INTERROGATING TRANSNATIONALISM: The Case of the Filipino
Diaspora in
the Age of Globalized Capitalism
By E. SAN JUAN, Jr.
Research Fellow, Harry Ransom Center, University
of Texas, Austin
Contemporary
cultural studies posit the demise of the nation as an unquestioned assumption,
almost a doctrinal point of departure for speculations on the nature of the
globalization process. Are
concepts such as the nation-state, national sovereignty, or nationalities, and
their referents obsolete and useless?
Whatever the rumors about the demise of the nation-state, or the
obsolescence of nationalism in the wake of September 11, 2001, agencies that
assume its healthy existence are busy: not only the members of the United
Nations, but also the metropolitan powers, with the United States as its
military spearhead, have all reaffirmed their civilizing nationalism with a
vengeance.
In this epoch of
counter-terrorism we have entered, the local and the global find a meeting
ground in the transactions among nation-states and diverse nationalities while
global hegemony is negotiated among the metropolitan powers. Their
instrumentalities-- the World
Trade Organization, NATO, the World Bank and IMF, and other consortia--are all
exerting pressures and influence everywhere. Citizenship cards, passports, customs gatekeepers, and border
patrols are still mundane regularities. Saskia Sassen has described the advent
of the global city as a sign of the “incipient unbundling of the exclusive
territoriality of the nation-state.”
At the same time, however, she adds that what we see looming in the
horizon is the “transnational geography of centrality…consisting of multiple
linkages and strategic concentrations of material infrastructure,” a “grid of
sites and linkages” (1998, 214) between North and South still comprised of
nation-states.
With WTO and finance capital in the
saddle, the buying and selling of labor-power moves center stage once more.
What has not escaped the most pachydermous epigones of free-market apologists who
have not been distracted by the Gulf War, the carnage in Bosnia and Kosovo, and
now in Afghanistan, are the frequency and volume of labor migration, flows of
bodies of color (including mail-order brides, children, and the syndicated
traffic in prostitutes and other commodified bodies), in consonance with the
flight of labor-intensive industries to far-flung industrial zones in Mexico,
Thailand, the Philipines, Haiti, China, and other dependent formations. These
regularities defy postmodernist concepts of contingency, ambivalence, and
indeterminacy. Such bodies are of course not the performative parodists of
Judith Butler in quest of pleasure or the aesthetically fashioned selves
idealized by Foucault and the pragmatic patriot, Richard Rorty.
Culture wars are
being conducted by other means through the transport and exchange of bodies of
color in the international bazaars. And the scaling of bodies proceeds
according to corporeal differences (sex, race, age, physical capacity, etc.).
Other diasporas—in addition to the historic ones of the Jews, Africans,
Chinese, Irish, Palestinians, and so on—are in the making. The editors of The South Atlantic
Quarterly special issue on “diaspora
and immigration” celebrate the political and cultural experiences of these nomadic
cohorts who can “teach us how to think about our destiny and how to articulate
the unity of science with the diversity of knowledges as we confront the
politics of difference” (Mudimbe and Engel 1999, 6). Unity, diversity, politics of difference—the contours and
direction of diasporas are conceived as the arena of conflict among disparate
philosophical/ideological standpoints.
Contesting the European discourse on modernity and pleading for the
“inescapability and legitimate value of mutation, hybridity, and intermixture”
(1993, 223), Paul Gilroy has drawn up the trope of the “Black Atlantic” on the
basis of the “temporal and ontological rupture of the middle passage.” Neither the Jewish nor the African diasporas
can of course be held up as inviolable archetypes if we want to pursue an
“infinite process of identity construction.” My interest here is historically focused: to inquire into
how the specific geopolitical contingencies of the Filipino diaspora-in-the-making
can problematize this infinitude of identity formation in the context of “third
world” principles of national liberation, given the persistent neocolonial, not
postcolonial, predicament of the Philippines today (San Juan 1996).
Postmodern
Cultural Studies from the counter-terrorizing North is now replicating
McKinley’s gunboat policy of “Benevolent Assimilation” at the turn of the last
century (Pomeroy 1992). Its missionary task is to discover how without their
knowing it Filipina domestics are becoming cosmopolitans while working as maids
(more exactly, domestic slaves), empowering themselves by devious tactics of
evasion, accommodation, and making-do. Obviously this task of naturalizing
servitude benefits the privileged few, the modern slave-masters. This is not
due to a primordial irony in the nature of constructing their identity which,
according to Ernesto Laclau, “presupposes the constitutive split” between the
content and the function of identification as such since they—like most modern
subjects—are “the empty places of an absent fullness” (1994, 36). Signifiers of lack, these women from
poverty-stricken regions in the Philippines are presumably longing for a
plenitude symbolized by a stable, prosperous homeland/family that, according to
postcolonial dogma, is forever deferred if not evacuated. Yet these maids
(euphemized as “domestics”) possess faculties of resourcefulness, stoic
boldness, and ingenuity. Despite this, it is alleged that Western experts are
needed for them to acquire self-reflexive agency, to know that their very presence
in such lands as Kuwait, Milan, Los Angeles, Taipeh, Singapore, and London and
the cultural politics they spontaneously create are “complexly mediated and
transformed by memory, fantasy and desire” (Hall 1992, 254). The time of labor
has annihilated indeed the spaces of the body, home, community, and nation. The
expenditure of a whole nation-people’s labor-power now confounds the narrative
of individual progress on which the logic of capital and its metaphysics of
rationality are hitherto founded.
Space-time particulars are needed if we want to
ascertain the “power-geometry” (Massey 1993) that scales diasporic duration,
the temporality of displacement. I might state at the outset an open secret:
the annual remittance of billions of dollars by Filipino workers abroad, now
more than eight million, suffices to keep the Philippine economy afloat and
support the luxury and privileges of less than one percent of the people, the
Filipino oligarchy. Since the seventies, Filipino bodies have been the No. 1 Filipino
export, and their corpses (about five or six return in coffins daily) are
becoming a serious item in the import ledger. In 1998 alone, according to the
Commission on Filipinos Overseas, 755,000 Filipinos found work abroad, sending
home a total of P7.5 billion; in the last three years, their annual remittance
averages $5 billion (Tujan 2001).
