Manifest Technique

Hip Hop, Empire, and Visionary Filipino American Culture

Mark R. Villegas

• Editorial: University of Illinois Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780252052682
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Sociologie

An obscured vanguard in hip hop Filipino Americans have been innovators and collaborators in hip hop since the culture's early days. But despite the success of artists like Apl.de.Ap of the Black Eyed Peas and superstar producer Chad Hugo, the genre's significance in Filipino American communities is often overlooked. Mark R. Villegas considers sprawling coast-to-coast hip hop networks to reveal how Filipino Americans have used music, dance, and visual art to create their worlds. Filipino Americans have been exploring their racial position in the world in embracing hip hop's connections to memories of colonial and racial violence. Villegas scrutinizes practitioners' language of defiance, placing the cultural grammar of hip hop within a larger legacy of decolonization.

An important investigation of hip hop as a movement of racial consciousness, Manifest Technique shows how the genre has inspired Filipino Americans to envision and enact new ideas of their bodies, their history, and their dignity.

CHAPTER 1

Currents of Militarization, Flows of Hip Hop

Expanding the Geographies of Filipino American Culture

On October 11, 2011, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s oped “America’s Pacific Century” in Foreign Policy signaled President Barack Obama’s desire to rebalance U.S. economic and military interests away from Iraq and Afghanistan and toward Asia.1 On April 28, 2014, helping to fulfill the president’s geopolitical “pivot to Asia,” the United States and Philippine governments signed the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), calling for an increased U.S. military presence in the former U.S. colony. The agreement allowed U.S. troops, warships, and aircraft to share existing Philippine military infrastructures—rent-free—for a ten-year period, authorizing a large-scale U.S. military presence not seen since prior to the closures of Subic Bay Naval Base and Clark Air Base in 1992. The EDCA purported to improve response times for natural disasters in the region and to provide greater security during a heightened time of maritime disputes in the South China Sea between the Philippines and China.2 As the Trump administration inherited Obama’s pivot to Asia in intensifying U.S. military dominance in Asia in the name of regional security, the Philippines found itself in a familiar twentieth-century drama: the capitalization of U.S. foreign expansion in exchange for the abridgment of Philippine sovereignty. The drama of the Philippine and U.S. presidential administrations rehearsed on the stage of regional struggle: China has been aggressively asserting control of the South China Sea, which holds strategic geopolitical importance among several nations, thus testing the assurances of U.S. hegemony in the region.

Despite the United States assuming a role as regional protector, Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte’s position regarding the EDCA was famously erratic. Early in his tenure, Duterte lambasted U.S. influence in the Philippines and threatened to seek a “divorce” from the United States in order to explore a previously unimagined alliance with China—which Duterte immediately retracted.3 In 2019, as Chinese aggression in the region escalated, Duterte renewed his commitment with the United States despite his series of public flip-flops on the matter of Philippine allegiance.4 Further adding to the geopolitical circus, in 2020, Duterte unilaterally scrapped the 1998 Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), which served as a prelude to the EDCA in permitting the presence of U.S. military personnel in the Philippines for “joint exercises.” Yet, also in 2020, betraying the president’s tough posturing against the United States, Duterte’s regime secured a $2 billion U.S. Department of Defense weapons sales package and continues to enjoy millions of dollars in U.S. military aid used to violently repress poor people, environmental activists, labor organizers, and indigenous people in the name of counterterrorism programs, Duterte’s notorious and sketchy war on drugs, and Covid-19 pandemic order violations.5

Long before Duterte’s chaotic efforts at geopolitical realignment, imperiling the fates of the EDCA and VFA, the Philippines was bound to its former colonizer in colonial and neocolonial relationships. This partnership—formed in the aftermath of the Philippine-American War in the early 1900s, reaffirmed after Philippine independence in 1946, and solidified during the Cold War—brought bases and U.S. military personnel in the islands and enabled the recruitment of young Filipino men into the U.S. military labor force. Throughout the twentieth century, Filipinos migrated along the global currents of militarization, becoming seasoned travelers of U.S. empire, essentially suturing the category “Filipino American” to its U.S. colonial genealogy. In this chapter, I examine how the geographic vastness and the politics of a Filipino American hip hop vernacular are made possible through the United States’ century-long pivot to Asia and the consequential installation of Filipino communities in military bases worldwide. Furthermore, I investigate this vernacular’s response to these migratory and spatial formations. U.S. bases in the Philippines, the Pacific, and throughout the continental United States have served as cultural conduits to the growth of hip hop within Filipino communities. This chapter, therefore, establishes a material foundation that shapes culture. The overwhelming number of influential Filipino American hip hop artists who have connections to the U.S. military, especially those whose fathers migrated via U.S. recruitment in the Philippines, suggests the extent that militarization has shaped the expressions, movements, and embodiments of recent generations of Filipino Americans who have embraced hip hop culture as their dominant mode of expression and identification since the early 1980s.

