Carlos Bulosan, Filipino Writer-Activist Between a Time of Terror and the Time of Revolution

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Carlos Bulosan, Filipino

Writer-Activist

Between a Time of Terror and the Time of Revolution

E . S a n J u a n , J r .

Philippines Cultural Studies Center, Storrs, Connecticut

No uprising fails. Each one is a step in the right direction.

—Salud Algabre, leader of the 1935 Sakdal revolt1

h e bourgeois revolution has not been completed and left the feudal system

almost untouched. . . . We are doing everything to arouse the class conscious-

ness and revolutionary spirit of the masses, especially the peasants.

—Pedro Abad Santos, founder of the Socialist Party of the Philippines2

h e spirit, strength and intelligence of the people are miraculous. But truth

should be their beacon and guide at all times.

—Amado V. Hernandez, labor union leader3

© Michigan State University Press. CR: h e New Centennial Review, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2008, pp. 93–14. issn 1532-687x

C a r l o s B u l o s a n , F i l i p i n o W r i t e r - A c t i v i s t94 ●

On and after September 11, 2001, Carlos Bulosan, like thousands of

Filipinos, felt the impact of that disaster. Not because he was caught in the

Twin Towers or in the mountains of Aghanistan and the cities of Iraq. Nor was

he in Basilan or Zamboanga when thousands of U.S. Special Forces landed

in 2002 allegedly in pursuit of the Abu Sayyaf, welcomed by the sycophantic

Arroyo regime. Bulosan died on September 11, 1956, forty-eight years ago; he

was beyond the reach of imperial terror (San Juan 1994). But even the dead

are not safe from the enemy—witness how Jose Rizal, the national hero, was

co-opted by the American colonizers to suppress the underground resistance

after Aguinaldo’s surrender (Constantino 1978). Witness how the igure of

Andres Bonifacio has been attacked by American scholars eager to debunk

the prestige of the hero and prove how the leading Filipino historians have

failed, like the comprador and bureaucratic elite, to measure up to Western

neo-liberal standards (San Juan 2000).

In an analogous manner, Bulosan has also been co-opted and taken

for granted. Since the sixties, when Filipinos struggling for civil rights

and against the Vietnam War discovered Bulosan, the author of America

Is in the Heart (1946) has become institutionalized as a harmless ethnic

icon (Guillermo 2002). Notwithstanding this, I have met Filipino college

students today who have no idea who Bulosan is, and don’t care. Obviously

times have changed; indeed, circumstances, not ideas, largely determine

attitudes, choices, inclinations. h e current war on what Washington and

the Pentagon regard as foes of democracy and freedom, just like the ight

against Japanese militarism in World War II that compelled Filipino migrant

workers to join the U.S. military, is already repeating that call for unity with

the neo-colonial masters to suspend antagonism, rendering Bulosan’s cry

for equality and justice superluous. How do we avoid siding with, and serv-

ing, our oppressors?

Almost everyone who has read Bulosan—I am speaking chiely of those

who matured politically in the seventies and eighties, after which Bulosan suf-

fered the fate of the “disappeared” of Argentina, Nicaragua, the Philippines—

cannot help but be disturbed and uneasy over the ending of America Is in the

Heart (AIH). Clearly the American dream failed. Why then does the Bulosan

persona or proxy glorify “America” as the utopian symbol of happiness and

E . S a n J u a n , J r. ● 95

liberation when the reality of everyday life—for his compatriots and people

of color in the narrative—demonstrates precisely the opposite? Does some

transcript or subtext hide behind the wish-fulilling rhetoric? Various com-

mentators, including myself, have of ered ways of reconciling the paradox,

lattening out the incongruities, disentangling the ironies and discordances.

h e reconigured solution may be to say that life itself is full of contradictions

that, in spite of the dialectical ix underwritten by the historical process, will

not completely vanish; that these contradictions, perhaps sublimated in other

forms, will continue haunting us until we face the truth of the overarching

primal scenario. Absent this confrontation, we easily succumb to the seduc-

tive malaise of the politics of identity, in which the consumerist postcolonial

subaltern constructs identity as a pastiche, a hybrid concoction, a hyper-real

performance in the interstitial “third space” of the global marketplace.

R e a l i t y C h e c k

What is the reality today? Possibly the largest of what is denominated the

Asian group in the United States, Filipinos number 3 to 4 million of which

106,000 to 700,000 are undocumented owing chiely to overstayed visas. Of

this total, 70 to 75 percent are immigrants, and 25 to 30 percent are Filipino

Americans born in the United States, ethnically deined Filipino. Although

lumped together with Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Indians in the category

of “Asian Americans” (now 11 million, expected to triple by 2050), Filipinos

have so far failed to reach the status of the “model minority” in terms of

income, prestige positions, and other indicators, for reasons that inhere in

the colonial and neo-colonial subjugation of the Philippines and in the class-

divided structure and social metabolic process of racialized reproduction of

the U.S. polity (Chan 1991).

Again, a caveat in categorizing Filipino expatriates, sojourners, and ex-

iles. It is not historically correct to insert Filipinos into the homogenizing im-

migrant narrative of success (as the historian Ronald Takaki, 1989, and others

are wont to do), for the workers recruited by the Hawaii sugar planters were

not, properly speaking, immigrants. Nor was Bulosan an immigrant when he

landed in Seattle in 1930. Like thousands of Filipinos in the Alaskan canneries


and the farms of Hawaii and the West Coast, Bulosan was a “colonial ward.” In

various ways, we are still neo-colonial dependents of the U.S. empire. Neither

China nor Japan, Korea nor India, were completely colonized and annexed by

the United States. h ose formations, needless to say, possess unquestioned

cultural integrity and millennia of elaborate cultural development not found

in the Philippines. h e Philippines has perhaps the unenviable distinction of

being the United States’s only direct colony in southeast Asia from 1898 to

1946, and a strictly regulated neo-colony thereafter (Pomeroy ). Owing to the

ierce, implacable resistance of Filipino revolutionaries to U.S. colonial ag-

gression, the invading U.S. military (mostly veterans of the brutal campaign

against the American Indians) inlicted the most barbaric forms of torture,

punishment, hamletting, and other disciplinary measures. The United

States produced the “irst Vietnam” in this systematic genocidal campaign

of paciication made ideologically genteel by President McKinley’s policy of

“Benevolent Assimilation.” It was a protracted “civilizing mission” intended

to “Christianize” the natives, an unprecedented “killing ield” where, for Ga-

briel Kolko (echoing the anti-imperialist polemics of Mark Twain, William

James, Henry Adams, C. S. Peirce, William Dean Howells, and others), the

“orgy of racist slaughter . . . evoked much congratulation and approval,” a

“perverse acceptance of horror [that] helped make possible the dominating

experiences of our own epoch [the Vietnam War era]” (1984, 287).