Throughout the nineties, the average total of migrant workers is about a
million a year; they remit over five percent of the national GNP, not to
mention the millions of pesos collected by the Philippine government in myriad
taxes and fees. Hence these overseas cohorts are glorified as “modern heroes,”
“mga bagong bayani” (the “new
heroes”), the most famous of whom
are Flor Contemplacion who was falsely accused and hanged in Singapore, and
Sarah Balabagan, flogged in Saudi Arabia for defending herself against her
rapist-employer.
This global marketing of Filipino labor is an
unprecedented phenomenon, rivalled only by the trade of African slaves in the
previous centuries. Over one thousand concerned Filipino American students made
this the central topic of the 1997 FIND Conference at SUNY Binghamton where I
was the invited keynote speaker. These concerned youth were bothered by the
reputation of the Filipina/o as the “domestic help,” or glorified servant of
the world. How did Filipinas/os come to find themselves scattered to the four
corners of the earth and subjugated to the position of selling their selfhoods?
What are we doing about it? In general, what is the meaning and import of this
unprecedented traffic, millions of Filipinas/os in motion and in transit around
the planet?
Lifting the Embargo
Of the eight million Filipinos, there are more than a
million Filipina domestics (also known as OCWs or "Overseas Contract
Workers") in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan today, employed under
terrible conditions. News reports of brutal and inhumane treatment, slavery,
rape, suicide, and murder suffered by these workers abound. The reason for why
thousands of college-educated women continue to travel to Hong Kong and other
destinations even as the procession of coffins of their sisters greet them at
the ports of embarkation, is not a mystery. I can only sketch here the outline
of the political economy of migrant labor as a subtext to the hermeneutics of
diasporic representation.
Suffice it here to spell out the context of this
transmigrancy: the accelerated impoverishment of millions of Filipino citizens,
the oppressive unjust system (the Philippines as a neocolonial dependency of
the U.S. and the transnational corporate power-elite) managed by local
compradors, landlords, and bureaucrat-capitalists who foster emigration to
relieve unemployment and defuse mass unrest, combined with the economic
enticements in Hong Kong and other Newly Industrializing Countries, and so
on--all these comprise the parameters for this ongoing process of the marketing
of bodies. The convergence of complex global factors, including the internal
conditions in the Philippines, has been carefully delineated by, among others,
Bridget Anderson (2000), Delia Aguilar (2000), Grace Chang (2000), and Rhacel
Parrenas (2001). We may cite, in particular, the devalorization of women's
labor in global cities, the shrinking status of sovereignty for peripheral nation-states,
and the new saliency of human rights in a feminist analytic of the "New
World Order." In addition to
the rampant pillage of the national treasury by corrupt Filipino compradors,
bureaucrat-capitalists and feudalistic landlords, the plunder of the economy by
transnational capital has been worsened by the “structural conditionalities”
imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Disaggregation of
the economy has registered in the disintegration of ordinary Filipino lives
(most from rural areas) due to forced migration because of lack of employment,
recruiting appeals of governments and business agencies, and the dissolution of
the homeland as psychic and physical anchorage in the vortex of the rapid
depredation of finance capital.
In general, imperialism and the anarchy of the
"free market" engender incongruities, non-synchronies, and shifting
subject-positions of the Other inscribed in the liminal space of subjugated
territory. Capital accumulation is the matrix of unequal power (Hymer 1975;
Harvey 1996) between metropolis and colonies. The historical reality of uneven
sociopolitical development in a U.S. colonial and, later, neocolonial society
like the Philippines is evident in the systematic Americanization of schooling,
mass media, sports, music, and diverse channels of mass communication
(advertisements, TV and films, cyberspace). Backwardness now helps hi-tech
corporate business. Since the seventies, globalization has concentrated on the
exploitation of local tastes and idioms for niche marketing while the impact of
the Filipino diaspora in the huge flow of remittances from OCWs has accentuated
the discrepancy between metropolitan wealth and neocolonial poverty, with the
consumerist habitus made
egregiously flagrant in the conspicuous consumption of domestic returning from
the Middle East, Europe, Hong Kong, Japan, and other places with balikbayan (returnee) boxes. Unbeknownst to observers of this
postmodern “cargo cult,” coffins of these workers (one of them martyred in
Singapore, Flor Contemplacion, achieved the status of national saint) arrive in
Manila at the rate of five or six a day without too much fanfare.
Notwithstanding
this massive research into the structural and historical background of these "new heroes" (as
President Corazon Aquino call them in acknowledgment of their contribution to
the country’s dollar reserves), their plight remains shrouded in bureaucratic
fatuities. A recent ethnographic account of the lives of Filipina domestics
celebrates their new-found subjectivity within various disciplinary regimes.
Deploying Foucault's notion of "localized power," the American
anthropologist Nicole Constable seeks "to situate Filipina domestic
workers within the field of power,
not as equal players but as participants"(1999, 11).
Ambivalence supposedly characterizes the narratives of
these women: they resist oppression at the same time as they "participate
in their own subordination."
And how is their agency manifested? How else but in their consuming
power? Consider this spectacle:
During their Sundays off, Filipina maids gather in certain places like the food
restaurants of the Central District in Hong Kong and demand prompt service or
complain to the managers if they are not attended to properly. They also have the
option of exercising agency at McDonald's if they ask extra condiments or
napkins. Apart from these anecdotal examples, the fact that these maids were
able to negotiate their way through a bewildering array of institutions in
order to secure their jobs is testimony to what Constable calls "the
subtler and more complex forms of power, discipline and resistance in their
everyday lives" (1999, 202). According to one reviewer, this scholarly
attempt to ferret out signs of tension or conflict in the routine lives of domestics obfuscates the larger context
that defines the subordination of these women and the instrumentalities that
reproduce their subjugation. In short, functionalism has given way to
neopositivism. To put it another way, Constable shares Foucault's dilemma of
ascribing resistance to subjects while devaluing history as "meaningless
kaleidoscopic changes of shape in discourse totalities" (Habermas 1987,
277).
Nor is Constable alone in this quite trendy vocation.
