the cre­ation of the reter­ri­to­ri­al­ized “third space.” By apply­ing Susan Friedman’s five loca­tion­al trop­ic pat­terns, name­ly: the metaphorics of “glo­ca­tion”, migra­tion, nation, bor­ders and con­junc­ture, the paper exam­ines sev­en select­ed short sto­ries writ­ten by Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­cans, all focus­ing on Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can char­ac­ters. The paper shows that Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­cans expe­ri­ence a con­tin­u­ing sense of mar­gin­al­iza­tion as they are nei­ther entire­ly includ­ed in, nor com­plete­ly exclud­ed from, the Amer­i­can landscape.

Key­words

epis­temic vio­lence, loca­tion­al fem­i­nist tropes, post­colo­nial, decol­o­niza­tion, dis­lo­ca­tion, mar­gin­al­iza­tion, lost identities

“Hump­ty Dump­ty is a fan­ta­sy. It is fic­tion, not non-fic­tion,” pipes Joan­na, her lit­tle hands clasp­ing mine as we fol­low her Mom down the for­est path lit­tered with gold­en and orange autumn leaves.

“Fic­tion, like Cin­derel­la?” I ask, hold­ing on more tight­ly as she tries to tra­verse the uneven rocks lin­ing the path.

“Yes, like Cinderella.”

“And what about you, are you fic­tion or non-fic­tion?” She laughed at my sil­ly ques­tion and bal­anc­ing pre­car­i­ous­ly on the huge stones like a lit­tle hump­ty dump­ty, she replied, “I am non-fic­tion because I am real,” with the author­i­ty of five full years of life experiences.

Joan­na is a sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can. Her moth­er, born, raised, and edu­cat­ed in the Philip­pines, migrat­ed to the US when she mar­ried her Fil­ipino-Amer­i­can hus­band. I am a Fil­ip­ina, born, raised and edu­cat­ed in the Philip­pines, here in the US for a brief stay and writ­ing this paper from a space com­mon to all three of us. This is the reter­ri­to­ri­al­ized “third space” cre­at­ed by what is known as epis­temic vio­lence, or that which eras­es cul­tures, lan­guages, and iden­ti­ties. In seek­ing to both ques­tion the assump­tions that per­pet­u­ate this vio­lence and to affirm that which had been delet­ed, this paper enquires into notions of iden­ti­ty through the pro­duc­tion of mean­ings, but of sev­er­al inter­sect­ing texts: oral accounts of Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­cans, my own per­son­al expe­ri­ences dur­ing my brief time here in the US, social media posts about cur­rent events in the Philip­pines and the US, read­ings on Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture and fem­i­nist methodologies/approaches.

The main thread that runs through these inter­wo­ven texts is the Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can and how her sto­ry is told by her fel­low Fil­ip­inaAmer­i­cans. Fil­ip­ina sub­jects of Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can writ­ers are described by the­o­rists as het­ero­ge­neous and mobile, their sto­ries dwelling upon the prob­lems of artic­u­la­tion and silence, mem­o­ry and his­to­ry, indi­vid­u­al­i­ty and com­mu­ni­ty, respon­si­bil­i­ty and apa­thy, aware­ness and amne­sia, trau­ma and recov­ery as well as the mate­r­i­al strat­i­fi­ca­tions that mark the bod­ies of Fil­ipino sub­jects and their con­tin­gency with the world’s sub­jects (Sulit, “Philip­pine Dias­po­ra” 147). In her dis­cus­sion of transpa­cif­ic fem­i­nini­ties, Denise Cruz speaks about cul­tur­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions and autho­r­i­al strate­gies with ref­er­ence to move­ment across bor­ders, tran­si­tion and change, class and gen­dered hier­ar­chies, and chang­ing impe­r­i­al and nation­al dynam­ics (Cruz 7–8).

Blend­ing per­son­al expe­ri­ences with the­o­ret­i­cal reflec­tions, the mean­ings pro­duced in this paper will be framed with­in Susan Friedman’s five loca­tion­al fem­i­nist trop­ic pat­terns: the metaphorics of “glo­ca­tion,” migra­tion, nation, bor­ders, and con­junc­ture. These five trop­ic pat­terns are the preva­lent forms of geopo­lit­i­cal and transna­tion­al literacy.

The term “glo­ca­tion­al” is a com­bi­na­tion of the terms glob­aland local. Gre­w­al and Kaplan argue for a form of transna­tion­al fem­i­nism that avoids the homog­e­niz­ing ten­den­cies of glob­al fem­i­nism, respects the mate­r­i­al and cul­tur­al speci­fici­ties of local fem­i­nist for­ma­tions, and encour­ages analy­sis of how the gender/race/class sys­tem in one loca­tion is polit­i­cal­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly linked to that of anoth­er (Fried­man 30). Transna­tion­al and post­colo­nial fem­i­nists address gen­der and human rights issues by con­sid­er­ing cul­tur­al val­ues, reli­gions, eco­nom­ic con­di­tions and class issues, nation­al his­to­ries, sys­tems of gov­ern­ment, health prac­tices, colo­nial expe­ri­ences, and cul­tur­al­ly defined gen­der roles (Tong). Think­ing glo­ca­tion­al­ly involves under­stand­ing how the local, the pri­vate, and the domes­tic are con­sti­tut­ed in rela­tion to glob­al sys­tems, and con­verse­ly, how such sys­tems must be read for their par­tic­u­lar loca­tion­al inflec­tion (Fried­man 30).

The inter­na­tion­al dias­po­ra of Fil­ipinos, gen­er­al­ly under­stood as an effect of the eco­nom­ic con­di­tion of the Philip­pines, can also be seen as a result of colonialism/imperialism in the his­tor­i­cal con­text, the nega­tion of the Fil­ipino by the master’s nar­ra­tives account­ing for the dis­place­ment of self (Stro­bel 29). “To be is to be like the mas­ter” elu­ci­dates Leny Stro­bel as she explains that our col­o­nized con­scious­ness has con­vinced us that to be Fil­ipino is not enough. One effect of this inter­nal­iza­tion of the dark shad­ows pro­ject­ed by the col­o­niz­er onto the col­o­nized is the desire to live in the master’s house (Stro­bel 29). A man­i­fes­ta­tion of this desire is “mar­ry­ing out” (or mar­ry­ing up means mar­ry­ing white) of an eco­nom­ic caste, out of an insti­tu­tion­al, inter­nal­ized, colo­nial sense of infe­ri­or­i­ty, and out of the Philip­pines (Pierce 35). The most stark and depress­ing lega­cy of col­o­niza­tion as a patri­ar­chal lega­cy is the exploita­tion of women, the col­o­nized tak­ing care of the col­o­niz­er iron­i­cal­ly played out in hos­pi­tals by Fil­ipino nurs­es (Stro­bel 29). Migrant women are “deskilled,” low-paid, lim­it­ed in their access to par­tic­u­lar jobs and social rights, exploit­ed and harassed, and their gen­dered and eth­nic vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty enhanced (Erel 241).

Lin­da Pierce speaks of the per­pet­u­a­tion of the colo­nial com­plex through a denial of one’s inter­nal­ized oppres­sion. Because it is glob­al, decon­struct­ing the sys­tem­at­ic, impe­r­i­al white­wash­ing is dif­fi­cult. It is there­fore nec­es­sary to counter the panop­tic, out­side gaze with an oppo­si­tion­al gaze or gazes of resis­tance by step­ping away from denial and break­ing the silence (Pierce 42).

Post­mod­ernist thought scru­ti­nizes dom­i­nant (hege­mon­ic) knowl­edge claims and asso­ci­at­ed bina­ry cat­e­gories. It ques­tions assump­tions of “truth” and “self ” as sta­ble (or essen­tial), ahis­tor­i­cal, or uni­ver­sal, and stip­u­lates that real­i­ty and iden­ti­ty are social­ly con­struct­ed, embed­ded in rela­tion­ships and his­tor­i­cal con­texts, and repro­duced through lan­guage and pow­er rela­tion­ships (Bohan; Mor­row). The view of his­to­ry as a col­lec­tion of objec­tive facts is no longer viable in cur­rent aca­d­e­m­ic dis­cus­sions, because the writer of his­to­ry will always per­ceive events from a par­tic­u­lar posi­tion and with a par­tic­u­lar bias. Knowl­edge, rather than being objec­tive and neu­tral, is a con­struct of the greater glob­al con­text involv­ing pol­i­tics and eco­nom­ics. These post­mod­ernist per­spec­tives, which counter the per­pet­u­a­tion of colo­nial men­tal­i­ty, still escape a major­i­ty of Filipinos.

What Michel Focault and Gay­a­tri Spi­vak call the “epis­temic

5Vol. XL

vio­lence” of cultural/gender mar­gin­al­iza­tion and iden­ti­ty crises con­tin­ue to be relevant.

“Being a Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can means being post­colo­nial — after col­o­niza­tion, but cer­tain­ly not over col­o­niza­tion,” states Leny Men­doza Stro­bel, who con­sid­ers this a nec­es­sary phase in the devel­op­ment of a healthy Fil­ipino-Amer­i­can cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty in the Unit­ed States. For a “Pinay” liv­ing in Amer­i­ca, there is an auto­mat­ic rela­tion­ship to decol­o­niza­tion whether active or pas­sive, engaged, con­flict­ed, opposed, or in denial. It is about being aware of one’s “Philip­ine-ness” in Amer­i­ca, the per­sis­tent obsta­cles faced by one’s fam­i­ly, and one’s rela­tion­ship with oth­ers. To decol­o­nize, one must ask: Where do I go from here? (Stro­bel 32).

The “migra­tion” rhetoric reflects the mean­ings of immi­gra­tion, the con­stant trav­el back and forth, and dias­po­ra for spa­tial modes of think­ing about iden­ti­ty. “As the body moves through space, cross­ing bor­ders of all kinds, iden­ti­ty acquires sed­i­ment­ed and palimpses­tic lay­ers, each of which exerts some influ­ence on the oth­er lay­ers and on iden­ti­ty as a whole” (Fried­man 28).