Given the peculiar coniguration of U.S.-Philippines relations I have de-

lineated so far, one can conclude that the Filipino experience as colonized/

neo-colonized subject is singular and cannot be dissolved into the archetypal

immigrant syndrome. It cannot be altered to lump Filipinos with the Chi-

nese, Japanese, Korean, and Indian communities with their own historical

speciicities. Although the pan-ethnic category of “Asian American” was

invented in the sixties to articulate points of unity in the social, political,

and economic struggles for recognition of diverse groups, it is important

to note that the American colonial bureaucrats and military perceived

and handled Filipinos as if they were American Indians or African slaves

in the South (Zinn 1980; Rafael 1993). One can see unadorned vestiges of

this among American experts claiming epistemological authority over their

native informants. Again, it’s important to stress the ideological paradigm,

E . S a n J u a n , J r. ● 97

the frame of intelligibility, in which U.S. administrators, social scientists,

intellectuals, and others (including the notorious Stanley Karnow, author

of the best-selling In Our Image, 1989) made sense of Filipinos: we were (like

the American Indians) savages, half-childish primitives, or innocuous ani-

mals that can be either civilized with rigorous tutelage or else slaughtered

outright. h ey found that some could be trained like the African slaves or

Mexican stoop laborers. No one mistook the Filipinos for the persevering

if wily Chinese, the inscrutable Japanese, or the mystical Indian. We were

mistaken for unruly Africans, Mexicans, or American Indians who needed

to be tamed and domesticated (Volpp 2000). h is, plus the reputation of

Filipinos as militant union organizers and/or highly sexed dandies, explain

the putative nasty invisibility, irksome if indeterminate Otherness, our fabled

interstitial dif erence—which, however, does not protect us from the surveil-

lance of the Department of Homeland Security or the racist violence that

murdered postal worker Joseph Ileto and many others. We thus fail to be

invisible or dispensable, though still forced to employ the ruses of the sly

border-crosser, the tricks of the amphibious transmigrant.

One Filipino interviewed by Yen Le Espiritu, in her Filipino American

Lives, provides a key example of the border-crosser’s cunning. She evades the

contradictions in this naive but opportunist bricolage that Espiritu celebrates

as one that is neither pluralist nor assimilationist: “I use both the Filipino

value of family interdependence and the American value of independence

to the best interests of myself and my family” (1995, 28). Note the object of

his concern: “myself and my family.” Should we look for some sense of civic

responsibility or neighborly concern? Not here, for now at least. h e conjunc-

tion “and” easily absorbs any conlict, just as those balikbayan (returning

expatriate) boxes can contain all kinds of goods, legal or contraband, genuine

or spurious signs of duty or status-jockeying. We take this balikbayan cargo

cult as a sign of success or piety to the family and homeland by ex-President

Corazon Aquino’s “modern heroes,” for others “modern slaves.”

h e irony remains. Behind the triumphant invocation of a mythical

“America” linger the unforgettable images of violence, panicked escape, hor-

rible mutilation, rape, and death in Bulosan’s works. In April 1941, Bulosan

wrote to a friend: “Yes, I feel like a criminal running away from a crime I did


not commit. And the crime is that I am a Filipino in America” (1995, 173). It is

only now, thanks to the resonance of September 11, 2001, that we are begin-

ning to grasp what is meant by these prophetic words written sixty-six years

ago. h e truth of this will, I am sure, become manifest as the “endless” pre-

emptive war on terrorism unfolds from the battleields of Afghanistan and

Iraq to the heartland of the metropole. A similar climate of terror shrouded

the Filipino community in the early years of World War II, a situation to

which Bulosan’s subaltern mentality responded in a way that, without sum-

marizing Bulosan’s entire body of work, I would like to gloss with concrete

historical speciications in order to explain the profoundly antinomic irony

and paradox of his utopian vision of “America.”

A R e t r o s p e c t i v e I n t e r l u d e

h e irst and probably last time Allos—to call Carlos Bulosan by his artistic

alias—was in Washington, D.C., was November 18, 1943, based on his article

as contributing editor to the magazine, Bataan (1944b) on the occasion of the

death of Commonwealth President Manuel Quezon. He said he was writing

the 28th chapter of his book “In Search of America” (now AIH) when Presi-

dent Quezon requested his visit to Washington. He then met Vice President

Sergio Osmena, Colonel Carlos Romulo, the president’s wife and daughter,

and other assistants. He wrote that President Quezon was prompted to call

for him after reading his essay “Freedom from Want” published in the Satur-

day Evening Post (year). In this elegiac tribute, Allos evinces zealous praise for

Quezon, identifying the story of Quezon with the last 45 years of the coun-

try’s emergence into modernity. His oral homage to the president prompted

Quezon to ask him if he could write his biography, to which he gave a shy

hesitant gesture of assent. His admiration was, in some ways, self-serving, a

kind of fantasy projection, as evidenced in the following passage:

I began to ask myself why he [Quezon] felt so close and conidential to

me. I began to contemplate what I was a year ago, a common laborer, a

migratory farm worker, who had lived in the slums of both America and

the Philippines—was it because this man, the avowed leader of his people,

E . S a n J u a n , J r. ● 99

was also of humble origin and went through heart-rending deprivations in

his youth? It was then that I felt kinship with him, a feeling so great that

it sustained me in my perilous trip back to Los Angeles and immediately

afterwards, became the dynamic force that moved me to interpret him to the

misinformed Filipinos in California (1944a, 14).

Allos had no real solid knowledge of Quezon’s “humble origin” or the “heart-

rending deprivations” of Quezon’s youth. But when he read the attacks on

Quezon in fascist-inspired Filipino newspapers in California, Allos came to

the defense of the exiled Commonwealth government. It was still “united

front” politics then. Allos proceeded from D.C. to New York (where he met

his compatriot Jose Garcia Villa, the avantgarde self-exiled poet) to sign his

contract with his publisher, Harcourt Brace, before returning to California.

President Quezon telegrammed him afterward for a “memorandum on

the Filipinos in the West Coast.” Allos failed to fulill his promise; instead,

he “hoped that my autobiography . . . would give him all the materials he

would need . . . that in presenting the life story of a common Filipino im-

migrant, who had just attained an intellectual integrity that could not be

bought, I would be presenting the whole story of the Filipinos in the United

States” (1944a, 15). Like Quezon, he was an emblem or ethnic index to the

whole uprooted community. Allos bid farewell to Quezon who, conducting

the “good ight,” “died at a time when it seems sure that our country will be

free again, and will assume her independence in a world federation of free

and equal nations” (15).

h at future of “free and equal nations,” contrary to Allos’s sentiment,

remains in the future. Allos, to be sure, not only felt almost ilial kinship

with Quezon and his family, but also a tributary, even quasifeudal loyalty

to Quezon as a symbol of the nation’s struggle for independence. h is is

patently a traditional peasant view of the elite. At this point, we need to

interpose some historical perspective and assay the relative importance of

Quezon as a representative of the entrenched propertied interests of the

native oligarchy in the context of the recurrent grievances and revolts of

Filipino peasants, workers, and indigenous communities, throughout the

Commonwealth period and the two and half decades before 1935. One can


cite here the repression of the Tayug and Sakdal uprisings, among others, as

well as Muslim dissidence, in which the oligarchy and later Quezon himself

acted as partisans of the colonial status quo. During the Cold War period

and the McCarthyite witch hunt, the neo-colonial State was for Allos and

his brothers and sisters in the union a merciless persecutory force, fascism

revived, to resist and overcome.

h e extant account of Allos’s travels in the U.S. are sketchy, so it is dificult

to determine what other links he had to the personnel of the exiled Com-

monwealth government: for example, to Romulo (who became president of

the United Nations General Assembly and, later, the foreign af airs minister

of the Marcos dictatorship), J. C. Dionisio, Villa, Bienvenido Santos, among

others. We do not have any information whether, around this period, he met

the members of the progressive Philippine Writers League (either Salvador

P. Lopez, Federico Mangahas, or Arturo Rotor—major writers in English in

the thirties), who attended the h ird Congress of the League of American

Writers, June 2–4, 1939 (Folsom 1994, 241). Allos was certainly acquainted

with Lopez, the most signiicant critic of that period, as proved by his letter

in h e New Republic entitled “Letter to a Filipino Woman” (San Juan 1995,

210–14) whose death he prematurely announced. One question I would ask

any future biographer is whether Allos met the poet and militant unionist

Amado V. Hernandez when Hernandez visited the United States in the late

forties, after General Douglas MacArthur’s “liberation” of the homeland.