Donna Haraway (1992), among others, has earlier urged the practitioners of
Cultural Studies to abandon the politics of representation which allegedly
objectifies and disempowers whatever it represents. She wants us to choose
instead local struggles for strategic articulations that are always
impermanent, vulnerable, and contingent. This precept forbids the critique of
ideology--how can one distinguish truth from falsehood since there are only
"truth effects" contrived by power? This populist and often demagogic
stance promotes "a radical skepticism" (Brantlinger 1990, 102) that
cannot discriminate truth-claims, nor establish a basis for sustained and
organized political action.
The
most flagrant erasure in Constable's postmodernist inventory of episodes seems
more serious. This is her discounting of the unequal relation between the
Philippines and a peripheral capitalist city like Hong Kong, a relation enabled
by the continuing neocolonial domination of Filipinos by Western corporate
interests led by the United States (Sison and De Lima 1998). But this
microphysics of learning how to survive performed by Filipino maids cannot
exonerate the ethnographist from complicity with this strategy of displacing
causality (a technique of inversion also found in mainstream historians of the
Philippines such as Glenn May, David Steinberg, Stanley Karnow) and apologizing
for the victims by oblique patronage. Anne Lacsamana pronounces a felicitous
verdict on this specimen of Cultural Studies: "To dismiss the broader
history of Filipino OCWs in favor of more trivial pursuits (such as watching
them eat at a fast food restaurant) reenacts a Western superiority that has
already created (and is responsible for) many of the social, economic, and
political woes that continue to plague the country" (1998, 42).
Deracination Trauma
Now the largest
constituency in the Asian American group in the United States, Filipinos have
become the newest diasporic community in the whole world. United Nations statistics indicate that
Filipinos make up the newest migrant assemblage in the world: eight million
Filipino migrant workers (out of eighty million citizens), mostly female
domestic help and semi-skilled labor. They endure poorly paid employment under
sub-standard conditions, with few or null rights, in the Middle East, Asia,
Europe, North America, and elsewhere. It might be noted here that,
historically, diasporic groups are defined not only by a homeland but also by a
desire for eventual return and a collective identity centered on myths and
memories of the homeland. The Filipino diaspora, however, is different. Since
the homeland has long been colonized by Western powers (Spain, United States)
and remains neocolonized despite formal or nominal independence, the Filipino
identification is not with a fully defined nation but with regions, localities,
and communities of languages and traditions. Perceived as Others, they are lumped with familiar aliens:
Chinese, Mexicans, Japanese, Indonesians, and so on. Newspaper reports have
cited the Philippines as the next target of the U.S. government’s global
“crusade” against terrorism. Where is the nation alluded to in passports and
other identification papers? How do we conceive of this “Filipino” nation or
nationality, given the preemptive impact of U.S. domination and now, on top of
the persistent neocolonizing pressure, the usurping force of abstractive,
quantifying capital?
According to orthodox
immigration theory, “push” and “pull” factors combine to explain the phenomenon
of Overseas Contract Workers. Do we resign ourselves to this easy schematic
formulation? Poverty and injustice, to be sure, have driven most Filipinos to
seek work abroad, sublimating the desire to return by regular remittances to
their families; occasional visits and other means of communication defer the
eventual homecoming. Alienation and isolation, brutal and racist treatment, and
other dehumanized conditions prevent their permanent settlement in the
“receiving” countries, except where they have been given legal access to
obtaining citizenship status. If the return is postponed, are modes of
adaptation and temporary domicile in non-native grounds the feasible
alternatives for these expatriates (as they are fondly called by their
compatriots in Manila)?
The reality of
“foreignness” cannot be eluded. Alienation, insulting treatment, and racist
violence prevent their permanent re-settlement in the "receiving
societies," except where Filipino communities (as in the U.S. and Canada,
for example) have been given legal access to citizenship rights. Individuals,
however, have to go through abrasive screening and tests—more stringent now in
this repressive neofascist ethos. During political crisis in the Philippines,
Filipino overseas workers mobilize themselves for support of local and
nationwide resistance against imperial domination and local tyranny. Because
the putative “Filipino” nation is in the process of formation in the neocolony
and abroad, overseas Filipino workers have been considered transnationals or
transmigrants--a paradoxical turn since the existence of the nation is
problematic, and the “trans” label a chimera. This diaspora then faces the
ineluctable hurdles of racism, ethnic exclusion, inferiorization via racial profiling, and physical attacks.
Can Filipino migrant labor mount a collective resistance against globalized
exploitation? Can the Filipino diaspora expose also the limits of genetic
and/or procedural notions of citizenship? In what way can the Filipino diaspora
serve as a paradigm for analyzing and critically unsettling the corporate globalization
of labor and the reification of identities in the new millennium?
As a point of departure for
future inquiry, we might situate the Filipino diaspora within its Asian
American configuration—since the author is based here in this racial polity
(San Juan 2002). His intervention proceeds from a concrete historic staging
ground. First, a definition of “diaspora.” According to Milton Esman, the term
refers to “a minority ethnic group of migrant origin which maintains
sentimental or material links with its land of origin” (1996, 316). Either
because of social exclusion, internal cohesion, and other geopolitical factors,
these communities are never assimilated into the host society; but they develop
in time a diasporic consciousness which carries out a collective sharing of
space with others, purged of any exclusivist ethos or proprietary design. These
communities will embody a peculiar sensibility enacting a caring and
compassionate agenda for the whole species that thrives on cultural difference.
Unlike peoples who have been conquered, annexed, enslaved or coerced in some
other way, diasporas are voluntary movements of people from place to place,
although such migrations may also betray symptoms of compulsion if analyzed
within a global political economy of labor and inter-state political rivalries.
Immanuel Wallerstein (1995) feels that these labor migrants can challenge
transnational corporations by overloading the system with “free movement,” at
the same time that they try to retain for themselves more of the surplus value
they produce. But are such movements really free? And if they are cheap labor
totally contingent on the unpredictable fortunes of business, isn’t the
expectation of their rebelliousness exorbitant? Like ethnicity, diaspora which
is fashioned by determinate historical causes has tended to take on “the
‘natural’ appearance of an autonomous force, a ‘principle’ capable of
determining the course of social action” (Comaroff 1992). Like racism and
nationalism, diaspora presents multiform physiognomies open to various
interpretations and articulations. Historical precedents may provide clues of
what’s to come.
