Queering the Global Filipina Body

Contested Nationalisms in the Filipina/o Diaspora

Gina K. Velasco

• Editorial: University of Illinois Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780252052354
• Categoría: Scienze sociali
• Categoría: Sociologia

Contemporary popular culture stereotypes Filipina women as sex workers, domestic laborers, mail order brides, and caregivers. These figures embody the gendered and sexual politics of representing the Philippine nation in the Filipina/o diaspora. Gina K. Velasco explores the tensions within Filipina/o American cultural production between feminist and queer critiques of the nation and popular nationalism as a form of resistance to neoimperialism and globalization.Using a queer diasporic analysis, Velasco examines the politics of nationalism within Filipina/o American cultural production to consider an essential question: can a queer and feminist imagining of the diaspora reconcile with gendered tropes of the Philippine nation? Integrating a transnational feminist analysis of globalized gendered labor with a consideration of queer cultural politics, Velasco envisions forms of feminist and queer diasporic belonging, while simultaneously foregrounding nationalist movements as vital instruments of struggle.

CHAPTER 1

Mapping Diasporic Nationalisms

The Filipina/o American Balikbayan in the Philippines

“Couldn’t you just imagine busting out the tinikling right here?” asked my new acquaintance, Jeremy, as he gestured toward the vast grounds and Spanish colonial architecture of Intramuros.1 Jetlagged and unaccustomed to the summer humidity of Manila in the summer, I stared at Jeremy, unsure how to respond to such an incongruous question. It was June, and I had arrived in Manila the night before after over twenty-four hours of travel from Santa Cruz, California, to attend Tagalog on Site (TOS), a heritage language program that was affiliated with the University of California system.2 Unlike my younger, undergraduate-age classmates, I chose to attend TOS not because of a desire to “find” my Filipina/o identity or culture but to fulfill my language requirement for my PhD program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. While the majority of my classmates were undergraduate students from across the University of California system, I was a graduate student who had been born and raised in Dallas, Texas. My unfamiliarity with US West Coast Filipina/o American cultural nationalism, particularly the performance of cultural dances such as the tinikling at Pilipino Cultural Nights (PCN), informed the silence with which I responded to Jeremy’s question. I had not spent my undergraduate years rehearsing PCN scenes with Filipina/o American student associations. I lacked the repertoire of images and cultural fantasies of the homeland that shape Filipina/o American cultural nationalist imaginations of the Philippines. That summer, I was both fascinated with and unsettled by the narratives of diasporic “return to the homeland” that structured my classmates’ affective journey to the Philippines. Their romanticized notions of the Philippines sparked the development of my research questions, which eventually took the form of this book. I wondered, What forms of diasporic nationalisms emerge in the space of heritage language programs, the site in which revolutionary Philippine nationalism and Filipina/o American cultural nationalism converge? How do these narratives of diasporic belonging draw on gendered and sexual narratives of the Philippine nation? How do Filipina/o American balikbayans articulate and participate in forms of diasporic nationalism? I returned to the Philippines a few years later to conduct ethnographic research at the Philippine Studies Program (PSP), a heritage language program at the University of the Philippines at Diliman.

Within the Filipina/o diasporic imagination, the term balikbayan brings to mind the many Filipina/o expatriates who make their annual pilgrimage to the Philippines, waiting in customs lines at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport with their oversized “balikbayan boxes,” filled with everything from televisions and clothes to canned Kraft cheese. Balikbayan boxes, the most ubiquitous symbol of a contemporary Filipina/o labor diaspora, represent the affective and material relationships of Filipina/o expatriates to their country of origin, as well as the dependence of the Philippine economy on the remittances of Filipina/o migrant workers. The Philippines is a site of emotional tourism for Filipinas/os from the Global North, including second-generation Filipina/o Americans. Unlike Filipina/o expatriates, second-generation Filipina/o Americans’ imagination of the Philippines is largely mediated through their parents’ memories and their engagement with Filipina/o American cultural nationalism. Seeking a connection to their imagined homeland, some young Filipina/o Americans choose to study at heritage language programs in the Philippines, becoming balikbayans themselves.3

Focused on teaching Philippine history and language, heritage language programs for Filipina/o American youth are a crucible in which conflicting discourses of Philippine nationalism emerge: Philippine revolutionary nationalisms, Filipina/o diasporic nationalisms, and Filipina/o American cultural nationalisms. Based on ethnographic research conducted in 2006 at the PSP, this chapter examines the Filipina/o American balikbayan as a figure within the Philippine national imaginary, as well as a political actor within diasporic nationalist political movements, in which discourses of Filipina/o diasporic nationalism are articulated. The figure of the Filipina/o American balikbayan is positioned opposite the global Filipina body, a feminized figure that haunts the Filipina/o diasporic imagination. The global Filipina body—the overseas contract worker (OCW), the mail-order bride, the sex worker—circulates within Filipina/o diasporic cultural production as the corporealization of the Philippine nation, a source of exploited gendered labor for a neoliberal global economy. In contrast, within the Philippine popular imaginary, the Filipina/o American balikbayan represents the social and material capital of the United States, as well as the long reach of US imperialism. These twin figures, the figure of the Filipina/o American balikbayan and the present absence of the exploited global Filipina body, shape the articulation of diasporic nationalisms.

