SINGGALOT (Ties That Bind)
Re-Conceptualizing and Re-Mapping
the Filipino American Experience

FAHNS Keynote Speech

By Dean T. Alegado Ethnic Studies, University of Hawai’i at Manoa

Magandand umaga sa inyong lahat! Ma-ayong buntag sa imong tanan! Na-imbag a bigat you amin, apo! Aloha and mabuhay!

I would like take this opportunity to thank FANHS members for their invaluable contribution in sharing their photo collections and stories I used for the SINGGALOT photo exhibit project. In particular, Dorothy and Fred Cordova at the FAHNS national in Seattle, Estrella Alamar in Chicago, Edwina Lapa and Alan Bergano and the FAHNS chapter in Virginia Beach/Hampton Roads, Mel Orpilla in Vallego, and others just to many to mention I would need more time, so my sincere apology. If any of you have not visited the FAHNS national office in Seattle or Estrella Alamar’s house in Chicago, these are delightful treats that anyone seriously interested in researching Filipino American experience should not/can not miss. I would be remiss if I don’t mention my utang na loob to my mentor, Domingo Los Banos, who’s been one of my inspiration these last few years, and who allowed me into the world of his surviving First Filipino infantry regiment comrades and whose heroic story is no longer untold, thanks to Sonny Izon, Stephanie Castillo and Linda Revilla. I’ve already thanked Franklin Odo and his able staff at the Asia Pacific American Program at Smithsonian for the opportunity to do SINGGALOT. Franklin, who is here, has asked me to help schedule meetings with those of you interested in bringing the SINGGALOT exhibit to your local areas over the next 3 years as it go on national tour. My most humble Maraming salamat to all of you from the bottom of my heart.

The Politics of Memory

Nearly 10 years ago, the Filipino community in Hawai’i and throughout the U.S. and other parts of the world marked the 100th anniversary of the Philippine Revolution and the birth of the Philippine Republic. Throughout 1998, commemorative programs were held that mobilized the entire Filipino community, particularly first generation immigrants, to celebrate their Philippine heritage. Why the euphoria felt by Filipinos in celebrating the proclamation of the Philippine independence from 300 years of Spanish colonial rule and birth of a new nation was not followed up by further reflection and commemoration of what happened afterwards in 1899 is a good example of the politics of remembering or its opposite – of forgetting. I am referring, of course, to the outbreak of the Philippine American War, which many Filipinos both here in the U.S. and in the diasporas and in the Philippines, have not fully come to terms with. The territorial and economic expansion of the United States into Hawai’i, Guam, Samoa, the Philippines, and elsewhere in the Caribbean and Latin America would set into motion the movement not only of goods and capital, but also of people, including Filipinos. These people who were incorporated by force into the new American empire at the dawn of the 20th century not only were bearers of labor power, they also brought with them their lived culture, languages, history, traditions, and hopes.

The Hawai’i Filipino Centennial

In 2006, the Filipino community is commemorating its centennial in Hawai’i and the community is again the scene of many celebratory events. The 2006 centennial provides an excellent opportunity for the Filipino community in Hawai’i – and the U.S. -to critically reflect upon its cultural and historical linkages with the Philippines and the United States. But more importantly, the centennial offers us a unique opportunity to examine the broader historical and global forces shaping and reconfiguring the future of Filipinos and how they view themselves in America and elsewhere throughout the Pacific and other parts of the world. In Hawai’i alone, many conferences dealing with the Filipino American experiences have been held and will be held. In January we had the combined international and national Philippine Nurses Association conference attended by over 1,000 Filipino nurses and their families. In March the annual Sariling Gawa conference was held which regularly draw between 100 to 150 Filipino high school student leaders statewide. In April we had the Filipino College student summit at the UH attended by over 200 FilAm students including a handful from the continent. In May, we saw the biggest gathering of Filipinos in history of the annual Filipino Fiesta and Parade in which the people of Hawai’i felt the collective strength of more than 30,000 Filipino Americans that marched through Waikiki. We’re now here at the FANHS national conference. In September, the 4th Filipino Global Networking conference will be held at the Hilton Hawaiian Village and immediately followed by the National Federation of Filipino American Associations (or NFFAA) national conference. Earlier this year NAFFAA held a very successful Hawai’i Pacific regional conference at the FilCom Center in Waipahu attended by almost 400 people, with a large contingent of students from UH Manoa and LCC. From October to December 2006, Bishop Museum will host a 3-month long exhibition on the Filipino experience in Hawai’i. The Hawaii Contemporary Museum in Makiki Heights and the First Hawaiian Bank’s Contemporary Museum in downtown Honolulu are currently hosting exhibits of works of Filipino American artists. In December, the Center for Philippine Studies will be hosting an international conference focusing on the Filipino diasporas. These are just a few of the many, many events being held across the islands throughout 2006, covering a wide gamut of activities - artistic performances, film festivals, grand fiestas, banquets and so on. We will also witness a number of books and various types of publications and documentary films highlighting the Filipino American achievements over the past 100 years in Hawai’i. Normally, those of us in FAHNS would be ecstatic about these cultural events, but as some of us have hit the magic 50 and joined the over-the-hill-gang, we’re so tired at the half-way mark and there’s still 6 more months to go that some of us are contemplating seeking sabbaticals or early retirement next year as our bodies feel like 100 years old.