Allos protested Hernandez’s arrest by the government and included an ar-

ticle by Hernandez, “Wall Street Chains the Philippines,” in the August 1952

issue of the 1952 Yearbook, Local 37, of the International Longshoreman’s &

Warehouseman’s Union in Seattle.

D i a g n o s i s a n d P r o g n o s i s

Earlier I mentioned Allos’s attitude of being “beholden” to Quezon, an attitude

carried over from the conformist ethos of a section of the landless peasantry,

chiely tenants or peons. At this moment I would like to address the issue of

Americanism in AIH by engaging the question of social class not as status but

as a function of production relations. Herminia U. Smith recently e-mailed

E . S a n J u a n , J r. ● 101

Reme Grefalda, the editor of the online magazine Our Own Voice, about this

topic, complaining about people generalizing that “the Manongs came from

the Philippine peasantry; that they were uneducated, and that’s why they

were ‘only’ laborers” (2006).

At the outset, it would be instructive to quote Allos’s thoughts on educa-

tion and labor expressed candidly in his letter to his nephew dated April 1,

1948:

It is not really important to go to the university. A college degree does

not mean that you are educated. . . . Education comes after school, from

your relations with your fellow man, from your understanding of yourself.

. . . Education is actually the application of this discovery: that you are a

human being with a heart, and a mind, and a soul. Intelligence is another

thing, of course. . . . [Maxim Gorki] wrote books about the poor people in

his country that showed that we poor people in all lands are the real rulers

of the world because we work and make things. We make chairs, we plow

the land, we create children; that is what Gorki means. But those who do

not work at all, those rich bastards who kick the poor peasants around: they

contribute nothing to life because they do not work. In other words, Fred,

we can still have a nice country without money and politicians. We just

need workers. Everything we see and use came from the hands of workers.

(1988, 36–37)

My irst comment is that the term “laborers,” though often derogatory or

pejorative in intent, becomes so because we live in a system distinguished

by iniquitous class hierarchy. Class always carries an invidious connotation.

As a result of the division of labor in class society, from the slave to the

capitalist order of production relations, manual work has been degraded by

being associated with the unpropertied, unlettered groups; and thus people

deprived of land, tools, or animals are conined to sell their labor-power

and do manual “labor” while those free from laboring with their hands, sup-

posedly educated, occupy a higher position or status. h is is not a result of

being unschooled or unlettered, but of being dispossessed, racialized, and

colonized. Obviously, we all oppose class dif erentiation and discrimination,


and I hope we are all united in rejecting such an insulting class-ridden, ex-

ploitative system. Oppression is nothing to be proud of, or to celebrate, at

any time or place.

I would use the term “peasant” as a descriptive category deining a group

in relation to the means of production, in this case, land as the principal

means of production. It does not refer to status or lifestyle as such. It does

not imply lack of education or low status—except from the viewpoint of the

privileged idle landlord and parasitic business elite. Historically, in Europe,

the peasantry was a complex group classiied simply into the rich peasants

who owned the land they cultivated, did not employ landless people as serfs

(such as the feudal landlords) and had some power and prestige; the middle

peasants who may own land or not but who have independent means; and

the poor or landless peasants reduced to debt peonage and serfhood. You

can reine this category further by including ideology, ancestry, customs, and

other social-phenomenological criteria.

In the Philippines, however, there was a peculiar dif erence. h e Spanish

colonial system narrowed the classiication into two: the Spanish landlords

who owned iefdoms, operated through caciques, and hired overseers, and

the majority of dispossessed natives. Even Rizal’s family had to lease their

farms from the Dominican friars. Objectively, Rizal came from the rich

peasantry; but their access to education and lineage aligned them with the

ilustrado (enlightened) fraction who, although not owning land, accumu-

lated some wealth through farming, trade, and other activities that enabled

their separation from the landless poor colonized subjects. Because Filipino

peasants became gradually proletarianized when they moved to the towns

and cities, yet maintained the peasant ethos of the traditional village, their

sensibilities and behavior relected the vacillations typical of the youthful

Allos and his social class. h us we observe Allos’s strong spirit of solidarity

and egalitarianism mixed with his desire to move beyond the traditional

regime of submission to authority, to the power of the inheritors of prestige

and privilege founded on property.

When the United States colonized the Philippines, the legal idea of land

ownership with torrens title became part of the legal and political system.

Ordinary peasants acquiring the means were able to buy land. Some feudal

E . S a n J u a n , J r. ● 103

estates (especially those owned by the friars) were broken up, but not all; in

fact, as William Pomeroy documents in American Neo-Colonialism (1970),

tenancy increased during forty years of direct U.S. colonial rule. h e landlord

system, though weakened, was in fact renewed and strengthened with the U.S.

co-optation of the oligarchy in managing the State apparatus, bureaucracy,

schools, and so forth. In Allos’s case, the family owned some land (Allos men-

tions this land as a gift from his father’s friend), which they had to mortgage

or sell to pay for both his brother Aurelio’s and Allos’s passage. h e farm was

foreclosed. Allos writes in a sketch published in Poetry magazine:

My father was a small farmer, but when I was ive or six years old his small

plot of land was taken by usury; and usury was the greatest racket of the

ilustrado, and it still is although it is now the foreigners who are fattening

on it. My father had a big family to support, so he became a sharecropper,

which is no dif erent from the sharecroppers in the Southern States. Years

after, because of this sharecropping existence, my father fell into debts with

his landlord, who was always absent, who had never seen his tenants—and

this was absentee landlordism, even more oppressive than feudalism. h en

my father really became a slave—and they tell me there is no slavery in the

Philippine Islands! (circa 1943)

So when historians trace the genealogy of the Manongs to the peasantry,

it is not meant to debase them as “uneducated” or “only” laborers. Studies of

the peasantry (in itself, a rigorous scientiic discipline) by Eric Hobsbawm,

Eric Wolf, James Scott, h eodor Shanin, and others have demonstrated the

sagacity, intelligence, shrewdness, and wisdom of the peasantry. h eir adap-

tive skills have not been surpassed by the modern urban entrepreneur. Need-

less to say, formal education is not a measure of intelligence or wisdom. h e

best illustration of this is Allos’s h e Laughter of My Father (1944a), as well as

other stories collected in h e Philippines Is in the Heart (1978).

As for the degradation of workers and laborers, this is part of the con-

vulsive history of the rise of capitalism. h e U.S. Depression of the thirties

was a crisis of this system, worsening the plight not only of the unemployed

and starving millions of citizens but, more severely, of people of color like


the Manongs. (“Manong” or “older brother” is a term of endearment among

Filipino migrant workers.) h ey were not, strictly speaking, immigrants—not

until the Commonwealth would there be an immigrant quota for Filipinos—

but colonial subjects barred from access to citizenship. In addition, they were

also a proletarianized and racialized minority. Productive labor, of course, is

the source of social wealth, though from the viewpoint of market-centered

economics, labor is downgraded relative to capital, ownership of land, and

other productive means. h is is the ef ect of judging everything in terms of

exchange value, not use value, the result of translating all values into money,

possessions, or commodity fetishes.