Let us consider one late-modern interpretation of
diaspora. For David Palumbo-Liu, the
concept of “diaspora” performs a strategic function. It probably endows the
slash in the rubric “Asian/American” with an uncanny performative resonance.
Palumbo-Liu contends that diaspora affords a space for the reinvention of
identity free from naturalized categories but (if I may underscore here) not
from borders, state apparatuses, and other worldly imperatives. Although
remarking that the concept of diaspora as an “enabling fiction” affords us “the
ideological purchase different articulations of the term allow,” Palumbo-Liu
doesn’t completely succumb to the rebarbative postcolonialist babble about
contingency ruling over all. I want to quote a passage from his insightful
book, Asian / American, that might
afford parameters for the random reflections here apropos of the theme and
discourse of Filipino diaspora:
…”diaspora” does not consist in the fact of leaving Home, but in having that factuality
available to representation as such—we
come to “know” diaspora only as it is psychically identified in a narrative
form that discloses the various ideological investments…. It is that narrative
form that locates the representation of diaspora in its particular chronotope.
This spatiotemporal construct approximates a psychic experience particularly
linked to material history. It is
only after the diasporic comes into contact with the material history of its
new location that a particular discourse is enabled that seeks to mark a
distance, a relation, both within and outside that constellation of contingency
(1999, 355).
Like
the words “hybridity,” border crossing, ambivalence, subaltern,
transculturation, and so on, the term “diaspora” has now become chic in polite
conversations and genteel colloquia. A recent conference at the University of
Minnesota on “Race, Ethnicity, and Migration” lists as first of the topics one
can engage with, “Diaspora and diasporic identities,” followed by “Genocide,
ethnic cleansing, and forced migration.” One indeed dreads to encounter in this
context such buzzwords as “post-nation,” “alterity,” or ludic “differance” now overshadowed by “globalization” and everything
prefixed with “trans-“ and assorted postalities. In fact I myself used the word “diaspora” as part of the
title of my book, From Exile to Diaspora: Versions of the Filipino
Experience in the United States (1998b).
Diaspora becomes oxymoronic: a particularizing universal, a local narrative
which subsumes all experiences within its fold. Diaspora enacts a mimicry of itself, dispersing its members
around in a kaleidoscope of simulations and simulacras borne by the flow of
goods, money, labor, and so on, in the international commodity chain.
Let me interject a personal note: I have lived in the
U.S. for over 40 years now (the greater part of my life), with frequent visits
to the Philippines without too many balikbayan cargo, unfortunately. And in my various voyages
in/out, I have encountered Filipinos in many parts of the world in the course
of my research. In the early eighties I was surprised to meet compatriots at
the footsteps of the Post Office in Tripoli, Libya, and later on in the streets
and squares of London, Edinburgh, Spain, Italy, Greece, Tokyo, Taiwan, Hong
Kong, and other places. Have I
then stumbled onto some unheard-of enigmatic scandal as a “Filipino diaspora”?
Or have I surreptitiously constructed this, dare I say, “reality” and ongoing
experience of about eight million Filipinos around the planet? Not to speak of
millions of displaced indigenous peoples in the Philippines itself, an
archipelago of 700 islands, “one of the world’s most strategically important
land masses,” according to geographer George Demko (1992).
For those not familiar with my other writings critical
of poststructuralist approaches (San Juan 1996; 1998a), I want to state
outright that I consider such views about the Filipino diaspora half-truths
closer to rumor, if not sheer mystifications. Spurious distinctions about
cognition and perception concerning ethnic identity will remain vacuous if they
do not take into account the reality of imperial world-systemic changes and
their concrete multilayered ramifications. Lacking any dialectical materialist
analysis of the dynamics of colonialism and imperialism that connect the
Philippines and its peoples with the United States and the rest of the world,
conventional studies on Filipino immigration and resettlement are all
scholastic games, at best disingenuous exercises in chauvinist or
white-supremacist apologetics. This is because they rely on concepts and
methodologies that conceal unequal power relations—that is, relations of
subordination and domination, racial exclusion, marginalization, sexism, gender
inferiorization, as well as national subalternity, and other forms of
discrimination. I want to stress in particular unequal power relations among
nation-states. Lest people be misled by academic gossip, I am not proposing
here an economistic and deterministic approach, nor a historicist one with a
monolithic Enlightenment metanarrative, teleology, and essentialist or
ethnocentric agenda. Far from it. What is intriguing are the dynamics of
symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1997) and the naturalization of social constructs
and beliefs which are dramatized in the plot and figures of diasporic happenings.
Excavations in the Boondocks
The testimony of diasporic narrative may be a useful
pedagogical device to ground my observations here on the experiences of
Filipina migrant workers as synthesized in literary form. Prior to the
disruption of the postcolonial impasse and in order to situate postcolonial
difference in the Philippine context, I would like at this juncture to
concretize the crisis of bourgeois metaphysics and its political implications
in contemporary Filipino expression.
In my previous works (The
Philippine Temptation, History and Form,
and other books), I have described the domination of U.S. symbolic capital on
literary and critical discourse since the annullment of the Spanish language
and the indigenous vernaculars as viable media of expression in the public
sphere at the start of U.S. colonization in 1898. The ascendancy of the
hegemonic discourse of liberal utilitarianism expressed in English prevailed
throughout the period of formal independence and the Cold War until the martial
law period (1972-1986) when an authoritarian order reinforced semi-feudal and
tributary norms. Meanwhile, Pilipino (now “Filipino”) has become a genuine lingua
franca with the popularity of local
films and television serials, aided by the prohibitive costs of imported
Western cultural fare. As already noted earlier, these cultural developments
parallel the intense neocolonization, or even refeudalization, of the whole
political-economic system.
Symptomatic of a
disaggregated and uneven socioeconomic formation are the literary and
journalistic narratives spun around the trauma of dislocation undergone by over
eight million OCWs, mostly women. I analyze one specimen of this genre below.