Place and move­ment are basic con­cepts in both my research approach and my per­son­al expe­ri­ences as a schol­ar here in the US. I was able to hitch a long ride, first to New Orleans, and in anoth­er trip, to New York, all the way from Chica­go. In both these rides, I lis­tened to the sto­ries of a Mus­lim princess from Min­danao who had sought polit­i­cal asy­lum in Amer­i­ca, a retired Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can accoun­tant active­ly help­ing out new­ly immi­grat­ed Fil­ip­inas (specif­i­cal­ly the ones who mar­ried Amer­i­cans and encoun­tered the usu­al “prob­lems”), and a divorced Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can nurse mar­ried to a Fil­ipino. From their sto­ries and my own sense of mov­ing from place to place, I res­onate with the words of Melin­da de Jesus in her intro­duc­tion to her book, Pinay Pow­er: “We’re trav­el­ling — our pres­ence is erased as soon as it is made.” She con­nect­ed this sense of motion and simul­ta­ne­ous era­sure to her family’s his­to­ry — how they live in the very Amer­i­can “per­pet­u­al present,” eschew­ing any link to their Fil­ipino past: “So this is the Amer­i­can dream — liv­ing in the per­pet­u­al present, mov­ing through life with­out a past, swal­lowed whole, invis­i­ble, but unable to deny the lin­ger­ing ache of absence” (De Jesus 2).

Fried­man describes the dis­course of “nation” as emerg­ing out 6 A Loca­tion­al Fem­i­nist Read­ing of Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can Fiction:

of the impact of colo­nial­ism and post­colo­nial­ism, res­onat­ing with geo-polit­i­cal state to state rela­tions in an inter­na­tion­al con­text (26). The rhetoric of nation can be locat­ed in spaces that are “home” to the char­ac­ters: their own bod­ies, their fam­i­lies, and com­mu­ni­ties. Their words reveal their per­cep­tion of them­selves as women of their class, edu­ca­tion­al back­ground, race, and ethnicity.

In Novem­ber 2016, scores of Mar­tial Law human rights vic­tims, their sup­port­ers, and mil­len­ni­als took to the streets in protest of the sur­rep­ti­tious bur­ial of Fer­di­nand Mar­cos, the Philip­pine dic­ta­tor who had ruled for 20 years, at the Libin­gan ng Bayan (Ceme­tery for Heroes). This bur­ial was sanc­tioned by the same Supreme Court, which had, iron­i­cal­ly, decid­ed a case in favor of the claims for rec­om­pense by the same human rights vic­tims now call­ing for jus­tice and protest­ing against this revi­sion of his­to­ry. The cur­rent pres­i­dent, Rodri­go Duterte, was the one who insti­gat­ed and approved the bur­ial. He has become known for his “jokes” about how he should have been the first to rape a mis­sion­ary who was gang-raped at a prison in his pre­vi­ous bul­wark, Davao City. He has made jests about how he slaps the rumps of his female secu­ri­ty agents. The sad­dest thing is the laugh­ter of his supporters.

Already, the ‘home’ that Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­cans speak of and long for con­tains a his­to­ry that serves as the base of their mul­ti­ple-lay­ered iden­ti­ties. Dias­po­ra con­scious­ness places the dis­course of ‘home’ and dis­per­sion in cre­ative ten­sion, cri­tiques dis­cours­es of fixed ori­gins, and allows for bor­der­land rhetorics that move beyond the bina­ry to a named third space of ambi­gu­i­ty and even con­tra­dic­tion (Bud­geon 283).

“We are not only born split, but we are also born on the bor­der,” states Leny Stro­bel (27). “Border”rhetorics reveal spaces of desire for con­nec­tion, utopi­an long­ing, and the blend­ing of dif­fer­ences. Among the strug­gles that dias­poric indi­vid­u­als must go through as a result of their dis­lo­ca­tion are an abid­ing sense of nos­tal­gia and the pres­sures of the (cul­tur­al) tra­di­tions of their home­land war­ring with the sense of lib­er­a­tion born of this very dis­lo­ca­tion from these tra­di­tion­al con­straints (Bose 164). “Bor­der” expe­ri­ences high­light the para­dox­i­cal process­es of con­nec­tion and sep­a­ra­tion and are porous sites of inter­cul­tur­al mix­ing, cul­tur­al hybridiza­tion, and cre­oliza­tion. Iden­ti­ty ensures clash­ing dif­fer­ences and fixed lim­its (Fried­man 27).

In their dis­cus­sion of lit­er­ary voic­es in Asian dias­po­ra, Begoña Simal and Elis­a­bet­ta Mari­no write about recur­ring ideas of dis­place­ment and inscrip­tion, among oth­er com­pli­ca­tions of the dias­po­ra stem­ming from dias­poric real­i­ties, be it “first” migra­to­ry Asian dias­po­ra, or the sub­se­quent mul­ti­far­i­ous dias­po­ras (Simal and Mari­no 18). “Instead of try­ing to fit our­selves some­where between black and white, we need to cre­ate a place for our­selves out­side the con­tin­u­um,” states Allyson Tin­tiang­co-Cubales (139).

Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­cans are “invis­i­ble” or under­rep­re­sent­ed in AsianAmer­i­can, Fil­ipino-Amer­i­can and fem­i­nist stud­ies. Yen Le Espir­i­tu observes that the anti-racism agen­da has homog­e­nized dif­fer­ences among Asian-Amer­i­cans, caus­ing the era­sure of spe­cif­ic Fil­ip­inaAmer­i­can expe­ri­ences and con­cerns. She asks this ques­tion: “Why have we Fil­ip­inas silenced our­selves? And what/whom does our silence, our self-era­sure, serve?” (qtd in De Jesus 4).

In her book, “Com­ing Full Cir­cle,” Leny Men­doza Stro­bel sug­gests that to decol­o­nize is to tell and write one’s sto­ry, that in the telling and writ­ing, oth­ers may be encour­aged to tell their own (Pierce 31). The break­ing of this silence, this telling of sto­ries, or the ques­tion of the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­cans car­ries inter­laced issues and con­tentions, all of which sug­gest the per­pet­u­a­tion of the eth­nic, gen­dered and racial oppres­sion of Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­cans: nar­ra­tives of vic­tim­iza­tion, gloss­ing the his­to­ry of the US-Philip­pines con­fronta­tion, elite Fil­ipino and Fil­ip­ina authors rep­re­sent­ing stereo­types of the native Fil­ip­ina, and the con­sumerist com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of “eth­nic lit­er­a­ture” and “the Fil­ip­ina,” the down­play­ing of gen­dered racism.

Stro­bel speaks of decol­o­niza­tion as both per­son­al and polit­i­cal. One must be able to name one’s inter­nal­ized oppres­sion, shame, infe­ri­or­i­ty, con­fu­sion, anger, to reclaim mem­o­ry at the per­son­al lev­el in order to engage in the process of cre­at­ing a col­lec­tive mem­o­ry of a people’s his­to­ry (Pierce 39). Writ­ing is an act of sur­viv­ing, lis­ten­ing an act of wit­ness­ing, and the read­ing and inter­pre­ta­tion all part of a repet­i­tive process of reeval­u­a­tion, recon­struc­tion, retrans­for­ma­tion, re-trans­gres­sion, and espe­cial­ly, relove for one anoth­er (Tin­tiang­coCubales 140).

The anti­dote or the solu­tion poten­tial­ly lies in lan­guage — sto­ry­telling itself through the works of the Philip­pine dias­po­ra (Sulit Philip­pine Dias­po­ra, 126). The dias­poric visions of Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can writ­ers allow for mul­ti­ple iden­ti­fi­ca­tions for their char­ac­ters and, in turn, their read­ers and lan­guage assumes a trans­for­ma­tive pow­er that enables resis­tance against the per­pet­u­a­tion of trau­ma (Sulit Philip­pine Dias­po­ra, 147).

The term “con­junc­tural­ism” refers to jux­ta­po­si­tions of dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al for­ma­tions, replac­ing con­ven­tion­al comparison/contrast analy­sis of sim­i­lar­i­ties and dif­fer­ences. This epis­te­mo­log­i­cal junc­ture sheds light on each for­ma­tion and for the way in which each dis­cur­sive sys­tem inter­rupts the oth­er. It cor­re­sponds with the term cul­tur­al parataxis, a form of con­junc­ture or super­im­po­si­tion devel­oped par­tic­u­lar­ly as a part of mod­ernist poet­ics to describe the rad­i­cal jux­ta­po­si­tions that poets and artists made with a delib­er­ate sup­pres­sion of explic­it con­nec­tion. The two forms of parataxis are col­lage and mon­tage. The reader/critic is invit­ed to estab­lish the con­nec­tion not explic­it­ly expressed by the artist or poet (Fried­man 31).

This paper is a con­ver­sa­tion among sev­er­al voic­es: the aca­d­e­m­ic voic­es of fem­i­nist lit­er­ary the­o­rists, the voic­es of the char­ac­ters in the Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can fic­tion pieces I have cho­sen, the voic­es of the women I have con­versed with across the coun­try, my cre­ative non-fic­tion voice, and my voice as the writer weav­ing all these togeth­er to form this one text. This delib­er­ate mix comes from an aware­ness that researchers are not abstrac­tions but are posi­tioned with­in spe­cif­ic polit­i­cal, social and cul­tur­al con­texts, which in turn influ­ence what they per­ceive (Elias­si 86). The blend­ing of aca­d­e­m­ic research approach­es with expe­ri­ences and reflec­tion through the mech­a­nism of cre­ative non-fic­tion grounds issues in lived expe­ri­ences (Arvan­i­takis 9–10).

Ulri­ka Dahl speaks of dia­logues with women around kitchen tables and on car rides, par­tic­u­lar­ly those that nar­rate dias­poric sto­ries and migra­to­ry mem­o­ries and mem­oirs as (fem­i­nist) sto­ry­telling prac­tices because in their sit­u­at­ed and embod­ied forms, sto­ries help us cre­ate oth­er knowl­edge-worlds (150–154). I was able to con­verse with Fil­ip­ina Amer­i­cans from vary­ing soci­etal posi­tions and ages dur­ing two long cross-state car rides, two hop-on hop-off bus rides, sev­er­al train rides,

9Vol. XL

approx­i­mate­ly ten plane rides, and mul­ti­ple walks along dark city streets lined with trash, along man­i­cured sub­ur­ban lawns, for­est paths lined with trees, and make-believe cities peo­pled with Dis­ney char­ac­ters. Their sto­ries, their voic­es will be inter­twined with mine.

The spa­tial rhetorics of glo­ca­tion, migra­tion, nation, bor­ders, and con­junc­tural­ism iden­ti­fied in the cho­sen lit­er­ary texts will be dis­cussed in this paper. Rhetoric, states Susan Frei­d­man, pro­vides access to the under­ly­ing cat­e­gories of thought which would oth­er­wise remain lost to con­scious­ness. In short, rhetoric points to ways of think­ing (Fried­man 17). The pres­ence of the tropes indi­cate thought process­es, which counter those (e.g., bina­ries, essen­tial­ism, lin­ear devel­op­ment, uni­ver­sal­i­ty) that per­pet­u­ate the col­o­niza­tion of the mind, bring­ing to light the mul­ti­ple inscrip­tions that cul­tur­al cat­e­gories such as race, gen­der, eth­nic­i­ty, and class make on indi­vid­u­als. The above con­cepts made me choose to write about dias­poric short sto­ries writ­ten by Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­cans about Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can protagonists.