“ L i t t l e B r o w n B r o t h e r ’ s ” B u r d e n

h is is the moment to confront the problem of white-supremacist “Ameri-

canism.” Practically all readers of AIH read it only as an immigrant story,

or at best a Popular Front collective biography, as Michael Denning (1997)

and others have done. Obviously it is far from being an exemplary narrative

of immigrant success. h ere is arguably more allegory, gothic melodrama,

and utopian fabulation in AIH than in Laughter. As I have stressed in previ-

ous works (San Juan 1996; 2006), the inability to understand the substantive

function of the irst part of AIH (chapters 1 to 12) is a symptom of the larger

failure to understand the political and cultural actuality, signiicance, and

consequence of the colonial subjugation of the Philippines from the time

of the Filipino-American War of 1899 to 1946, and its neo-colonial depen-

dency thereafter. It is a crippling failure that leads to all kinds of vacuous,

ill-informed pronouncements (which I will illustrate in a moment).

h is is the reason why I propose that we decenter the Bulosan canon

and begin our critical hermeneutics and evaluation with noncanonical texts

such as h e Cry and the Dedication, Laughter, his essays, poetry, and his other

writings in approaching the totality of his achievement. h ese marginalized

works avoid the celebration of “America” as the totemic paradigm of freedom

and democracy. We hope to correct the formalist framework of intelligibility

that would exclude the historical context of the profound colonial subjuga-

tion that Allos and the Filipino people as a whole experienced from 1899

E . S a n J u a n , J r. ● 105

to the present. h at prophylactic exclusion resulted in, irst, espousing 200

percent Americanism; second, dificulty making sense of the contradictory

messages of the narrative; and third, a cynical acceptance of immigrant

success leading to a dismissal of AIH and corollary texts as tedious, naïve,

self-ingratiating factoids. (One example is Jessica Hagedorn’s visceral repu-

diation of Bulosan in h e Gangster of Love.) I will not go into the countless

reasons why AIH turned out to be such an ideological pastiche well before

the vogue of postmodernism; one reason may be discerned in the case of

Kenneth Mostern’s essay, “Why is America in the Heart?,” which epitomizes

the dilemma of most pseudoradical critics of Bulosan.

Mostern, a self-proclaimed Marxist of sorts, faults AIH for its “American-

ism” and its unqualiied endorsement of “American democratic institutions,

even at their worst” as “the vanguard of world politics.” Was Allos really guilty

of this? I think Mostern imputes to AIH a spurious teleology that springs

from his assumption that the Philippines as a classic colony was really being

shaped by U.S. “benevolent” policies to be a fully democratic, industrialized

society, an organic part of the metropolis. Not only is Mostern not aware of

the lagrant series of U.S. legislation and policies ( from the Jones Act to the

Bell Trade Act and their sequels) that ixed Philippine neo-colonial depen-

dency and subordination for the last half of the twentieth century and the

next. His analysis also exhibits a remarkable insensitivity to the experience of

racialized subjugation, a law rather astonishing for those boasting of being

schooled not only in Marx and Lenin but also in W.E.B. DuBois, Fanon, Said,

Freire, and a whole battery of thinkers who have exposed the limits of pa-

tronizing the Eurocentric teleology Mostern claims to reject. Consider, for

example, Mostern’s concern that Filipinos should be grateful for U.S. imperial

altruism even if not intended:

I am not claiming that Bulosan’s desire to bring technological development to

the Philippines—seeing its economy as needing . . . “development”—is what

is wrong here. While the Philippines is poor and oppressed the attempt to

bring some of what the U.S. has to it is obviously appropriate and deserves

the support of all U.S. leftists, whether or not we are Filipino. . . . Just as the

wealth of the United States, earned in part through imperial presence in Asia,


allowed Bulosan the space to become a writer, such a continuing disparity

of wealth, where it occurs, and the colonial legacy, even where it doesn’t,

may ensure the continuation of this pattern [of allowing the Philippines to

develop into a full-blown industrial capitalist power]. (1995, 49)

Mostern’s argument is now considered rather embarrassingly inept, to

say the least. It is based on the crude mechanical view that social devel-

opment goes through a straitjacket evolution from slavery and feudalism

to capitalism, and the latest is of course superior to what came before it.

When Marx heard that his followers were attributing this linear teleology to

him, he famously remarked, “If that is marxism, then I am not a Marxist.” A

clear sign of Mostern’s chosen stance of ignoring the impact of U.S. colonial

domination, and what it signiies for Filipinos who sacriiced 1.4 million

lives to defend the gains of the revolution against Spanish despotism, is this

revealing remark:

Bulosan opens the book with a moment of disjunction, an explicit contrast

between a young peasant boy, Carlos himself, working the land with his fam-

ily and the intersection of this apparently primeval scene with the outside

world, most speciically the world of a war in Europe, where Carlos’s brother

Leon is ighting. No reason is given why a Filipino boy would be ighting on

another continent; instead, the fact of the global situatedness of the peasant

economy is the theoretical premise of the book, that which the intelligent

reader must already know (1995, 46).

What Mostern forgot was precisely his self-professed duty to apply materialist

dialectics to this “global situatedness,” one mediated by U.S. colonial rule and

its worldwide basis in monopoly and inance capital. He deliberately ignored

what almost everyone knows today: Filipinos, like most colonized subjects,

were then enlisted to ight U.S. corporate wars (thousands of Filipinos today

serve in the U.S. Navy). And, in the process of creating the “reserve” army of

unemployed, the serlike or slavish existence of landless peasants like Allos’s

father and millions of his countrymen have been legitimized by the preserva-

tion of the power of the oligarchical landlord class as a political strategy of

E . S a n J u a n , J r. ● 107

neo-colonial rule. Mostern also failed to take into account the truth that the

ight for independence against U.S. colonial oppression is what motivated

the popular front struggle here in the United States and in the Philippines

against fascism (part of the Filipino oligarchy supported Franco in Spain)

and Japanese militarism (part of that oligarchy believed it was a useful foil

to U.S. imperialism).

Reading AIH as a gloriication of “Americanism” or American Exception-

alism may in part result from the editorial cleansing of the text itself. It is,

as some have duly suspected, a very sanitized text in its silence over the

destructive ef ects of U.S. colonial rule, especially during the years from 1914

to 1948. Given the Filipino rejection of Spanish autocratic rule and religious

authoritarianism, American proclamation of its “civilizing mission,” com-

plete with h omasite teachers, public education, and so forth, was attrac-

tive. h ere was no other choice under the disciplinary, panoptic regimen of

Manifest Destiny. Except for the allusion to the January 1931 Tayug peasant

insurrection, there is no mention in AIH of the millenarian Tangulan move-

ment (1930–31) nor the Sakdal uprising of May 2–3,1935, and its aftermath in

the Huk uprising of the 1940s and 1950s.

Nonetheless, it is absurd to erase or wholly obscure—as most conven-

tional exegeses have done—the scenes and chapters that expose the savage

truth of “Americanism” in action, represented in white-supremacist violence

on behalf of agribusiness and monopolies. Nor is it correct to assume that the

presumed proletarian politics of the later part of the narrative has replaced

the peasant society portrayed in the irst section. In a self-incriminating ges-

ture, Mostern calls the Filipino workers “expatriates” whose “backwardness,”

however, he deplores repeatedly in favor of an enlightened “leftist” United

States Studies, which, given the neo-conservative tide of reaction, turns out

to be a vapid token of pettybourgeois wish-fulillment.