It should be recalled that this unprecedented hemorrhage of labor-power, the
massive export of educated women whose skills have been downgraded to
quasi-slavish domestic help, issues from a diseased body politic. The marks of
the disease are the impoverishment of 75% of the population, widespread
corruption by the minuscule oligarchy, criminality, military/police atrocities,
and the intensifying insurgency of peasants, women, youth, workers, and
indigenous communities. The network of the patriarchal family and semifeudal
civil society unravels when women from all sectors (except the rich minority)
alienate their “free labor” in the world market. While the prime commodity remains labor-power (singularly
measured here in both time and space especially for lived-in help), OCWs find
themselves frozen in a tributary status between serfhood and colonizing
pettybourgeois households. Except for the carceral condition of “hospitality”
women in Japan and elsewhere overseen by gangsters, most Filipinas function as
indentured servants akin to those in colonial settler societies in 17th century
Virginia, Australia, Jamaica, and elsewhere. But unlike those societies, the Middle East, Canada, Hong
Kong, Singapore and other receiving countries operate as part of the
transnationalized political economy of global capitalism. These indentured
cohorts are witness to the dismemberment of the emergent Filipino nation and
the scattering of its traumatized elements to state-governed territories around
the planet.
At this point I want to illustrate the
phenomenon of neocolonial disintegration and ideological reconstitution of the
“third world” subject as a symptom of uneven capitalist hegemony in a fictional
account by a Filipina author who writes in Pilipino, the national language.
Fanny Garcia (1994) wrote the story entitled “Arriverderci” in 1982 at the
height of the Marcos-induced export of Filipina bodies to relieve widespread
immiseration in all sectors of society and curb mounting resistance in city and
countryside.
Garcia’s ascetic representation of this highly
gendered diaspora yields a diagnostic illustration of postcolonial
schizophrenia. In the opening scene, Garcia describes Filipina domestics in
Rome, Italy, enjoying a weekend break in an excursion outside the city. One of
these domestics, Nelly, meets a non-descript compatriot, Vicky (Vicenta), who
slowly confides to Nelly her incredible experience of physical hardship, loneliness,
and frustrated ambition, including her desperate background in her hometown,
San Isidro. Vicky also reveals her fear that her employer might rape her,
motivating her to inquire about the possibility of moving in with Nelly whose
own crowded apartment cannot accommodate Vicky. Spatial confinement resembles
incarceration for those who refuse the oppression of live-in contracts, the
latter dramatized in Vicky's earlier experience.
Dialogue begets
intimacy and the shock of discovery. After trust has been established between
them, Nelly learns that Vicky has concealed the truth of her dire situation
from her relatives back home. Like others, Vicky has invented a fantasy life to
make her folks happy. After a short lapse of time, Nelly and her companions
read a newspaper account of Vicky’s suicide—according to her employer, she
leaped from the fifth floor of the apartment due to a broken heart caused by
her sweetheart, a Filipino seaman, who was marrying another woman. Nelly of
course knows the real reason: Vicky was forced to kill herself to save her
honor, to refuse bodily invasion by the Italian master. Nelly and her friends
manage to gather funds to send Vicky’s body back home to the Philippines. When
asked how she would explain Vicky’s death to the next-of-kin, everyone agrees
that they could not tell the truth.
Nelly resolves their predicament with a fictive ruse:
“Ganito na lang,” sabi ni Nelly, “nabangga ang kotseng sinasakyan n’ya.”
Sumang-ayon ang lahat.
Pumunta sa kusina si Nelly. Hawak ang bolpen at nakatitig sa blangkong putting papel na
nakapatong sa mesa, naisip ni Nelly, dapat din niyang tandaan: sa San Isidro,
si Vicenta at Vicky ay si Bising (1994,
334-335).
[“Let’s do it this way,” Nelly said,” she died when
the car she was in crashed.”
Everyone agreed.
Nelly entered the kitchen. Holding a ballpoint pen and
staring at the blank piece of paper on the table, Nelly thought that she should
also remember: in San Isidro, Vicenta and Vicky were also Bising.]
In
the triple personas of Vicky nurtured in the mind of Nelly, we witness the
literal and figurative diaspora of the Filipino nation in which the manifold
layers of experience occuring at different localities and temporalities are
reconciled. They are sutured together
not in the corpse but in the act of gendered solidarity and national
empathy. Without the practices of communication and cooperation among Filipina workers, the life of the
individual OCW is suspended in thrall,
a helpless fragment in the nexus of commodity circulation. Terror in
capitalist society re-inscribes boundaries and renews memory.
What I want to highlight,
however, is the historicizing power of this narrative. Marx once said that
capitalism conquers space with time (Harvey 2000). The urgent question is: can
its victims fight back via a counterhegemonic strategy of spatial politics?
Here the time of the nationalizing imagination overcomes displacement by global
capital. Fantasy becomes complicit with truth when Nelly and her friends agree
to shelter Vicky’s family from the terror of patriarchal violence located in
European terrain. We see that the routine life of the Filipino community is
defined by bureaucratized space that seems to replicate the schedule back home;
but the chronological itinerary is deceptive because while this passage lures
us into a calm compromise with what exists, the plot of attempted rape and
Vicky's suicide transpires behind the semblance of the normal and the ordinary:
…Ang buhay nila sa Italia ay isang relo--hindi
nagbabago ng anyo, ng direksiyon, ng mga numero.
Kung Linggo ng umaga, nagtitipon-tipon sa loob ng Vaticano, doon sa
pagitan ng malalaking haliging bato ng colonnade….
Ang Papa'y lilitaw mula sa isang mataas na bintana ng isang gusali, at
sa harap ng mikropono'y magsasalita't magdadasal, at matapos ang kanyang
basbas, sila'y magkakanya-kanyang grupo sa paglisan. Karaniwa'y sa mga parke
ang tuloy. Sa damuhan, sa ilalim ng mga puno, ilalabas ang mga baon. May paikot-ikot sa mga grupo,
nagtitinda ng pansit na lemon ang pampaasim, litsong kawali na may ketsup, at
iba pa. Umpisa na ng piknik. Magkakasama ang mga Ilokano, ang mga
Batanggenyo, at iba pang hatiang batay sa wika o lugar. O kaya'y ang mga propesyonal at
di-propesyonal. Matapos ang
kainan, palilipasin ang oras sa pamamagitan ng kuwentuhan o kaya'y pagpapaunlak
sa isang nagpapasugal. Malakas ang
tayaan. Mga bandang alas-tres o
alas-kuwatro ng hapon, kanya-kanyang alis na ang mga pangkat. Pupunta sa mga simbahang pinagmimisahan
ng mga paring Pinoy na iskolar ng kani-kanilang order. Sa Ingles at Pilipino ang misa, mga
awit at sermon. Punong-puno ang
simbahan, pulos Pilipino, maliban sa isa o dalawa o tatlong puti na maaring
kaibigan, nobio, asawa o kabit ng ilang kababayan.