“Per­la and Her Love­ly Bar­bie” by Amalia B. Bueno(Brainard 2739) is set in Hawai­iand nar­rat­ed by an unnamed teenage Fil­ip­ina who is the mid­dle child of three sis­ters. This lin­ear-plot sto­ry revolves around the image of the Bar­bie Doll which is well-known, well-loved, and well­sold to young girls all over the globe.

The main char­ac­ter is 12 years old, hov­er­ing between child­hood and adult­hood. In Fil­ipino fam­i­lies, age defines one’s author­i­ty. Her bor­der (age/generation) posi­tion allows her to have a mea­sure of author­i­ty over her younger sis­ter, yet places her beneath her more “pow­er­ful” elder sis­ter, Mari­na. She moves with­in two cul­tures: one dom­i­nat­ed by Mcdonald’s and Bar­bie dolls; and the oth­er one by tobac­co leaves, nine­day funer­als, and the Vir­gin Mary.

The trope of “nation,” which defines through the body one’s sense of self, is revealed in the very first lines of the sto­ry: “I nev­er loved Bar­bie when I was her age. I didn’t even like Bar­bie. She doesn’t look real to me. Her big blue eyes so emp­ty and cold scared me. I didn’t like Barbie’s skin­ny legs, too. They remind­ed me of how short and ugly my brown legs are. In fact, nobody in my fam­i­ly looks like Bar­bie.” A woman’s body is her first home. Her self-image is reflect­ed in the way she describes her own body.This young girl becomes aware of her “dif­fer­ence” (and infe­ri­or­i­ty) as ear­ly as her 12th year.

Toni Mor­ri­son speaks of “the dam­ag­ing inter­nal­iza­tion of assump­tions of immutable infe­ri­or­i­ty orig­i­nat­ing in an out­side gaze.” It is an “out­side gaze” that made us learn to priv­i­lege white­ness (qtd in Pierce 39). Through her words, we sense the main character’s desire to break away from accept­ed (hege­mon­ic) supe­ri­or stan­dards of beau­ty. Her learn­ing about her own “ugli­ness” com­pared to Bar­bie look-alikes such as school­mate Eliz­a­beth (Liz­by) Wat­son has been slow and painful. This les­son was brought home to her by her best friend Jason who turns away from her when she tells him that Liz­by “type of gecko lives in Kali­hi Val­ley and plays the flute in the sum­mer” looks just like a stiff Bar­bie doll. He takes up with Liz­by, and she takes it upon her­self to destroy her lit­tle sis­ter Perla’s favorite Bar­bie doll.

Per­haps she desires to spare her sis­ter from the same rejec­tion, espe­cial­ly when she notices this: “Per­la was start­ing to act more and more like Mari­na. Like want­i­ng to wear dress­es instead of pants and eat­ing less and smil­ing more. Per­la also didn’t want to go out­side and play in the sun as much, because she didn’t want to get her skin dark­er. Just like Mari­na, who always put on sun­screen and wore a hat even if it wasn’t sun­ny out­side.” She sug­gests that they give the Bar­bie doll a hot bath from water boiled in a pot, “to see if Barbie’s skin would slow­ly get soft or if it would melt right away.” But Per­la refus­es to oblige.

She tries to con­vince Per­la by sug­gest­ing that they play at hav­ing funer­al rites, first with items from the garbage can, and then lat­er with the Bar­bie doll. This play­ful funer­al rite becomes a mix of Fil­ipino and Amer­i­can cul­tures, cre­at­ing a par­o­dy of that which is con­sid­ered as sacred: “I said the Fil­ipino ver­sion three times, then the mixed Eng­lish ver­sion three times. I end­ed with, ‘Moth­er Mary, you are full of bit­ter mel­on’ and pushed the cross in at the far end where the chicken’s head was buried.”

Per­la final­ly con­cedes when her sis­ter sug­gests some­thing, which approx­i­mates a funer­al rite famil­iar to Fil­ipinos: “So I said we could dig Bar­bie up nine nights lat­er. I could tell Per­la was think­ing about it. So, I said, as a bonus, on the tenth day we could pre­tend that one whole year had gone by and we could have a one-year death anniver­sary par­ty for Bar­bie.” Fil­ipinos adhere to a nine-day nove­na prayer after the death of a loved one, and hon­ors the death anniver­sary every year.

This con­junc­tion­al trope of jux­ta­pos­ing play with the seri­ous theme of death, of mak­ing par­al­lels between what is con­sid­ered as trash and what is con­sid­ered as valu­able, of what is real and imag­ined is high­light­ed by the pro­tag­o­nist: “I told her, Per­la Con­chi­ta Domin­go Asun­cion, you said so your­self that you do real things to Bar­bie, like feed her, and sing to her and comb her hair. Well, I explained, anoth­er real thing that hap­pens is peo­ple go away and peo­ple die. We could prac­tice bury­ing Bar­bie as just anoth­er real thing that peo­ple do. We could pre­tend Bar­bie died, say a Mass for her and then bury her.”

It is inter­est­ing to note that this final death, this bur­ial of the Bar­bie doll, is accom­pa­nied by items col­lect­ed (not nec­es­sar­i­ly with their per­mis­sion) from all the mem­bers of the fam­i­ly. Per­haps it is the main character’s desire to save not just her­self but her whole fam­i­ly from the pain and con­fu­sion of being her “brown and small” self.

The sto­ry ends with these words: “Per­la was dis­ap­point­ed that Bar­bie did not seem that pret­ty any­more. And her beau­ti­ful clothes were a lit­tle dirty. After not play­ing with Bar­bie for more than a week, she didn’t seem to miss her as much as she thought she would. Now she most­ly puts Bar­bie up on the shelf by her bed. Per­la takes Bar­bie down once in a while to let Bar­bie sit qui­et­ly next to her. I knew she would end up not lov­ing Bar­bie so much.”

Per­haps the Bar­bie can nev­er be buried, no mat­ter how dirty it becomes or how old. It will always be there, star­ing from an imag­ined chair next to any Fil­ip­ina sit­ting before a mir­ror, the white faced, lon­g­legged supe­ri­or self to which she will always be “infe­ri­or.” How­ev­er, the very act of bury­ing also sig­ni­fies a cer­tain death, for the main char­ac­ter at least, and now for her sister.

In “Dou­ble Dutch” by Lesliann Hobayan (Brainard 42–49), a dou­ble-named girl skips to a dou­ble-roped game, after which she goes home to her dou­ble-cul­tured fam­i­ly. What hap­pens with­in the home forces her to make a painful choice. The feel­ing of being “left out” makes her want to “fit in” so that she must “leave out” what is not “in.”

Many Fil­ip­inas are giv­en two names, the first of which is often “Maria,” an inher­i­tance from the Span­ish col­o­niz­ers of the Philip­pines who replaced the pagan prac­tices with the Catholic reli­gion. Many of 12 A Loca­tion­al Fem­i­nist Read­ing of Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can Fiction:

us still car­ry this defin­i­tive mark as it is hand­ed down from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion. At a recent inter­na­tion­al gath­er­ing, I was with a fel­low Fil­ip­ina and both of us were addressed by our first names, Maria. We had to cor­rect the oth­er par­tic­i­pants and tell them that we were called by our sec­ond names.

Our pro­tag­o­nist hates the fact that her par­ents gave her two first names, the fact that her mid­dle name is her mother’s maid­en name: “It sounds so strange. Maria Eliz­a­beth Raño­la Ramos. Two first names and two last names.” “But that’s what Fil­ipinos do,” her moth­er explained. In some­thing as sim­ple as our names, we car­ry the bur­den of our col­o­nized history.

Maria Eliz­a­beth also bears the bur­den of her race. “Her nun teach­ers are impressed with her con­sis­tent A’s, but they say it’s because she’s Asian — she’s sup­posed to be stu­dious and ded­i­cat­ed.” Wher­ev­er I went in the US, I would hear about Fil­ipino chil­dren excelling, most­ly in school or in the field of music. This can be seen as an uncon­scious reac­tion to an unspo­ken sense of infe­ri­or­i­ty based on race, felt implic­it­ly but nev­er spo­ken of explicitly.

While the girls are at play, their con­ver­sa­tions reveal their com­pli­ance with the hege­mon­ic stan­dards of beau­ty: “When I grow up, I wan­na be a mod­el. Oh yeah? Keep dreamin ‘cause you ain’t skin­ny enough for that.”

How does Maria Eliz­a­beth per­ceive her­self through her name (his­to­ry), race, and body? On this trope of “nation,” she con­stant­ly finds her­self “dif­fer­ent,” always at the borders.

While Eliz­a­beth strug­gles with all these ten­sions in the out­side world, inside her home, she must lis­ten to her par­ents who them­selves are striv­ing to resolve these inter­nal bor­der con­flicts aris­ing from their migra­tion expe­ri­ence. When she arrives home, she calls to her Mom excit­ed­ly, but her Mom scolds her: “‘Ma’? What is this ‘Ma’? Who are you talk­ing to? I am your Mom­my. Don’t ever talk like that again, hah?” Eliz­a­beth had mim­ic­ked her (black) friend Ali­cia when she called her moth­er “Ma.” This would be the first indi­ca­tion in the sto­ry that the par­ents want­ed to “fit in” to erad­i­cate any­thing that sound­ed “dif­fer­ent” or Filipino.

Her friend Ali­cia had braid­ed her black hair before she went home. She is met by these words: “What’s the mat­ter with you? Why do you want that hair­style? Are you try­ing to be Black?” In the par­ents’ desire to belong, to “become white,” they must eschew all rela­tions to those con­sid­ered as “oth­er,” even if (and maybe espe­cial­ly because) they them­selves fall under that same cat­e­go­ry. “I don’t want you play­ing with that Black girl any­more,” Elizabeth’s father commands.

