Imagining the Filipino American Diaspora

Transnational Relations, Identities, and Communities

Jonathan Y. Okamura

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136530715
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1998. The Philippines play a major role in expanding the international Filipino community through its promotion of international labor migration-Filipinos can currently be found in over 130 countries throughout the world. As the first major work to conceive of Filipino immigration as a diaspora, this study analyses the diasporic nature of Filipino relations, identities, and communities and shows how these transnational phenomena are socially constructed by the everyday actions and activities of Filipino Americans. Instead of focusing on an ethnic minority and its relation to its host society, a diasporic perspective places emphasis on the transnational relations created and maintained among that minority, its homeland, and other diasporic communities. Transnational ties are evident in the movement of people, money, consumer goods, information, and ideas. Diaspora represents a new and fluid conceptual image quite apart from the usual coordinates based on physical location, territory, and distance. Transnational relations and practices will continue to be an increasingly important dimension of the Filipino American community because of the ongoing family-based immigration from the Philippines, further technological advances in communication and transportation, the expansion of transnational capital, and continuing racism and discrimination, all of which have made it necessary for Filipinos in the United States, the Philippines, and throughout the world to create and maintain diasporic lives and culture.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The chapters in this book span a research period of eighteen years beginning in 1979, when I began my dissertation fieldwork in anthropology with post-1965 Filipino immigrants in Honolulu, to fall 1997 as I completed the writing of several chapters. Considered together, they reflect my rethinking of Filipino American immigration, cultural practices, community organization, and identity construction. My interest in viewing Filipino Americans and other overseas Filipinos specifically as a diaspora, rather than as an immigrant or ethnic minority, began in 1987 when I read an article in a Philippine news magazine (Midweek) on “The Filipino Diaspora in Europe.” My research interests in Filipinos and the Philippines had led me to spend three years in the mid 1980s teaching at a Catholic university in Manila and conducting research on the Hanunuo Mangyan indigenous minority on the island of Mindoro and on other topics.

Prior to that time I had begun to meet Filipinos in far flung corners of the world such as Hong Kong, London and Belau. I had gone to the latter tiny island republic in the remote western Pacific in the summer of 1983 to teach a University of Hawai'i extension course. After landing on the weekly flight from Guam, I went to have lunch at one of the few restaurants in the capital town of Koror, and to my great surprise a young Filipina came to take my order. She told me she was from Pampanga province and had been recruited to work in Belau by the restaurant owner's wife who claimed she was the first Filipino to arrive on the island in the 1970s. I soon learned there were many other Filipinos working at the restaurant, including the band that played at night, and during my six week stay in Belau I met other Filipinos who were employed as nannies (yayas), domestic workers, construction workers, musicians, and teachers at the local junior college. I also became aware that not everyone welcomed the Filipino presence on the island, although they had been recruited as contract workers rather than being illegal aliens. Local resentment was especially directed against the skilled construction workers who were building several resort hotels financed by corporations based in Japan, Belau's former colonial ruler between the world wars. I recently learned that there are presently about 6,000 Filipinos in Belau, representing more than one-third of the republic's population of 17,000, who are able to enter on tourist visas and obtain work visas with relative ease (Finin 1997). Because of their considerable numbers, their wages are as low as $100 a month for live-in domestic work, and animosity against Filipinos also has increased.

Another memorable encounter I had with Filipino labor migrants was at the Bangkok international airport in December 1982 while I was on my way to the Philippines. At the liquor section of the duty free shop, I met a group of construction workers who had just disembarked from their flight from Saudi Arabia where alcohol is banned except for more privileged expatriate workers. These young men appeared determined to buy out the supply of the more expensive brands of scotch as they flashed their wads of crisp $100 bills and shouted out their orders to the overwhelmed sales clerk. With their long hair, jeans and construction boots, they seemed like a modern day version of cowboys hitting the local saloon to satisfy their alcohol deprived thirst after a long and hard cattle drive. One of the men gleefully explained to me that they were stocking up for the Christmas parties they all would be hosting in their hometowns across the Philippines upon their return.