Matapos ang misa, muling maghihiwalay ang
mga pangkat-pangkat. May pupunta muli sa mga parke, may magdidisco, may
magsisine. Halos hatinggabi na
kung maghiwa-hiwalay patungo sa kanya-kanyang tinutuluyan…. (329-330).
[Their lives in Italy
resembled a clock—never changing in shape, direction or numbers.
On Sunday mornings they would gather inside the
Vatican, there between the huge rocky pillars of the colonnade…
The Pope
would appear at a window of the tall building, and would pray and speak in
front of a microphone, and after his benediction, they would all join their
groups upon leaving. Usually they head for the parks. On the grass, under the
trees, they will spread their packs. Some will circle around selling noodles
with lemon slices, roast pork with catsup, and other viands. The picnic begins. Ilocanos congregate
among themselves, so do those from Batangas, and others gather together
according to language or region. Or
they socialize according to profession or lack of it. After eating, they will pass the time telling stories or
gambling. Betting proceeds vigorously. Toward three or four in the afternoon,
the cohorts begin their departure. They head toward the churches where Filipino
priests, scholars of their orders, hold mass in English or in Filipino, together
with songs and sermon. The
churches overflow, all Filipinos, except for one, two or three whites, who may
be friends, sweethearts, wives, or partners. After the mass, the groups will again separate. Some will
return to the parks, others will go to discos or moviehouses, until around
midnight they will go their separate individual ways to wherever they are
staying.]
Resignation
is premature. This surface regularity conceals fissures and discontinuities
that will only disclose themselves when the death of Vicky shatters the peace
and complicates the pathos of indentured domesticity.
Ludic Mis-Representations
The most telling
symptom of uneven development caused by the new international division of labor
is the schizoid nature of the Filipina response to serflike confinement. This
response has been celebrated by postcolonial critics as the exemplary act of
"sly civility," a tactic of outwitting the enemy by mimicry and
ambivalent acts. We read a tabulation of this tactic in Garcia's description of
Nelly's plans to tour Europe by touching base with friends and acquaintances
throughout the continent, an escape from the pressure of responsibility or
accountability to anyone. Here is
the cartography of Nelly's "imagined community" which generates a new
position: the deterritorialized citizen of global capital. The space of
recreation may relieve the pressure of alienated time, but it cannot ultimately
resolve the dilemma of spatiotemporal dislocation and dispersal. Asked by her
friends what's going on between her and Vicky, Nelly simply smiles and shrugs
her shoulders:
Mas mahalaga sa kanya ang mga tanong ng sarili.
Pulos Roma na lamang ba? Aling
sulok at kanto pa ng Roma ang hindi niya natatapakan? Pulos pagkakatulong na lamang ba? Hindi siya nagpunta sa Europa upang paganapin lamang ang
sarili sa mga istorya ng pagliliwali kung Linggo, na kabisadong-kabisado na
niya ang simula't dulo. Hindi siya
nangibang bansa upang makinig lamang sa mga usapang nakaangkla sa mga
"nanay," 'tatay," "anak," mga gawaing-bahay, hinaing
at problema. Hindi upang sundan
ang buhay at kasaysayan ng isang Vicenta.
Ipinasya niyang umpisahan na ang
paglilibot sa Europa. May sapat na
siyang naiipon para sa ibang bansa.
Bibili siya ng Eurail pass, mas mura sa tren. Unahin kaya muna niya ang France, West Germany at
Netherlands? May mga kaibigan siya
doon. Nasa Paris si Orly, may
kuwartong inuupahan. Nagpunta ito
sa Paris bilang iskolar, artist-observer sa loob ng tatlong buwan, ngunit tulad
niya, hindi na ito bumalik sa Pilipinas. Ngayo'y nabubuhay ito sa pamamagitan
ng pagpipinta at pagiging potograpo.
Sa Frankfurt, makikituloy siya kay Nora at sa Alemang napangasawa nito,
dating penpal. Nasa Amsterdam si
Angie, kahera sa department store, at ka-live-in ang isang Dutch. Sapat na
marahil ang isang buwang paglalakbay.
Saka naman iplano ang mga ibang bansa. Sinulatan niya ang tatlong kaibigan. (333)
[ More valuable for her are the questions addressed to
herself. Am I to be confined to
Rome alone? What corner and crossroad of Rome has she not covered already? Am I
to be tied to domestic work? She
didn’t travel to Europe in order to let herself play a role in the stories of
killing time on Sundays, whose beginning and end she knew thoroughly. She
didn’t go abroad only to listen to talk anchored to “mother,” “father,”
“child,” domestic chores, grumblings and problems. Nor to pursue the life and history of a certain Vicenta.
She decided to start her travels around Europe. She already has enough
savings for the trip to other countries. She’ll buy a Eurail pass, it’s cheaper
by train. Should she begin with France, West Germany, and the Netherlands? She
has friends there. Orly is in Paris, with a rented room. He went to Paris as a
scholar, artist-observer, for three months, but like her he never returned to
the Philippines. Now he’s
supporting himself by painting and photography. In Frankfurt she’ll stay with
Nora and her German husband, her former penpal. Angie is in Amsterdam, a cashier at a department store, with
a live-in Dutch partner. Perhaps a
month’s journey will be enough. She’ll plan visiting other lands later. She
wrote her three friends.]
In
the above passage, we discern the contradictions immanent in Filipina agency as
she negotiates her position in the locus between wage-labor under serflike
conditions and the mobility promised by the "free market" of late
capitalist Europe. This situation may provide us the source of scaling the
postcolonial dilemma suffered by Filipinas, conceving scale as (in Neil Smith's
definition) "the geographical resolution of contradictory processes of
competition and co-operation" (1993, 99). But the chance for an escape to
resolve the contradictions is foiled for the moment when Nelly and her friends
learn of Vicky's death.
