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It is now time for the light of truth to shine; it is now time for us to show that we have feelings, honor, shame, and mutual cooperation.... Therefore O my countrymen! Let us open the eyesof our minds and voluntarily consecrate our strengths to whatgood in the true and full faith that the prosperity of the landof our birth, which is aimed at, will come to pass.

Andres Bonifacio

Let us fight to our last breath in order to defend our sovereignty, our independence.... Abject suicide will be the fateof anyone who will allow himself to be duped by the poisonouspromises of the North Americans. For wherever we turn we arebeing pursued by race prejudice, which is deep, cruel, andimplacable in the North American Anglo-Saxon.

Apolinario Mabini

Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makakarating saparoroonan. [One who doesn't look back to where he came from willnot arrive at his destination.]

Folk aphorism

Throughout Asia, from India to Malaysia and the China of Sun Yat-Sen, our revolution against Spanish colonialism symbolized the awakening of dark-skinned peoples against Western domination. Rizal, for example, is highly esteemed not only by Indonesians, Malaysians, Japanese, and other Asians but also by people in Latin America. When I visited Havana, Cuba, in early eighties, I found hat Rizal's two novels (recently issued) were best-sellers, probably read by more Cubans than Filipinos in the Philippines. A few days ago, I received an invitation to participate in a centennial gathering at the Casas de las Americas in Havana, Cuba, of representatives from countries whose fates were decided by the vicissitudes of the Spanish-American War at the turn of the century; Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico (one of the few remaining classic colonies in the world).

Needles to say, I am not a government factotum assigned to promote official celebrations. But since we are engaged today in a process of critical reflection on our collective situation as "Filipinos" in the diaspora, there is reason for this review of historical records. Or Filipino fugitives from the Spanish galleons settled in Lousiana in 1763, and so on. Now I am not against antiquarian research of this kind per se. It may provide leisure for some, a career for others. But surely there are other events we should invest in if our project is the vindication of our national dignity, not just ethnic competition with the native

Like it or not, we surfaced in the American consciousness not as museum curiosities--one must say, though, that the exhibition of Igorots, Moros and other "indigenous types" at the St. Louis Exposition of 1904 contributed to the fixation of a Filipino stereotype in the popular lore--but as a nation of resisters to U.S. colonial aggression and the power of U.S. capital. If we want to change the stereotype, we need to change our orientation. Instead of claiming Gaspar Molina's part in building the first ship in California in 1720, why don't we acknowledge the achievements of Pablo Manlapit, Pedro Calosa, and others in organizing the workers in Hawaiian sugar plantations in the twenties? Why not study the achievements of Silme Domingo, Gene Viernes, Philip Vera Cruz, and other dissidents during the long night of the Marcos dictatorship (Churchill 1995; Scharlin and Villanueva 1992)? Instead of celebrating Wall Street brokers and idolizing successful businessmen and politicians like Ninoy Aquino now glorified in some murals of San Francisco and Los Angeles, why don't we pay attention to the struggles of so many unnamed Filipino nurses and employees in the sixties and seventies against discrimination and ostracism? And those of domestics, "mail order" brides, millions of Overseas Contract Workers today here and elsewhere?

I don't need to belabor what is common knowledge today: The anatomy and complexion of the majority of the Filipinos in the United States today are profoundly different than those of the "Manongs" of Carlos Bulosan's time and of the veterans of World War II--240,000 of them, as you know, have never enjoyed full veteran's benefits; now, only about 70,000 are still alive waiting for the promised federal award. According to the 1990 census, almost two-thirds of Filipinos here (64.4%) were born in the Philippines. In most cases, the uprooted childhood and adolescence of many Filipinos here an experience whose traumas and shocks of recognition, or joy of Americanization, as the case may be, are perhaps being restricted now in the preoccupation with identity--who is more Filipino or is less Filipino, who belongs and who doesn't. Whether you were born here or not, you are perceived by the dominant society as someone "alien," not quite "American" and somehow categorized as "Other." This is the inherent racial politics of the milieu we happen to inhabit.

As everyone knows, the narrative of the United States as a multiracial and multicultural polity is still in the process of being fought through; in the racial politics of that narrative, we are implicated as protagonists (together with millions in the categorized groups) interrogating the hegemonic definition of "American" as centered in a patriarchal, property-oriented Western discourse opposed to the realization of a radically democratic, just, egalitarian order. But we cannot concentrate solely on what is happening within the territorial border of the United States; this border has tentacles extending to the Philippines, even though the military bases are gone (U.S. access, however, is guaranteed anytime by the Ramos regime [Schirmer 1997]). For us Filipinos, that is impossible. Some of you are fascinated with the current idiom of "difference", hybridity, fluid and decentered personas, transcultural subjectivity, syncretic and border cultures. But the process of globalizing transnational corporations has not eliminated the power of the sovereign nation-state--you will have to get your passport, the U.S. military still flies its own flag (with United nations as front) in Bosnia, Korea, and elsewhere, INS agents and border patrols still hunt for "undocumented" aliens--and Germany and Japan still consider Japanese or German as languages of prestige. In this postCold War environment of interdependency, we are confronting what the Cold War ideologue Samuel Huntington calls the "war of civilizations," a proxy for rivalry between the hegemonic industrial powers and the Islamic "rogue" or "terrorist" states.