Orientalism and the Struggle for Asian /Filipino American History and Identity

But more seriously, it should be noted that until the establishment of ethnic studies programs on campuses across the U.S. in the 1970s, it was unusual for members of immigrant or ethnic minorities to celebrate their “native” or national cultures and heritage. Due to the dominant ideology of assimilation and ‘melting pot’, non-WASP minority groups were expected to shed their “cultural baggage” and “become American” or else risk being labeled “foreigner” or “disloyal.” Thus, second and third generation children of immigrants were often ashamed of their ethnic or cultural backgrounds, or have very little appreciation of the role played by their parents and grandparents in the development of Hawai’i’ and the United States.

Historians have documented the fact that Filipinos have been on these islands since 1853, perhaps as early as 1780s in California and early 1800s in Louisiana. Unfortunately, until recently the history of Filipinos and other Asian immigrants on the Pacific coast of the U.S. was little known, omitted from the traditional discourse of U.S. history which was dominated by the ideology of manifest destiny and what Columbia University professor, Gary Okihiro, a local boy from Kauai, has argued the ways in which the “Orientalist” legacy shaped American views of the immigrants from Asia. According to Okihiro, the very term Asian was an invention of this Orientalism. The people who immigrated from across the Pacific did not think of themselves in continental, and until the late 19th century, even in national terms, their primary identification being with their origins in local societies. Asians were rendered into a racial and cultural formation in their depiction as “Asians, “Orientals”, or “Mongolians” by the dominant discourse. This discourse also rendered Asians into permanent foreigners, incapable culturally and even genetically of becoming “real” Americans, which would serve as justification for exclusion from 1882 to World War II. The exclusion did not extinguish memories of ties to native origins, or even involvement in the politics of nations of origin, but it rendered affirmation of such ties into a liability. Even where consciousness of origins was weak, as with generations born in the U.S., the very “Asianess” of Americans of Asian descent precluded their becoming “real” Americans. The most tragic manifestation of this racist Orientalism was the incarceration in concentration camps of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II.

While on rare occasions able to unite in struggles against their oppression, there is little evidence that Asians of different nationalities had a sense of kinship for one another on account of being “Asian.” On the contrary, to the extent that they identified with their national origins in Asia, including the Philippines, conflicts within Asia pitted different groups of Asian immigrants against one another, resulting in “disidentification” whereby members of one group distanced themselves from another group so as not to be mistaken and suffer the blame for the presumed misdeeds of that group.

Grounded very much in the U.S. soil, Americans of Asian descent were excluded from U.S. national history for over a century. It was the struggles for civil rights in the 1960s that eventually reframed the terms of the discourse on Asian Americans. Asian American scholars and students and groups such as FANHS would play a crucial role in uncovering and reconstructing the “buried past” of Asian Americans, including Filipino Americans. Maxine Hong Kingston described the new discourse as “claiming American” by rooting Asian Americanness in the ground of U.S. history. In his preface to Roots: An Asian American Reader, Franklin Odo wrote that:

Increasing numbers of Asian Americans look to their “roots” . . . our roots go deep into the history of the United States and they can do much to explain who we are and how we became this way . . .

Asian Americans, including Filipinos, in other words, rather than the transplantation in the U.S. of racially and culturally marked peoples without history, were the very products of the history of the U.S., in the making of which they had been participants from the beginning.

The grounding of Asian Americans, including Filipinos, in U.S. history underlined the commonality of the Asian American experience with the experiences of other oppressed groups in American society. But the relationship of Asian Americans to distant origins in Asia created tensions and conflict. “What should be a ‘proper’ stance toward the inculcation or maintenance of a cultural heritage? How closely, if at all, and in what ways should Asian Americans relate to Asia? Responses vary from ‘back to Asia’ types to a strictly “Americanized, localized point of view.” By mid-1960s, as Washington decided to test its domino theory of stopping Mainland China from overrunning its neighboring countries in northeast and southeast Asia, and began deploying hundreds of thousands of its troops in Indochina, the tiny Asian American community, once the feared inassimilable yellow menace were now being hailed as America’s model minority.