As a sign of the Filipina/o diaspora, the Filipina/o American balikbayan is a fraught figure that simultaneously embodies the failure of the Philippine nation in a context of capitalist globalization and the promise of Filipina/o diasporic political movements. The Filipina/o American balikbayan suggests the porousness of Philippine national boundaries in relation to outward labor migration. Simultaneously, Filipina/o American balikbayans are actively involved with anti-imperialist nationalist movements in the Philippines. The Filipina/o American balikbayan embodies the discursive struggle over the meaning of the Philippine nation, particularly the gendered and sexual politics of imagining a diaspora. Within the diasporic site of Philippine heritage language programs, distinct forms of gendered Philippine nationalisms—state nationalisms, popular nationalisms, and diasporic nationalisms—converge and come into tension.4 This contact zone of contradictory nationalisms reveals the inherent tensions between feminist and queer critiques of the nation and Philippine antistate, decolonial nationalist feminisms. This chapter considers the political potential of Filipina/o American diasporic nationalisms from a specifically feminist and queer perspective, taking into account both the violence and political possibilities of the nation as an organizing model for anticapitalist and anti-imperialist social movements. As such, the triangulation of the masculinist heterosexual Filipino American balikbayan and his supplement, the global Filipina body, with the queer balikbayan embodies the innate tension between revolutionary nationalisms and feminist and queer critiques of the nation. On the one hand, within both popular and scholarly discourses in the Global North, the nation has been critiqued as an inherently heteronormative and masculinist social formation. On the other hand, decolonial social movements in the Global South have mobilized the nation as a locus for decolonial, anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist resistance. The figure of the queer Filipina/o American balikbayan is positioned between queer diasporic engagements with anti-imperialist and revolutionary Philippine nationalism and mainstream US homonationalism. The triangulation of these three figures reveals the conflicting discourses of the nation in which Filipina/o diasporic nationalisms emerge.

The Figure of the Filipina/o American Balikbayan

Serving as a discursive interlocutor between the United States and the Philippines, the Filipina/o American balikbayan is an ambivalent figure within the popular Philippine imaginary.5 The PSP is an especially rich site of analysis for examining the Filipina/o American balikbayan as both a figure within the Filipina/o diasporic imagination and an actor in Filipina/o transnational social movements. Most PSP students were born in the United States, and almost all of them identified as Filipina/o American, having spent a large portion of their lives in the United States. As Filipina/o Americans “returning” to the Philippines, they fit within and exist apart from popular discourses about balikbayans in the Philippines. S. Lily Mendoza describes young Filipina/o Americans who “return” to the Philippines as a “different breed of Filipina/o balikbayans” in which one encounters “the diaspora in reverse.” Mendoza asks, “But what of U.S.-born Filipina/o Americans who travel to the Philippines for the first time? Surely, they could not be balikbayans in the same sense of the word? Given that such persons—save perhaps for the color of their skin—would not be marked by a ‘native’ identity, it isn’t likely that their (re-)turn would be imbued with the same ‘authenticity’ as a native born like me? And yet, on another level, might one not say that a virtual (re-)turn is possible even for Pinoys who have never set foot on Philippine soil?”6 The enthusiasm with which Mendoza, a self-described “native born” Filipina, responds to the presence of Filipina/o American balikbayans contrasts with a more ambivalent popular discourse in the Philippines about US Filipinas/os. The figure of the balikbayan reveals the failure of the Philippine nation to maintain its borders in the face of neoliberal globalization, as well as the ongoing neoimperial relationship of the United States to the Philippines. As a figure that invokes both anxiety and envy, the Filipina/o American balikbayan occupies an uneasy position within the Filipina/o diasporic imagination. Unlike the Filipina OCW, who is hailed as a national hero within Philippine state discourse, the Filipina/o American balikbayan is seen as both a traitor to the nation and a privileged figure to admire and emulate. Vicente Rafael distinguishes between OCWs and balikbayans: “Whereas overseas contract workers (OCWs) are seen to return from conditions of near abjection, balikbayans are frequently viewed to be steeped in their own sense of superiority, serving only to fill others with a sense of envy.”7 Rafael’s statement echoes a comment made by Leah, a PSP language instructor: “I used to say [about Filipina/o Americans], ‘I think they’re brats. Why would they want to learn the language?’ … Well, that’s the usual impression of Fil Ams.”8 Indeed, the popular Philippine journalist Conrado de Quiros compares Filipina/o balikbayans to the Thomasites: “Balikbayans as Thomasites are thus positioned as neocolonizers whose ambitions lie in setting themselves apart from the rest of the so-called natives rather than affiliating with them.”9 In contrast to Mendoza’s laudatory description of Filipina/o American youth’s desire to “return” to the Philippines, de Quiros’s criticism of balikbayans reveals the tensions evoked by the presence of US Filipinos/as in the Philippines.