Eliz­a­beth starts to protest but is imme­di­ate­ly silenced by her par­ents. “Soon, because the silence is uncom­fort­able, her moth­er begins to speak to her father in Taga­log, ask­ing him about his day at the hos­pi­tal, if he had any new patients. This is not a con­ver­sa­tion meant for her.” This silenc­ing, this mar­gin­al­iza­tion through lan­guage is a com­mon expe­ri­ence among sec­ond gen­er­a­tion Fil­ipino-Amer­i­can chil­dren. One can say that this bor­der expe­ri­ence with lan­guage is a reper­cus­sion of what the par­ents them­selves expe­ri­ence out­side the walls of their home. Eliz­a­beth recalls an inci­dent at the store when her moth­er is try­ing to buy ox tail. “The man talked loud­ly and slow­ly to her moth­er, as if she were deaf. Whaaaat do you­u­u­uu neeeeeed? She noticed her mother’s voice drop when she repeat­ed her request. Then, her moth­er grabbed Maria Elizabeth’s hand and they left the store quick­ly. They nev­er did get the ox tail.”

This is how Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­cans are silenced, how they erase them­selves, how they build their inner walls: “She forces her­self to fin­ish what is on her plate so she can be invis­i­ble. A clean plate grants per­mis­sion to leave the table, to dis­ap­pear. So she does. The next day, she doesn’t tell her school friends about Dou­ble Dutch, doesn’t men­tion the spi­ral­ing ropes, the danc­ing. Noth­ing. She says noth­ing all day. Walk­ing home from the bus stop, she tries to avoid Ali­cia. Her walk picks up into a sprint. She looks away from Alicia’s house as she races past. For a long time, Maria Eliz­a­beth stays inside the lit­tle white house with red shut­ters, watch­es TV, says nothing.”

The song that is sung as Eliz­a­beth jumps between the two ropes of the Dou­ble Dutch game cap­tures what Fil­ip­ina girls grow up with and how they come to know themselves:

“We can’t tell you where it started

We don’t know where it’s been

But have no doubt, the word is out

Dou­ble Dutch is in.”

“Here In the States”by Rashaan Mene­ses (Brainard 51–66)is nar­rat­ed by Alma, the eldest of three sib­lings, the only one who has known what it’s like to live and grow up in the Philip­pines. Per­haps to pur­sue the Amer­i­can Dream, her par­ents brought her from their home­town of Cebu to the USA. The sto­ry opens with Alma’s moth­er call­ing her to help with her younger sib­ling who has peed in his pants. While she hides from her moth­er to avoid the smelly chore, these are her thoughts:“Ever since we moved to the States, I’ve had to look after my broth­er and sis­ter, clean their mess­es, cook their food — do every­thing! Back in the Philip­pines, our house was tidi­er. The meals weren’t burned at the edges or left frozen in the mid­dle. Our house­keep­er, Amalia, would cook break­fast, merien­da and din­ner. Now we’re even lucky if Nanay comes home in time to make some­thing. Usu­al­ly I end up hav­ing to and I hate cooking.”

Clear­ly, the migra­tion from the Philip­pines to Amer­i­ca has result­ed in a bor­der expe­ri­ence of long­ing for “home,” for what used to be. She may have phys­i­cal­ly moved across oceans, but much of who she was remains with her as she says: “This wasn’t at all what I thought it’d be like when we came here.” Per­haps she her­self was told about the Amer­i­can Dream. Per­haps she believed it. In this sto­ry, we see an unrav­el­ling of what she had been made to expect.

The dis­il­lu­sion­ment is drawn out in the sto­ry from the eyes of a daugh­ter look­ing at her moth­er: “In this pic­ture, Nanay stands proud­ly next to some men she worked with; everyone’s dressed in fan­cy suits. All these pro­fes­sors used to come over on week­ends and hol­i­days for for­mal din­ner par­ties that Nanay liked to host. Nanay’s face was young and fresh then. She didn’t have any of the wor­ry wrin­kles she has now. I have to look away ‘cause Nanay’s face then doesn’t match what I see today. She wears ten­nis shoes to work now instead of those shiny pumps she used to always buy.”

A moth­er is a daughter’s “home,” a reflec­tion of her­self, or she is a reflec­tion of who or what her moth­er has become. From where she is, in her new home but want­i­ng to go back to her old home, she directs her anger at her Mom: “I feel like kick­ing some­thing but I can’t. Instead, I say, ‘I’m not sup­posed to take care of Nita and Frankie all the time. You’re the mom, you should do it.’”

She leaves for a school field trip to the LA Muse­um. In the bus, two of her Fil­ipino class­mates tease her: “What­sa mat­ter, Alma, you on your peri­od?” To exac­er­bate her sense of mar­gin­al­iza­tion, these boys make fun of an inti­mate and pri­vate female rit­u­al, their seem­ing­ly harm­less taunt a pos­si­ble fore­warn­ing of what awaits her in the future as a female.

She sits with her best friend, June, who is also a Fil­ip­ina. “Her dad was an artist and made a lot of mon­ey back in Mani­la. Here in the States, he works as a cashier at Vons.” As the sto­ry pro­gress­es, it becomes clear that these two come from eco­nom­i­cal­ly sta­ble fam­i­lies in the Philip­pines. When they reach a street lined with huge man­sions, Alma thinks: “But it’s not like June and I haven’t seen man­sions like this before. It’s not like we nev­er lived in our own back home. We both turn to the front of the bus and stare at the road ahead of us. I know what June’s think­ing but she doesn’t say any­thing. We nev­er do any­more.” Once more, the loss of voic­es, the seem­ing dis­ap­pear­ance of truth as expec­ta­tions are turned upside down.

The migra­tion expe­ri­ence of these girls has been an awak­en­ing. The real­i­ties of what they thought would be a bet­ter place, a bet­ter life has come to this: “Life in the States has been small­er and grungi­er com­pared to what we used to have. In Cebu, we had a swim­ming pool in the back­yard and a jet stream bath­tub that could fit three people.”

The trip to the muse­um changes Alma, not because of the Modigliani paint­ings, but because of a sight she could not for­get. Out­side one of the man­sions, she sees her moth­er. But she does not point her out to June or call out to her Nanay. She silences her­self, but it is a silence that screams inside her: “I keep won­der­ing where Nanay is and what she’s doing. I know she’s out there some­where clean­ing Amy and that baby’s mess. I take a deep breath but my insides are burn­ing. I wish I was home right now with Nanay telling me to put away the dish­es or do my home­work. I wish I was with Nanay on that walk instead of Amy. I feel raw like a pump­kin that has all its seeds and pulp scraped out. I can’t shake how that lit­tle girl pulled my nanay’s arm and the look in my nanay’s eyes.”

When her moth­er comes home from work, Alma breaks her silence and final­ly asks: “Is this what you thought it would be?” Her moth­er gives her a kiss and says, “I’m not sure what I thought.” Such is a bor­der state­ment that speaks of what was and what is. This rec­on­cil­i­a­tion between moth­er and daugh­ter is strange­ly brought about by the daughter’s final­ly see­ing with her own eyes what this new place has made of her moth­er, what this new space has made of her as a daugh­ter. Their long­ing had brought them here, and they remain in this space of longing.

“In Amer­i­ca, Restau­rants Are Crowd­ed” by Julia Palar­ca (Brainard 317–324) is a snip­pet from the life of a Fil­ip­ina, born and raised in the Philip­pines, who goes to Amer­i­ca to study. Migra­tion brings her to the bor­der spaces where she must learn to relin­quish old for new per­cep­tions about what she longs for and how she knows herself.

The trope of “nation” is imme­di­ate­ly evi­dent in the very first words refer­ring to the main char­ac­ter: “The brown slant-eyed girl smiled…” The objec­tive voice with which this sto­ry is writ­ten serves as the “gaze” that iden­ti­fies the woman as “dif­fer­ent.”

Migra­tion is an act that is born of a deep long­ing. Imaged as the empire and the cen­ter, the source of hege­mon­ic cul­ture, Amer­i­ca is everybody’s dream. Anto­nia (Toni) was sent off by her par­ents, her mother’s eyes “filled with a lone­li­ness more poignant then tears,” her father “car­ried Pride like a flag.”

The lone wait­ress who is at the sink glances at her and con­tin­ues to wash the dish­es. The brown girl looks around “with amused under­stand­ing” and in her thoughts: “I know, I know.” In the sto­ry, the char­ac­ter does not artic­u­late what she knows, but as read­ers we under­stand that what hap­pens in the restau­rant must have been hap­pen­ing to her for a while. Any Fil­ipinoAmer­i­can read­er will prob­a­bly also know where her words are com­ing from. Even now, in this post­mod­ern era, I still hear sto­ries about Fil­ipinos being served last in restau­rants: “In Amer­i­ca, restau­rants are crowd­ed. Ages before one is served.” I have also spo­ken to Fil­ipino-Amer­i­cans who do not at all expe­ri­ence racist dis­crim­i­na­tion, but I have also spo­ken to those who have.

There is only one oth­er cus­tomer seat­ed beside Toni. When she removes her coat, “her arms looked frag­ile and dark beside the hairy white­ness” of the man seat­ed next to her and self-con­scious­ly draws away from him. In a glo­ca­tion­al sense, this self-con­scious­ness, this almost reflex­ive “mov­ing away” is among the small, spe­cif­ic acts that artic­u­lates in minute detail a glob­al his­to­ry involv­ing pol­i­tics and economics.

She waits and smiles until “the bright smile stiff­ened into an impaled curve on her mouth.” The wait­ress con­tin­ues to ignore her and Toni feels her cheeks burn: “Twen­ty mil­lion lit­tle pins pricked her face, first on the fore­head, then ran in a pit­ted path down to her chin. Oh, please, Lord, don’t let it show.” What does she not want to show and why is she afraid not to show “it”? The story’s silence about her reac­tion mir­rors the way she tries to erase herself.

The man sit­ting next to her is look­ing uncom­fort­able. She breaks her silence: “Don’t they serve for­eign­ers here?” and the man calls out in anger, “Hey! Come on over, will ya? ”

When in the bor­der space of long­ing, one often steals away from real­i­ty towards imag­i­na­tion. Toni finds her­self hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with the stranger next to her. He becomes a stu­dent like her, a Ger­man Jew whose words come out “like a rush of angry waters, bit­ter with pain: ‘What a rot­ten thing to do! Don’t ever, ever allow any­one to treat you like a less­er human being. Least of all, not an arro­gant, stu­pid wait­ress.’” He asks her out, and offers to take her home. But the read­er, along with Toni, is made to real­ize that the con­ver­sa­tion occurs only in her mind. Toni must come back to real­i­ty, to the cof­fee and mac­a­roni and cheese, which she had wait­ed for but no longer wants to eat.

In“Apollo & Junior Grow Up” by Veron­i­ca Montes (171–176), the unnamed first-per­son voice is that of a moth­er and wife. The nar­ra­tive revolves around her son and her hus­band, her life sto­ry and iden­ti­ty seem­ing­ly revolv­ing around theirs.