The metaphor of currents helps congeal together the symbiotic epistemological flow between the cultural politics of Filipino American hip hop performance and the structural determinations of militarization. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho use the metaphor of currents to “signal how militarization operates across temporal and spatial boundaries.”6 Similarly, in Filipino Crosscurrents, Kale Bantigue Fajardo develops a crosscurrent framework (in part) to imagine oceanic migratory flows on a global scale. Currents illuminate the ways in which the contours of Filipino American culture are formed by the global flows of U.S. militarization, especially flows via U.S. Navy migrations. Not simply about the “guns and troops,” however, this chapter echoes Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez’s concerns in recognizing militarization’s process of “ideological, political, and cultural control.”7 Militarization is an essential component to the aesthetics, politics, and embodiments circulating within Filipino American hip hop performance. Hip hop, therefore, offers a crucial counter-discourse to the United States’ racialized and colonial history and geographies. In this way, a Filipino American hip hop vernacular is contoured by a colonial legacy—it can be described as postcolonial culture.

Filipino American emcees Geologic and Bambu proficiently testify to the reverberations between U.S. militarized currents and a Filipino American hip hop vernacular. The two artists’ biographies provide a critical lesson of the interlocking between Filipino American hip hop performance and military migration. Geo’s father migrated along militarized currents as a U.S. Navy serviceman, which brought his family around the world. Mirroring the post-colonial nature of his father’s migration, Geo’s mother was also a participant of global flows of Filipino labor as an early recruit for domestic work in Italy. She met Geo’s father in Italy, where he was stationed at the time. Because of his father’s navy career, Geo was born in Long Beach, California, and grew up in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, and Bremerton, Washington.8 Geo’s geographic migrations and proletarian sensibilities offer a critical reimagining of Filipino American communities, especially as regards to this community’s class dynamics and spatial mapping. As a sailor, Bambu’s father also migrated to Bremerton. But, Bambu’s story differs slightly because the emcee grew up in several districts in Los Angeles, which were not necessarily navy or military communities. Yet, as Bambu shows, these areas were still highly militarized in the sense that young men of color living there have been aggressively sought as recruits. Having served in the U.S. Marines, Bambu’s experiences reflect the realities of military presence in poor and racialized urban areas.

I begin by outlining U.S.-Philippine “special relations,” which resulted in the long-term military occupation of the former U.S. colony. Understanding this relationship, military bases broadly function as conduits of cultural interactions—as imperial contact zones—among diasporic Filipinos and similarly displaced and vulnerable communities. Second, expanding on the culture of inhabitants of these imperial contact zones, I examine Geo’s proletarian narratives. Following what Roderick N. Labrador calls “Asian American hip-hop musical auto/biographies,” I read the lyrics emerging from artists’ songs as narrations motivated by the synergism between the individual artist and a collective audience.9 Geo’s musical poetics reflect the experiences of a “Filipino American military class,” a positionality that shapes the aesthetics and political stakes of a Filipino American hip hop vernacular by offering a critical “bottom-up” perspective of Filipino American culture. Next, I observe how Geo and Bambu’s interviews and music narrate the ways in which military communities assemble a larger imperial home that resides within a globally expansive geography. Finally, I analyze the Blue Scholars’ antiwar anthem “Back Home,” which further elaborates these artists’ discursive symbiosis between home and empire. The music video for “Back Home” visualizes the struggles and gendered relations of members of the Filipino American military class.10 This video bears witness to ongoing U.S. overseas war making that found its footing in military excursions in the Philippines, inviting memory of the United States’ “special relations” with the Philippines.