Yen Le Espiritu, a Vietnamese scholar married to a Filipino, published sometime ago her research into the lives of Filipinos in San Diego entitled Filipino American Lives(1995). She concludes that Filipinos are now transitional and amphibious creatures sandwiched between assimilationist and pluralistparadigms, neither bipolar nor linear identities, cyborgs ordenizens of a world in rapid metamorphosis. Clearly influenced bythe precipitous mutations of the political economy of Europe inthe nineties, Espiritu's thesis registers the postmodernist shift of sensibility. But the notion of strategies of cultural construction is not really anything new. Recall how the "Manongs" memorialized in Bulosan's America is in the Heart devised ingenious ruses to circumvent racism and invent their own uniquelife-forms. In the late sixties, young Filipinos whose parentscame after war experienced the process of self-awareness orconscientization (to use Paulo Freire's term) in the turbulenceof the civil rights struggles, the youth "hippie" revolt, theantiwar movement, and the beginning of women's liberation. Now weare in a period of reaction, still at the height ofneoconservative "Contract with America" and the exorbitance ofthe "model minority" myth. Espiritu failed to recognize theheavy, profound "colonization" of the Filipinos she interviewedbecause her utilitarian and empirical framework assumed thelegitimacy of the market system, the existing property relations,class hierarchy, and other liberal individualist normsunderpinning the racial order. You certainly can't "read" thehistory and experience of Filipinos from the viewpoint of theoppressors. Today we need to ask in addition: Why is the"Identity crisis" of the sixties acquiring a kind of "secondcoming" in the form of "identity politics" in the framework ofthe debate on multiculturalism? Why is the critique of "white supremacy" and institutional racism being replaced by managerial programs of cultural diversity and fundamentalist revivalsharmonizing differences?

Most of you know that before Cunanan's partial Filipinobackground was discovered, his identity was a mystery -- his namesounded Irish, his appearance resembled a cross between a Latinoand Caucasian, indeed a "bastard" specimen. In the twenties,Filipinos almost escaped the antimiscegenation law when in 1931the Court judge that we were not Mongolian; we belonged to theMalay group (some equated the Malay with the Mongolian). Becauseof this, the California legislature prohibited white-Filipinomarriages, a law not repealed until 1948 (Chan 1991: 60-61;Foster 1994).

When the facts about Cunanan came out, the Filipinos in thePhilippines felt so outraged that they protested in public thatthe country should have nothing to do with Andrew and his father,a fugitive from justice hiding in the Philippines. In otherwords, they came out to disclaim Cunanan as Filipino. Alas, wewould not even have the privilege of claiming our first highlypublicized "serial killer," notorious only because his victim wasa celebrity of the haute bourgeoisie. For students needing topicfor their thesis of research project, the life of Andrew Cunananand the situation of thousands of Filipinos who lived and grew upin the shadow of the U.S. Navy present a challenge that canunravel the most crucial question of racism, class division,homophobia, deception and chicanery in high society, and so on.Cunanan's trail is littered with the remains of our own colonialhistory that continue to haunt all of us, whether you are awareof it or not, whether you can "pass" or not. In our media societygoverned by the mass consumption of simulacra and simulations ofprestige, adventures like Cunanan can be catapulted to becomecelebrity scapegoats that provide "canon fodder" also for hateracially motivated genocide.

Second, in the recent National Filipino American EmpowermentConferences held last August in Washington DC, the FilipinoAmerican CEO Loida Nicolas-Lewis, the model-minority incarnate,pleaded on behalf of the unrecognized Filipino Veterans whosefate betokens our own collective marginality. It was a symbolicgesture of solidarity. It was also a charitable act, and proof --according to Asian Week commentator Emil Guillermo (1997) -- that Filipino egos can unite only when there is a victim whotranscends our regional, class, generational, linguistic, andother divisions -- symptoms of our alleged "damaged" collator.This view of a charismatic figure for ethnic unity presupposesthe alienation and fragmentation that bedevils the structure ofthe "internal colonies: in the metropolis.

The project of empowerment of "Filipino Americans" cannot belaunched unless we problematize that conjunction of two fields ofsubjectivity, two trajectories. It is easy to say that we are allcitizens of the United States polity and also Filipino byethnicity (this last is chiefly interpreted as descent, or blood lineage rather than cultural in the large sense). But merejuxtaposition does not clarify anything; in fact, it begs all thefundamental questions about autonomy, social justice, andequality in a society characterized by alienation and commodityfetishism. This is starkly if pathetically exemplified by thefollowing remark of Maria PP Root, the editor of a recentcollection of essays entitled Filipino Americans, who states thatshe wants to be inclusive in her definition of the unhyphenatedcategory -- at last, free at last from the hyphen:

We are immigrants-now-citizens, American born, immigrant spouses awaiting eligibility for green cards, mixed-heritage Filipinos,students or workers on visa, tago ng tago (undocumented), andtransnationals moving between the Philippines and the UnitedStates. Thus, Filipino American is a state of mind rather than oflegality or geography Under the same roof, family members holddifferent meanings for and attachments to being Filipino American. (1997:xiv)

Now one can sympathize with the urge to be ecumenical, to subsumeeveryone under the "same roof," to welcome everyone in the spiritof what the late Virgilio Enriquez (1992) once called"pakikipagkapwa"--his answer to what is authentically Filipino.This seems ideal provided of course everyone keeps quiet andcontinue to police their minds. Unfortunately, minds don't simplyfloat around in ethereal naivete; bodies and collision ofbodies--the atomistic metaphor will catch with us again--willremind us of the reality of lived experience, of our history as asubjugated and recalcitrant people, of the specific trajectoriesand genealogies of the terms "Filipino" and American."

(To be continued)