Mostern’s self-righteous act of patronage is typical of neo-liberalizing

scholars guilty of the excesses of what Pierre Bourdieu (2000) calls “scho-

lastic reason.” Presuming to be bearers of an omnipresent cosmopolitan

mind, they pass judgment on the world without any awareness of their own

accessory location, their ineluctable inscription in the social-historical text

of which they claim to be free. h is stance of presumptuous objectivity may


be simply dismissed as innocent, a self-indulgent reproduction of trivialities,

or dangerous in being complicit with forces producing misery and horror for

millions of human beings receiving the blessings of democracy and freedom

from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and U.S. Special Forces.

Mostern wants to take out the “America” of the brainwashed subaltern in a

sanitized U.S. Studies. But is the phrase “United States” any less of a “rogue

state” (Blum 2005) than the exceptionalist “America” of Anglo leftists in elite

U.S. academies? Notwithstanding these caveats, thanks to Mostern’s nomi-

nalist syndrome, we are now alerted to the dangers of imposing formulaic

solutions to neo-colonial “backwardness” masquerading as latter-day “be-

nevolent assimilation,” the Anglo’s “civilizing mission” in ultraleft drag. Are

there any takers of “U.S. Studies Without America” in the Homeland Security

State?

One symptom of peasant subaltern ambivalence I mentioned earlier may

be found in its afinity for millennial or messianic movements that relect

the reality of their isolated, fragmented lives. As Hobsbawm notes, the unit

of organized action for subaltern groups is “either the parish pump or the

universe. h ere is no in between” (1984, 20). h is may explain the inlated

rhetoric of an “America” inhabited by an indiscriminate “common people”

or “toiling poor,” a utopian space beyond class and state, as well as its frag-

mentary segmented nature, a fact registered in the episodic, repetitious or

segmentary low of the narrative. h ese stylistic and formal qualities linked

to the peasant world-view contrast with the more cohesively class-conscious

part of the narrative, which relects the basic social reality of proletarian

existence—that is, of migrant contract workers who are colonized and racial-

ized subjects—in being concentrated in groups of mutual if forced coopera-

tion in farmwork and in organized union activities.

h e exigencies of uneven historical development cannot be avoided.

What illuminates the contradictions in AIH is thus not a contrived formulaic

schema such as the one imposed by Mostern, based on his limited world of

leftist sectarianism; rather, it is our grasp of the historical and social reality of

the Filipino peasantry in the colonial “lost” homeland, and of the Manongs,

bachelors in barracks, moving from place to place, ostracized from normal

life by massive laws, by customary prohibitions of everyday life—a violently

E . S a n J u a n , J r. ● 109

distorted, grotesque, and terror-illed landscape beyond the comprehension

of sheltered academics, a milieu perhaps approximating what our ethnic

communities may be experiencing after 9/11 in the “homeland security state.”

Could history repeat itself without “bad faith”?

A n t i - M i s c e g e n a t i o n B l u e s

One other approach to understanding the charge of “Americanism” without

reservation is to consider how the “America” utopianized rhetorically in AIH

resembles Clarabelle in Allos’s “h e Romance of Magno Rubio.” h e story

of course is not a realistic but a satiric portrayal of a contrived situation,

with strong allegorical and didactic elements. Like the vignettes in Laugh-

ter, both story and play mobilize the tendentious potential of caricature,

incongruities, and ribald exaggeration found in the genre. h ey ingeniously

expose the fakery of the invented and fantasized object inhabiting Magno’s

imagination, a fantasy-contagion that infects all the “little brown brothers”

from the Asian colony. Here, of course, the “Americanism” or American

Dream whose quasiloating signiier is the igure of Clarabelle—the ixation

on money, consumer goods, white-skin privilege, superpower afluence, and

so on—is humorously exploded as a mirage, a star-spangled hallucination.

h e recurring refrain, attributed to Claro, the astute letter-writer, already

foregrounds the hyperbolic discrepancies to which the honest Magno Rubio

seems wrongheadedly blind:

Magno Rubio. Filipino boy. Four-foot six inches tall. Dark as a coconut. Head

small on a body like a turtle. Magno Rubio. Picking tomatoes on a California

hillside for twenty-ive cents an hour. Filipino boy. In love with a girl one

hundred ninety-ive pounds of lesh and bones on bare feet. A girl twice his

size sideward and upward, Claro said. (1996, 118)

But are Claro and Nick, the knowing smart guys, always to be trusted?

Magno’s “love” turns out to be a collective trauma, a group ixation, to which

systematic education (or mis-education, as Renato Constantino, 1978, would

put it) and ideological manipulation in the colony, among other forces, had


made these lonely bachelors highly susceptible. h e “romance” in the title,

caused partly by anti-miscenegation laws but mainly by their colonized and

racialized position, refers to this collective psychic illness whose origin and

cure seem to inhere in the unsettled, unixed but also regimented condition

of contracted and recruited workers from the colony. Unlike the Chinese,

Japanese, and Koreans, Filipinos alone are considered “savage” or “barbaric”

for their ierce resistance to American “pacifying” troops circa 1899–1902

(witness the “water cure,” retrenchment of entire villages, anti-sedition laws,

and other ethnocidal measures replicated in today’s barbaric war on the

Islamic separatists in southern Philippines, all infected with the contagion

of the terrorist Abu Sayyaf) and their obsession with independence. Disillu-

sionment for Magno begets a sense of pathos; but comic distance eventually

supervenes, and life returns to routine work in the end.

h is theme of sharing a perceived good or value, whether it is an object,

person, information, or a dream, inds a memorable embodiment in the

story “h e End of the War.” I should point out that the publication of this

story in the New Yorker in September 1944 occasioned a charge of plagia-

rism against Allos, which the magazine settled out of court. For this, Allos

was viliied in the Philippines by journalists like I. P. Soliongco and others

who disliked his radical politics. h e charge is not serious, I think, because

Allos’s story is not an exact copy of “h e Dream of Angelo Zara” by Guido

D’Agostino, the plaintif . h ere is an obvious similarity of plot, in the same

way that Shakespeare’s plays borrowed plots from Italian, Greek, and Roman

folklore and other sources. Whereas for D’Agostino’s Italian characters, the

dream of seeing Mussolini dead is shared and passed on from one character

to another, none privatizing the original, in Allos’s story, one person’s dream

of the occupying Japanese soldiers surrendering to the Filipino infantry

testiies to Allos’s desire for the empowerment of the entire community, not

only for individual self-gratiication. h is is a key dif erence that makes “h e

End of the War” quite exceptional in refracting the anomie-ridden, violently

disintegrated life of the Manongs. h is collectivist intuition makes a world

of dif erence.

On the whole, the characterization, setting, imagery, and style of Bulosan’s

story all exhibit Allos’s singular trademark, with an uncanny resemblance

E . S a n J u a n , J r. ● 111

to the collective sharing of an illusion in “h e Romance of Magno Rubio.”

h ere is the same exchange of a value without the mediation of money or

some reifying fetish. In Laughter, Allos reworked many traditional fables and

anecdotes whose provenance in Arabic and Indian folklore is well-known

and whose plots, motifs, and character types continue to be reproduced by

authors in many disparate languages and cultures. It is the folk, the people,

who function ultimately as the original authors; in this context, Allos’s task

was to mediate between this world of subaltern folk and the world of indus-

trialized capitalist modernity.