Imperial Contact Zones and “Special Relations”

A Filipino American hip hop vernacular testifies to the development and intimacies of racialized communities emerging out of the militarized violence of the expanding American state. Within militarized spaces, Filipino Americans have been remaking military towns into social landscapes productive for their hip hop cultural expressions by taking advantage of military community centers, gyms, and recreation halls. Given these resources, young Filipino Americans have created rich cultural spaces and shared community among otherwise disparate racial and regional groups. These military bases functioned as imperial contact zones of interaction and collaboration.11 These imperial contact zones where young Filipino Americans live are spread throughout a variety of geographies, including small port cities in militarized geographies around the world, particularly in locations where colonial interaction and encounter occur in multiple spaces and venues inside and beyond the metropole.12

For many Filipino Americans, militarized contact zones have been important conduits of people and culture, especially in the dissemination and development of hip hop within a network of Filipino American communities. For example, DJ Kuya D, a veteran Filipino American DJ from Queens, New York, and Virginia Beach, explains the eclectic qualities of hip hop among Filipino Americans in Virginia Beach, a navy community host to a large Filipino American population: “[Virginia Beach hip hop is influenced by] the navy or the military. It’s a broad mix of where people come from here. You know navy babies who travel a lot from the West Coast, back and forth, here and there.” Martin Briones, an emcee and music producer from Virginia Beach, also comments on the mix of styles that came through his city: “So growing up here, there was always people coming and going. We always had people from New York coming down, moving here, going to school with me. But then we also had people from California or from the South that would also come here. So, it was a wide variety of influences.”13 Growing up across the country, Geo describes a parallel series of migratory encounters: “In that the interaction, you’re kind of forced to have [that interaction] not only with other Filipinos who are in the same situation, but with people from other backgrounds. You were in contact with people—other Americans, you know Black Americans, white Americans from all over the country. Even in Hawai‘i out of all places. I’d meet someone from the South whose family grew up in New York. Then they were gone like two years later. So, there was always this movement of people from other backgrounds as well as from Filipinos from these other areas.”14 Geo describes the multiple meanings of his song “Motion Movement” (2003), including how the currents of militarization shaped his family’s encounter with imperial contact zones:

At the time, it was definitely more of motion and movement as far as “social movements” and at the same time, b-boy, b-girl, physical dance, cultural movement, and using our bodies rhythmically—an idea that both being one in the same. But embedded in the lyrics themselves is the story of movement, “migration movement,” both as immigrant diaspora, transnationals and what not, and then also even once we made one migration from one country to another, the migration within this new country from place to place. And being part of a community where that’s constantly happening. My history specifically being Filipino family from military background, pops in the navy, also being in a different elementary school every two-three years, having a new set of friends every two-three years.15

In his reflection on the meanings associated with “Motion Movement,” Geo expands motion and movement as multipurpose allusions to organized resistance, hip hop performance, and the migration of his family along imperial contact zones. For the artist, migrating along militarized currents influenced both the text of his music as well as its poetic tenor.

The sheer magnitude of Filipino presence in these militarized spaces brings the former subjects of U.S. empire to the postcolonial center. It is beyond this chapter’s scope to catalog even a sliver of Filipino American hip hop performers who are associated with the military. But it is worth mentioning a few notable performers with family connections to the military. Garnering from interviews and observing their music over the years, I have noted these performers’ military backgrounds. Anna Sarao’s father was in the navy, and she grew up in the navy town of San Diego. Anna is credited for being a crucial leader in organizing Southern California’s hip hop competitive dance scene, which has now grown in international relevance. Rocky Rivera, who hails from the Filipino American hip hop artist factory of the Excelsior District in San Francisco, was born on Clark Air Base in Pampanga, Philippines. Her family relocated to the Bay Area, where her father was stationed on Treasure Island. Bay Area–based hip hop photographer Leo Docuyanan was raised in the military community of Southeast San Diego. The Digital Martyrs, who are based in Oakland, California, come also from a navy community in San Diego. Emcees Son of Ran and Pele also hail from San Diego. Hip Hop dance activist and original Kaba Modern member Cheryl Cambay comes from a navy background in Cerritos, California. Jojo and Bobby Gaon, founders of isangmahal arts kollective in Seattle, migrated along a navy base route from Charleston, South Carolina, to San Diego and to Bremerton. Artist and community activist Che has navy roots in Virginia Beach and resides in Jacksonville, Florida. Apl.de.ap, whose African American father was stationed in Clark Air Base, is perhaps the most celebrated Filipino American hip hop artist as a member of the pop group...