During a return trip to Manila while I was living there in the mid 1980s I was on a flight with a dozen or so young Filipinas who had boarded the plane in Osaka, Japan. As we disembarked after arriving at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, I noticed that most of them were dressed in rather brief shorts, such attire generally not being worn in public places in the Philippines. In the baggage claim area, these young women retrieved large cardboard shipping boxes that indicated their contents were television sets, video cassette recorders, stereo cassette players, small refrigerators, and various other appliances, all of which were manufactured in Japan. They also picked up other boxes that indicated they were members of a “Cultural Dance Troupe” that presumably had been on a tour of Japan, the boxes perhaps containing their costumes and other dance paraphernalia. Being able to perform a number of traditional Filipino cultural dances is one means of obtaining a work visa to enter Japan. But the revealing attire of these dancers, the substantial value of the “souvenirs” with which they were returning, and the open stares of the other Filipino passengers led me to believe that they were probably “Japayuki,” Filipino women who work as “entertainers” in Japan. These women were part of a rapidly developing population of Filipino workers, mostly illegal and mostly female, in Japan (David 1991) who were attracted by the jobs created as a result of Japan's emergence as an economic superpower in the mid 1980s.

The above and other unexpected personal encounters with overseas Filipinos eventually led me to become more fully aware of their global dispersal as labor migrants, permanently settled immigrants, political refugees, and so called “mail order brides.” Curious about the cultural and social characteristics and dynamics of this movement and its economic and political significance for the Philippines as a struggling developing country, I began to research and write on overseas Filipinos in Hawai'i, the United States, and throughout the world from a diasporic perspective. But my research interest in particularly the global Filipino diaspora is not merely academic and certainly not celebratory. I have not applied the concept of diaspora to overseas Filipinos simply because it has become academically fashionable to invoke the term, and by doing so neither am I seeking to glorify immigrant/migrant Filipinos with the latest trendy conceptual label. By writing about Filipinos as representing a global diaspora I do not mean to celebrate their dispersal in more than 130 countries or to laud their ability to adapt to difficult living and working conditions in the countries where they have migrated.

My three years of living and working in the Philippines, during which I was constantly exposed to the pervasive poverty and inequality that plagues Manila and the rest of the country, made me fully aware of why so many Filipinos feel compelled to leave their home for the uncertainties and dangers of working abroad as migrant laborers. I know that they, even young daughters and wives, do so ultimately for the benefit and security of their families, a significant factor that is not given due consideration if the agency of migrants is disregarded. While I have personally enjoyed meeting and talking with Filipino workers in various parts of the world, I still consider it a national tragedy that they should have to depart in such great numbers and at such great distances from their families to perform jobs that others despise. By writing this book, I hope to remind readers that underlying the theoretical significance of the concept of diaspora is a substantial amount of human suffering and oppression borne by those forced to live diasporic lives.

KALIHI AS A DIASPORIC COMMUNITY

Rather than a diasporic perspective, in my early field research on Filipino immigrants in a multiethnic, inner city area of Honolulu called Kalihi, I explicitly followed a traditional anthropological approach centered on a defined community. The latter for me was a discrete locale where the people I was interested in studying lived, worked or operated businesses, worshipped, socialized with one another, and conducted other social activities. In describing my research methodology, I even went so far as to delineate the physical dimensions and boundaries of Kalihi according to various major streets that demarcated it from the adjacent Palama and Kalihi Valley districts because I thought it was an important methodological consideration. Although those two neighboring areas also had substantial numbers of Filipino immigrants, I concentrated my fieldwork in Kalihi because I believed that “there seemed to be more of a sense of community and identity amongst Filipino immigrants” in that area (Okamura 1983a: 14). I thus emphasized that immigrant Filipinos perceived and had an appreciation for Kalihi as a Filipino community due to their considerable and highly visible presence, although Filipinos, while the largest ethnic group, constituted less than a majority of the population.

In noting the presence of their relatives and other Filipinos as the primary reason why Filipino immigrants desired to live in Kalihi, I implied that those social relationships were more important to them than those that extended beyond the community's boundaries. Furthermore, some of my analyses of the social and cultural processes and activities of Filipino immigrants (Okamura 1984b), such as the accretion of kinship ties, the expression of ethnic identity, and the organization of religious rituals, emphasized their localization in the community and hence their contribution to demarcating the spatial boundaries of the Filipino American community in Kalihi. Thus in my descriptions and analyses, I could justly be accused of reifying the community to an extent that was not warranted given the openness of the community's social borders to relationships with other Filipinos in Hawai'i, the continental United States and the Philippines. The cultural and social boundaries of the Filipino American community in Kalihi were far more indeterminate and permeable than I had made them appear to be.