“In the col­lec­tive con­scious­ness of Fil­ipinos, dis­lo­ca­tion is assumed to be a nat­ur­al state. We have learned not to take our iden­ti­ty crises seri­ous­ly. We have learned instead to laugh, and sing, and dance, for it seems that these are the only per­mis­si­ble ways of assert­ing an iden­ti­ty” (Stro­bel 25). The sto­ry opens with her son say­ing, “As a Fil­ipino, I feel it is my respon­si­bil­i­ty to be a good dancer.” This sin­gle state­ment will not often be heard from Fil­ipino-Amer­i­cans, espe­cial­ly 3rd-gen­er­a­tion teenagers whose par­ents can no longer speak Taga­log or will not know much about the Philip­pines. Once I asked Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­cans who had been born here, “How do you think of your­self — Fil­ipino or Amer­i­can.” The swift answer was “Amer­i­can!”

As the sto­ry unfolds, the read­er will learn that, as with many oth­er Fil­ipino-Amer­cian house­holds, it is the grand­par­ents who hold the family’s/nation’s sto­ries. Per­haps this is also where this teenag­er has got­ten his sense of being Fil­ipino, even want­i­ng to be Fil­ipino and feel­ing “respon­si­ble” for pro­mot­ing his cul­ture. Apol­lo stays awake until two o’clock in the morn­ing to watch the “hilar­i­ous splen­dor” of Fil­ipino vari­ety shows. The moth­er, caught between these two gen­er­a­tions, embod­ies the bor­der long­ing for the loss of the past. Her lack of inter­est in her family’s past or in that “oth­er” nation’s his­to­ry is in stark con­trast to her son’s con­stant­ly ask­ing her to teach him Taga­log, to tell him about the per­sons in the col­lec­tion of pic­tures she keeps. His ques­tions are mere­ly “a gen­tler reminder that the things (she) nev­er both­ered to learn could have made him hap­pi­er.” Her response to him is always: “You know I don’t know.” Some­times, she would make up sto­ries: “I tell him about imag­i­nary gam­blers and doomed love, about an ille­git­i­mate baby girl who became the leg­endary beau­ty of Pasay, about a boy with no tongue.” In a con­junc­tur­al sense, these made-up sto­ries some­how bear a hint of truths she keeps from her son – about doomed love, ille­git­i­ma­cy, and the silence that per­vades her life.

It is her son who tells her about her grand­fa­ther, who was one of the five ille­git­i­mate sons of a mar­ried Spaniard and a Fil­ip­ina with a beau­ti­ful voice. The Spaniard had seduced but nev­er mar­ried the Fil­ip­ina, a com­mon enough sto­ry for Span­ish-col­o­nized Philip­pines. Per­haps this is the rea­son behind the mother’s silence. This unspo­ken shame sur­round­ing chil­dren born out of wed­lock and the woman’s bur­den car­ries over to her own sto­ry. She and her hus­band Jun had got­ten mar­ried at the City hall, her Lolabreath­ing, “‘Thank God Thank God’ as if the five-minute legal pro­ceed­ing had washed (them) free of sin.” She knows that her hus­band stays with her “because (they’ve) been togeth­er for more than half our lives, and he can’t think of what else to do. Leav­ing (her) would be like aban­don­ing his only sister.”

“Didn’t you want to know?” her son asks. And she replies, “Some­times. No, not real­ly.” In this bor­der space which she occu­pies, noth­ing seems to be hap­pen­ing, noth­ing has hap­pened, and noth­ing will hap­pen. When her son queries, “But Ma, how can you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been?” She replies, “Where I’ve been? I’ve nev­er been any­where but here,” deflect­ing her son’s ref­er­ence to “her peo­ple” and say­ing: “You and your dad are my peeps.” This voice presents itself as devoid of any self with­out her son and her hus­band: “The dif­fer­ence between us is that he wants to know the sto­ries, while it’s enough for me to just look.”

This periph­er­al observ­er posi­tion is also evi­dent when she tells the sto­ry and her hus­band who is hav­ing an affair (one among many): “My hus­band knows that I’ll just wait until this girl and her nice smell goes away.” She states that “Junior is bored with her face” and that she felt the same way about him when she was 14. Yet her seem­ing­ly indif­fer­ent reac­tion is belied by her inner thoughts when Junior says to him, she has become a “mini­van,” and had stopped being a “sports­car.” Her thoughts, her actions, the images she uses for this moment are con­junc­tur­al: “I turn my head away and think of a dozen ways to answer him. My tongue starts to bleed, I’m bit­ing so hard. But I don’t say a word because once you do, you can’t take it back. It just twists in the wind like a capiz shell mobile, gath­er­ing dust.” There is both anger and silence, move­ment and still­ness, the image of the thin capiz shells reveal­ing fragili­ty, the gath­er­ing of dust an indi­ca­tion of neglect.

“I see that he can hard­ly breathe. I see that.” This is how the wife sees her hus­band and in her recog­ni­tion that “these things nev­er work out,” is a sense of res­ig­na­tion, a giv­ing up on her own life. She, too, can hard­ly breathe. Some­times, how­ev­er, she leaves her mid­dle ground, and breaks her self-imposed silence, as when she shows her anger to her hus­band: “Is that what you do? You han­dle us?” In her thoughts she admits this, when her hus­band throws the forks and spoons which clat­ter onto the floor: “Some­times — I pick up a fork — just some­times — I pick up a fork — I hate Junior.”

Apol­lo asks her one day if he was a mis­take like his Dad had said or if she had done it on pur­pose, becom­ing preg­nant. She just says his baby name, “Po.” Her son says, “I won’t tell him.” We final­ly learn why she stays: “When Junior walks out of any room — noth­ing fills the space. Not music, not food, not even my son.” She hates him, and she loves him. She wants to go, she wants to stay. Junior has taught her how to dri­ve and is buy­ing her a new car, even though she does not want to.

When Apol­lo asks her that he be allowed to dri­ve, he throws him­self into her arms: “He’s done this for­ev­er, but I can’t stand it now. I’m scared I will hold him for too long and he will shrink from my des­per­a­tion and walk away and nev­er stop.”

She is the link to the past which her son longs for, and she stands on the brink of an end in a mar­riage. The last scene is that of her son and hus­band dri­ving away from her. They are grow­ing up, grow­ing away from her. She sits wait­ing for them to come back, in that bor­der space where desire inter­sects with indif­fer­ence, where love is min­gled with hate. Per­haps she rec­og­nizes in her own son her own need to know her past, so that she would know where to go.

Migra­tion is the dri­ving trope in Her Wild Amer­i­can Self by Eveli­na Galang (67–82). “When Mona and Ricar­do moved to Amer­i­ca, they brought with them a trunk full of ideas — land of oppor­tu­ni­ty, home of democ­ra­cy and equality…but God for­bid we should ever be like those Amer­i­cans — loose, loud-mouthed, dis­re­spect­ful chil­dren.” Thus was the bor­der stage is set for their daugh­ter, Augusti­na, brought to Amer­i­ca, the land of the “free,” and expect­ed to uphold Fil­ipino val­ues, beliefs, and traditions.

“It’s like my family’s stuck some­where in the Philip­pine Islands.” This is the first state­ment of the voice, two gen­er­a­tions removed, that tells the sto­ry of wild Tita Augusti­na “who nev­er learned to obey, nev­er listened.”

When she was young, Augusti­na want­ed to be “cho­sen,” and want­ed to car­ry the cru­ci­fix down the aisle. When her moth­er does not give her per­mis­sion to do so, she stops going to Mass alto­geth­er. The word “cho­sen” becomes this con­junc­tur­al mix of reli­gious belief and a desire to be “seen.” Already, a sense of being “erased” after being uproot­ed must have been felt by the young girl. Even when her father forced her to dress up and dri­ve with them to church, she stayed in the car, so they final­ly let her stay home, but not with­out the guilt she must bear for bur­den­ing her moth­er who cries: “How will this look? My own daugh­ter miss­ing Sun­day Mass. Peo­ple will talk.” Augusti­na would, if they allowed her to be an altar girl and want­ed to play base­ball, but that was worse than not going to Mass. The unspo­ken assump­tion here is that, at that time, there were altar boys but no altar girls.

They send her to an all-girl Catholic school to tame her. On the first day of school, she gets her first taste of what it means to be “dif­fer­ent.” She joins a group of girls with “milk-white” faces at the can­teen, but they turn away when she tries to talk to them, say­ing: “This school’s get­ting cramped.” She begs her Mom to trans­fer her to anoth­er school but she is told it is “the best.” Her moth­er still believes in their dream of this new “home” as a land of democ­ra­cy and equality.

Stuck between her par­ents’ dream and her own real­i­ty, Augusti­na start­ed hang­ing out with her cousin Gabriel in places they’d find dis­turb­ing. “In many of the pho­tos, her image is like a ghost’s.” Unable to find her­self in both fam­i­ly (home) and school, Augusti­na with­draws into a world of her own — in the ceme­tery where she becomes a ghost sus­pend­ed between the real and the imag­ined. She sits at the foot of the stat­ue of St. Bernadette who was vis­it­ed by the Vir­gin and whom every­body thought had gone crazy but “Bernadette didn’t give a fuck what they thought.” At school, the nuns speak about cul­tures, strive to keep the girls chaste and “Augusti­na envi­sioned a large nee­dle and thread stitch­ing its way around the world, gath­er­ing young girls’ inno­cence into the cave of their bod­ies, hold­ing it there like the stuff­ing in a Thanks­giv­ing turkey.” On her body, she wears her bor­der “self ”: ele­phant-leg hiphug­gers, moc­casin-fringed vests and midriff tops, loose beads, and ban­gle ear­rings. Bor­der thoughts can be artic­u­lat­ed in con­junc­tur­al lay­ers of east and west, reli­gion and cult, self and non-self.

It was rumored that her cousin Gabriel was in love with her, and that he was what made her wild. Such a sto­ry may have been more accept­able than the sto­ry of her being unable to find a “home” in the insti­tu­tions where she was sup­posed to belong: at home and in school.

The rhetorics of glo­ca­tion, nation, migra­tion, and bor­der are evi­dent in this scene: “She told her Mom how the nuns point­ed her out in class, say­ing things like, ‘Thanks be to God Augusti­na, the Church risked life and limb to save your peo­ple, civ­i­lize them. Thank God, there were the Span­ish and lat­er the Amer­i­cans.’ All her moth­er said was, ‘She meant well, hija. Be patient.’” Thus is Augusti­na local­ly inter­pel­lat­ed by glob­al events lead­ing to their migra­tion as a fam­i­ly and to her present mar­gin­al position.