Contrary to postcolonial alibis concerning decentered
subject-positions, Garcia's narrative posits an interrogation of presumed
agency: Is the charm of adventure enough to heal the trauma of dislocation and
obviate the terror of rape? Are
the opportunities of consuming images and experiences offered by the wages of
indentured labor enough to compensate for the nullity of citizenship and the
loss of intimacy and the support of family and community? Is this postcolonial
interstitiality the new name of servitude under the aegis of consumerist
transnationalism where physical motion transcending fixed locality becomes a
surrogate for the achievement of dignity and freedom?
What is clear is the
dialectical unity of opposites embedded in the geopolitical predicament of OCWs
captured in Garcia's narrative. The homeland (or its internalized cartography)
is cannibalized and grafted onto sites of potential reconstitution. The
Filipino diaspora here is defined by the Filipinas' social interaction and its
specific differentiated geography, an interaction characterized by
family/kinship linkages as well as solidarity based on recursive acts of mutual
aid and struggle for survival. The political struggle over the production of
scale in global capitalism is translated here in Nelly's mapping of her
coordinates as she plans her tour of Europe, a translation of abstract space
into places indexed by Filipino friends and acquaintances. This is not
postcolonial ambivalence or hybridity because it is centered on the organic bonds
of experience with oppressed compatriots and their continuous resuscitation.
Nelly's affiliation with Vicky is tied to a web of shared stories of intimacy,
dehumanization and vulnerability. The Eurocentric fabrication of Otherness is
qualified if not neutralized by Nelly's collectively assigned task of
communication with Vicky's family, a task that prefigures and recuperates even
if only in symbolic terms the interrupted struggle for national autonomy and
sovereignty on the face of disintegration by transnational corporate
aggression.
Postcolonial disjunctures are reproduced
by acts of revolt and sustained resistance. Such acts constitute a bad example
for metropolitan citizen subjects of industrialized democracies. Racism still
prevents them from uniting with their victims. While it would be exorbitant to
claim that global capitalism has been dealt a blow by Filipina agencies of
coping and life-maintenance, I would suggest here that this mode of
representation, which I would categorize as a type of allegorical realism
grounded in the confluence of vernacular poetics and selective borrowings from
the Western avant-garde (Brecht, Mayakovsky, Neruda), enables us to grasp the
totalizing virtue of Filipino nationalism as it interpellates diasporic subjects.
Perhaps this virtue manifests itself only as a potential reservoir of energies
that can be mobilized in crisis situations; still, the cultural and ideological
resistance of neocolonized Filipinos overseas testify to its immanent presence
in what Lenin called "the weak links" of the imperialist chain around
the planet, not only in the peripheral dependencies but also in the margins now
transposed to the centers of empire.
Extrapolations
and Reconfigurations
In summary, I venture the following theses for further
discussion. My first thesis on the phenomenon of the Filipino dismemberment is
this: Given that the Philippine habitat has never cohered as a genuinely
independent nation—national autonomy continues to escape the nation-people in a
neocolonial set-up—Filipinos are dispersed from family or kinship webs in
villages, towns or provincial regions first, and loosely from an inchoate, even
“refeudalized,” nation-state. This dispersal is primarily due to economic
coercion and disenfranchisement under the retrogressive regime of
comprador-bureaucratic (not welfare-state) capitalism; migration is seen as
freedom to seek one’s fortune, experience the pleasure of adventure, libidinal
games of resistance, and other illusions of transcendence. So the origin to which
one returns is not properly a nation-state but a village, a quasi-primordial
community, kinship network, or even a ritual family/clan. In this context, the
state is viewed in fact as a corrupt exploiter, not representative of the
masses, a comprador agent of transnational corporations and Western
(specifically U.S.) powers.
Second thesis: What are the myths enabling a cathexis
of the homeland? They derive from assorted childhood memories and folklore
together with customary practices surrounding municipal and religious
celebrations; at best, there may be signs of a residual affective tie to
national heroes like Rizal, Bonifacio, and latter-day celebrities like singers,
movie stars, athletes, and so on. Indigenous food, dances, and music can be
acquired as commodities whose presence temporarily heals the trauma of removal;
family reunification can resolve the psychic damage of loss of status or
alienation. In short, rootedness
in autochtonous habitat does not exert a commanding sway, experienced only as a
nostalgic mood. Meanwhile, language, religion, kinship, the aura of family
rituals, and common experiences in school or work-place function invariably as
the organic bonds of community. Such bonds demarcate the boundaries of the
imagination but also release energies and affects that mutate into actions—as
performed by Garcia’s characters—serving ultimately national-popular
emancipatory projects.
Third thesis: Alienation in the host country is what
unites Filipinos, a shared history of colonial and racial subordination,
marginalization, and struggles for cultural survival through hybrid forms of
resistance and political rebellion.
This is what may replace the non-existent nation/homeland, absent the
liberation of the Filipino nation-state. In the thirties, Carlos Bulosan once
observed that “it is a crime to be a Filipino in America.” Years of union
struggle and political organizing in inter-ethnic coalitions have blurred if
not erased that stigma.
Accomplishments in the civil rights struggles of the sixties have
provided nourishment for ethnic pride. And, on the other side, impulses of
assimilationism via the “model minority” umbrella have aroused a passion for
multiculturalism divorced from any urge to disinvest in the “possessive
investment in whiteness” (Lipsitz 1998). But compared to the Japanese or Indian
Americans, Filipino Americans as a whole have not made it; the exceptions prove
the rule. Andrew Cunanan (the serial killer who slew the famous Versaci) is the
specter that continues to haunt “melting pot” Filipino Americanists who
continue to blabber about the “forgotten Filipino” in the hope of being awarded
a share of the obsolescent welfare-state pie. Dispossession of sovereignty
leads to shipwreck, natives drifting rudderless, or marooned in islands all
over the planet. Via strategies of community preservation and other schemes of
defining the locality of the community in historical contexts of displacement,
the Filipino diaspora defers its return—unless and until there is a Filipino
nation that they can identify with. This will continue in places where there is
no hope of permanent resettlement as citizens or bonafide residents (as in
Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and elsewhere). This is the disavowed
terror of globalization.