However, I was aware and did note that the social relations and cultural practices of Filipino immigrants extended well beyond Kalihi to include relatives and friends who lived elsewhere. I observed, “Despite settling in Hawaii and the great distance from the Philippines, Filipino immigrants continue to maintain close ties with their relatives in the homeland through letters, occasional visits, and monetary and other assistance” (Okamura 1983a: 183). I discussed balikbayan (returnee) visits home and the sending of remittances and consumer goods by immigrants to relatives in the Philippines for their financial support. I considered such visits important enough that I accompanied a group of Ilokano friends to their hometown in Ilocos Norte province in northern Luzon to attend the annual town fiesta. In the early 1980s other means for maintaining kinship linkages with the homeland, such as “balikbayan box” parcel and remittance delivery services, were not widely prevalent in the Filipino American community, and long-distance telephone communication to the Philippines was much more expensive than at present, although relatively few people in the Ilocos provinces had home telephones.

Since then, technological advances in communication and transportation have facilitated the development and maintenance of transnational connections and practices by Filipino Americans, particularly those based on family and kinship relations. While travel agencies were quite prevalent (and still are) in Kalihi when I was conducting my fieldwork, other commercial means for sustaining transnational linkages with the Philippines did not appear until the mid to late 1980s. During this period, business enterprises that offered remittance and balikbayan box delivery services, videotapes of Philippine films, and various Philippine made goods, such as compact discs and cassette tapes of popular Filipino singers and daily newspapers, began to be established in the community to serve the needs and desires of a growing clientele, particularly post-1965 immigrants. These various businesses and the goods and services they provide, which also are commonly found in other Filipino communities in the United States, are cultural representations of the diasporic identity and consciousness of Filipino American communities since they signify cultural, economic and social connections with the Philippine homeland. Rather than viewing them as demarcating the spatial boundaries and localization of a Filipino American community, these enterprises can be more productively understood as indicating the various ways by which those boundaries are being transcended on a daily basis by transnational linkages of people, money, goods and information. To be sure, there are many other kinds of Filipino owned and operated businesses in their communities, such as restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores, medical clinics, law and accounting firms, and real estate and insurance agencies, but they are less expressive of their diasporic identity.

CHAPTER SUMMARIES

The central argument of Imagining the Filipino American Diaspora is that Filipino Americans should be conceived as a diaspora because of their significant cultural, social and economic linkages with their homeland that distinguish them from other ethnic minorities in the United States. These transnational relationships are developed and maintained by Filipinos in diaspora through cultural practices such as return visits, sending remittances and consumer items, and regular communication to the homeland. Introducing the conception of a diaspora as a transnational social construction, the book presents an alternative view of Filipino Americans from a transnational perspective instead of conceptualizing them from a “domestic” perspective as a socially bounded ethnic minority situated within the political, cultural and geographical boundaries of the United States. It describes and analyzes the diasporic nature of their relations, identities and communities and how these transnational phenomena are socially constructed by the everyday actions and activities of Filipino Americans, both immigrant and American born.

The second chapter on “Diaspora as Transnational Social Construction” outlines the two related dimensions of an analytic approach to diasporas that I consider most important for their understanding. These aspects are that diasporas are transnational in scope and are socially constructed. Instead of focusing on an ethnic/immigrant minority and its relations in its host society, a diasporic perspective places emphasis on the transnational relations created and maintained between that minority and its homeland and other diasporic communities. As social constructions, diasporas can be seen to be produced and sustained by the agency of immigrants/migrants as they engage in transnational connections and practices rather than being viewed primarily as the result of macroeconomic processes of international labor migration and transnational capital. This chapter also includes a critical review of the recent literature on Filipino and other Asian American diasporas and identities.

The next chapter on “Filipino Americans as the Marginalized Minority” provides an historical and contemporary overview of the community, including its culture and ethnic identity, immigration to Hawai'i and the continental United States, socioeconomic status and problems, and political status and participation. It contends that as a result of ongoing racism and discrimination, Filipino Americans continue to hold a politically and economically subordinate position in U.S. society which they have contested through collective resistance and advocacy, especially through labor organizing and community struggles. Filipino Americans thus can be conceived as representing a diaspora because “the term diaspora is a signifier, not simply of transnationality and movement, but of political struggles to define the local, as distinctive community, in historical contexts of displacement” (Clifford 1994: 308, emphasis in original).