The era­sure and the silence con­tin­ue. When she was 16, that age when one must leave child­hood and move towards adult­hood, Tina locked the door of her bed­room and hid away from every­one. Inside, a con­junc­tur­al mix of things affords her solace: a West­ern song about “Moth­er Mary and trou­bled times and let­ting it go, or was that be,” an altar of rocks from Mon­troe beach, Gabriel’s pho­tos, a medal­lion of the Vir­gin Mary stolen from her Mom.

For Augusti­na, her warn­ing was the sto­ry of Emmy, the one who got preg­nant and became an out­cast: “Bet­ter not be wild, bet­ter not embar­rass the fam­i­ly like that girl.” The sto­ry goes that Augusti­na was sent back to the Philip­pines, pre­sum­ably to have a baby, or to dis­ci­pline her wild Amer­i­can self. The sto­ry­teller (the voice) telling Augustina’s sto­ry is warned by her Lola Mona and her moth­er: “You’re next. Watch out.”

The nar­ra­tive ends with her Tita Ina giv­ing her the neck­lace with its Vir­gin Mary pen­dant: “The paint was fad­ing and chip­ping from its sky blue cen­ter, but still there was some­thing about Her, the way Her skirts seemed to flow, the way Her body was sculpt­ed into minia­ture curves, the way the tiny rosary was etched onto met­al plate.” Per­haps it was the Vir­gin Mary’s puri­ty that called to Augusti­na and the Emmy — a puri­ty that spoke of being hon­est to one­self, of being true despite the many ways by which they were iden­ti­fied by the world around them. Per­haps anoth­er sto­ry will be told to the next gen­er­a­tions — that of the sto­ry­teller who had “the same look in the eye, the same stub­born­ness.” Per­haps she will final­ly see what to watch out for.

In “Wilmington”by Gina Apos­tol (19–35), the nar­ra­tor is the younger daugh­ter of the woman whose sto­ry is being told. As if these were told around a kitchen table with inter­rup­tions in between words, we piece togeth­er a bor­der sto­ry about a Fil­ip­ina who socks a GI Joe in the face, and whose hus­band intro­duces his chil­dren to the par­ents of his oth­er woman.

In a con­junc­tur­al palimpsest of images, mem­o­ry, imag­i­na­tion, iden­ti­ty, and space, this nar­ra­tive fol­lows the migra­tion of a moth­er, and two daugh­ters from Amer­i­ca to the Philip­pines and back: “The unfold­ing Polaroid pic­ture was a creep­ing alchem­i­cal weep­ing, slow­ly bla­tant as migra­tion, a move­ment from one place to anoth­er, the dis­tance mag­i­cal­ly immea­sur­able despite the vast evi­dent change: the liq­uid blank­ness has become all col­or — yel­low-swirled TV tray, jester lozenges in jeans, Pookie’s blondness, my own bright eyes in Polaroid: red eyes.”

The “eyes” which see, the voice who speaks, is that of the younger daugh­ter. It opens with images of linoleum floors and cheap faux Tiffany lamps bought at Sears. “It’s the Amer­i­ca she brought back home with her.” These migra­tion images are faith­ful­ly cap­tured in a new polaroid cam­era, bought by the mon­ey Father want­ed to save — for the casi­nos. “Moth­er was fierce: she want­ed pic­tures.” Her fam­i­ly at home was starved for images, sights of the Amer­i­ca she was seeing.

She is liv­ing the Amer­i­can dream. This is the sto­ry she would like to tell. But as with all bor­der expe­ri­ences of Fil­ip­inas liv­ing in Amer­i­ca, there is anoth­er side to the sto­ry. Moth­er worked at the bank, wore all those exot­ic multi­na­tion­al guis­es. “Viet­namese? Per­sian? AfroScan­di­na­vian?” the cus­tomer at the bank ques­tions her, the sto­ry a leg­end in the fam­i­ly. One didn’t need a Polaroid for peo­ple at home to rec­og­nize him. They’d call him Joe. When he learned she was Fil­ip­ina, he told her of his nights in the Philip­pines and the girls he got there. Her moth­er slapped the Amer­i­can and was fired. This desire to move away from the periph­ery is repeat­ed through­out the nar­ra­tive, with scenes of her moth­er shriek­ing and jump­ing up and down with joy when Ms Philip­pines wins the Ms Uni­verse con­test: “Amer­i­ca got the moon, but the Philip­pines won the Uni­verse.” And they turn it around by par­rot­ing ques­tions such as: “Is Mani­la still full of mon­keys, hoho­ho.” This is a glo­ca­tion­al trope that reveals the bor­der posi­tion of a nation.

Nation, or the trope that reveals their sense of them­selves, is a con­stant­ly shift­ing space for the two sis­ters. Through their moth­er, Amer­i­ca is their nation. When they go back to the Philip­pines, they try to “make the change a tem­po­rary translit­er­a­tion — as if (they) weren’t shift­ing from one dis­crete lan­guage to anoth­er but main­ly liv­ing in dif­fer­ent sym­bols, sub­sti­tut­ing rather than trans­form­ing. (They) jeal­ous­ly guard­ed the shad­ows of Wilm­ing­ton — the lan­guage of Eng­lish for one — or we tricked each oth­er with tales, i.e., with true and untrue mem­o­ries, so that one could cor­rect the oth­er.” When they receive the box­es filled with things from Amer­i­ca, they final­ly rec­og­nize that their time in Amer­i­ca is over: “Our world­ly effects unthink­able in our native land: skate in the ocean, shiny jer­sey zip­pered look wad­ing in the floods.”

Their fre­quent migra­tions take their toll on them, com­ing out as 24 A Loca­tion­al Fem­i­nist Read­ing of Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can Fiction:

bor­der thoughts: “And there was too much for mem­o­ry to account for: could so much be unmem­o­rable? Could we have missed numer­ous oth­er pos­si­bly mem­o­rable events mere­ly by mov­ing away, by not hav­ing items close by?” Vicky choos­es to go back and live in Mass­a­chu­setts. From for­eign­er to native to vis­i­tor in her home coun­try, she is wel­comed by “sighs, excla­ma­tions, shrieks, food of island pro­por­tions… I tried to take in all the abun­dant ges­tures and crammed objects in the apart­ment, grown small­er with each of the family’s reg­u­lar migra­tions when we’d escape from rent and take with us only our belongings.”

These three women’s mem­o­ries are both con­nect­ed and dis­joint­ed. Vicky remem­bers the “tat­too of a sun­flower with dimin­ish­ing petals on the arm of a pos­si­ble crim­i­nal.” This seems to be refer­ring to the nextdoor neigh­bor Frank who heaved a stereo up above his head in rage: “It remains there above his head. Cer­tain mem­o­ries are locked like that.” Her mem­o­ries of Frank are linked with her mem­o­ries of her moth­er: “I remem­ber I’d wake up at nights to a sol­id, fleshy moon and creep about to see where moth­er had slept — she end­ed up at var­i­ous beds, like a night nurse, a hun­dred pound angel.” She asso­ciates the men sur­round­ing her moth­er with rage and knives, as when her father comes home from Pookie’s par­ents. These frozen and unclear mem­o­ries are very much a bor­der expe­ri­ence for Vicky: “Now when I try to fig­ure out the facts form the enig­mas, the mys­ter­ies remain.”

This con­junc­tur­al trope is repeat­ed through­out the nar­ra­tive: “From dream-sleep to dream of present, I looked at dolls, dress­es, my shirt in the dream, and smelled that smell — becom­ing weird­ly sweet with famil­iar­i­ty — that came from pack­aged for­eign objects, as if dis­place­ment had some per­fume, emerg­ing mag­i­cal­ly from the unrav­el­ling of things. And all I thought about, after this trau­ma of car­niv­o­rous moms, was this swing I once swung on in the grass of someone’s yard. My mnemon­ic trea­sures are odd, out of place, like flung glass beads from bit­ten strings.” The unre­al world of dreams, plas­tic dolls, the real smell of for­eign things, a mem­o­ry, once more of swing­ing at a neighbor’s yard — all these com­bined make up Vicky’s mem­o­ry of their past life in Amer­i­ca. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, she, the voice nar­rat­ing this sto­ry, does not know every­thing that has hap­pened, and can­not be sure if they ever hap­pened. This is the uncer­tain­ty that often marks bor­der iden­ti­ties which are root­ed nei­ther here nor there.

Her cheer­ful, old­er sis­ter Stel­la, now resid­ing in the Philip­pines, has a dif­fer­ent mem­o­ry of Amer­i­ca: “I hat­ed those lies, those sto­ries about Amer­i­ca — that it was the best thing that could have hap­pened to us…The way Mom­my spanked us when we didn’t speak Eng­lish. I was so proud of the lan­guage that no one else in Wilm­ing­ton knew.”

Unlike Vicky who has gone back to live in Mass­a­chu­setts, Stel­la stayed in the Philip­pines with their moth­er. Until this con­ver­sa­tion, Vicky had believed her mother’s per­cep­tion of the Amer­i­can dream. She recalls that she was proud of her free lunch tick­et, hav­ing been told by her Mom that it was a priv­i­lege, “being Fil­ipino and all.” Yet Stel­la is clear about what she remem­bers: “The worst things are the sto­ries. As if she’d nev­er been dis­crim­i­nat­ed against, even by those evil old neigh­bors she had to live with. I feel sor­ry for her and I’m angry.”

Towards the end of the nar­ra­tive, the read­er is again thrown off­course about who real­ly holds the true mem­o­ries. Stel­la speaks about skat­ing in the neigh­bor­hood park and Vicky says: “That’s my mem­o­ry. I remem­ber it being real­ly cold and I’d still go out, and I remem­ber the soli­tude: I remem­ber those spaces of soli­tude in Amer­i­ca.” To this, Stel­la replies: “Real­ly? Then maybe it was yours — your mem­o­ry that you’d trad­ed with me before, and I’ve kept it.”

With­in that bor­der space between her moth­er and her old­er sis­ter, Vicky is the teller of sto­ries both real and unre­al, the hold­er of incom­plete mem­o­ries. She looks at both of them: “The woman at the bank teller’s win­dow, who had once been French, Viet­namese, Per­sian all at once, who had slugged the Amer­i­can vet, was nowhere in those murky fea­tures — where­as Stel­la was grow­ing stouter and more vibrant a pres­ence, like an over­whelm­ing flood of memory.”

For both Stel­la and Vicky, it has become clear that their old Amer­i­can neigh­bor­hood was not the best place to live in. Their Mom how­ev­er says: “I didn’t know that was what the neigh­bor­hood was. I thought it was just America.”

