Announcements
 Midterms back at end of class
 Presentation W 2/13
 April, Daniel, Stephani, Isaac Hong, & Sith
 No class M 2/18
 Final paper prompts on M 3/4
Commonwealth Ambiguities
 1898-1934: Philippines = unincorporated territory
 1934-1946: Philippine Commonwealth = preparation
for independence
 1940 Commonwealth Literary Awards
 Literature and culture used to imagine Philippine nation.
Ex. Philippines – (Spain + America) = Molave
 Pitfalls of nationalism:
 Patriarchal divide between masculine public and
feminine private
 Nationalism enables neocolonialism
Jose Garcia Villa
 Most accomplished Filipino
writer in English of the period
 1929 – immigrated to US
 Filipino writer?
 American writer?
 Filipino American?
 Colonialist or critic?  Do his
writings challenge US
benevolent assimilation?
Philippine nationalism?
Divine Play
with God
 McKinley’s “Address to a
Methodist Delegation”
 America = white
masculine father =
closest to God
 Philippines =
emasculated dark child =
most like an animal
 Divine Poem 76
 Divine Poem 77
 Large influx of immigrants – almost
150,000 nationally (including HI) by
1920; 30,470 in CA alone
 “pensionados”
 Laborers in Hawaiian plantations –
110,00
 “Alaskeros” – about 3,500
 Domestic help/Service labor – about
10,000
 Mainland stoop and migrant farm
labor – about 30,000
Trans-national Laborers
 1902-1934 = “manong” generation

“manong” – Ilocano term of respect
for elder male relatives
 94% male, agricultural peasant class
and under the age of 30
 Factors of immigration:
 Increased land dispossession due to
transition from Spanish to American
governance
 Agricultural depression due to
drought – particularly in Ilocos
 Ilocano tradition of inter-regional
cultivation
 Contract-labor system and sojourner
mentality
 Spanish Catholic gender norms
 American educational system
The Manong Generation
“The arrival of Filipino immigrants in
the imperial metropole rendered
visible the colonialism that Americans
had tried to make invisible through the
myths of historical accident and
benevolence. Filipino migration lay
bare contradictions between the
insular policy of benevolent
assimilation and the immigration
policy of Asiatic exclusion which had
fully matured by the 1920s, and
domestic racism generally” (97)
Embodied Contradictions
 Precedents of anti-Asian exclusion:

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



Naturalization Law of 1790
Page Act of 1875
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
Gentlemen’s Agreement 1907
CA Alien Land Law of 1913
Anti-miscegenation Laws of 1920
 “If nativists believed Chinese and
Japanese were unassimilable
because they were radically
different from Euro-Americans,
both racially and culturally, they
were discomfited precisely by the
extent of Filipinos’
Americanization.” (109)
Life & Death of a Filipino in America
 Taxi dance halls  sites of racial mixing, class
alliances, violation of gender norms
 “You can realize, with the declared preference
of the Filipino for white women and the
willingness on the part of some white females
to yield to that preference, the situation
which arises… California in this matter is
seeking to protect the nation, as well as itself,
against the peaceful penetration of another
colored race” (V.S. McClatchy)
 Bulosan’s Miss O’Reilly
 “Thus anti-Filipino hostility was a site where
ideas about gender, sexuality, class,
colonialism intersected in violent ways and,
moreover, informed the construction of the
racial identity of both European and Filipino
immigrants” (115)
 Solution = independence (1934)
Bulosan’s America
1. In “Story of the Letter,” what
does the letter come to signify
to the narrator and his family?
Why does he only reveal what
the letter said at the end of the
story? Why does he both laugh
and cry while reading it? (65)
2. In Consorcio’s story, what does
it mean to “be American”? If it is
not defined by citizenship
papers, then what defines being
American in the story? (72)