We are not sure that all of Allos’s characters in “h e Romance” derive from

the peasantry or the displaced rural populace. All display in varying degrees

the naivete, cunning, intelligence, resiliency and solidarity of peasants whose

labor, while intrinsically alienating, also preserves a certain humanity in

them. Magno and his worker-friends were deinitely not “guests of the State,”

nor were they immigrants; they were, as many have noticed, colonial wards

subject to all the disciplinary rigor of anti-miscegenation laws, prohibitions,

and exclusions of all kinds. But the whole lesson of AIH, we might recall here,

is none other than the transformation of the Filipino subaltern conscious-

ness, fragmented but at the same time cosmic and global, into a critical and

cohesively class-conscious intelligence through the process of afiliating with

the organized political movement of a multiracial working class rooted in

the deracinated peasantry. h is act of self-liberation through class libera-

tion, however, is incomplete unless it is dialectically mediated through the

emancipation of the colonized homeland, through national liberation of the

producers (workers and peasants). I think this is the inal cardinal lesson

that cannot be gained without reading h e Cry and the Dedication, the 1952

Yearbook, and the complicated folds of class conlicts and colonial tensions

informing them.

h ere is a fashion nowadays of claiming to be cosmopolitan or transna-

tional as a safeguard against neo-conservative fundamentalism, a latter-day

version of multicultural Americanism, or pragmatic American Exceptional-

ism (see Ponce 2005; San Juan 2004). Transnationalism, however, apologizes

for the hegemonic pluralism that legitimates imperial conquests and justiies

the predatory market consumerism that passes for globalization. h ere is


no escape from distinguishing between imperial nationalism and the na-

tional liberation struggles of oppressed peoples. What Hobsbawm once said

remains true despite the vogue of neo-liberal globalization: “h e scale of

modern class consciousness is wider than in the past, but it is essentially

‘national’ and not global. . . . h e decisive aspects of economic reality may be

global, but the palpable, the experienced economic reality, the things which

directly and obviously af ect the lives and livelihoods of people, are those

of Britain, the United States, France, etc.” (1984, 22). In this regard, Allos’s

sensibility, with its peasant and populist ethos, mutated via a process of self-

education and disillusionment into the more focused class consciousness of

the writer committed to the concrete program of union reforms and speciic

political principles of which the rejection of imperialism, segregation and

racial apartheid, and support for the emancipation of colonies are obligatory

demands.

One of Allos’s last public acts of commitment to his vocation is the cam-

paign to defend Chris Mensalvas and Ernesto Mangaong, militant leaders and

oficers of Local 37, International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU),

who were facing deportation. h ey were accused of being communists if not

card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA. h e lealet accompa-

nying this campaign against Cold War McCarthyism condemns “the drive

to deport foreign labor leaders [as] part of the hysteria that is terrifying the

nation today. It is the vicious method of Big Business Race Haters to cripple

organized labor and its gains, destroy civil rights and liberties, and abrogate

the American Constitution.” Allos wrote a poem, “I Want the Wide American

Earth” (echoing the earlier poem, “If You Want to Know What We Are”) to

beneit the Defense Fund of the ILWU oficers. In it he afirms that we, the

multitude of productive men and women “have the truth / On our side, we

have the future with us,” and “we are the creators of a lowering race” (1979,

15). It is a bold Whitmanesque ode charged with universalist and utopian im-

pulses, invoking a cosmic protagonist, an heroic egalitarian multitude. h at

millenarian or chiliastic tendency persists, though in a muted subterranean

form, in h e Cry and the Dedication, whose bold counterpoint is the recov-

ery, simultaneously hypothetical and imperative, of a free and prosperous

homeland—not the Homeland born of the global war on Islamic terrorism.

E . S a n J u a n , J r. ● 113

P e r m a n e n t E m e r g e n c y

We have all heard of the recent deportation of the Cuevas family of Fremont,

California, in July 2007. At the same time, 89 Filipinos were deported, a move

alleged to be the Bush administration’s retaliation against Philippine Presi-

dent Arroyo’s withdrawal of 51 Filipino troops in exchange for the release of

hostage Angelo de la Cruz. We might recall earlier incidents (Mendoza 2003).

In August 2002, 63 Filipinos were herded onto an airplane for a direct light

to the Philippines, all deportees chained and manacled during the light,

monitored by FBI agents. In December 2002, a second batch of 84 Filipinos

were deported under the same humiliating conditions, legitimized by the Ab-

sconder Apprehension Initiative Program of the U.S. Department of Justice

and Immigration and Naturalization Services (launched January 13, 2001).

h is program has so far targeted 314,000 “undocumented” people, includ-

ing 12,000 Filipinos. In the seven-month period from October 2001 to April

2002, 334 Filipinos were deported under authoritarian measures enforced

through legislative actions or direct executive order (including of course the

USA Patriot Act) under the current administration. As far as the historical

record shows, Filipinos have never been deported in this manner in the past;

now, with the discovery of “terrorists” in their homeland (not only the Abu

Sayyaf but also the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s

Army), the perception and judgment of Filipinos may approximate Bulosan’s

suspicion of himself as a kind of paranoid Kafkaesque hero noted earlier.

Of all groups in the United States, immigrants have always been and

continue to be targeted for severe repression ( Jacobson 1998). From the

earliest period marked by the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to the Cold

War McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, they have been subject to “ideological

exclusion”—deported or banned on account of speciic beliefs and ideas—

even though this violates provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human

Rights. In the 1950s, for example, the Immigration and Nationality Act

provided for the exclusion or deportation of any immigrant who advocated

anarchism or communism. Of late, immigrants associated with anti-Zionist

and anti-imperialist Palestinian organizations branded as “terrorists” have

been prohibited entry. As everyone knows, on August 9, 2002, Secretary of


State Colin Powell labeled—in a kind of pre-emptive unilateral attack—the

Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army as foreign

terrorist organizations, a move seconded by the Arroyo regime (San Juan

2002–2003). After 9/11, the USA Patriot Act not only reafirmed such sanc-

tions but expanded and widened the scope of the powers of the State ap-

paratuses to suppress any criticism or dissent, even of ering incentives to

immigrants to spy on their compatriots.

On August 5, 2004, Representative Crispin Beltran introduced a resolu-

tion in the Philippine Congress denouncing the U.S. government’s threat to

expel 300,000 Filipinos in the following months. Beltran noted that during

the irst wave of the Iraq war, Filipinos were already targeted for deportation;

and that “since 9/11, the U.S. government has indiscriminately criminalized

and demonized all immigrants,” particularly those racially proiled as “ter-

rorists” or associated with countries harboring terrorists, such as Pakistan,

Syria, Iran, North Korea, and of course the Philippines (Mahajan 2002). h e

Philippines has already been designated as the second front (after Afghani-

stan) in this endless war against Al Qaeda and the enemies of the U.S. “way

of life.”