This collective effort at local community definition is the subject of the next chapter on “Beyond Adaptation: Immigrant Filipino Ethnicity in Hawai'i.” It demonstrates how Filipino Americans as a diasporic people resist assimilation and acculturation into the host society and therefore differ significantly from other ethnic/racial minorities in this regard. In contrast to a diasporic approach, adaptationist perspectives focus on the adaptation or adjustment of immigrants to their country of settlement as the dominant social and cultural process in which they are involved and further assume that they eventually will be acculturated, assimilated and integrated into the mainstream of the larger society. Rather than merely using their social institutions and cultural practices to adapt or accommodate themselves passively to the constraints and demands of the host society, Filipino Americans can be viewed more significantly as subjects engaged in a larger process of constructing and articulating their distinct diasporic identity because of the racist subordination and exclusion they encounter in society.

The last three chapters are written from an explicit diasporic perspective and discuss various ways by which overseas Filipino communities in Hawai'i, the United States and throughout the world are constructed and represented as a diaspora, that is, as a transnational network of social relations among those communities and between them and the Philippine homeland. These chapters seek to establish the socially constructed nature of the Filipino and other diasporas through the individual and collective agency of immigrants and migrants to develop and sustain transnational relationships. “Writing the Filipino Diaspora in Hawai'i” analyzes the academic and popular writings of Roman R. Cariaga, a Filipino anthropologist who studied at the University of Hawai'i in the 1930s and later became a journalist and respected leader in the Filipino American community. In the published version of his master's thesis, The Filipinos in Hawaii: Economic and Social Conditions 1906–1936 (1937), and in his other articles, Cariaga sought to challenge the widespread stereotyping and ignorance about Filipinos and the racism and discrimination against them that resulted by creating a more status enhancing ethnic identity for the community. As a “cultural worker/broker in diaspora” (Chow 1993: 99), Cariaga used writing as an alternative mode of political expression and advocacy to contest the rampant essentializing and demonizing of Filipinos as the archtypical racialized other in Hawai'i during the especially difficult Depression years of the 1930s. Such demeaning stereotyping still remains a problematic issue for Filipino Americans and is discussed in chapter three.

The chapter on “Siting the Filipino American Diaspora in Space, Time and Ethnicity” discusses how the sites of space, time and ethnicity distinguish Filipino Americans as a diasporic community, the concept of site being understood as “an arena of social activity with a characteristic set of social relations defining its specificity” (Gintis and Bowles 1981: 4 cited in Omi and Winant 1986: 166). In particular, I focus on the sites of time and space to emphasize what has been referred to as the “annihilation of space through time” under conditions of transnational capitalism that have contributed to the emergence and proliferation of global diasporas as a postmodern cultural and social phenomenon. As for ethnicity, it is a site for the articulation of Filipino American identity and culture but also of their political and economic marginalization from the dominant society. As a social construction of distinct “maps/histories” (Clifford 1992) and ethnic identity, the Filipino American diaspora can be viewed as a unique representation of its sites of space, time and ethnicity.

The concluding chapter on “Imagining the Global Filipino Diaspora” is of course intellectually indebted to Benedict Anderson's classic Imagined Communities (1991) on the origins of nationalism. Rather than the latter, my concern is to determine how it is possible for overseas Filipinos to conceive of themselves as a diaspora since, like the members of a nation, they “will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them.” As a transnational social construction, the global Filipino diaspora is imagined through various circulations of people, money, goods, and information to and from the Philippines. The Philippine state plays a major role in expanding the Filipino diaspora through its promotion of international labor migration with the result that Filipinos can be found in more than 130 countries. Since other diasporic peoples also engage in transnational relations and practices, diasporas are distinguished by differing cultural styles in their imagining that result in the construction and expression of distinct diasporic identities.

The chapters described above collectively seek to demonstrate the significance and utility of conceptualizing Filipino Americans as a diaspora rather than as an ethnic minority which admittedly they also are. Viewing Filipino Americans primarily as an ethnic minority in U.S. society denies the salience of their transnational...

Table of contents

• Cover
• ASIAN AMERICANS
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Diaspora as Transnational Social Construction
• Chapter 3 Filipino Americans as the Marginalized Minority
• Chapter 4 Beyond Adaptation: Immigrant Filipino Ethnicity in Hawai'i
• Chapter 5 Writing the Filipino Diaspora in Hawai'i
• Chapter 6 Siting the Filipino American Diaspora in Space, Time and Ethnicity
• Chapter 7 Imagining the Global Filipino Diaspora
• References
• Index