Dur­ing my con­ver­sa­tions with first gen­er­a­tion Fil-Ams, I would play­ful­ly ask them: “If you were watch­ing a game between teams from Amer­i­ca and the Philip­pines, whom would you root for?” Some­times I am met with silence. Some­times, the answer is imme­di­ate: the Philip­pines. How­ev­er, if you ask a teen-age Fil­ipino-Amer­i­can who was born here, s/he would imme­di­ate­ly say, “Amer­i­ca, because I am Amer­i­can.” In oth­er con­ver­sa­tions, one Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can plans to resign from her high-pro­file job to buy land in the Philip­pines and plant veg­eta­bles in a farm some­where in the provinces, while a care­tak­er of elder­ly per­sons in Chica­go works both night and morn­ing shifts because she wants to save and “retire” in the Philippines.

The search for “home” is seen as the con­text for the inter­na­tion­al dias­po­ra of Fil­ipinos (Stro­bel 29). The trope of nation, evi­dent in these sto­ries through the women’s iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with their bod­ies (e.g., one teenage girl pre­oc­cu­pied with Bar­bie and anoth­er await­ing her peri­od), mem­o­ries (e.g., through pic­tures in the sto­ry Montes), and imag­i­na­tions (e.g., Toni’s imag­ined con­ver­sa­tion with the Amer­i­can), is fraught with notions of home, exile, and belong­ing — the “holy tri­umvi­rate” in the very idea of dias­po­ra. The sense of belong­ing floats between nos­tal­gia for the native land and the desire to pos­sess (and be pos­sessed) by the adopt­ed one. Many char­ac­ters in these sto­ries rec­og­nize that the exer­cise of mem­o­ry is the only means of keep­ing in touch with that part of their hybrid, hyphen­at­ed iden­ti­ty (Bose 163–168).

The nar­ra­tive of “nation” is con­tained in the sto­ry of the self, and to locate one’s per­son­al his­to­ry with­in the his­to­ry of the com­mu­ni­ty is to find the rela­tion­ship between the self, the nation, and the nar­ra­tion. This is the begin­ning of decol­o­niza­tion (Pierce 37). It is nec­es­sary to look at the dai­ly per­for­mances of women and the ways by which they (re)write the nation on the mar­gins — a nation that is dynam­ic and flu­id, steeped with the com­plex­i­ty of their indi­vid­ual, dai­ly par­tic­i­pa­tion, which is the cre­ative force at the root of nation build­ing (West­lake 19). The char­ac­ter is a repos­i­to­ry for indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive mem­o­ry. Sulit calls this a col­laps­ing of the per­son­al and polit­i­cal which allows for the emer­gence of a nation­al and transna­tion­al lit­er­a­ture, offer­ing the ways in which nations con­struct one anoth­er (“Pinay Writ­ings” 370).

“Bor­der” spaces of long­ing, lim­i­nal­i­ty, para­dox­i­cal process­es of con­nec­tion and sep­a­ra­tion and cul­tur­al hybridiza­tion are occu­pied by the char­ac­ters in these sto­ries, for instance, Maria Eliz­a­beth play­ing Dou­ble Dutch, or “wild” Ina defy­ing all con­ven­tions. Col­o­nized and overde­ter­mined from with­out, Fil­ipinos are not just born “split,” but are also born on the “bor­der.” Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­cans are cit­i­zens of nowhere, nei­ther entire­ly includ­ed in nor com­plete­ly exclud­ed from the Amer­i­can land­scape, “wards” and “nation­als” but not cit­i­zens of the Unit­ed States (Sulit, “Philip­pine Dias­po­ra” 124). Gay­a­tri Spi­vak speaks of the dias­poric woman as transna­tion­al­ly locat­ed, the site of glob­al pub­lic cul­ture pri­va­tized, spend­ing her entire ener­gy upon the suc­cess­ful trans­plan­ta­tion or inser­tion into the new state, and pos­si­bly the vic­tim of an exac­er­bat­ed and vio­lent patri­archy which oper­ates in the name of the old nation as well (qtd in Bose 167).

In this “third space,” there is always the ques­tion of whether iden­ti­ty is to be true to its ori­gins or to the adopt­ed cul­ture, or whether to embark on the more dif­fi­cult path of con­struct­ing a self that acknowl­edges both (Bose 163). Amy Kil­gard speaks of lim­i­nal expe­ri­ences as moments of height­ened aware­ness of the rela­tion­ships between images, ideas, peo­ple, and things; and of bor­der cross­ing as liv­ing on and with the edges (Kil­gard 146). Born hybrid, one is con­stant­ly strug­gling to main­tain a con­sis­tent and coher­ent iden­ti­ty between phys­i­cal and meta­phys­i­cal cul­tur­al bor­ders: “You per­son­i­fy the col­o­niz­er at the same time that you are col­o­nized; you par­tic­i­pate in the col­o­niza­tion of your­self ” (Pierce 33). Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­cans con­stant­ly live with the con­cept of bor­der­land, its mul­ti­ple bound­aries, inter­con­nect­ed­ness, flu­id­i­ty, and cre­ativ­i­ty (Stro­bel 26).

“Migra­tion to a new soci­ety neces­si­tates and enables a new posi­tion­ing of the self” (Erel 239). The “move­ments” expe­ri­enced by the char­ac­ters in these sto­ries com­pli­cate their sense of belong­ing, exile, and nos­tal­gia. For instance, for the two sis­ters and their moth­er mov­ing back and forth between the Philip­pines and Amer­i­ca in the sto­ry “Wilm­ing­ton,” home is a tran­sient loca­tion, whether imag­i­nary or real (Bose 167).

These sto­ries decon­struct the stereo­typ­i­cal fix­a­tion of migra­tion as a uni­lin­ear jour­ney (Erel 240). Like the char­ac­ters in Mene­ses’ and Palarca’s sto­ries, many Fil­ipinos leave their home coun­try for the “Amer­i­can dream,” to promis­es linked to the “val­ue of white­ness”: eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ty, equal treat­ment under the law, and the promise of each individual’s right to pur­sue hap­pi­ness. Pierce speaks of the his­to­ry of the US as a long and repet­i­tive nar­ra­tive of the inac­ces­si­bil­i­ty of the promis­es of the Amer­i­can dream to many peo­ple and com­mu­ni­ties of col­or (Pierce 36). 28 A Loca­tion­al Fem­i­nist Read­ing of Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can Fiction:

Fil­ipino-Amer­i­cans are the sec­ond fastest-grow­ing Asian/Pacific Islander com­mu­ni­ty in the US (con­sti­tut­ing 18% of total Asian/Pacific Islander pop­u­la­tion), accord­ing to a 2000 US cen­sus. As shown in the sto­ries, there is a con­tin­u­ing sense of mar­gin­al­iza­tion, and dom­i­nant themes of lost iden­ti­ties and his­to­ries. Oft-writ­ten about is how the dou­ble her­itage of dual col­o­niza­tions (first, by Spain then by the US), cou­pled with Amer­i­can impe­ri­al­ism, has left an indeli­ble mark on the Fil­ipinoAmer­i­can psy­che. Epi­fanio San Juan Jr speaks of the predica­ment and cri­sis of dis­lo­ca­tion, frag­men­ta­tion, loss of tra­di­tions, exclu­sions and alien­ation of Fil­ipino-Amer­i­cans, while Oscar Cam­po­manes refers to the cri­sis Filipino/American identity’s impe­r­i­al nation­al­i­ty as one of “amne­sia,” tran­scribed by pow­er­ful acts of for­get­ting and impres­sions of form­less­ness. Right­ful­ly, Eric Gama­lin­da points to the Filipino’s “invis­i­bil­i­ty” as a con­se­quence of amne­sia, still regard­ing their own cul­ture as infe­ri­or. “It is no won­der that sec­ond- and third-gen­er­a­tion Fil­ipino-Amer­i­cans feel they are nei­ther here nor there, per­am­bu­lat­ing between a cul­ture that alien­ates them and a cul­ture they know noth­ing about or are ashamed of ” (qtd in De Jesus 3).

The “glo­ca­tion­al” trope, exem­pli­fied in the effect of the Bar­bie doll on Per­la in the sto­ry by Bueno, shows how the local, the pri­vate, and the domes­tic are con­sti­tut­ed in rela­tion to glob­al sys­tems. This cor­re­sponds to the idea of the “local” men­tioned by Susan Fried­man in her dis­cus­sion of geopo­lit­i­cal lit­er­a­cy or the “ordi­nary and every­day” in Toril Moi’s con­clud­ing state­ments in her book, Sexual/Textual Pol­i­tics.

The process of decol­o­niza­tion allows for the recog­ni­tion of iden­ti­ty as tied to glob­al dis­cours­es and colo­nial impe­ri­al­ism. By virtue of being born, a Fil­ipino inher­its four hun­dred years of com­bined col­o­niza­tion. With the com­bined forces of col­orism by Spain and racism by the US, the inter­nal­ized notion of “White is beau­ti­ful” con­tin­ues to infe­ri­or­ize Fil­ipinos. In Maria P. P. Root’s words: “You come to under­stand that your life, your fam­i­ly, your day-to-day inter­ac­tions that were once so per­son­al are actu­al­ly part and par­cel of par­tic­u­lar social con­struc­tions of race, gen­der, class, and nation” (qtd in Pierce 33).

The glo­ca­tion­al trope can also point to the greater com­mu­ni­ty to which Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­cans belong. Dias­po­ra holds the notion of “inter­con­nect­ed­ness.” The effects of col­o­niza­tion, inter­na­tion­al­ism, glob­al­iza­tion, and the trans­plan­ta­tion of Fil­ip­inas (Pinays) liv­ing in the Unit­ed States affect those who live in the Philip­pines, Aus­tralia, and else­where, and vice ver­sa (Tin­tiang­co-Cubales 142–143).

Mov­ing beyond the text, women writ­ers of the Philip­pine dias­po­ra embody a lit­er­a­ture of wit­ness, encom­pass­ing a kind of two-way vision of Fil­ipino dias­poric com­mu­ni­ty, one that inves­ti­gates the dialec­tic of homog­e­niza­tion and dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion in a world sys­tem, the posi­tion of cri­sis for the writer con­struct­ing nar­ra­tives of the dias­po­ra, and the obsta­cles that Fil­ipinos face in form­ing com­mu­ni­ties of empow­er­ment to resis­tance. David Lei­wei Lim artic­u­lates the strug­gle of a writer to choose between the oblig­a­tion to their imme­di­ate com­mu­ni­ties and the demands of a con­sumer cul­ture (qtd in Sulit, “Philip­pine Dias­po­ra” 126127) Car­olyn Ped­well sug­gests that authors may need to think fur­ther, not only about the kinds of sub­jects and voic­es that the cul­tur­al and polit­i­cal con­texts they are con­cerned with engen­der, but also the kinds of sub­jects their own dis­course (re)produces and ‘gives voice’ to (196). In the end, what mat­ters is how writ­ers mod­u­late transna­tion­al, nation­al, and per­son­al voic­es alike (Simal and Mari­no 15–16).