It is a matter of record that Filipinos in such numbers and in such horren-

dous conditions have never been oficially deported from the United States

since the islands came under U.S. rule. True, individual “trouble makers” like

the union activists in Hawaii were deported in the twenties and thirties. But

the entire community as such has never been singled out in this manner, in

the way that the Chinese were stigmatized as a group before and after the

1882 Exclusion Act and the Japanese at the outbreak of World War II. So

this is a irst in the annals of Filipino history, thanks to the Abu Sayyaf and

the Bush-Cheney gospel of pre-emptive war on behalf of globalized inance

capital.

h is undisguised terrorism over the Filipino community today is not new,

but it is more deceptive and invasive. To be sure, the Philippines as a nation-

state has never posed a threat to the security of the United States, at present

the world’s only superpower. It has in fact been victimized as a dependency

of the Empire (instanced recently by the grievance of 13,000 Filipino veterans

who fought in World War II but are deemed ineligible to receive full veteran

E . S a n J u a n , J r. ● 115

beneits). Except for the American Indians, I would argue that Filipinos were

the only nationality that experienced the relentless ferocity of white-suprem-

acist violence during the Filipino-American War of 1899–1903, which claimed

1.4 million Filipino lives (Schirmer and Shalom 1987). General Jack Smith of

the irst invading contingent of troops in 1899 earned infamy by his order to

convert the countryside into a “howling wilderness”: “I want no prisoners. I

wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn the better it will please

me” (Agoncillo and Alfonso 1967, 272). h is ruthless conquest of the Philip-

pines continued in 1906 when 600 Moro men, women, and children were

killed in the battle of Mount Dajo; and in 1913 when, in a repeat confrontation

at Mount Bagsak in Jolo, close to 5,000 Moro men, women, and children

perished at the hands of Captain John Pershing’s troops (Zwick 1992). h is

genocidal carnage inaugurating the birth of the U.S. global empire has never

been fully investigated to the same extent that similar atrocities in Bosnia,

Ruwanda, Darfur, and elsewhere are now being thoroughly researched and

publicized.

It is only now that this outrage, the United States’ “irst Vietnam,” has

come to the foreground of the world’s conscience, along with the St. Louis

Exposition of 1904. But the problem is that they are either exoticized or ren-

dered harmless for scholastic speculation. Bulosan distills the intensity of

such bloody subjugation of the Filipino revolutionary forces in key episodes

in AIH and in stories that describe lynching and white vigilante attacks. As

the bulk of Bulosan’s essays and letters emphasize, the struggles of Filipino

migrant workers in the United States cannot be understood without its

context in the ierce class war between peasants and landlords in the Philip-

pines, between ordinary Filipinos and the Americanized oligarchy whom he

satirized in h e Laughter of My Father and in h e Philippines Is in the Heart.

All the personal anecdotes and incidents in Bulosan’s works need to be read

as historicized allegories of the national situation to appreciate their full

signiicance. In other words, Bulosan may be read as a rubric, an emblem

of that whole constellation of themes and ideas surrounding the fraught,

unequal relation between the colonized formation and the imperial overlord,

particularly the oppression and resistance of Filipino migrant workers in the

metropole.


T h e E g a l i t a r i a n I m p e r a t i v e

Another episode distilling what Alain Badiou calls the principle of the “eter-

nity of the equal” (Toscano 2004, 139) as operationalized by Filipinos may be

cited here. When Filipinos began to be active in union organizing in Hawaii

in the 1920s and 1930s, they encountered savage repression reminiscent of

the anti-sedition campaigns against Macario Sakay and other recalcitrant

bandits. h e cold-blooded killing of 16 Filipino strikers in the Hanapepe

plantation on Kauai in 1924 is the most telling index of fascist barbarism.

Filipino militants like Pablo Manlapit and Pedro Calosa were imprisoned

and deported, with Calosa resurfacing in Tayug, Pangasinan, as a leader of

the Colorum peasant uprising (Sturtevant 1976). h e linkage here is not the

ad hoc conjunction and of the late-modern Filipino subject trying to equalize

two poles of the hierarchy, the dominant and the oppressed. Rather, it is

the nexus of hegemonic colonial authority. Imperial violence demonstrated

its power in two fronts: fascist suppression of workers in the annexed land

of Hawaii and neo-colonial repression of worker-peasant resistance in the

territorial possession of the Philippines.

We may formulate this thesis of reciprocal determination in another

way. h ere may be two time zones and places in the lives of Filipinos, but

the cartography of struggle articulates them in one narrative that, I think,

is found more unambiguously dramatized in h e Cry and the Dedication. In

it Bulosan resolved the dilemma that Filipino militants faced in the 1960s

during the anti–martial law movement here from 1972 to 1986, and after. It

is wrong-headed to dichotomize mechanically (as the Filipino left-wing as-

sociation called the Union of Democratic Filipinos did) the struggle for civil

rights and racial equality here in the United States and the anti-imperialist

struggle in the Philippines—both target the same enemy, the U.S. corporate

elite, from varying angles (Rosca 2000). h is elite is represented by the rul-

ing bloc of compradors, bureaucrats, and landlords in the Philippines. Since

1898, Filipinos here and at home have borne the brunt of class, racial, and

national oppression simultaneously, in various modalities. h e Archimedean

point underlying this complex seems to me to be the continuing domina-

tion of the Philippines as a nation and people that, if not changed, cannot

E . S a n J u a n , J r. ● 117

transform the subordinate identity or position of the Filipino community

in the United States. As I have asserted on various occasions, the liberation

of the homeland is the decisive and pivotal item in the agenda (San Juan

1999). h e struggle for national democracy in the Philippines (and for ra-

cial equality here) follows Marx’s view that white labor cannot emancipate

itself when it is oppressing those of color, and that no nation can be free if

it oppresses another. Of course, the concrete conditions for carrying out the

democratic struggle vary, as do the agencies and protagonists engaged. It

is nonsense to valorize armed struggle in the Philippines as a “great morale

booster” compared to street demonstrations and other nonviolent actions

here, or to belabor the generational conlicts such as those between Filipinos

born here and those newly arrived. Given the priority objective mentioned

above—xxxxx—it is then a strategic question of where the concrete struggle

is waged, the collectives involved, the limits and possibilities of logistics, and

so forth.

During the height of the Cold War and the McCarthy witch hunt in the

1950s, oppositional Filipinos bore the brunt of oficial anti-communist hys-

teria. Filipino trade unionists (such as Ernie Mangaong, Chris Mensalvas,

and others active in the ILWU in Seattle) were brought to trial, harassed,

and threatened with deportation. After his transient fame in the late forties,

Bulosan suf ered ostracism and censorship until his death in 1956. Evange-

lista and other scholars charge Bulosan of yielding to “alcoholism, illness,

obscurity, neurosis, and despair” in a time of fascist terror and emergency

(1985, ). h ese are, from a more judicious view, cynical judgments based on

trivializing speculation oblivious of the artist’s impact on his audience.

It is uncanny to ind Bulosan writing in the 1952 Yearbook of ILWU Local

how “Terrorism Rides the Philippines.” h at is the title of his article on the

persecution of Amado V. Hernandez and other progressive nationalists by

the Roxas puppet government. It suggests Bulosan’s unbroken service in the

anti-imperialist front despite his physical distance from Manila. His novel

h e Cry and the Dedication, inspired by Luis Taruc’s autobiographical ac-

count, Born of the People, is an eloquent testimony to Bulosan’s wrestling

with the forces of racism as well as class and national oppression without

idealizing the supposed political maturity of Filipino revolutionaries against


labby American reformists and patronizing fellow-travelers. h is latter claim

echoes the opinion that Filipinos who speak “Filipino” are more genuinely

Filipino than those Filipinos, born here, whose parents have prevented them

from learning their language. We have outgrown chauvinism, infantile iden-

tity-politics, and essentialism. Being Filipino is not a trans-historical essence

but a political project of realizing collective emancipation. It is a question of

becoming Filipino on what grounds, for what reasons and principles—what

is ultimately at stake?