Let me briefly talk about the Impacts of the Post-1965 “New Asian” Immigration to the U.S.

The idea of being “Asian American” faced a critical challenge almost as soon as it had come into existence: the challenge of the new immigration from Asia, made possible by reforms in U.S. immigration law in1965 would result in a dramatic increase in the number of Asian immigrants. On the surface, the new immigration boosted the population of Asian Americans – as well as Hispanic Americans or Latinos – by rapidly increasing the numbers of Asians in the U.S. from a total of 1.3 million in 1970; the number of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the U.S. would almost triple to 3.7 million in 1980 and double once more to 7.2 million in 1990. By 2000, Asian American Pacific Islander population would reach more than 12 million, or a little more than 4% of the country’s almost 300 million people.

The growth in the population of the Filipino American community is just as dramatic. The large and continuing influx of immigrants from the Philippines has accounted for the steep growth in the population of Filipinos in the U.S. the last 4 decades. From 176, 000 in 1960, to 343,000 in 1970, it would double to 782,000 in 1980, and double again to 1.4 million in 1990. By 2000 census, the population of Filipinos in the U.S. went well over 2 million. According to a population study of the National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, the projected size of the Filipino population in the U.S. would reach 2.7 million in 2010; 3.35 million in 2020, and 4 million in 2030. In Hawai’i, the Filipino community has grown from 95,354 in 1970 to 140,000 in 1980 and 168,000 in 1990. In the 2000 census, “self-identified” Filipino only respondents numbered 180,000 while part-Filipinos numbered some 275,728.

Equally important, however, was the fact that the new immigration almost immediately made irrelevant the fundamental assumption that had guided the struggle for civil rights among Asian Americans and Filipino Americans: their rootedness in U.S. history, in other words, that we belonged; that WE THE PEOPLE, included people originally from Asia and the Pacific. This was the point of Fred Cordova’s poignant documentary. Filipino Americans: Discovering Their Past and Lonnie Dong’s Ancestors in the Americas. In 1970, US-born and educated Asians made up about two-thirds of the population of Asians in America. By 1980, a mere 10 years, the percentage had been reversed with the foreign-born constituting 73 percent of the population, up dramatically for all groups except Japanese Americans. The new immigrants also transformed the relative numerical strengths of the various national ethnic groups, moving the Chinese and Filipinos way ahead of Japanese Americans, as well as adding immense numbers to formerly numerically marginal groups such as Koreans, South and Southeast Asians, as well as Pacific Islanders. “Roots” for this new population was more likely to mean roots somewhere in Asia or the Pacific than in the U.S, or in US history.

The new immigration to the U.S. coincided with crucial transformations in the Pacific. The U.S. was to play a crucial part in the new Pacific economy and from a US based perspective, what is most striking is the flow across the Pacific Ocean of Asian peoples. The major difference between the present and the past is the economic and political emergence of Pacific Asian societies, particularly the so-called Asian “dragons” and “tigers” which has resulted in a restructuring not only of the Pacific but of global economic, political, social and cultural relations in general, and endowed these motions of Asian peoples with a new meaning, and represents an unprecedented challenge to the very idea of Asian as well as Filipino American identity and community.

The new migrations take place in a Pacific restructured by contemporary economic forces. The strengthening of the Pacific Rim economies to contain communism was to end up creating economic powers that have come to challenge U.S. economic domination of the Asia Pacific region, and perhaps even in the global economy.

Pacific Asian economies are today active players in the global economy. They are no longer merely the exporters of labor, but also of capital, commodities and culture. And they are crucial to the productive activity of U.S. corporations, which have become major exporters of jobs across the Pacific. Two important consequences of this systemic integration of the Pacific are relevant to the Filipino community here in Hawai’i, the U.S. and elsewhere. First is the formation of diasporic populations, or where such populations already existed, their transformation into what I call transnational ethnicities. The term diasporas has become increasingly current over the last 15-20 years, in connections mainly with Chinese but also with Asian Indian and Filipino populations. In the case of the first two groups, large-scale overseas migration is not a new phenomenon but goes back to the 19th century and even earlier. But they have acquired a new significance in light of global economic developments, and the localized identities and histories they have acquired and developed in their settlements abroad have been overwhelmed by reassertions of cultural nationalisms that stress their “essential” unity across global spaces.

These transnational linkages among overseas Filipinos have been strengthened by advances in telecommunications and transportation; remittance flows, “balikbayan” visits and door-to-door delivery of goods, The Filipino Channel (TFC) programs that’s broadcast in 12 time zones to more than 30 countries across the globe, and texting using cellular phones.