The trope of con­junc­tural­ism is inex­tri­ca­bly tied to the bor­der expe­ri­ence, and not just of the char­ac­ters found in these sto­ries. Con­junc­tural­ism, as found in the texts of Bueno, Galang, Montes, and Apos­tol, among oth­ers, is about jux­ta­po­si­tions, inter­sec­tions, and inter­con­nec­tions of dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al for­ma­tions writ­ten by the writer and read by the crit­ic. There are inter­sec­tions of cul­tur­al essen­tial­ism and racism, gen­dered and sex­u­al­ized process­es of dom­i­na­tion, and dis­tinct embod­ied prac­tices and cul­tur­al groups (Ped­well 197). In Bueno’s and Galang’s sto­ries, reli­gion inter­sects with tra­di­tion, gos­sip is jux­ta­posed with his­to­ry. In Montes and Apostol’s sto­ries, mem­o­ry is jux­ta­posed with his­to­ry until one is not cer­tain which is real or imaginary.

The con­cept of nation in all its local aspects, its links to the glob­al vil­lage, along with notions of migra­tions across bor­ders result­ing in hybridiza­tion and tran­scul­tur­a­tion is cru­cial in under­stand­ing the overde­ter­mined posi­tions, and there­fore the mul­ti-lay­ered sub­jec­tiv­i­ties and iden­ti­ties of the Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can. This rev­e­la­tion becomes an inter­ro­ga­tion of the nor­mal­ized vio­lence man­i­fest­ed by the era­sure of the Philip­ine-Amer­i­can his­to­ry and cul­ture, as well as the silenc­ing of Fil­ip­ina-Amer­i­can voic­es. This inter­ro­ga­tion paves the way towards break­ing that silence and towards recov­er­ing that which has been erased.

Works Cit­ed

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Bohan, Janis S. “Sex dif­fer­ences and/in the self: Clas­sic themes, fem­i­nist vari­a­tions, post­mod­ern chal­lenges.” Psy­chol­o­gy of Women Quar­ter­ly 26, (2002).

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Brainard, Cecil­ia Manguer­ra et al., edi­tors.Grow­ing Up Fil­ipino II: More Sto­ries for Young Adults. Kin­dle Edi­tion. San­ta Mon­i­ca, CA: PALH, 2015.

Bud­geon, Shel­ley. “The Con­tra­dic­tions of Suc­cess­ful Fem­i­nin­i­ty: Third Wave Fem­i­nism, Post­fem­i­nism and “New’ Fem­i­nini­ties.” New Fem­i­nini­ties: Post­fem­i­nism, Neolib­er­al­ism and Sub­jec­tiv­i­ty.Edit­ed by Ros­alind Gill and Christi­na Scharff. New York: Pal­grave Macmil­lan, 2011.

Cruz, Denise. Transpa­cif­ic Fem­i­nini­ties: The Mak­ing of the Mod­ern Fil­ip­ina. Durham, NC: Duke Uni­ver­si­ty Press. 2012. Dahl, Ulri­ka. “The Road to Writ­ing.” Emer­gent Writ­ing Method­olo­gies in Fem­i­nist Stud­ies. Edit­ed by Mona Livholts. New York: Rout­ledge, 2012.

De Jesus, Melin­da. “Intro­duc­tion: Toward a Pem­i­nist The­o­ry, or The­o­riz­ing the Filipina/American Expe­ri­ence.” Pinay Pow­er: Pem­i­nist Crit­i­cal The­o­ry: The­o­riz­ing the Filipina/American Expe­ri­ence. Edit­ed by Melin­da de Jesus. New York: Rout­ledge Tay­lor and Fran­cis Group, 2005.

Erel, Umut. “Migrant Women Chal­leng­ing Stereo­typ­i­cal Views on Fem­i­nini­ties and Fam­i­ly.” New Fem­i­nini­ties: Post­fem­i­nism, Neolib­er­al­ism and Sub­jec­tiv­i­ty.Edit­ed by Ros­alind Gill and Christi­na Scharff.New York: Pal­grave Macmil­lan, 2011.

Fried­man, Susan Stan­ford. “Loca­tion­al Fem­i­nism: Gen­der, Cul­tur­al Geo­gra­phies, and Geopo­lit­i­cal Lit­er­a­cy.” Fem­i­nist Loca­tions: Glob­al and Local, The­o­ry and Prac­tice.Edit­ed by Mar­i­anne Dekoven.U.S.A: Rut­gers Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2001.

Galang Eveli­na M. “Her Wild Amer­i­can Self.” Her Wild Amer­i­can Self. Min­neapo­lis: Cof­fee House Press, 1996.

Kil­gard, Amy K. “Direct­ing Per­for­mances of Bor­der Cross­ing: An Alle­go­ry of Turnst(y)les.” Cast­ing Gen­der: Women and Per­for­mance in Inter­cul­tur­al Con­texts. Crit­i­cal Inter­cul­tur­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Stud­ies. Thomas K. Nakaya­ma, Gen­er­al Edi­tor, vol 7. New York: Peter Lang Pub­lish­ing Inc., 2005.

Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Pol­i­tics: Fem­i­nist Lit­er­ary The­o­ry.2nd ed. New York: Rout­ledge, 2002. Montes, Veron­i­ca. “Apol­lo & Junior Grow Up.” Going Home to A Land­scape: Writ­ings by Fil­ip­inas.Edit­ed by Mar­i­anne Vil­lanue­va and Vir­gina Cere­nio. Min­neapo­lis: Calyx Books, 2003.

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Pierce, Lin­da M. “Not Just My Clos­et: Expos­ing Famil­ial, Cul­tur­al, and Impe­r­i­al Skele­tons.” Pinay Pow­er: Pem­i­nist Crit­i­cal The­o­ry: The­o­riz­ing the Filipina/American Expe­ri­ence. Edit­ed by Melin­da de Jesus. New York: Rout­ledge Tay­lor and Fran­cis Group, 2005.

Simal, Begoña and Mari­no Elis­a­bet­ta, edi­tor. “Intro­duc­tion: Approach­ing Dif­fer­ent Lit­er­ary Voic­es in Asian Amer­i­ca and the Asian Dias­po­ra.” Con­tri­bu­tions to Asian Amer­i­can Lit­er­ary Stud­ies: Transna­tion­al, nation­al and Per­son­al Voic­es: New Per­spec­tives on Asian Amer­i­can and Asian Dias­poric Women Writ­ers. Vol. 3. New Jer­sey: Rut­gers Uni­ver­si­ty, 2004.

Stro­bel, Leny Men­doza. “A Per­son­al Sto­ry: On Becom­ing a Split Fil­ip­ina Sub­ject.” Pinay Pow­er: Pem­i­nist Crit­i­cal The­o­ry: The­o­riz­ing the Filipina/American Expe­ri­ence. Edit­ed by Melin­da de Jesus. New York: Rout­ledge Tay­lor and Fran­cis Group, 2005.

Sulit, Marie-Therese C.“Through our Pinay Writ­ings: Nar­rat­ing Trau­ma, Embody­ing Recov­ery.”Pinay Pow­er: Pem­i­nist Crit­i­cal The­o­ry: The­o­riz­ing the Filipina/American Expe­ri­ence. Edit­ed by Melin­da de Jesus. New York: Rout­ledge Tay­lor and Fran­cis Group, 2005. —. “The Philip­pine Dias­po­ra, Hunger and Re-Imag­in­ing Com­mu­ni­ty: An Overview of Works by Fil­ip­ina and Fil­ip­ina Amer­i­can Writ­ers,” Con­tri­bu­tions to Asian Amer­i­can Lit­er­ary Stud­ies: Transna­tion­al, Nation­al and Per­son­al Voic­es: New Per­spec­tives on Asian Amer­i­can and Asian Dias­poric Women Writ­ers.Edit­ed by Begoña Simal and Mari­no Elis­a­bet­ta, vol. 3. New Jer­sey: Rut­gers Uni­ver­si­ty, 2004.

Tin­tiang­co-Cubales,Allyson Goce. “Pinay­ism,” Pinay Pow­er: Pem­i­nist Crit­i­cal The­o­ry: The­o­riz­ing the Filipina/American Expe­ri­ence. Edit­ed by Melin­da de Jesus. New York: Rout­ledge Tay­lor and Fran­cis Group, 2005.

Tong, Rose­marie. Fem­i­nist Thought (3rd ed.). Boul­der, CO: West­view Press. 2009. West­lake, E.J. “The­o­ret­i­cal Foun­da­tions and Inter­cul­tur­al Per­for­mance: (Re) writ­ing Nations on the Mar­gins.” Cast­ing Gen­der: Women and Per­for­mance in Inter­cul­tur­al Con­texts. Crit­i­cal Inter­cul­tur­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Stud­ies.Thomas K. Nakaya­ma, Gen­er­al Edi­tor, vol 7. New York: Peter Lang Pub­lish­ing Inc., 2005.

Erra­tum:

    In Vol 39, p 33, De Vega should be “Vega”

in “The De Vega’s Wartime Episode”

by Chris­t­ian G Mundo.

 

Tags: Philip­pine Stud­ies, Fil­ipino Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, Philip­pine Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, Fil­Am studies 

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Welcome!

I am a daugh­ter of the Philip­pines and an adopt­ed daugh­ter of Amer­i­ca. I have also trav­eled to many places so I am also a daugh­ter of the Earth. My expe­ri­ences have found their way into my sto­ries, which try to depict char­ac­ters caught in impor­tant moments in their lives, sit­u­a­tions that force them to act, make deci­sions, change. I try to see the world from my own point of view, not the dom­i­nant West­ern one, thus my inter­est in his­to­ry, cul­ture, and set­ting. But my char­ac­ters car­ry my sto­ries; they are the most impor­tant in my sto­ry-telling. I have to dive deep into them to under­stand their human­i­ty – their good­ness as well as their bad­ness, their beau­ty as well as their ugli­ness. Just like us. Just like each of us. I need to know where they came from, where they are now, so I under­stand where they are going. Just like us.

Please read my full biog­ra­phy here

 

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