Bulosan himself bewailed the reproduction of colonial self-hatred and

impotence in his compatriots here. It is not surprising that relatively suc-

cessful Filipinos, especially professionals who came after the liberalization

of immigration in 1965, dismiss Bulosan as obsolete or irrelevant. Bulosan is

alleged to be useful only in inding out about the experience of the irst gen-

eration of Manongs during the Depression. Now that Filipinos have begun

to lift themselves by their bootstraps, as it were, or are beginning to make

it—witness Loida Nicolas Lewis, General Antonio Taguba (whose recent rev-

elations of the “truth” of the “American Dream” should give us pause), and

other model minority igures touted by Filipinas, Philippine News, and mass

media back home—we don’t need Bulosan. We don’t need the lessons gained

from past ordeals, the struggles of the Manongs like Manlapat, Calosa, Philip

Vera Cruz, and Larry Itliong (without whom, it may be said here, the United

Farm Workers of America would not have emerged in a radically trenchant

fashion)—except to measure how far we have advanced in the social ladder,

in the pecking order of the class and racial hierarchy. Bulosan, of course,

also wrote a substantial number of essays and stories about Filipinos back

home, some of which I collected in the anthology, h e Philippines Is in the

Heart (1978). Besides, leftist radicalism is out of fashion in the age of cyber

globalization and transnational cyborgs morphing from one ethnoscape

to another—even though the pasyon (the traditional Easter season ritual

celebration) and its postmodern variants are still used as the monolithic

standard of interpretation and evaluation for social movements today.

One may add here that, strictly speaking, there was no signiicant diaspora

of Filipinos before the Marcos dictatorship institutionalized the “warm

body export” at a time when the circumstances warranted the exchange.

E . S a n J u a n , J r. ● 119

h e circulation of commodiied labor, mainly domestics, now reaching ten

million bodies, is the principal mode by which globalization impinges on

the Filipino consciousness. It is not the success of Lea Salonga, General

Taguba, and other celebrities. Films, songs, stories of Flor Contemplacion,

Sarah Balabagan, and nameless other victims of the global “care chain” have

now arrived at the cultural arena. In time, no doubt, we will have many male

and female Bulosans to chronicle the travails and struggles of this migrante

population exploring real and imagined worlds (San Juan 2000).

T o w a r d P r o l e t a r i a n A g e n c y

Despite the voguish alterity, Filipinos continued to evade easy categorization.

Bulosan was one of the irst organic intellectuals of the Filipino community

to have understood this singularity precisely in his depiction of the Filipinos

as subjects occupying a unique position: participating in the class struggles

of citizens in the United States for justice and equality, not just for a “place

in the sun,” while at the same time demanding freedom and genuine sover-

eignty for the Philippines as a necessary condition for their being recognized

as full human beings. h is is a far cry from the stereotype lauded by Manila

newspaper columnists. One of them mused recently what “A Day Without

Filipinos” would be, following the lead of the ilm “A Day Without Mexicans.”

Are we really indispensable, not expendable? Filipino caregivers are much

in demand in the global “care chain” because “they have that special touch,

that extra patience and willingness to stay an hour more when needed” (Tan

2004). Whether we like it or not, this is the ubiquitous image of the Filipino

projected onto the public consciousness by Internet, rumor, printed media,

television, and so on (Aizenman 2004). h is image is displacing the memory

of Imelda Marcos and her fabulous shoe collection, despite the recent ilm

on her life apologizing for her charming kookiness.

Indeed, there is a struggle of and for representation, superimposed on

the fundamental narrative of class war. Writing before his death, Bulosan

afirmed a desire for critical representation that is today frowned upon by

postmodernist deconstructors. It is said that no one can represent anyone

faithfully and accurately; language always fails. But everyday practice proves


the opposite; the corporate media are more powerful in representing us for

proitable exploitation. Bulosan expressed his creed: “What impelled me

to write? h e answer is: my grand dream of equality among men and free-

dom for all. To give a literate voice to the voiceless one hundred thousand

Filipinos in the United States, Hawaii, and Alaska. Above all and ultimately,

to translate the desires and aspirations of the whole Filipino people in the

Philippines and abroad in terms relevant to contemporary history” (1995b,

216). Whether he succeeded or failed, that is for us and future readers to

decide. Unfortunately, for various reasons, Filipinos in general do not read.

We may have to translate Bulosan and other writers into the language of

the Internet, the discourse of ilms, television, rap music, dance, and other

nonprint media.

Always mindful (unlike his critics) of the need for anyone passing judg-

ment on the world to factor in his or her position in self-relexive critique,

Bulosan gives advice to his nephew at the end of World War II that bore

witness to the decisive and irreversible transformations in his life, and the

beginning of the Cold War, a new era of social cataclysms. A touchstone of

Bulosan’s commitment to the national liberation struggle with its universal

resonance may be found in this passage from his letter to his nephew dated

April 1, 1948:

And when you are old enough to go away, Arthur, do not hesitate to go out

and face life. And whatever the future has in store for you, I request you to

challenge it irst before giving up. But never forget your family, your town,

your people, your country, wherever you go. Your greatness lies in them. . . . If

someday you will discover that you are a genius, do not misuse your gift; apply

it toward the safeguarding of our great heritage, the grandeur of our history,

the realization of our great men’s dream for a free and good Philippines. h at

is real genius; it is not selish; it sacriices itself for the good of the whole

community. We Filipinos must be proud that we had the greatest genius in

Jose Rizal, who sacriiced his life and happiness for the people. (1988, 36).

Given this dialectical self-relectiveness, I want to point out that Bulo-

san—so often this is forgotten even among progressives—was a resilient

E . S a n J u a n , J r. ● 121

historical materialist in his friendship with people across class, race, gender,

and ethnicity. He learned mainly from experience to distinguish between the

privileged ruling class and the mass of American citizens, not all of whom

are on the side of the class enemy. In fact, this enemy can only maintain its

hegemony (that is, governing by consent with the help of the coercive appa-

ratus of jails, police, army) by overt or subtle ideological manipulation. And

after September 11, 2001, by fear, by stigmatizing people of color as sinister

aliens, criminals, terrorists (Mann 2002). We need to make this necessary

distinction so that we do not isolate ourselves and then indulge in sectarian

self-righteousness, compensating for our elitism by boasting about the supe-

rior revolutionary discipline or intelligence of Filipino insurgents. If Bulosan

did that, he would never have survived in the crisis of the Depression and

McCarthyism. More crucially, he would never have gotten the uncompro-

mising support of many white American women who became his intimate

companions and helped him write and publish. (I frankly believe that most

of his works are products of combined ef orts by him and his numerous

women helpers. A novel purported to be by Bulosan, All the Conspirators, is,

judging from its style and content, the work of a woman friend who was also

a writer.) Nor would he have deigned to read the works of Richard Wright,

Melville, Whitman, h eodore Dreiser, William Saroyan, and of course his

close friend Sanora Babb if he conined himself to the narcissism of petit

bourgeois identity politics.

In the last analysis, Bulosan’s lesson may be condensed in this injunc-

tion: We need to unite with as many people as possible, here and across

the planet, on the basis of principled struggle for the broadest democratic

rights and social justice, against fascism and imperialist terror, in solidar-

ity with the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, Venezuela, Korea, Palestine,

Nepal, and others. Certainly, another world is possible provided we struggle

as partisans for the universal ideals of human rights, freedom, equality, and

compassion for all life in the endangered ecosystem. We need to build on the

accomplishments of past generations of radical workers and revolutionary

artists, especially in a period of crisis, which is a moment of both danger and

of opportunity. Crisis gives us the opportunity to educate and raise mass con-

sciousness by mobilizing those classic qualities of patience, fortitude, humor,


cunning, intelligence, and generosity in Filipinos, at home or in transit, deter-

ritorialized or rooted in vernacular platforms, that Bulosan immortalized in

his life and work.

=

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Carlos Bulosan, Filipino Writer-Activist Between a Time of Terror and the Time of Revolution

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