As Jon Okamura noted in one of his articles, overseas Filipinos are able to express and affirm social relationships with significant others in their homeland or elsewhere in the diasporas that the casual observer might assume to have declined in importance following immigration abroad, especially if they are permanent residents or naturalized citizens in countries such as the U.S. Long distance communication gives new meaning to the notion of the “extended” Filipino family for which geographic, national and financial boundaries pose no threat to its continued persistence.

Conclusion

To understand Asian American and Filipino American identity and history today, it is no longer sufficient to comprehend their roots in U.S. history or history in Hawai’i. The history of contemporary Filipino community in Hawai’i and the U.S., and those in other parts of the world, was constructed by a multiplicity of historical trajectories that converged in the various locations of settlement. This multiplicity of location is evident in even a cursory examination of Filipino community publications, including, for example, the FILIPINAS magazine, considered the national magazine or voice of the Filipino American community in this country, which, unlike in an earlier day, include happenings in distant places throughout the world so long as they involve “Filipinos.” It also finds a counterpart in discussions of Filipino identity in the new positive value assigned to the idea of hybridity (i.e. Japafinos, Kiwifinos, Tsinoys, etc.).

It seems clear that the idea of being a Filipino or Asian American today requires a different mapping of the U.S., Asia, the Pacific, and the world than that which produced the idea three decades ago. The old political, economic and geographic units and directions that informed the older mapping are no longer sufficient in grasping the forces that are in the process of reshaping contemporary nationalities, racial affinities, and ethnicities. Viewed from this vantage point, the Filipino presence in the U.S. the past one hundred years has come a full circle. America’s bloody encounter with Filipinos in the Philippines at the turn of the century set into motion movements of Filipinos out of the country who would establish communities in far-flung parts of the world, but who would be linked inescapably – SINGGALOT, as Ilokanos would say - with their past migration history and sense of co-ethnicity with others of similar background. The crack of gunshot fired by an American sentry at a Filipino revolutionary soldier on that fateful day on February 4, 1899 signaled the beginning of America’s onslaught against the newly born Philippine republic; it also signaled the beginnings of diasporas that’s still playing itself out today.

The Filipino American community is entering its second century in this country in a much more solid footing and more deeply rooted.

In some communities, second, third and fourth generation Filipino Americans are growing in numbers, although first and one-and-a half-generation Filipino immigrants continue to be the largest in the community. Many of the issues that will confront the community in the immediate future will continue to be rooted in the largely immigrant characteristic of the community: cultural adjustment, the complex challenge of maintaining transnational families and households, standing up to anti-immigrant prejudices and racism, and employment related issues.

With the existence and growth of Filipino ethnic enclaves in a number of cities and states throughout the U.S., particularly on the Pacific coast, the political and economic presence of the community will increasingly be felt in these regions. With greater awareness of the strength of their numbers and growing community resources, Filipino Americans will increasingly become “significant players and actors” in local and regional political arenas throughout the West Coast, in the same way their kababayans in Hawai’i had been able to do in the 1980s and 1990s.

Filipinos in Guam and in the former U.S. trust territories in the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, Palau and the Federated States of Micronesia are also going to become a significant force in these Pacific island societies. In Guam, Filipinos now make up about a quarter of the islands’ population. In the CNMI, Filipinos now constitute almost one-third of the islands’ population of 70,000. The large flows of Filipinos into Palau in the 1990s have made them the largest non-Palauan group in the tiny republic. Filipinos number about 6,000 out of the 17,000 people in Palau. The number of Filipinos in the Federated States of Micronesia, while still relatively small, is also growing.

Thus, a “re-conceptualization” of what makes up the new Filipino American communities in the 21st century will have to take into consideration the emergence of Filipino communities in the Pacific. It is in these small island societies of Hawai’i, Guam, CNMI and Palau, what I call the “Pacific borderzones”- our Rio Grande - where Filipinos will play important roles in the geo-politics of central and western Pacific in the 21st century.

In the increasingly globalized world, it is their rootedness in their local communities and regional political economy that will determine the role and impact Filipino Americans will have in their respective societies. One wonders, however, what unforeseen tumultuous events - similar to those of World War I and World War II, the Depression years of the 1930s, the “granting” of Philippine independence in 1946, the civil rights movements of the 1960s, the rise of the Marcos dictatorship in the 70s and 80s, and the restoration of elite democracy in the Philippines in 1986 - are in store in the next century. One can only speculate about the impacts of political and economic transformations in the Philippines, in the U.S. and in the world will have on future generations of Filipino Americans in this country. If the 20th century was extraordinary in the lives of Filipinos in this world, one can only be awed by what‘s in store in the upcoming millennium.

Thank you and aloha!