Fourth thesis: Some Filipinos in their old age may
desire eventual return only when they are economically secure. In general,
Filipinos will not return to the site of misery and oppression—to poverty,
exploitation, humiliated status, despair, hunger, and lack of dignity. Of
course, some are forcibly returned: damaged, deported or dead. But OCWs would
rather move their kins and parents to their place of employment, preferably in
countries where family reunification is allowed, as in the United States,
Italy, Canada, and so on. Or even in places of suffering and humiliation,
provided there is some hope or illusion of future improvement. Utopian longings
can mislead but also reconfigure and redirect wayward adventures.
Fifth thesis: Ongoing support for nationalist
struggles at home is sporadic and intermittent during times of retrenchment and
revitalized apartheid. Do we see any mass protests and collective indignation
here in the United States at the Visiting Forces Agreement, for example, and
the recent invasion (circa 1998-2000) of the country by several thousand U.S.
Marines in joint U.S.-Philippines military exercises? Especially after
September 11 and the Arroyo sycophancy to the Bush regime, the
Philippines—considered by the U.S. government as the harbor of homegrown “terrorists”
like the Abbu Sayyaf--will soon be transformed into the next “killing field”
after Afghanistan. During the Marcos dictatorship, the politicized generation
of Filipino American youth here was able to mobilize a large segment of the
community to support the national-democratic mass struggles, including the
armed combatants of the New People’s Army (led by the Communist Party of the
Philippines), against U.S.-supported authoritarian rule. Filipino nationalism
blossomed in the late sixties and seventies, but suffered attenuation when it
got rechanelled to support the populist elitism of Aquino and Ramos, the lumpen
populism of Estrada, and now the mendacious Arroyo regime. This precarious
balance of class forces at this conjuncture is subject to the shifts in
political mobilization and calculation, hence the intervention of Filipino
agencies with emancipatory goals and socialist principles is crucial and
strategically necessary.
Sixth thesis:
In this time of emergency, the Filipino collective identity is in crisis
and in a stage of formation and elaboration. The Filipino diasporic
consciousness is an odd species, a singular genre: it is not obsessed with a
physical return to roots or to land where common sacrifices (to echo Ernest
Renan) are remembered and celebrated. It is tied more to a symbolic homeland
indexed by kinship or particularistic traditions and communal practices which
it tries to transplant abroad in diverse localities. So, in the moment of
Babylonian captivity, dwelling in “Egypt” or its modern surrogates, building
public spheres of solidarity to sustain identities outside the national
time/space “in order to live inside, with a difference” may be the most viable
route (or root) of Filipinos in
motion—the collectivity in transit, although this is, given the ineluctability
of differences becoming
contradictions, subject to the revolutionary transformations emerging in the
Philippine countryside and cities. It is susceptible also to other radical
changes in the geopolitical rivalry of metropolitan powers based on
nation-states. There is indeed
deferral, postponement, or waiting—but history moves on in the battlefields of
Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao where a people’s war rooted in a durable revolutionary
tradition rages on. This drama of a national-democratic revolution will not
allow the Filipino diaspora and its progeny to slumber in the consumerist
paradises of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or Seattle. It will certainly disturb the peace of
those benefiting from the labor and sacrifices of OCWs who experience the
repetition-compulsion of globalized trade and endure the recursive traumas of
displacement and dispossession.
Caught in the cross-currents of global upheavals, I
can only conclude with a very provisional and indeed temporizing epilogue—if I
may beg leave from those Filipina bodies in coffins heading home: Filipinos in
the United States (and elsewhere, given the still hegemonic Western
dispensation amid allegations of its disappearance) are neither “oriental” nor
“hispanic,” despite their looks and names. They might be syncretic or hybrid
subjects with suspect loyalties.
They cannot be called fashionable “transnationals” or flexible
transmigrants because of racialized, ascribed markers (physical appearance,
accent, peculiar non-white folkways, and other group idiosyncracies) that are
needed to sustain and reproduce white supremacy in this racial polity. Bridget
Anderson (2000) has cogently demonstrated how the international labor market
consistently racializes the selling of Filipina selfhood; thus, not only gender
and class but, more decisively, “racial identities” conditioned by immigrant
status, inferiorized nationality, and so on, are reproduced through the
combined exploitation and oppression taking place in the employer’s household.
Slavery has become re-domesticated in the age of reconfigured mercantilism—the vampires of the past continue
to haunt the cyberprecinct of finance capital and its futurist hallucinations.
The trajectory of the Filipino diaspora remains
unpredictable. Ultimately, the rebirth of Filipino agency in the era of global
capitalism depends not only on the vicissitudes of social transformation in the
U.S. but, in a dialectical sense, on the fate of the struggle for autonomy and
popular-democratic sovereignty in the Philippines where balikbayans (returnees) still practice, though with increasing
trepidation interrupted by fits of amnesia, the speech-acts and durable
performances of pakikibaka (common struggle), pakikiramay (collective sharing), at pakikipagkapwa-tao (reciprocal esteem). Left untranslated,
those phrases from the “Filipino” vernacular address a gradually vanishing
audience. Indeed, this essay itself may just be a wayward apostrophe to a
vanished dreamworld—a liberated homeland, a phantasmagoric refuge—evoking
the utopias and archaic golden
ages of myths and legends. But wherever it is, this locus of memories, hopes
and dreams will surely be inhabited by a new collectivity as befits a new
objective reality to which Susan Buck-Morss, in her elegiac paean to the
catastrophe that overtook mass utopia, alludes to: “the geographical mixing of
people and things, global webs that disseminate meanings, electronic prostheses
of the human body, new arrangements of the human sensorium. Such imaginings, freed from the
constraints of bounded spaces and from the dictates of unilinear time, might
dream of becoming, in Lenin’s words, “as radical as reality itself” (2000,
278). That was already
approximated by Marx in his view that “the coincidence of the changing of
circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and
rationally understood only as revolutionary practice” (Fischer 1996, 170). Or, to translate in the proverbial
idiom warranted by the experience of all diasporic bodies and ventriloquized by
the Angel of history (invoked by Walter Benjamin [1969]) surveying the ruins before and after: De te
fabula.
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