The figure of the Filipina/o American balikbayan in the Philippines reflects the historical development of Philippine state policy to promote return tourism among balikbayans, creating a state-initiated form of diasporic nationalism. From expedited immigration lines at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila to the existence of a tourist industry that caters to the needs of returnees, balikbayans are given special treatment by the Philippine state. Eric Pido describes the role of balikbayans in the development of the Philippine economy, emphasizing the ambivalent role that balikbayans play in the Philippine nation.10 In 1973 the Marcos administration created the Balikbayan Program to develop the Philippine tourist industry and attract balikbayans to the country. The Balikbayan Program provided a means of securing foreign aid and remittances for the foreign debt–ridden Philippine economy. Through the mabuhay (welcome) campaign, the Philippine Department of Tourism (DOT) organized training programs to instruct local city and provincial governments in the “culture of tourism” in order to encourage balikbayan tourism.11 According to Pido, the mabuhay campaign created a tourist culture that positions balikbayans as the privileged elite, drawing on the simultaneous nostalgia of balikbayans for their pre-Marcos memory of the Philippines while encouraging their paranoia about the dangers of life in the Philippines.12 The ambivalence toward the Filipina/o American balikbayan is an effect of state initiatives such as the Balikbayan Program and the mabuhay campaign, which has positioned balikbayans as both privileged elites and traitors to the nation. As Robert Diaz argues, “The creation of a tourist industrial complex during Marcos’ time was first and foremost an attempt to ‘repair’ the human rights abuses and limits to freedom affected by the dictatorship.”13 Thus the Balikbayan Program served the dual purpose of ameliorating the effects of martial law while creating a new form of diasporic nationalist identity among Filipinos abroad. Under President Cory Aquino’s administration, the Balikbayan Program became Republic Act (RA) 6768, which provided even more economic incentives for balikbayans to visit the homeland.14

Filipina/o American balikbayans are often positioned as “privileged outsiders whose connections to an imagined ‘America’—land of opportunities, consumer goods, middle-class or upper middle-class lifestyles, Hollywood—grant them special access to the Philippine social, literary, and mass-media circles.”15 Despite the cultural capital granted to Filipina/o Americans, they are often perceived as without culture, inauthentic, privileged versions of authentic Filipinas/os. The presence of Filipina/o Americans in the Philippines evokes mixed responses. Caroline Hau notes: “Filipinos in America by their very presence evoke anxieties and fantasies on the part of the middle classes and intellectuals in Manila. Their departure for greener pastures abroad is characteristically seen by these Filipinos as an act of selfishness, a ‘betrayal’ of the Philippine nation.”16 This sense of national “betrayal” may or may not transfer to the children of Philippine expatriates. Although viewed with both envy and scorn for their inherent and inherited material and social capital, Filipina/o Americans who were born and/or raised in the United States articulate a counternarrative to the notion of national betrayal through the Filipina/o American discourse of “returning to the motherland.” Within the transnational site of heritage language programs, young Filipina/o American balikbayans narrate their journey to the Philippines as “coming home,” “finding their Filipino culture,” and assuming a Philippine national identity that they lacked as racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. One PSP student, Jeremy, commented, “I had never been to the Philippines, and I wanted to come home for the first time.… You have all these expectations. You want it to be the best.… I wanted to let the country enter me.…I wanted to feel at home, and I did.”17 Jeremy’s statement illustrates the affective narratives inherent to discourses of diasporic nationalism within heritage language programs. Narratives of return are central to the affective structures of diasporic nationalisms, in which Filipina/o Americans play a central role.18

Similarly, discourses of return undergird the participation of PSP students in transnational Filipina/o political organizing. “Exposure programs” such as the PSP serve to galvanize feelings of diasporic nationalism among Filipina/o American youth. Discourses of diasporic nationalism among Filipina/o Americans are shaped by revolutionary nationalist discourses of the Philippine Left, particularly the National Democratic (ND) movement of the Philippines, as well as identity-based Filipina/o American cultural nationalism in the United States. Heritage language programs are a crucible in which disparate discourses of the nation converge in the formation of diasporic nationalisms. ...